To the Ends of the Earth (59 page)

“I understand, indeed I do! Not dying! For there is a kind of magical comedy about our situation. The intellect disdains what the heart knows feelingly! I
know
that!”

“Mr Talbot! This from you whom I have thought incapable—”

“Oh, I am, ma’am, wholly so. But, as you say, so much has happened; and after all, the world is upside down, is it not? We hang from it by our feet!”

“This is fanciful! We all change. It is danger, I suppose, which shows us all in our true colours, our grim captain, the right man to get us where we are going, our decayed vessel contriving to float and Mr Prettiman’s careful plans all thrown into the melting pot.”

“But he is recovering!”

“So he may be. But I cannot conceive of his leg ever being as serviceable as it was. How can he get about to examine the condition of the convicts? How can he endure the hardship of exploration, of leading a crowd of reformed criminals and settlers into the interior of this continent in search of his promised land?”

“I see.”

“Aloysius Prettiman—who was to be to the Southern Ocean what Tom Paine was to the Atlantic—lamed and having to be helped where he had hoped to lead!”

My immediate thought was,
This is phantasy
, but I did not say so.

“I am sure our government will help, ma’am!”

She had been looking, as it were, through the bulkhead as if at some more distant prospect. Now she glanced at me and smiled—bitterly, I thought.

“To found the Ideal City? There is a refreshing innocence about you, sir. Mr Prettiman has revealed to
me the elaborations and knaveries of the government! Be sure they will have known of his intentions even before we sailed. There is no harm in your knowing now what we may have concealed from them, but he—we—carry a printing press with us.”

The air about me and particularly about my ears seemed to burn, but I did not know what to say. It seemed as if my whole interior self was suddenly spread out for her
inspection
. I was once more in the high-ceilinged office before the huge desk.

By the bye, Talbot. You will be going out in the same ship as Prettiman and his printing press. Keep an eye on him
.

“You were about to say, sir?”

“I shall be a part, however small, of that government.”

“My dear Mr Talbot! I was not thinking of you! We believe now that they will have put a spy to sail with us.”

“Spy!”

“An agent of the government if you prefer euphemisms. Indeed”—here she glanced through the open door, then back at me—“Mr Prettiman believes that the accident which crippled him may not have been a simple accident.”

“That is impossible!”

“Lean your head a little closer, sir. I wish to whisper. He finds Mr Bowles’s masquerade as a solicitor’s clerk transparent.”

“Bowles!”

“Your astonishment is natural. Well, there it is. What are we to do?”

“You should both go home, I believe.”

“You think it is only in England—in Europe—he would find the medical attention which might restore him to some degree of mobility? He will not be so easily deflected from his purpose!”

“Even so, it is good news that he is better. Now for Mr
Benét. If he continues to plague you, you may call on me. I will take his verses and invite him to—”

“I wish things were as simple. As I said, his verses are not all ridiculous. This, though it addresses me as ‘Egeria’, is pompous but fluent and far above what might be expected from a naval officer. Put together with his two contrivances which are said to have saved our lives—”

“I would mention first the frapping invented by
Lieutenant
Summers! That above all has been the principal agent of our preservation. Why, even in the late tempest, it held the ship together! Believe me, Mr Summers—”

She held up her hand, smiling.

“I understand you. You need not continue. So believe
me
that at moments when your careless assumptions of privilege have been most provoking you have been rendered
tolerable
by your evident admiration for that worthy man!”

It was a backhander. But then, as I have said, Mrs Prettiman was an adept of the backhander. I was annoyed and should have said something like—“For a lady who indulges in premarital copulation”, but I did not. As the words rang in my head I heard myself use other ones.

“Is it impossible that I should read the verses to Egeria?”

“Quite impossible. I am addressed in such terms as puts me to the blush.”

Again the words in my head were pushed aside by others—

“I might agree with more of the verses than you think, Mrs Prettiman.”

Oh, it was intolerable! She was looking at me with plain astonishment!

“One request, ma’am. May I visit the patient?”

“He is asleep, I think—I hope. Since we have no more laudanum sleep is precious and hard to come by.”

“I would go in like a mouse and sit by him till he wakes.”

She seemed doubtful. I pressed the point.

“Believe me, when I knew of him at first I made all the assumptions about your husband which could be drawn from gross political caricatures. But my first presence at his bedside—well. Now I remember my stumble against his leg—though I may be the unwitting agent of his
recovery
—as a moment which will haunt me for ever, the moment when I inflicted on him such agony that he fainted away with it.”

“And so?”

“I should be less than human did I not wish to offer him my congratulations on his partial recovery, my
commiserations
on his disability and my profound sorrow for the agony I caused him.”

“No man could say fairer than that, Mr Talbot. Had you by any chance evolved and put by you those ringing periods?”

I was silent. Suddenly she started to speak, I know not what, for now it was my turn to hold up a hand.

“Say no more, Mrs Prettiman. I am fated by my nature to talk like that sometimes. Generally it makes people believe me older than I am.”

“So I suppose. But you will grow out of it.”

I was silent for a moment. Who was she to be critical of me? A lady, a woman who had behaved like a common trollop!

“I do not desire to ‘grow out of it’. And now, ma’am, may I visit the patient?”

Her face was quite without expression as she bowed in assent.

I left Mrs Prettiman’s cabin and closed the door behind me without looking back. I stood for a few moments in the rocking lobby and thought. I had meant to be uniformly dignified and stern with her—but there it was!

I remembered the letter which the man had given me when he thought himself dying. Would he not wish to have it back now he was on the mend? But I had not pockets in my seaman’s rig in which the letter might be carried
without
crumpling and I did not wish to carry it openly in my hand. She might look out, see, and ask and so set in train endless complications and confusions. I therefore opened Mr Prettiman’s door as quietly as I had shut hers—there was a thump and hiss beyond the wall as some point of
cornering
water struck our hull—and brought it to behind me. He lay, as I have said, turned end for end. His head was now next to the writing flap. I moved forward cautiously and sat in the canvas chair by him. There was no longer a mound lifting the bedclothes at his waist. The blankets were gone as well. A cotton sheet and a shawl of woven material were all that covered his body. The air was not balmy. Such an adjective would be out of place for any sickroom! But the scanty bedclothes gave me a sudden awareness of the other change in our circumstances. Water might still swill about our feet and legs—condensation might lie on and stream down any wall, any bulkhead, but we were at last approaching, if we had not reached it, the southern spring! If this continued, I thought, we should find ourselves wearing “doldrums” rig again!

Mr Prettiman’s eyes were closed and he breathed easily. His face was still wasted and lined but there was
now the faintest trace of colour in his hollow cheeks where before there had been nothing but shadow. His hands lay outside the sheet, one of them on an open book. I leaned forward with a natural curiosity but must have disturbed him somehow. His head turned on the pillow, his
breathing
altered—became laboured. I kept deadly still in a state of apprehension that I had injured him all over again! But then his breathing eased, his hand moved from the book and a page stood up so that I could see what it was.

“Good God! Pindar!”

His eyes opened and he turned his head.

“You. Young Talbot.”

“Mrs Prettiman said she thought you wouldn’t mind if I sat by the bunk until you woke, sir.”

“Had to move, didn’t you? Had to speak? Had to wake me?”

“No, Mr Prettiman! The word was—involuntary.”

A trace of a smile appeared.

“What else did you suppose I meant? But never mind. You said ‘Pindar’.”

“Yes, sir. There, by your hand.”

“When you have to lie flat, holding up a book makes the whole thing a trial. I was looking for a quotation and drifted off. It’s somewhere in the sixth Olympian. It goes—‘
ϕύονται δὲ καὶ νέοις ἐν ἀνδράσιν πολιαί
’.”

The lines were very familiar to me.

“‘Grey hairs flourish even among young men’—and it goes on—‘here and there before the right time of life for it’. But that’s not the sixth Olympian. It’s the fourth, right at the end. May I—? There!”

“So you know!”

“Well, sir, we are all having a rough time of it, aren’t we? I daresay I could find a grey hair or two if I looked.”

“Not that, boy! The Greek! You’ve kept it up—Why?”

“I just liked it, sir, I suppose. I read it now and then.”

“No boy of your age who keeps up his Greek can be entirely witless—silly perhaps—but with some inkling of a wider view.”

“I’m not precisely a boy, Mr Prettiman!”

“You’re not precisely a mature man either! Now don’t answer back. I must apologize for not looking you straight in the face all the time but I have to lie flat, you see. This leg. Have to hobble for the rest of my life, I suppose. How is a man to get round like that? I suppose the surgeons will strap me up. Do you think I shall be able to ride?”

“I can’t say.”

“Might be able to ride side-saddle. Mrs Prettiman would ride astride, of course, in her trowsers”—a laugh began in his chest but never reached the surface except to give it a heave or two—“‘Here come the Prettimans,’ they’ll say. ‘Which is which?’”

“I came in to say, sir, that I congratulate you on your recovery, and apologize for my part in it.”

The laugh was right there, loud and prolonged. Tears ran out of his eyes.

“‘Apologize for my part in it’! Oh, my hip!”

“I see what you mean, sir, and it is indeed amusing—or I would have thought it so had I not said it myself. But I am sincerely sorry for the terrible pain I caused you.”

“You certainly gave me a twinge, Talbot. But without it I should still be in a sad case. Having your own thigh bone rammed up into your body is no joke, I can tell you. Well. So you know more Greek than was beaten into you. Latin, of course. But let us say nothing of Latin. It is a language for sergeants. Why do you read Greek then? Come along!”

“I don’t know. Amusement perhaps. No, that won’t do. Glaucus and Diomede—”

“Intellectual snobbery? Being better than your
neighbour
? Belonging to a select few?”

“Yes, to some extent. But there is more, sir, as well you know!”

“Ambitious to become a bishop?”

“No, sir. But you must not be plagued with me, Mr Prettiman. I have said how sincerely sorry I am for the pain I caused you. And now I will leave you.”

Good God, this was in the very vein of Parson Colley! But the sick man was making fretful motions of denial with his right hand.

“Don’t go!”

“I believe I am not an adequate conversationalist for you, sir. And so—”

“My dear Mr Talbot!—does that form of address
content
you?—if you had lain for days in the forced
contemplation
of a white-painted ceiling only eighteen inches above your head, I don’t know what seamen call it—”

“The Tarpaulins would call it ‘the deckhead’, sir. Well, I am flattered to be regarded as a little more interesting than white paint!”

“Your opinions interest me profoundly. Some of them have been reported to me while others I must confess I have overheard, for you know you tend to speak in a loud not to say authoritative manner!”

“As I am clearly—”

“I said ‘Don’t go!’”

“That was certainly authoritative!”

“So it was. We must be gentle with each other. Sit down again—please! There. Now. What is the purpose of your voyage?”

“I would have said a few months ago that it was to fit me for a position of responsibility in the government of my country. Now my ambitions are somewhat different.”

“Since
Alcyone
drifted alongside us with her ladies—Oh, sit down! Do you think that sort of thing can be
private
? Marriage is a public declaration! I should know!”

“I could only wish it had indeed been a question of
marriage
—but I do not suppose our conditions are similar.”

“I should hope not indeed! The considered alliance of two persons dedicated to the betterment of the human condition is not lightly to be compared with—”

“‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!’”

“You started your voyage with the objectivity of
ignorance
and are finishing it with the subjectivity of
knowledge
, pain, the hope of indulgence—”

“And you, sir, travelling with the avowed intention of making trouble—of troubling this Antipodean society is created wholly for its own betterment! It is a noble gesture which offers freedom and rehabilitation even to the
criminal
elements of our own society at home!”

“Do you know ‘our own society’?”

“I have lived in it!”

“School. University. A country house. Have you ever visited a city slum?”

“Good God, no!”

“The cottages on your father’s estates. Do the
labourers
sleep in beds?”

“They are accustomed to the ground. They are happy there. They would not know what to do with a bed stood on legs!”

“You know nothing.”

“You are clearly seized of universal truths, Mr Prettiman. Some of us do not find them so easy to come by!”

“Some of us do not try to find them.”

“The established order—”

“Is sick!”

This was a kind of cry which convulsed the man’s body. It was resumed—subsumed in one of those great cries which had so disconcerted me. His body which had jerked under the bedclothes now shook as with the extremity of passion, but this was pain. His face had paled
again. Sweat coursed down it as he gritted his teeth. The door opened and Mrs Prettiman hastened in. She looked quickly from him to me. Then she pulled a large
handkerchief
from beneath his pillow and wiped his face with it. She murmured to him. I could catch no more than the word “Aloysius” and the word “calm”. His anguish appeared to subside. I was rising from the chair again to withdraw from this private scene when his hand shot out and grasped my wrist firmly.

“Stay, Talbot. Letty. We have a specimen. What do you say? Shall we see if anything is to be done with it?”

The word “specimen” had a precise medical connotation as far as I was concerned. But to my surprise Mr Prettiman continued to hold my wrist instead of allowing my
departure
. Mrs Prettiman, on the other hand—and I noticed that her hair was now properly confined and hidden—said
nothing
but nodded solemnly, then withdrew. I feared that I might be about to be lured into some medical nastiness but the sick man simply continued our previous conversation.

“What
do
you know then, Mr Talbot?”

I thought.

“I know fear. I know a friendship which would exchange gold armour for bronze. Above all, I know love.”

“Oh, do you? Do you not vaunt yourself? Are you sure you are not puffed up? Do you not seek your own?”

“Perhaps. But without it I am indeed become as
sounding
brass and tinkling cymbals. And long before St Paul, did not Plato claim that we may ascend from the one love to the other?”

“Well said, my boy! Well said indeed! There is a book above my head. The third along, I think. Please take it down. Thank you. Will you read it to me?”

“It is French.”

“Do not speak so dismissively of the language just because you are acquainted with a greater one!”

“To tell you the truth, I have had such a dose of Racine from my godfather it has soured me with their whole
literature
.”

“This is by a master who could stand with all but the very greatest of the ancients.”

“Very well, sir. What do you want me to read?”

So, moving with roll and heave, with creak of timber and roar of wind, I found myself as we moved towards the unknown shore sitting by the bed of a man as strange and unknown; and reading aloud with an accent which appeared to satisfy Mr Prettiman, though it was little like Mr Benét’s, from Voltaire’s
Candide
! He had directed me as I now see was inevitable, to the passages concerning Eldorado. As I read, an astonishing change began to appear in Mr Prettiman. He nodded every now and then, his lips moved, his eyes, as if they did not merely receive light but could refashion it, seemed to shine with an interior source of their own. His face flushed, words moved towards his lips but were never given air, he listened so intently. When I read out the words of
le bon vieillard
: “We don’t pray to God, he gives us what we need, we are eternally grateful—we do not need priests, we are all priests!” he interrupted at last, crying out, “Yes, yes, that’s it!”

It was my turn to interrupt.

“But, Mr Prettiman! This is no more than an expansion of Pindar—the Fortunate Isles—you have it there under your hand—allow me!”

I took the book, found the place and read it out to him.

“‘
ἀπονἐστερον ἐσλοὶ δέκονται βίοτον, οὐ χθόνα ταράσσοντες ἐν χερὸς ἀκμᾷ
—’, and so on.”

When I had done he took the book back, glanced at the text, smiling, and muttered a translation.

“‘The gift of easy life they get, not irritating earth with lusty hands, no, nor troubling salt water to scrape a bare living—’”

“And the rest, sir! They rejoice in the
presence
of the gods! There’s the tower of Cronos—ocean breezes, flowers of gold blazing—”

“Yes, yes, I remember. I might as well tell you, Edmund, that I had to learn it all by heart as an imposition and even that did not entirely spoil it! It was—perceptive of you to bring it into the ring with Eldorado. You are well read, my boy—and you read well too! But don’t forget the difference between Pindar and Voltaire. Pindar is talking about a mythological land—”

“So is Voltaire, surely!”

“No no! Oh, I have no doubt that literally speaking South America was much different from the country Candide
discovered
! How could it be otherwise in a country devastated by the Roman Catholic Church?”

“They had not reached it.”

“But there was indeed an Eldorado, and there will be again.”

“You are overexciting yourself, sir. Shall I—”

“It is what this voyage is about, you see. Do you
understand
? How can I—I am crippled. Not for me, not for me. I may see the promised land, glimpse a far peak of Eldorado, but the country itself will be for other men!”

“And
that
is what the voyage is about?”

“What else? We would have gone, a caravan of convicts released, our printing press with us, immigrants of
goodwill
, women convicts, or the poor young followers of their ignorant men—”

“You are feverish, sir. I will call Mrs Prettiman.”

“Stay.”

For a while he was silent. He lay quiet, then spoke with his head straight in the pillow and his eyes shut.

“It seems I shall—survive if we all do. A certain
document
which I entrusted to you—”

“I had wondered, sir. Shall I bring it to you?”

“Wait. Why will you always try to be one step ahead? I am confined to my couch. Mrs Prettiman devotes herself to me. She must not be troubled with the view of such a missive or
ever know
that I entrusted it to your hands.”