Clearing Cape Town when bound for the East is, or was in those days, something of a dangerous proceeding, not as dramatic as rounding Cape Horn but still dangerous. Davy Jones’s locker there is well-stocked with the bones of fine ships and brave men. First one must fight round a thirty-mile projection of the Cape, usually against stubbornly adverse winds, then run east past Cape Agulhas, notorious for its fiendish winds, then parallel to the country’s southern shore where there is a small patch of low-lying ground between Green Point and Mouillé Point over which the fog has an evilly misleading way of clinging. A mere passenger might have thought this part of our passage merely slow and tedious but I knew Peter well by now and could see that under his ordinary air of carelessness there was now a tense preoccupation and fatigue. I noticed, too, that both he and the Second did not, at this time, take advantage of all the sleeping-times to which they were entitled – and sleep, even more than rum and dry clothes, is the sailor’s most coveted treat.
Peter Stevenage was a strange and valuable man and I often blame myself for not having prized him more at that time, when my character was being formed. He had the rarest and truest sort of charm: that is, he did not exude a charm of his own but gave you the certainty, simply with a special sort of silence, that you were charming him. This is not an art which can be learned by taking thought or by studying books; it is not an art at all, it is a gift from God, if you will pardon the expression. (There was a boy at my school who had this gift. He was neither tall nor strong nor handsome; at lessons he was always just half-way up, or down, the form. At games he was reliable but did not shine. He spoke little and never harmfully, even of us few Jews in the school, but he would listen intently to anyone who spoke to him, even the masters; this was his gift. When you had finished he would say “yes” or perhaps “no” and you would go away purged and happy, like a Papist from the confessional-box. All of us in my year would cheerfully have died for him, except that he would have thought this a bizarre thing to do. He is now, without a doubt, the teller in a bank, trusted by one and all, and goes home each evening to a fat wife in a house smelling of cabbage and children’s urine.)
Peter had been born with this happy gift of listening as though each word you spoke was powerful; his only other gift was that of a gentle, solemn mockery which prevented one from admiring him too much. This was, I am sure, deliberate. Only the strongest of men try, when they are ripe for death, to make themselves appear valueless. Peter was strong in just such a way.
The air in the Indian Ocean, when we were fairly into it, was hot and moist and cosy as the well-pissed bed of a sleepy child. There were little, desultory airs which sometimes made our sails rattle and shake but these scarcely did more than keep the quartermaster awake at his wheel.
There came a day when our diminutive Captain was pacing up and down, glaring aloft from under his chimney-pot hat in a fashion which made the more knowing of our crew suspect that a capful of wind might be signified by the barometer and that he would presently be ordering royal studding-sails, sky-sails and all the other “flying kites” that she had room for to be sent aloft, although there was small chance that any of our rivals in the trade would have found better winds.
Fate, however, was on the side of our top-men, for at noon, just as the Captain was chewing his beard in an agony of decision, the fellow at the mast-head holla’d the deck, crying a sail “fine on the port bow”. Captain Knatchbull instantly sent Peter Stevenage up the shrouds with the best spy-glass in the ship. For his part, he strolled to the starboard side, affecting to study the scend of the sea.
Two minutes later Peter was reporting: “Large Aden dhow, Sir; at about three miles. Only a scrap of sail on her and a bucket at the main-truck. Distress, Sir. No sign of life. No one at the helm, I fancy.”
“Thankyou, Mr Lord Stevenage; I am well acquainted with the meaning of a bucket at the main-truck in these waters. Pray tell the steersman to set a course to close with the, ah, distressed vessel and to heave to at one cable’s length from her.”
I followed Peter and intercepted him after he had delivered his orders.
“Why are you smiling, Peter?” I asked.
“Wait and see. And, oh, Karli, are your pistols primed, the charges dry and so forth?”
I looked at his grave face, decided that for once he was in deadly earnest, scuttled below and saw to my pistols. In a minute, one barker at each side of my belt, I sauntered on deck and joined the Captain in his scrutiny of the waves.
“Is it the plague, do you suppose, Sir?”
“They are the plague, Mr Van Cleef,” he answered tersely. I said no more, for his manner invited silence.
When we were hove-to every glass in the ship was trained upon the unlucky vessel. The only living being observable was a man in a turban and a gaudy, night-shirt-like robe, lashed to the mast and waving feebly to us.
“Gunner,” said the captain quietly, “can you put a ball through the mast?”
“I reckon I can that, Sir.”
“Then pray do so.”
“Aye aye, Sir.”
I gazed aghast as the gunner ambled towards the long brass Armstrong 68-pounder mounted on a pivot between the mast and bustled about it, testing the lock and handling the balls in the net until he chose one of perfect roundness. One of his mates came running up in list slippers (for he had been in the magazine, where a spark from a nailed shoe would send the whole ship to glory) carrying a stout cylindrical package. The gunner bit off a fragment of the cartridge-paper and poured some of the powder into the touch-hole. His mate rammed the rest into the barrel, then a wad, then the ball and another wad, thumping all well home.
“The ship’s company will wave,” said the captain. “Cheerily, now, lads!” Everyone waved in a cheery fashion to the poor wretch so near to salvation, except for me, who waved in a mystified way. The heathen waved back vigorously. The captain nodded to the gunner, who fussed a little more with his piece then snapped the lock.
When I could open my eyes again the heathen was no longer waving. This was because his head had vanished, you see. He was still tied to the stump but the rest of the mast was toppling, infinitely slowly, overside. I turned to the Captain: in my horror and agitation at his barbarous conduct I believe I was on the very point of rebuking him but, at that moment, a horrid clamour of raging screams came over the water and from behind the dhow there emerged two long boats, crammed with heathens, rowing frantically towards us. Those who were not rowing were brandishing curved swords which glistered in the sun.
“Only two boats, Sir,” said the First Mate laconically.
“Then I’ll have two guns run out, Mister,” grunted the Captain. “Fire at will. But destroy them before they come too close. I want no blood on my decks, you understand? See to it.”
The gunner was a master of his art, a master: his first shot from the carronade was a trifle high and only killed the heathen at the steering-oar but his next took her squarely in the bows and she opened out like a cabbage ready for stuffing – and, indeed, there was no want of minced meat to add kitchen-colour to the receipt. Our fellows on the gun-deck were less fortunate, or ill-trained, for their shots missed time and again so that the other boat, at which they were shooting, was soon so close that the guns would not depress low enough to bear.
“All gun crews to practise during their watches below for the next two days,” said the Captain in a disgusted voice. “Break out cold shot, if you please, Gunner.”
The next instant, it seemed, the shrieking horde were against our chains and grappling-hooks were flying – some lodged on our rail. Two of our men ambled forward nursing great cannon-balls and dropped them into the bottom of the boat. It was holed, filled and sunk in a moment but not before several of the Mahometan fiends were swarming up our side. One of our sturdy fellows sawed away at the grappling-lines with his great case-knife: he took a bullet from an ancient flintlock pistol in his shoulder but the lines were severed and the heathens fell screaming into the se
a. Only one succeeded in boarding us; he rushed towards the Captain and me. There was a pistol in my hand. I aimed at his heart but my hand shook so that I shot him just above the private parts; he made an intolerable noise as he squirmed in the scuppers, voiding his bowels, his bladder and his blood most copiously. I had never killed a man before. I felt no distress, only a detached interest at how ignobly a brave man dies. I realised for the first time that Blanche was beside me, her lips parted, her eyes wide, her bosom heaving rapidly.
“Fined five shillings, Mr Van Cleef,” said the Captain crossly. “You heard me say I’d have no blood on my decks, did you not?”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. After all, I had saved his life, although I confess that my preoccupation had been more with my own.
“Go to your cabin, Blanche,” he went on. “Be ready in four and one half minutes.” He pulled out his watch.
A bored, disgusted seaman lifted my victim, still jerking and squealing, and hove him over the rail. I gazed down in horror, for the water was already boiling with sharks and other rapacious scavengers of the deep. Peter appeared beside me, put his hand on my shoulder.
“Karli, if you ever go overside in Tropic waters, pray for a shark, do. They are quick, you see. The barracoutha takes his time, goes for the titbits first, if you take my meaning. A fellow might live for half an hour with a barracoutha at him. Now, I’ve just to see the guns swabbed and secured then I’ll join you for dinner. Fish chowder today, you are fond of fish I believe?”
I think he was trying to hearten me. I forget what I said to him.
As we traversed the Indian Ocean the breezes became ever more warm and spiced. The doctor’s dishes, too, became hotter and spicier as he weaned me, not unwillingly, onto such fare. Those karis, pilaffs and tarkeeans, you see, not only disguise the odour of meat which is past its youth, they also provoke the jaded appetite in the long, languorous days and induce a wholesome, cooling sweat. How different they were from the gross Dutch food of my childhood, yet how I learned to love them! The Doctor, it was evident, grew to love me for my appreciation of his victuals and Orace was kept busy running from the galley to our cabin, carrying each day new and more bizarre confections. Peter Stevenage had a poor appetite, ruined by liquor and the pox, I suppose, but he never ceased to marvel at my adroitness with the knife and fork. He often remarked, as he passed me his scarcely-touched plate, that to watch me at the trencher was as good as a feast. I am sure that he meant this in sincerity and kindness, for there was no malice in his whole body.
Blanche, too, became warmer and spicier in the sultry air; her clothing – I observed her narrowly – was now little more than a muslin gown no less explicit than a shift. She no longer bridled when I called her “Blanche” and sometimes, when we leaned on the rail together enjoying the first cool wafts of the tropic dusk, her naked arm would rest warmly against mine and once or twice, even, I would relish the incandescence of her flank through my cotton trowsers.
I made no move, for I had decided on this as a new tactic, and I was right. She was, perhaps, piqued or perhaps she had heard about the Griqua girls in the Cape Town and thought that my lust for her had been allayed. Be that as it may, one evening as we left the rail, Blanche, inadvertently as it were or was meant to seem, brushed her splendid teats across my arm as she bade me goodnight.
Have you ever played the game where everyone holds hands and the instigator winds the handle of an electrical generating machine, in a little mahogany box, each terminal of which is held by the two people at the open end of the circle? The effect is quite formidable. One jumps. The sport has gone out of fashion, I am told, because there have been occasions when young ladies have wet themselves with the surprise and alarm of it.
The effect on me of the brief brushing of Blanche’s breasts against me was just such a shock, but without the wetting, thank God. There was, you see, not the soft, goose-feather sensation that you or I might have expected. Her teats were hard, hard, as though swollen.
“Are you well, Mr Van Cleef?” she asked, looking over her shoulder as she left me.
I mumbled something valiantly although my head was reeling.
“I’m so glad,” she said, her eyelashes flickering modestly as her large and lovely eyes rested for an instant on a territory just below my belt. “These tropic nights are replete with evil humours, are they not, and gentlemen’s clothes are so constricting. I hope you will sleep well. My husband always sleeps well but then, he is used to … these tropic nights, you understand.” I understood.
“Good night,” I said. It seemed an inadequate rejoinder but I had not been given the time to think of a better and, in any case, my mind was on lower things.
Peter was reading in the cabin. He eyed me in a friendly way.
“Are you well?” he asked.
“Uncommonly well, thankyou,” I replied evenly.
“Then why are you grinding your teeth, Karli?”
The world stood still while I decided whether to strike my mess-mate and only friend or to chew on my bile and swallow it. I made the right decision.
“It is because I am hungry, Peter,” I said.
“Karli,” he said in a grave voice.
“Yes?”
“There is something I must say to you.” I sat down.
“Yes?” I said.
“Karli, when you were out on deck communing with the, ah, spiced breezes, I made a decision.”
“Yes?” I said again.
“Yes. You see, I have been much disturbed. The long, hard, Italian sausage which has been hanging between our bunks was preying on my mind. You said, I know, that the grocer assured you that it would travel to the Indies but what do Italian warehousemen know of the Indies? In any case, we are, to speak strictly, already in the Indies. I fear for that sausage, Karli. Shall we cut it?”
He had the art, you see, of distracting a preoccupied mind.
The long, halcyon days span themselves out, each one much the same as another. It became, tacitly, an understood thing that Blanche would be at the weather rail a little before the short tropic dusk gathered and that I would be there, sometimes with Peter Stevenage, sometimes alone. We talked of many things and I found that she, too, was an admirer of “Jane Austen”, although in her sweet womanly simplicity she firmly believed him to have been a woman. But little ignorances of this kind only endeared her the more to me. All one can ask for in a woman is that she have a soft voice, a firm body and a pretty, empty head. (You will remark that I do not demand that she be complacent – every woman is unchaste if one applies oneself with zeal and patience to making her so. If you are tongue-tied and maladroit, do not attempt to practise on an ugly woman: she will know that she is but a pis-aller and there will be difficulties. Attempt, rather, a beautiful one, for she may well have a compassionate heart and her experience as a beauty will have taught her curiosity and, perhaps, a relish for carnality. You will understand all these matters when you are older, like me. By then, of course, it will be too late.)
She had, too, a passion for the poems of one Wordsworthy; a man of small talent who chose to write simple verses about idiot children, wayside weeds and large geographical features in the cold Northern parts of England. His work bore no relation to life but appealed to her charming, silly head and I indulged her in this matter. Sometimes I would recite to her, in Dutch, the English play Hamlet which I had mastered at school, but, inexplicably, she could not take it seriously. Once, when I had reached the solemn moment when the ghost says “Omlet, Omlet, ik ben je poppa’s spook …” she stuffed her handkerchief in her mouth and ran to her cabin. She was strange, strange.
Once, too, First Mate Lubbock joined us, making many an ironic remark to me. I drew the subject round to Great Circle Navigation, which I had been conning in one of Peter’s books. It was clear that Lubbock had but little knowledge in this and he soon made off, snorting vehemently.
I taught Blanche a few phrases in Dutch – although these did not mean what I told her t
hey meant: it was pleasant to hear her say them unwittingly but also disturbing. I remember, for instance, that she mastered perfectly a sentence which she believed meant “It is a fine night, is it not: only look at the stars!” but which, in fact, meant, “Loosen my bodice, I beg you, and cover my breasts with kisses until I swoon in your arms.” When she at last pronounced it perfectly, I kissed her on the cheek, saying that this was a Dutch schoolmaster’s praise. She believed this, too, and the cheek-kissing became a normal part of our lessons. Better still, and more encouraging, her accidental brushing of her breasts against me became more frequent and once my hand was in the way. She pretended not to notice. But the ship was full of eyes – there is no privacy on so small a vessel – and I durst not make more explicit overtures.
Our first landfall for many weeks was hailed with absurd pleasure by the lookout, greeted with cheers by the jaded crew and with admiration by those of the officers who understood how skilful must have been the Captain’s navigation. It was the island of Minicoy, the most southerly of the Laccadivhs. The Captain gave the quartermaster a correction of his course but, just then, the lookout bawled “Deck, there! Sail three points on the port quarter, tops’ls just over the horizon. Ship-rigged, looks to me Sir.”
A grim glance and a nod from the Captain and Peter was swarming up the ratlines (“the lady’s ladder” we called it on the John Coram, for the rope steps were set kindly close together) and soon we could see him in the wide-circling crows-nest, training his glass on what was invisible to us. Then we saw him almost vaulting out of the nest – scorning the lubber-hole – and slithering down the rigging like a toy monkey.
On deck, panting from his exertions (for he was not well, you recall) he reported “Not ship-rigged, Sir. A barque. Baltimore-built, I fancy. Carrying top-gallants, royals, sky-sails. Fore-reaching on us, I’m afraid, Sir.”
Usually Peter spoke, even to the Captain, in a debonair, damn-your-eyes fashion: I had never before heard him use such a timid, almost cringing, tone.
All the Tea in China Page 15
