To the Ends of the Earth (63 page)

This, then, if not the end of our voyage, was the beginning of the end. There was a period of some days in which everyone came to believe that our troubles were over—and seldom has a popular belief been so triumphantly
vindicated
! The weather, though occasionally what we would once have called
rough
, was never uncomfortably so. Mr Summers and Mr Benét argued politely about the
longitude
. But no one could believe that it was still a matter of importance since the weather was so uniformly clear that it would have been impossible to miss seeing the land even from ten miles away. The middle watch, which I
continued
to keep with Charles, became a time of enchantment! The stars seemed near enough to touch. Night was a
harmony
of blue. The sailors seemed to sing the darkness away! During the day all those who could walked the deck, where the Pike children now played regularly and healthily. Mr Brocklebank was to be seen basking in the sun without his coach cloak. I continued to read to Mr Prettiman and once had the privilege of pacing the deck at the side of Mrs Prettiman and was proud of myself—that onetime gorgon now tamed! Indeed, I had hoped that Lieutenant Benét would observe our constitutional and be put in his place by it. But that afternoon when I read to Mr Prettiman, Mrs Prettiman did not stay to listen but excused herself and, I learnt afterwards, took an
afternoon
constitutional at the side of Lieutenant Benét. An encyclopaedia of behaviour could not have spoken plainer.

One morning Charles told me that I should see an
operation
worth watching. So it was. I came up on deck and looked round. There were no more than a very few white
clouds bulging up towards the meridian. Mrs Pike leaned on the rail by the break of the fo’castle and talked with Billy Rogers as Zenobia had done before she took to her bed. Mr Gibbs with a couple of men was putting the last touches to the repair of the rail where the ice had smashed it. Under the main bitts and near it, Mrs East and the two small Pike girls were holding a dolls’ tea party! But now there was a whole series of orders from Captain Anderson and the dolls’ party was interrupted by the need to use some ropes made fast there as the ship was
hove to
. (Please consult Falconer, for I shall not.) Men stationed themselves all along the larboard side with sheaves of line in their hands. There was a boom rigged outboard with a lead suspended from it—a much heavier lead than the hand-lead which one man can manage. Mr Benét in the waist shouted “Let go!”; down went the lead with a pfutt! The line was abandoned all along the side of the vessel—another length lifted and at once abandoned—another and another—

“Take up the slack!”

“Charles—what is this about? Will it tell us where we are?”

“No indeed—” He paused for a moment, then smiled. “You might say it tells us where we are not.”

Now the line was no longer up and down but leading out to an angle towards the northwest.

“There is your circumpolar current, Edmund. I
suppose
it is the only direct evidence anyone ever had.”

“You are talking in riddles.”

“Mr Summers, would you suspend your conversation long enough to bring her over the lead?”

Charles smiled wryly. He went off and bade the parties of men alter the strain on various sheets, easing some so that their sails rounded their bellies a little, and a rustling and tinkling of water now sounded from our travelling bows. Captain Anderson smiled his brief yellow smile down at
me. Well, what captain would not be happy on such a day of sunlight and whispering, chuckling, delighted water?

“Hand over hand and roundly now!”

“Up and down!”

“A hundred and ten fathom, sir.”

There was a pause while the vertical line was hauled in. At last the dripping lead itself broke the surface.

“Bear away, Mr Cumbershum. Northeast true.”

Mr Benét hailed from the waist.

“The lead is inboard, sir. Sand and shell, sir!”

The captain nodded as though he had expected this information. I turned to the first lieutenant.

“That was all very interesting. What does it signify?”

“Why, that we are in soundings. Benét had his own ideas about our longitude and the captain too. So have I and so has Cumbershum. In this visibility it does not matter much.”

He went off, about the ship’s interminable business.

“Mr Talbot. A word with you.”

I turned. Mr Brocklebank had emerged from the lobby. Once more he was massive in his wrapped coach cloak.

“What can I do for you, Mr Brocklebank?”

The old man drew close.

“I fear I did not appear at my best, sir, during the late emergency—”

“Well, you are old and cannot be expected—”

“It was not age, Mr Talbot, not decrepitude but
sickness
. I feared a syncope, a sudden failure of the vital organ.”

“The ship seemed almost certain to sink and that was about to settle all our problems.”

“Better without a syncope than with one. I fear the enemy within more than the sea without! You remember when
Alcyone
lay alongside us?”

“Indeed I do!”

“Oh, but now I remember—you was in your cabin, which was what she must have been crying about—”

“She?”

“The young lady. I was interrogating the surgeon from
Alcyone
when he came from your cabin but he brushed me aside! There’s a medical man for you! He went back to his ship and the women crowded round him—I understand now! They wanted to know how you went on.”

“Oh, it was Miss Chumley! It must have been!”

“Imagine that—a strong fellow like you monopolizing the surgeon, let alone the women—Good God, there never was such a consultation as I had then while two ships were parting! I halloed him and they implored him and orders were shouted and there was such a groaning and a
creaking
—and that silly young woman crying, ‘
Mr Truscott, Mr Truscott, will he live?
’ and Lady Somerset crying, ‘
Marion, Marion, not before the sailors. Oh, this is so affecting
’—and so much
‘Cheerily, my hearties, roundly now’
—so much noise from the sails and the surgeon—can you imagine it? Just bawling back at me, ‘
What do you want?
’—and I crying, ‘
I wish for a regimen’
and he
—‘Less of the pipe, none of the bottle, less of the trencher and none of the couch, you fat old fool
’—and the young one flinging her arms round Lady Somerset’s neck with a cry of
‘Oh, Helen!’
And it sheered off,
Alcyone
, I mean, so I have had to do the best I could without proper medical advice, which accounts for my indifferent performance when—”

“She really cried out, ‘
Will he live
’?”

“The young woman? Yes, or words to that effect. It may have been ‘
I suppose he will live
’ or ‘
He may live
’—”

“It must have been ‘
Will he live
?
’ She would not have cried out the surgeon’s name twice had she not been distracted!”

“Yes. Well. She may have cried it twice, ‘
Truscott, Truscott
’, or perhaps it was ‘
Oh, Truscott
!’ or ‘
Mr Truscott
’!”

“Oh, God.”

“I remember it clearly. Pipe, bottle, trencher, couch. I ask you!”

“Oh, if she did not cry his name twice I am the
unhappiest
of men!”

“Mr Talbot, this is unlike you! I was simply explaining my conduct during the late crisis. She may have cried, ‘
Truscott, Truscott, Truscott
’—or more. And the worst of it is, under his regime I let more wind than I did when I was eighteen stone of solid man!”

“But she did cry out!”

“How else could I have heard her?”

“Charles had seen her the night before staring through the side of the ship—”

“So did the surgeon cry out, ‘
No pipe, less trencher, no bottle and no couch
’? Or was it ‘
less couch
’? By which he would have implied an occasional healthy recourse to the connubial. He would not have said no bottle and no trencher—and here I have been living all these weeks chaster than a nun! Women are so cruel. ‘
You go right out on deck, Wilmot
,’ she says. ‘
I cannot endure your horrid smells. Besides, I believe it is bad for my complexion
.’”

“And Miss Chumley expressed the deepest concern for my welfare!”

I waited for a reply, but the old man, one hand on the bulwarks, his feet spread wide, had lapsed into a state of concentration on his interior. I withdrew quickly.

So I added yet another atom of comfort and torment to the cobweb-thin collection of yearnings and surmises that bound me to her.

There is, I suppose, only one moment of drama towards which the reader is still looking. When, after this year-long or nearly year-long voyage, did we sight land? I sympathize with the reader’s suspense. It has been, it still is, a difficulty
to me too. The truth is that our first sight of land was about as undramatic as it could well be. I have thought now and then of ways round this dull patch. I had thought of
introducing
the slapstick, the low comedy of Nature making fools of everyone in sight. I pictured a misty morning, a slight air; and the moment at which someone on the ship, preferably a woman or child, realizes the ludicrous truth. There are gales of laughter from the crew and sheepish grins from our navigators. We are aground in still water, which sinks away slowly to leave us high and dry—and what is more, as the mist is drunk up by the sun, we see that we are able, by the use of ladders, to step ashore! But a certain
synaesthesia
with our noble vessel tells me that in such a case there would have been three dreadful reports as the weight came wholly on Charles’s frapping and the hull subsided into its own weed and ballast and spread like—anything that melts in the sun!

Then again, I thought of preserving the truth but
sharpening
it a little. There was, for example, a hole in the bulwarks under the main chains, and examining this with Mr Askew, the gunner, I learnt about the dreadful art or craft of cannon-ball rolling. A disaffected sailor is able to lift a cannon ball out of a shot garland and allow it to decide for itself what damage it will do. Mr Askew—he muttered the information, for it is not to be spread throughout the lower deck of a ship—informed me that as a ship
works
, such a cannon ball, in an unfortunate case, is able to fly the full length of the vessel and take apart the random target as brutally as if it had been shot from a gun. But the hole had not been made by a cannon ball or there would have been damage to the main chains as well. Perhaps the ice did it, though I myself am inclined to rats. But build up the suggestion of disaffection, detect a mutter here and there, and you have your high drama to take the place of the low comedy. There is a
confrontation
.
The crew and the emigrants inch out of the fo’castle threateningly. Captain Anderson is proud and defiant. The men move forward. One is about to strike a—

But the cry rings out from the crosstrees of the foremast.

“Deck there! Land ho! Land ahead and on the larboard bow! Deck there! Land ho!”

It will not do, of course. I do not mean because this is an autobiography, for I have come to think that men
commonly
invent their autobiographies like everything else. I mean it would be too stagey.

The truth in a way was subtler and more amusing. On a morning of perfect visibility, when Mr Summers handed the captain his folded paper with the computed latitude and longitude, the captain examined it with raised
eyebrows
and compared it with the other folded paper which had been given him by Mr Benét. His only comment was to order the ship’s course to be maintained. We sighted land some hours later.

What a novelist could not have foreseen and the
autobiographer
must make as interesting as he may was the complete reversal of expected attitudes. The crew, which might have rolled cannon balls, or made protests, or
grumbled
and sent deputations
before
we sighted land, were quiet, good-humoured and obedient until the low-lying coast was there before them. Only then was there
murmuring
and the clear voice of dissent. They thought we should disembark at once on this land of milk and honey, pausing merely to select ourselves the slaves of our choice from the eager applicants!

It was at this time that Mr Prettiman had some kind of—revelation is the only word I can find for it. He
confessed
that he now believed there was a profound mystery (rather than secret) at the heart of the cosmos to which man would be admitted. He was made extraordinarily
happy. I myself had a premonition of his death which like all the premonitions in my life proved to be mistaken. In brief, I learnt from a few words what I had no business to know. I have to own, it was moving and—confounding, even if he was, as he must have been, deluded.

On that day as I entered his cabin I saw that his eyes were closed and I paused, for in his pain, sleep was very precious to him. I wondered if I should go away again but as I stood there, he spoke, or rather muttered in what I can only describe as a tone of awed astonishment.

“
I am able to bless
—!”

Yes, I should have gone there is no doubt about that. But in a strange embarrassment I did nothing but utter an involuntary, and I fear silly, laugh. His eyes opened and looked straight into mine. A positive tide of crimson seemed to consume his face. I got out of the cabin, shut the door and only then was able to feel the extraordinary
difference
between these few humble words and the rarified concept of the Good which we were too often prone to
discuss
. My mind plunged back to that early interview when I had read to him from Voltaire’s
Candide
the strange words of
le bon vieillard
“We have no need of priests—we are all priests”!

I went away confounded for a time and have thought since that it was one of several occasions in my life when I have felt myself to be on the brink of a mystery which through character, upbringing and education I am wholly unable to penetrate. But at the time, when I came to myself, I reflected that after all, the “good old man” had been one hundred and sixty five, and even
he
blushed as he spoke openly of the religious mysteries of El Dorado!