Rites of Passage

by William Golding

  “Very well, Rogers. That will be all. You may return to your duties.”

  The colour came and went in the man’s face. He let out his breath in a prolonged gasp. He knuckled his forehead, began to smile, turned and went away out of the cabin. I cannot say how long the three of us sat without word or movement. For my part, it was something as simple and ordinary as the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing; yet the “wrong thing” would be, so to speak, raised to a higher power, to such a power as to be fearful and desperate. I felt in the long moments of our silence as if I could not allow myself to think at all, otherwise my face might redden and the perspiration begin to creep down my cheeks. I made by a most conscious effort my mind as nearly blank as might be and waited on the event. For surely of the three of us it was least my part to speak. Rogers had caught us in a mantrap. Can your lordship understand how already touches of suspicion came to life in my mind whether I would or no and flitted from the name of this gentleman to that?

  Captain Anderson rescued us from our catalepsy. He did not move but spoke as if to himself.

  “Witnesses, enquiries, accusations, lies, more lies, courts-martial​—​the man has it in his power to ruin us all if he be brazen enough, as I doubt not he is, for it would be a hanging matter. Such accusations cannot be disproved. Whatever the upshot, something would stick.”

  He turned to Summers.

  “And there, Mr Summers, ends our investigation. Have we other informants?”

  “I believe no, sir. Touch pitch—”

  “Just so. Mr Talbot?”

  “I am all at sea, sir! But it is true enough. The man was at bay and brought out his last weapon; false witness, amounting to blackmail.”

  “In fact,” said Summers, smiling at last, “Mr Talbot is the only one of us to have profited. He had at least a temporary elevation to the peerage!”

  “I have returned to earth, sir—though since I was addressed as ‘my lord’ by Captain Anderson, who can conduct marriages and funerals—”

  “Ah yes. Funerals. You will drink, gentlemen? Call Hawkins in, Summers, will you? I must thank you, Mr Talbot, for your assistance.”

  “Of little use I fear, sir.”

  The captain was himself again. He beamed.

  “A low fever then. Sherry?”

  “Thank you, sir. But is everything concluded? We still do not know what happened. You mentioned informants—”

  “This is good sherry,” said the captain brusquely. “I believe, Mr Summers, you are averse to drinking at this time of the day and you will wish to oversee the various arrangements for the unfortunate man’s committal to the deep. Your health, Mr Talbot. You will be willing to sign, or rather counter-sign, a report?”

  I thought for a while.

  “I have no official standing in this ship.”

  “Oh, come, Mr Talbot!”

  I thought again.

  “I will make a statement and sign that.”

  Captain Anderson looked sideways up at me from under his thick brows and nodded without saying anything. I drained my glass.

  “You mentioned informants, Captain Anderson—”

  But he was frowning at me.

  “Did I, sir? I think not!”

  “You asked Mr Summers—”

  “Who replied there were none,” said Captain Anderson loudly. “None at all, Mr Talbot, not a man jack among them! Do you understand, sir? No one has come sneaking to me—no one! You can go, Hawkins!”

  I set down my glass and Hawkins took it away. The captain watched him leave the stateroom, then turned to me again.

  “Servants have ears, Mr Talbot!”

  “Why certainly, sir! I am very sure my fellow Wheeler has.”

  The captain smiled grimly.

  “Wheeler! Oh yes indeed! That man must have ears and eyes all over him—”

  “Well then, until the sad ceremony of this afternoon I shall return to my journal.”

  “Ah, the journal. Do not forget to include in it, Mr Talbot, that whatever may be said of the passengers, as far as the people and my officers are concerned this is a happy ship!”

  At three o’clock we were all assembled in the waist. There was a guard, composed of Oldmeadow’s soldiers, with flintlocks, or whatever their ungainly weapons are called. Oldmeadow himself was in full dress and unblooded sword, as were the ship’s officers. Even our young gentlemen wore their dirks and expressions of piety. We passengers were dressed as sombrely as possible. The seamen were drawn up by watches, and were as presentable as their varied garments permit. Portly Mr Brocklebank was erect but yellow and drawn from potations that would have reduced Mr Colley to a ghost. As I inspected the man I thought that Brocklebank would have gone through the whole of Colley’s ordeal and fall with no more than a bellyache and a sore head. Such are the varied fabrics of the human tapestry that surrounds me! Our ladies, who must surely have had such an occasion in their minds when they fitted themselves for the voyage, were in mourning—even Brocklebank’s two doxies, who supported him on either side. Mr Prettiman was present at this superstitious ritual by the side of Miss Granham, who had led him there. What is all his militant Atheism and Republicanism when pitted against this daughter of a canon of Exeter Cathedral? I made a note as I saw him fretting and barely contained at her side, that she was the one of the two with whom I must speak and to whom I must convey the kind of delicate admonition I had intended for our notorious Freethinker!

  You will observe that I have recovered somewhat from the effect of reading Colley’s letter. A man cannot be forever brooding on what is past nor on the tenuous connection between his own unwitting conduct and someone else’s deliberately criminal behaviour! Indeed, I have to own that this ceremonious naval occasion was one of great interest to me! One seldom attends a funeral in such, dare I call them, exotic surroundings! Not only was the ceremony strange, but all the time—or some of it at least—our actors conducted their dialogue in Tarpaulin language. You know how I delight in that! You will already have noted some particularly impenetrable specimens as, for instance, mention of a badger bag—does not Servius (I believe it was he) declare there are half a dozen cruxes in the Aeneid which will never be solved, either by emendation or inspiration or any method attempted by scholarship? Well then, I shall entertain you with a few more naval cruxes.

  The ship’s bell was struck, muffled. A party of sailors appeared, bearing the body on a plank and under the union flag. It was placed with its feet towards the starboard, or honourable side, by which admirals and bodies and suchlike rarities make their exits. It was a longer body than I had expected but have since been told that two of our few remaining cannon balls were attached to the feet. Captain Anderson, glittering with bullion, stood by it. I have also been told since, that he and all the other officers were much exercised as to the precise nature of the ceremonies to be observed when, as young Mr Taylor expressed it, “piping a sky pilot over the side”.

  Almost all our sails were clewed up and we were what the Marine Dictionary calls, technically speaking—and when does it not?—hove to, which ought to mean we were stationary in the water. Yet the spirit of farce (speaking perfectly exquisite Tarpaulin) attended Colley to his end. No sooner was the plank laid on the deck than I heard Mr Summers mutter to Mr Deverel:

  “Depend upon it, Deverel, without you aft the driver a handspan she will make a sternboard.”

  Hardly had he said this when there came a heavy and rhythmical thudding from the ship’s hull under water as if Davey Jones was serving notice or perhaps getting hungry. Deverel shouted orders of the warrarroohoowasst! variety, the seamen leapt, while Captain Anderson, a prayerbook clutched like a grenade, turned on Lieutenant Summers.

  “Mr Summers! Will you have the sternpost out of her?”

  Summers said nothing but the thudding ceased. Captain Anderson’s tone sank to a grumble.

  “The pintles are loose as a pensioner’s teeth.”

  Summers nodded in reply.

  “I kno
w it, sir. But until she’s rehung—”

  “The sooner we’re off the wind the better. God curse that drunken superintendant!”

  He stared moodily down at the union flag, then up at the sails which, as if willing to debate with him, boomed back. They could have done no better than the preceding dialogue. Was it not superb?

  At last the captain glanced round him and positively started, as if seeing us for the first time. I wish I could say that he started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons but he did not. He started like a man in the smallest degree remiss who has absentmindedly forgotten that he has a body to get rid of. He opened the book and grunted a sour invitation to us to pray—and so on. Certainly he was anxious enough to get the thing over, for I have never heard a service read so fast. The ladies scarce had time to get out their handkerchiefs (tribute of a tear) and we gentlemen stared for a moment as usual into our beavers, but then, reminded that this unusual ceremony was too good to miss, all looked up again. I hoped that Oldmeadow’s men would fire a volley but he has since told me that owing to some difference of opinion between the Admiralty and the War Office, they have neither flints nor powder. However, they presented arms in approximate unison and the officers flourished their swords. I wonder—was all this proper for a parson? I do not know, neither do they. A fife shrilled out and someone rattled on a muffled drum, a kind of overture, or postlude should I call it, or would envoi be a better word?

  You will observe, my lord, that Richard is himself again—or shall we say that I have recovered from a period of fruitless and perhaps unwarranted regret?

  And yet—at the last (when Captain Anderson’s grumbling voice invited us to contemplate that time when there shall be no more sea) six men shrilled out a call on the bosun’s pipe. Now, your lordship may never have heard these pipes so I must inform you that they have just as much music in them as the yowling of cats on heat! And yet and yet and yet! Their very harsh and shrill unmusicality, their burst of high sound leading to a long descent that died away through an uneasy and prolonged fluttering into silence, seemed to voice something beyond words, religion, philosophy. It was the simple voice of Life mourning Death.

  I had scarcely time to feel a touch of complacency at the directness of my own emotions when the plank was lifted and tilted. The mortal remains of the Reverend Robert James Colley shot from under the union flag and entered the water with a single loud phut! as if he had been the most experienced of divers and had made a habit of rehearsing his own funeral, so expertly was it done. Of course the cannon balls assisted. This subsidiary use of their mass was after all in keeping with their general nature. So the remains of Colley dropping deeper than did ever plummet sound were to be thought of as now finding the solid base of all. (At these necessarily ritualistic moments of life, if you cannot use the prayer book, have recourse to Shakespeare! Nothing else will do.)

  Now you might think that there was then a moment or two of silent tribute before the mourners left the churchyard. Not a bit of it! Captain Anderson shut his book, the pipes shrilled again, this time with a kind of temporal urgency. Captain Anderson nodded to Lieutenant Cumbershum, who touched his hat and roared:

  “Leeeoonnawwll!”

  Our obedient vessel started to turn as she moved forward and lumbered clumsily towards her original course. The ceremonially ordered ranks broke up, the people climbed everywhere into the rigging to spread our full suit of sails and add the stun’s’ls to them again. Captain Anderson marched off, grenade, I mean prayerbook in hand, back to his cabin, I suppose to make an entry in his journal. A young gentleman scrawled on the traverse board and all things were as they had been. I returned to my cabin to consider what statement I should write out and sign. It must be such as will cause his sister least pain. It shall be a low fever, as the captain wishes. I must conceal from him that I have already laid a trial of gunpowder to where your lordship may ignite it. God, what a world of conflict, of birth, death, procreation, betrothals, marriages for all I know, there is to be found in this extraordinary ship!

  (&)

  There! I think the ampersand gives a touch of eccentricity, does it not? None of your dates, or letters of the alphabet, or presumed day of the voyage! I might have headed this section “addenda” but that would have been dull—far too, too dull! For we have come to an end, there is nothing more to be said. I mean—there is, of course, there is the daily record, but my journal, I found on looking back through it, had insensibly turned to the record of a drama—Colley’s drama. Now the poor man’s drama is done and he stands there, how many miles down, on his cannon balls, alone, as Mr Coleridge says, all, all alone. It seems a different sort of bathos (your lordship, as Colley might say, will note the amusing “paranomasia”) to return to the small change of day to day with no drama in it, but there are yet some pages left between the rich bindings of your lordship’s gift to me, and I have tried to stretch the burial out, in the hope that what might be called The Fall and Lamentable End of Robert James Colley together with a Brief Account of his Thalassian Obsequies would extend right to the last page. All was of no avail. His was a real life and a real death and no more to be fitted into a given book than a misshapen foot into a given boot. Of course my journal will continue beyond this volume—but in a book obtained for me by Phillips from the purser and not to be locked. Which reminds me how trivial the explanation of men’s fear and silence concerning the purser proved to be. Phillips told me, for he is more open than Wheeler. All the officers, including the captain, owe the purser money! Phillips calls him the pusser.

  Which reminds me again—I employed Phillips because no matter how I shouted, I could not rouse Wheeler. He is being sought now.

  He was being sought. Summers has just told me. The man has disappeared. He has fallen overboard. Wheeler! He has gone like a dream, with his puffs of white hair, and his shining baldness, his sanctified smile, his complete knowledge of everything that goes on in a ship, his paregoric, and his willingness to obtain for a gentleman anything in the wide, wide world, provided the gentleman pays for it! Wheeler, as the captain put it, all over ears and eyes! I shall miss the man, for I cannot hope for as great a share in the services of Phillips. Already I have had to pull off my own boots, though Summers, who was present in my cabin at the time, was good enough to help. Two deaths in only a few days!

  “At least”, said I to Summers with meaning, “no one can accuse me of having a hand in this death, can they?”

  He was too breathless to reply. He sat back on his heels, then stood up and watched me pull on my embroidered slippers.

  “Life is a formless business, Summers. Literature is much amiss in forcing a form on it!”

  “Not so, sir, for there are both death and birth aboard. Pat Roundabout—”

  “Roundabout? I thought it was ‘Roustabout’!”

  “You may use either indifferently. But she is delivered of a daughter to be named after the ship.”

  “Poor, poor child! But that was the mooing I heard then, like Bessie when she broke her leg?”

  “It was, sir. I go now to see how they do.”

  So he left me, these blank pages still unfilled. News, then, news! What news? There is more to be recorded but germane to the captain, not Colley. It should have been fitted in much earlier—at Act Four or even Three. Now it must come limping after the drama, like the satyr play after the tragic trilogy. It is not a dénouement so much as a pale illumination. Captain Anderson’s detestation of the clergy! You remember. Well now, perhaps, you and I do know all.

  Hist, as they say—let me bolt my door!

  Well then—Deverel told me. He has begun to drink heavily—heavily that is in comparison with what he did before, since he has always been intemperate. It seems that Captain Anderson—fearful not only of my journal but also of the other passengers who now with the exception of steely Miss Granham believe “Poor Colley” was mistreated—Anderson, I say, rebuked the two men, Cumbershum and Deverel, savagely for their part in the affair
. This meant little to Cumbershum, who is made of wood. But Deverel, by the laws of the service, is denied the satisfaction of a gentleman. He broods and drinks. Then last night, deep in drink, he came to my cabin and in the dark hours and a muttered, slurred voice gave me what he called necessary observations on the captain’s history for my journal. Yet he was not so drunk as to be unaware of danger. Picture us then, by the light of my candle, seated side by side on the bunk, Deverel whispering viciously into my ear as my head was inclined to his lips. There was, it appears, and there is, a noble family—not I believe more than distantly known to your lordship—and their land marches with the Deverels’. They, Summers would say, have used the privilege of their position and neglected its responsibilities. The father of the present young lord had in keeping a lady of great sweetness of disposition, much beauty, little understanding and, as it proved, some fertility. The use of privilege is sometimes expensive. Lord L——(this is perfect Richardson, is it not?) found himself in need of a fortune, and that instantly. The fortune was found but her family in a positively Wesleyan access of righteousness insisted on the dismissal of the sweet lady, against whom nothing could be urged save lack of a few words spoke over her by a parson. Catastrophe threatened. The dangers of her position struck some sparks from the sweet lady, the fortune hung in the balance! At this moment, as Deverel whispered in my ear, Providence intervened and the incumbent of one of the three livings that lay in the family’s gift was killed in the hunting field! The heir’s tutor, a dull sort of fellow, accepted of the living and the sweet lady and what Deverel called her curst cargo together. The lord got his fortune, the lady a husband and the Reverend Anderson a living, a wife and an heir gratis. In due course the boy was sent to sea, where the casual interest of his real father was sufficient to elevate him in the service. But now the old lord is dead and the young one has no cause to love his bastard half-brother!