Rites of Passage

by William Golding

  “Damned silly thing to do. Don’t know what came over me.”

  “Is this how you behave on a stricken field, Oldmeadow? No, forgive me! I am not myself either. The dead, you see, lying in that attitude as I had so recently seen him—why even then he might have been—but now, stiff and hard as—where the devil is that steward? Steward! Brandy here and some more for Mr Oldmeadow!”

  “I know what you mean, Talbot. The truth is I have never seen a stricken field nor heard a shot fired in anger except once when my adversary missed me by a yard. How silent the ship has become!”

  I glanced through the saloon door. The party of men was crowding into Colley’s cabin. I shut the door and turned back to Oldmeadow.

  “All will be done soon. Oldmeadow—are our feelings unnatural?”

  “I wear the King’s uniform yet I have never before seen a dead body except the occasional tarred object in chains. This has quite overcome me—touching it I mean. I am Cornish, you see.”

  “With such a name?”

  “We are not all Tre, Pol and Pen. Lord, how her timbers grind. Is there a change in her motion?”

  “It cannot be.”

  “Talbot, do you suppose—”

  “What, sir?”

  “Nothing.”

  We sat for a while and I attended more to the spreading warmth of the brandy through my veins than anything else. Presently Summers came in. Behind him I glimpsed a party of men bearing a covered object away along the deck. Summers himself had not yet recovered from a slight degree of pallor.

  “Brandy for you, Summers?”

  He shook his head. Oldmeadow got to his feet.

  “The afterdeck and a breath of air for me, I think. Damned silly of me it was. Just damned silly.”

  Presently Summers and I were alone.

  “Mr Talbot,” he said, in a low tone, “you mentioned justice.”

  “Well, sir?”

  “You have a journal.”

  “And—?”

  “Just that.”

  He nodded meaningly at me, got up, and left. I stayed where I was, thinking to myself how little he understood me after all. He did not know that I had already used that same journal—nor that I planned this plain account to lie before one in whose judgement and integrity—

  My lord, you was pleased to advise me to practise the art of flattery. But how can I continue to try it on a personage who will infallibly detect the endeavour? Let me be disobedient to you if only in this, and flatter you no more!

  Well then, I have accused the captain of an abuse of power; and I have let stand on the page Summers’s own suggestion that I myself was to some extent responsible for it. I do not know what more the name of justice can demand of me. The night is far advanced—and it is only now as I write these words that I remember the Colley Manuscript in which there may be even plainer evidence of your godson’s culpability and our captain’s cruelty! I will glance through what the poor devil wrote and then get me to bed.

  * * *

  I have done so oh God, and could almost wish I had not. Poor, poor Colley, poor Robert James Colley! Billy Rogers, Summers firing the gun, Deverel and Cumbershum, Anderson, minatory, cruel Anderson! If there is justice in the world—but you may see by the state of my writing how the thing has worked on me—and I—I!

  There is light filtering through my louvre. It is far advanced towards morning then. What am I to do? I cannot give Colley’s letter, this unbegun, unfinished letter, cannot give this letter to the captain, though that for sure, legalistical as it might sound, is what I ought to do. But what then? It would go overboard, be suppressed, Colley would have died of a low fever and that would be all. My part would disappear with it. Do I refine too much? For Anderson is captain and will have chapter and verse, justifications for everything he has done. Nor can I take Summers into my confidence. His precious career is at stake. He would be bound to say that though I was perhaps right to appropriate the letter I have no business to suppress it.

  Well. I do not suppress it. I take the only way towards justice—natural justice I mean, rather than that of the captain or the law courts—and lay the evidence in your lordship’s hands. He says he is “For the beach”. If you believe as I do that he went beyond discipline into tyranny then a word from you in the right quarter will keep him there.

  And I? I am writ down plainer in this record than I intended, to be sure! What I thought was behaviour consonant with my position—

  Very well, then. I, too.

  Why Edmund, Edmund! This is methodistical folly! Did you not believe you were a man of less sensibility than intelligence? Did you not feel, no, believe, that your blithely accepted system of morality for men in general owed less to feeling than to the operations of the intellect? Here is more of what you will wish to tear and not exhibit! But I have read and written all night and may be forgiven for a little lightheadedness. Nothing is real and I am already in a half-dream. I will get glue and fix the letter in here. It shall become another part of the Talbot Manuscript.

  His sister must never know. It is another reason for not showing the letter. He died of a low fever—why, that poor girl there forrard will die of one like enough before we are done. Did I say glue? There must be some about. A hoof of Bessie. Wheeler will know, omniscient, ubiquitous Wheeler. And I must keep all locked away. This journal has become deadly as a loaded gun.

  The first page, or it may be two pages, are gone. I saw them, or it, in his hand when he walked, in a trance of drunkenness, walked, head up and with a smile as if already in heaven—

  Then at some time after he had fallen into a drunken slumber, he woke—slowly perhaps. There was, it may be, a blank time when he knew not who or what he was—then the time of remembering the Reverend Robert James Colley.

  No. I do not care to imagine it. I visited him that first time—Did my words bring to his mind all that he had lost? Self-esteem? His fellows’ respect? My friendship? My patronage? Then, then in that agony he grabbed the letter, crumpled it, thrust it away as he would have thrust his memory away had it been possible—away, deep down beneath the bunk, unable to bear the thought of it—

  My imagination is false. For sure he willed himself to death, but not for that, not for any of that, not for a casual, a single—

  Had he committed murder—or being what he was—!

  It is madness, absurdity. What women are there at that end of the ship for him?

  And I? I might have saved him had I thought less of my own consequence and less of the danger of being bored!

  Oh those judicious opinions, those interesting observations, those sparks of wit with which I once proposed to entertain your lordship! Here instead is a plain description of Anderson’s commissions and my own—omissions.

  Your lordship may now read:

  COLLEY’S LETTER

  so I have drawn a veil over what have been the most trying and unedifying of my experiences. My prolonged nausea has rendered those first hours and days a little less distinct in my memory, nor would I attempt to describe to you in any detail the foul air, lurching brutalities, the wantonness, the casual blasphemies to which a passenger in such a ship is exposed even if he is a clergyman! But now I am sufficiently recovered from my nausea to be able to hold a pen, I cannot refrain from harking back for a moment to my first appearance on the vessel. Having escaped the clutches of a horde of nameless creatures on the foreshore and having been conveyed out to our noble vessel in a most expensive manner; having then been lifted to the deck in a kind of sling—somewhat like but more elaborate than the swing hung from the beech beyond the styes—I found myself facing a young officer who carried a spyglass under his arm.

  Instead of addressing me as one gentleman ought to address another he turned to one of his fellows and made the following observation.

  “Oh G—, a parson! That will send old Rumble-guts flying into the foretop!”

  This was but a sample of what I was to suffer. I will not detail the rest, for it is now many da
ys, my dear sister, since we bade farewell to the shores of Old Albion. Though I am strong enough to sit at the little flap which serves me as priedieu, desk, table and lectern I am still not secure enough to venture further. My first duty must be, of course (after those of my calling) to make myself known to our gallant captain, who lives and has his being some two storeys, or decks as I must now call them, above us. I hope he will agree to have this letter put on a ship proceeding in a contrary direction so you may have the earliest news of me. As I write this, Phillips (my servant!) has been in my small cabin with a little broth and advised me against a premature visit to Captain Anderson. He says I should get up my strength a little, take some food in the passenger saloon as a change from having it here—what I could retain of it!—and exercise myself in the lobby or further out in that large space of deck which he calls the waist and which lies about the tallest of our masts.

  Though unable to eat I have been out, and oh, my dear sister, how remiss I have been to repine at my lot! It is an earthly, nay, an oceanic paradise! The sunlight is warm and like a natural benediction. The sea is brilliant as the tails of Juno’s birds (I mean the peacock) that parade the terraces of Manston Place! (Do not omit to show any little attention that may be possible in that quarter, I must remind you.) Enjoyment of such a scene is as good a medicine as a man could wish for when enhanced by that portion of the scriptures appointed for the day. There was a sail appeared briefly on the horizon and I offered up a brief prayer for our safety subject always to HIS Will. However, I took my temper from the behaviour of our officers and men, though of course in the love and care of OUR SAVIOUR I have a far securer anchor than any appertaining to the vessel! Dare I confess to you that as the strange sail sank below the horizon—she had never appeared wholly above it—I caught myself day-dreaming that she had attacked us and that I performed some deed of daring not, indeed, fitted for an ordained minister of the Church but even as when a boy, I dreamed sometimes of winning fame and fortune at the side of England’s Hero! The sin was venial and quickly acknowledged and repented. Our heroes surrounded me on all sides and it is to them that I ought to minister!

  Well, then, I could almost wish a battle for their sakes! They go about their tasks, their bronzed and manly forms unclothed to the waist, their abundant locks gathered in a queue, their nether garments closely fitted but flared about the ankles like the nostrils of a stallion. They disport themselves casually a hundred feet up in the air. Do not, I beg you, believe the tales spread by vicious and un-Christian men, of their brutal treatment! I have neither heard nor seen a flogging. Nothing more drastic has occurred than a judicious correction applied to the proper portion of a young gentleman who would have suffered as much and borne it as stoically at school.

  I must give you some idea of the shape of the little society in which we must live together for I know not how many months. We, the gentry as it were, have our castle in the backward or after part of the vessel. At the other end of the waist, under a wall pierced by two entrances and furnished with stairs or, as they still call them, ladders, are the quarters of our Jolly Tars and the other inferior sort of passenger—the emigrants, and so forth. Above that again is the deck of the fo’castle and the quite astonishing world of the bowsprit! You will have been accustomed, as I was, to thinking of a bowsprit (remember Mr Wembury’s ship-in-a-bottle!) as a stick projecting from the front end of a ship. Nay then, I must now inform you that a bowsprit is a whole mast, only laid more nearly to the horizontal than the others. It has yards and mastcapping, sidestays and even halyards! More than that, as the other masts may be likened to huge trees among the limbs and branches of which our fellows climb, so the bowsprit is a kind of road, steep in truth but one on which they run or walk. It is more than three feet in diameter. The masts, those other “sticks”, are of such a thickness! Not the greatest beech from Saker’s Wood has enough mass to supply such monsters. When I remember that some action of the enemy, or, even more appalling, some act of Nature may break or twist them off as you might twist the leaves off a carrot, I fall into a kind of terror. Indeed it was not a terror for my own safety! It was, it is, a terror at the majesty of this huge engine of war, then by a curious extension of the feeling, a kind of awe at the nature of the beings whose joy and duty it is to control such an invention in the service of their GOD and their King. Does not Sophocles (a Greek Tragedian) have some such thought in the chorus to his Philoctetes? But I digress.

  The air is warm and sometimes hot, the sun lays such a lively hand on us! We must be beware of him lest he strike us down! I am conscious even as I sit here at my desk of a warmness about my cheeks that has been occasioned by his rays! The sky this morning was of a dense blue, yet no brighter nor denser than the white-flecked blue of the broad ocean. I could almost rejoice in that powerful circling which the point of the bowsprit, our bowsprit, ceaselessly described above the sharp line of the horizon!

  Next day.

  I am indeed stronger and more able to eat. Phillips says that soon all will be well with me. Yet the weather is somewhat changed. Where yesterday there was a blueness and brightness, there is today little or no wind and the sea is covered with a white haze. The bowsprit—which in earlier days had brought on attack after attack of nausea if I was so rash as to fix my attention on it—stands still. Indeed, the aspect of our little world has changed at least three times since our Dear Country sank—nay, appeared to sink—into the waves! Where, I ask myself, are the woods and fertile fields, the flowers, the grey stone church in which you and I have worshipped all our lives, that churchyard in which our dear parents—nay, the earthly remains of our dear parents, who have surely received their reward in heaven—where, I ask, are all the familiar scenes that were for both of us the substance of our lives? The human mind is inadequate to such a situation. I tell myself there is some material reality which joins the place where I am to the place where I was, even as a road joins Upper and Nether Compton. The intellect assents but the heart can find no certainty in it. In reproof I tell myself that OUR LORD is here as much as there; or rather that here and there may be the same place in HIS EYES!

  I have been on deck again. The white mist seemed denser, yet hot. Our people are dimly to be seen. The ship is utterly stopped, her sails hanging down. My footsteps sounded unnaturally loud and I did not care to hear them. I saw no passengers about the deck. There is no creak from all our wood and when I ventured to look over the side I saw not a ripple, not a bubble in the water.

  Well, I am myself again—but only just!

  I had not been out in the hot vapour for more than a few minutes when a thunderbolt of blinding white dropped out of the mist on our right hand and struck into the sea. The clap came with the sight and left my ears ringing. Before I had time to turn and run, more claps came one on the other and rain fell—I had almost said in rivers! But truly it seemed they were the waters of the earth! Huge drops leapt back a yard off the deck. Between where I had stood by the rail and the lobby was but a few yards, yet I was drenched before I got under cover. I disrobed as far as decency permits, then sat at this letter but not a little shaken. For the last quarter of an hour—would that I had a timepiece!—the awful bolts have dropped and the rain cascaded.

  Now the storm is grumbling away into the distance. The sun is lighting what it can reach of our lobby. A light breeze has set us groaning, washing and bubbling on our way. I say the sun has appeared; but only to set.

  What has remained with me apart from a lively memory of my apprehensions is not only a sense of HIS AWFULNESS and a sense of the majesty of HIS creation. It is a sense of the splendour of our vessel rather than her triviality and minuteness! It is as if I think of her as a separate world, a universe in little in which we must pass our lives and receive our reward or punishment. I trust the thought is not impious! It is a strange thought and a strong one!

  It is with me still for, the breeze dying away, I ventured forth again. It is night now. I cannot tell you how high against the stars her gr
eat masts seem, how huge yet airy her sails, nor how far down from her deck the night-glittering surface of the waters. I remained motionless by the rail for I know not how long. While I was yet there, the last disturbance left by the breeze passed away so that the glitter, that image of the starry heavens, gave place to a flatness and blackness, a nothing! All was mystery. It terrified me and I turned away to find myself staring into the half-seen face of Mr Smiles, the sailing master. Phillips tells me that Mr Smiles, under the captain, is responsible for the navigation of our vessel.

  “Mr Smiles—tell me how deep these waters are!”

  He is a strange man, as I know already. He is given to long thought, constant observation. He is aptly named, too, for he has a kind of smiling remoteness which sets him apart from his fellow men.

  “Who can say, Mr Colley?”

  I laughed uneasily. He came closer and peered into my face. He is smaller even than I, and you know I am by no means a tall man.

  “These waters may be more than a mile deep—two miles—who can say? We might sound at such a depth but commonly we do not. There is not the necessity.”

  “More than a mile!”

  I was almost overcome with faintness. Here we are, suspended between the land below the waters and the sky like a nut on a branch or a leaf on a pond! I cannot convey to you, my dear sister, my sense of horror, or shall I say, my sense of our being living souls in this place where surely, I thought, no man ought to be!

  I wrote that last night by the light of a most expensive candle. You know how frugal I must be. Yet I am forced in on myself and must be indulged in a light if nothing else. It is in circumstances such as these present that a man (even if he make the fullest use of the consolations of religion that are available to his individual nature), that a man, I say, requires human companionship. Yet the ladies and gentlemen at this end of the ship do not respond with any cheerful alacrity to my greetings. I had thought at first that they were, as the saying is, “shy of a parson”. I pressed Phillips again and again as to the meaning of this. Perhaps I should not have done so! He need not be privy to social divisions that are no concern of his. But he did mutter it was thought among the common people that a parson in a ship was like a woman in a fishing boat—a kind of natural bringer of bad luck. This low and reprehensible superstition cannot apply to our ladies and gentlemen. It is no kind of explanation. It seemed to me yesterday that I might have a clue as to their indefinable indifference to me. We have with us the celebrated, or let me say, the notorious free thinker, Mr Prettiman, that friend of Republicans and Jacobins! He is regarded by most, I think, with dislike. He is short and stocky. He has a bald head surrounded by a wild halo—dear me, how unfortunate my choice of words has been—a wild fringe of brown hair that grows from beneath his ears and round the back of his neck. He is a man of violent and eccentric movements that spring, we must suppose, from some well of his indignations. Our young ladies avoid him and the only one who will give him countenance is a Miss Granham, a lady of sufficient years and, I am sure, firmness of principle to afford her security even in the heat of his opinions. There is also a young lady, a Miss Brocklebank, of outstanding beauty, of whom—I say no more or you will think me arch. I believe she, at least, does not look on your brother unkindly! But she is much occupied with the indisposition of her mother, who suffers even more than I from mal de mer.