by Ursula Bloom
She waited. Footsteps shuffled up and down the alley. She heard voices calling. The bell again, harsh and insistent, sending her heart down into her boots. And all the while the wretched contraption in her hand, the infernal life-saving apparatus that she simply could not get rid of.
‘I think I’d rather drown,’ Ann told herself.
Silence at last, only the heavy sighing of the ship, the rising and falling, the heaving and the swaying. She did not know what to do. Was it over? Had anybody missed her? Had the Captain sent down for her, and had her absence been discovered? She felt quite unable to think.
Cautiously she came out, and looked up and down. She went back to the cabin, and tried to fold up the apparatus to look as though she had never touched it. Whilst she did so, she heard running footsteps, and peeping round the corner saw a young man, still wearing his apparatus and looking strangely distorted, like pictures she had seen of Chinese punishments in a book her father had had.
Seeing her he called, ‘Lifeboat drill,’ and ran on.
It wasn’t over. It hadn’t begun apparently. In her dilemma she went back and dragged up the hateful apparatus again. Just as she had thought it was all done with. Just as she had been happy about it again. Now this! She heard more running footsteps, and now determined that nothing short of death itself should entice her into this contraption, worse than any Chinese punishment, she dived into her precious sanctuary She did not know how long she waited this time. The ship had taken on its normal noises; it had become again like every other ship in the world. She emerged. A stewardess with a hot-water can surveyed her with reproach.
‘Oh, the lifeboat drill is postponed,’ she said, ‘the Commander has decided to have it to-morrow. Nobody hardly turned up to-night.’
And after a whole hour of hiding! After this dodging like a truant child! Ann Clements re-entered her cabin and plonked the apparatus down with a bang. Regardless of what Cuthbert would have said she gave vent to her feelings. The new atmosphere had got her. The wonder cruise was beginning to work its miracle.
‘Damn,’ said Ann Clements with emphasis, ‘damn.’
III
After that things went on in a daze. There was dinner. She entered the saloon nervously, for she had suddenly become quite sick with fright. If she could have escaped this meal she would have done so, only she had to eat. She was far too afraid of the stewardess whose name was Brown, to ask her to bring food to her cabin. She had a sick longing for the homeliness of Mrs. Puddock’s, for the baked beans and the poached egg set on a tin tray perched perilously on your knee over the fire in winter, or on the table pulled under the window in summer.
She tried to tell herself that everybody was feeling strange and therefore it was as bad for them, as it was for her. Everybody whom she met seemed to be beset with too bold a swagger, or too nervous a tread. Nobody was at their ease.
She entered the saloon at a run, owing to the lurch of the ship, and she cannoned into an old gentleman who did not appear too pleased. He was obviously North country (there seemed to be a tremendous amount of North country people on board), for he shook himself free and he said ‘Naow then.’ It frightened Ann a good deal.
Already other passengers were at her table. A large middle-aged woman with the fast-looking daughter. Ann had noticed them earlier in the day on deck, and she had decided that she did not like them; they were not ‘her sort’. The fast-looking daughter was apparently called Ethel; she had too red lips in a too white face, and she wore a skimpy black chiffon frock with a knot of white violets on the shoulder. Ethel looked discontented, she looked as though she were prepared to grumble. In truth she and her mother had come here on a man-hunt. Ethel was getting on. Men were scarce. They had thought of cruising as an original idea, and they had hopes of picking up a count. Titles were four a penny on the Continent, they had been told. Ann recognized a difference, subtle but certain, between her own lace dinner frock, as recommended by the shop assistant as being ‘so useful for all occasions’, and Ethel’s. As she sat down she glanced across at the other two inquiringly. Did they speak or not? She recalled the one time when she had stayed in a boarding-house in Worthing, and there it had been etiquette for everyone to speak. Apparently it was etiquette here.
‘Good evening,’ said Mrs. Duncan, the large middle-aged lady.
‘Good evening,’ said Ethel indifferently.
‘Good evening,’ said Ann.
That was that.
Everybody waited for somebody else to say something intelligent and so set the ball rolling. At last Mrs. Duncan thought of something original.
‘It’s a large ship,’ said Mrs. Duncan.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Ann.
‘Larger than I expected,’ said Ethel.
‘Oh much,’ said Ann.
It was really rather dreadful. It was the desperate and hopeless attempt of people feeling their way in conversation. Three people who had got to be friends whether they liked one another or not. Ann would so much rather that people did not talk at all than talk like that. There were four other empty chairs, those on either side of her. She did hope nice people would sit in them, her sort of people; that would make all the difference in the world.
The next arrival was a ship’s officer, young and dark, who took the seat on Ann’s right. He wore the red stripes of a doctor, though that conveyed nothing to Ann, who presumed that some wore one colour, some wore another, just by way of a change. He said ‘Good evening’ and sat down. Ann thought that he looked what she called ‘nice’, and certainly Ethel brightened considerably. She darted him one of her looks. But the doctor did not brighten. He had been on these damned cruises ever since he had started; there had not been enough money left from the fiasco his father had made of business, for the son to buy a practice, so he had come straight to sea, and had been going backwards and forwards ever since. Once he had been ambitious and keen on surgery, but now ‒ he was thirty-four ‒ all that seemed to have been left far behind.
Nothing ever happened here, nobody ever got ill, not decently ill with something that was interesting. Once there had been an appendix, but they had been close to shore, and he had had to let it go into hospital. His only touch with that surgical life which had once so inflamed his ambition was the B.M.J. and the Lancet, delivered to different ports to await the arrival of the ship. He was sick to death of it. He saw no way out, for he had to continue like this to live. Fergus Simmonds was a soul in chains, and the chains were there for eternity. He knew that.
Every cruise provided him with uninteresting table companions, and the painful necessity ‒ urged by the Company ‒ of making yourself pleasant to your fellow travellers. They liked having an officer about, especially the women. His uniform gave them an emotional rapture. Fergus hated it. Voyagers were of few varieties. Fast and amorous like the red-lipped girl opposite (the passenger list had told him that her name was Ethel Duncan), or dull and stupid like the old trout on his left. The passenger list had told him that her name was Ann Clements. She wasn’t really old in years, he supposed, but she had got into the way of appearing old. She thought oldly; she wore frumpish clothes, and she had the old personality.
Fergus had seen too many of them not to recognize them when he found them sitting at his table, glancing at him with that admiring yet inquiring manner; Ethel wondering if he epitomized her romance, Ann wondering if she would ever dare talk to him. ‘Same old people, same old cruise, same old everything,’ he thought desperately.
Monsieur Paul Vallé came next. He was twenty-four and he spoke extremely bad English, but thought that he spoke it very well. He sat the other side of Ann, and before the meal started she realized to her horror that he was a distinctly French eater! He spiked her with his elbows as he ate; he was very noisy; he masticated freely and thoroughly. He was little and rotund, with small dark eyes peering at the red-lipped Ethel through goggle glasses. She intrigued him ‒ he called her Mees ‒ if he had been the girl sort probably he would have had an a
ffaire du coeur with Mees. But he wasn’t the girl sort. He was the food sort. He had come for the menu, and he wasn’t going to allow Mees to distract him from that menu.
So far Ann was disappointed in her fellows. She had believed that at sea everything took on a new glitter and a new glamour. She had not anticipated dull people, people who had come for the food, people who were frankly bored before they had started. Old people in stacks, Lancashire and Manchester people in hordes.
Old gentlemen in tweeds and bowler hats, young gentlemen in flannels and panamas, and this although they were as yet only off Dover.
The last couple to make up the party were the final straw. Mr. and Mrs. Spinks. Mr. Spinks had pioneered a particularly successful brand of cheap jam, and he had done so well by it that now he was in his own parlance ‘quite a gentleman’. He had emanated from the board schools, and Mrs. Spinks had at one period in her life been a cashier in a Brixton butcher’s shop. She believed that it was her proximity to the meat that had made her full-blooded and florid. She was also massive, for she had run to over much flesh on the good food that nowadays they could afford. They had come to do the things that everybody does, without being hampered by the difficulties of foreign lingo and foreign exchange. Last year they had done Juan les Pins, or Juan les Pins had done them. Juan les Pins had recognized them for what they were and had deliberately misunderstood their execrable French, and had fleeced them badly. Being a self-made man, Mr. Spinks was extremely mean, though he wished to give the impression of being lavish with his riches. He was a little man with such untrimmed and bushy eyebrows that he gave the impression of an inquiring shrimp. A little round man in a black velvet jacket, and carrying a large cigar. It was an expensive cigar, and he wished everybody else to know that it was an expensive cigar, and what was more he’d have them understand that he could afford it.
His wife, half a head the taller, full busted, and buttoned into a lace frock, was emblazoned with diamonds, and tactlessly wore a very full-blown rose over her heart, where she was unfortunately a great deal too full-blown herself.
‘Well, here we are,’ said Mrs. Spinks, settling herself into her chair, and she remarked affably, ‘Good evening, everybody.’
‘Good evening, all,’ said Mr. Spinks.
Fergus groaned. This was going to be a worse trip than ever. It was positively vicious.
Disappointedly, and yet she hardly knew what she had expected, Ann looked about her. She felt that she had nothing in common with any of these people. There was no neutral ground upon which they could possibly meet. She ought not to have come. She was too old to mix with others, too shy, too self-conscious. She wondered how she could live through the entire cruise with people of this kind, and if perhaps it was not a just retribution for having won the money as she had done, and having spent it entirely on herself.
A little while ago she had been congratulating herself that now they could not put back. Nothing would put them into port again until they got to Gibraltar. Now she could only deplore the fact. She could have wept for herself as she sat there spiked by the noisy Frenchman on her left, and trying to converse with people whom quite frankly she did not like.
Although the ship was bound for sunshine and blueness, for the joys of the Mediterranean, and for the grandeur of Naples and the glamour of Venice, she felt herself entirely alienated from them all.
Instead of going up into the lounge to partake of coffee, she shrank down into her cabin and crept into bed. She was cold. Her first night at sea, Ann wept tears of bitter chagrin.
IV
Daze. Haziness. Queer jumble of thoughts all tangled, and of events equally involved. She was seasick. She wasn’t very seasick, yet enough to keep to her cabin, feeling giddy and wretched, and apprehensive that surely this was the hand of God in wrathful adjudication on her unfortunate head. She lay there in a cabin, the porthole of which had of necessity to be closed, owing to the ferocity of the seas through which the Allando was ploughing. They were quite unexpected. From adjacent cabins there came sounds of other sufferers in even deeper agonies. Ann felt giddy, confused, and her head ached. She was also in that unfortunate position which warned her that though she was not actually sick, it would take very little to make her so.
She lay there and time ceased to be. There was only the eternal rising and falling. Only the sounds of stewards hurrying to and fro, and the stewardesses’ starched gowns rustling, and the desperate brightness of the gramophone at the end of the alley, which played jazz music incessantly to two dreadfully hearty young men obviously undisturbed by the weather conditions.
All the meals took on a sameness, and none were appetizing. She did not know how long it lasted. Sleepy periods. Periods of acute misery. Darknesses. Lightnesses. Gloomily lying on her heart Cuthbert’s grim warning, ‘Well, didn’t I tell you not to go?’
Then a new morning. A sea grown amazingly calm, the sunshine stronger and warmer than any she had known at this time of year. Finistère passed. The porthole was flung wide and the warmth and the new light came in in a golden wash. She felt restored; pale, a little green and decidedly thinner, but herself again. Ann staggered on to the deck.
It was an eternity since last she had stepped upon it, she felt, and now it was a new ship stirring with ship life, moving rapidly into the warmth and the blueness. ‘It is quite horrible,’ thought Ann, ‘to remember that I’ll have to come back this way and go through all this misery again,’ and she tried to console herself that that was over three weeks ahead. A lot may happen in three weeks ‒ even Judgement Day.
It is absurd to fret over the coming back on the going out. In the sunshine she found strength returning to legs that had been inclined to wobble. She found colour being fanned back to her cheeks. Fergus passing said, ‘Hello, been sick? We’ve missed you from the table.’
She inquired how the others had fared and learnt that the Spinkses had been unable to leave their cabins, and that the Frenchman should not have left his cabin, but had done so injudiciously and had fled back to it, but unfortunately not in time. The result had been calamitous. The Duncans, mother and daughter, had held firmly on to their seats, and though at times pale green and having obvious difficulty in seeing the food set before them, and a reactionary dislike of poached eggs, pork and pastry, they had however managed to stick it out. Fergus remarked that the very sight of the ‘fiddles’ had been enough to send the unwary back to bed. Ann, who had no idea what the ‘fiddles’ were, smiled as though amused. Probably they had music in the saloon.
When Fergus had passed on, the old lady sitting in the deck chair alongside made herself acquainted. She mumbled very much. ‘You must excuse me, my dear,’ she said, ‘but I had an accident the very first day out. Mo’ unfor’nate.’
‘Oh, what happened?’ asked Ann.
The old lady, who had to unburden her soul to someone, launched into the story. She and her husband had come for the food. They liked good food, and it was better at sea than anywhere else, particularly on this line. It had been rough the first night, and after dinner she had felt rather seedy. They had gone for a walk along the deck. ‘I feel sick, George,’ she told her husband; George felt the same. Being both equipped with what is more gracefully described as an ‘artificial denture’, George suggested that they should take them out in case of accidents. Very unfortunately the accident happened first in the lady’s case. Dinner and the artificial denture had gone over the side together. Now she could eat nothing but slops until she got home. They had come for the food, and this was what had happened! Bread and milk would have been possible at home, and bread and milk was all she was going to get here.
Ann did not know whether to be disgusted or whether to laugh. Cuthbert had artificial dentures, but he did not mention them. He thought they were rather indecent, like Eleanor’s underthings. You had to have them, but you never alluded to them.
When she could, she got up and she walked away.
The deck steward brought round beef tea. It seemed to h
er to be very funny having it at this time, and she had supposed that the smell of it would make her sick again. Instead she suddenly found that she was very hungry. She sipped it gratefully. She could survey her fellow passengers with a new interest. After all had they not all suffered together? Most of them were bright young people, rather terrifying in their brightness and their youth. Blazers were out. White shoes strapped with brown, berets, dark glasses, field glasses, blue jumpers with brass buttons, American sailors’ caps. They were all the equipment of cruising. There was a new tone about it all.
She saw Oliver Banks.
‘Well, and how did lifeboat drill go off?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t go. I never got as far. I was sick!’
He laughed. ‘We get into Gib. at ten o’clock to-morrow. What about coming ashore?’
The thought of getting to Gib. was worth all the misery and the chilliness, and the sense of desolation which had descended upon her in the throes of seasickness. It was worth the panic of hiding from the intricacies of lifeboat drill, and of the shambles below decks when the ship pitched and tossed. This evening she would have a talk with the bath steward ‒ it seemed all wrong having a man arrange your bath for you ‒ and she would have a proper bath this time. Before she had been too frightened. Bathing had been so complicated, it was most confusing. The big bath greenly full, and the funny little nursery tub set in a wooden tray before you. One for the face and one for the body, she had thought, in the extensive way that they did things on board. That evening the steward disillusioned her. He explained that one was salt water, and one wasn’t. You could not soap with salt water. Ann, testing it for herself, came to the conclusion that this was true. She went down to dinner feeling like someone rejuvenated.
V
The saloon was full, though considerably paler than it had been on the first night. Mr. and Mrs. Spinks were still absent, but the noisy eater was noticeably present. Monsieur Vallé was making up for previous losses in the food line. Mrs. Duncan, decidedly limp, and Ethel, much as before, seeing that her makeup was applied like a paste, and her lipstick like an enamel.
