Rites of Passage

by William Golding

  All this by an unsteady candle light, querulous remarks in his sleep from Mr Prettiman, with snores and farts from Mr Brocklebank in the other direction. Oh that cry from the deck above us—

  “Eight bells and all’s well!”

  Deverel, at this witching hour, put his arm about me with drunken familiarity and revealed why he had spoken so. This history was the jest he had meant to tell me. At Sydney Cove, or the Cape of Good Hope, should we put in there, Deverel intends—or the drink in him intends—to resign his commission, call the captain out and shoot him dead! “For”, said he in a louder voice and with his shaking right hand lifted, “I can knock a crow off a steeple with one barker!” Hugging and patting me and calling me his good Edmund he informed me I was to act for him when the time came; and if, if by some luck of the devil, he himself was taken off, why the information was to be put fully in my famous journal—

  I had much ado to get him taken to his cabin without rousing the whole ship. But here is news indeed! So that is why a certain captain so detests a parson! It would surely be more reasonable in him to detest a lord! Yet there is no doubt about it. Anderson has been wronged by a lord—or by a parson—or by life—Good God! I do not care to find excuses for Anderson!

  Nor do I care as much for Deverel as I did. It was a misjudgement on my part to esteem him. He, perhaps, illustrates the last decline of a noble family as Mr Summers might illustrate the original of one! My wits are all to seek. I found myself thinking that had I been so much the victim of a lord’s gallantry I would have become a Jacobin! I? Edmund Talbot?

  It was then that I remembered my own half-formed intention to bring Zenobia and Robert James Colley together to rid myself of a possible embarrassment. It was so like Deverel’s jest I came near to detesting myself. When I realized how he and I had talked, and how he must have thought me like-minded with the “Noble family” my face grew hot with shame. Where will all this end?

  However, one birth does not equal two deaths. There is a general dullness among us, for say what you will, a burial at sea, however frivolously I treat it, cannot be called a laughing matter. Nor will Wheeler’s disappearance lighten the air among the passengers.

  Two days have passed since I diffidently forbore to ask Summers to help me on with my slippers! The officers have not been idle. Summers—as if this were a Company ship rather than a man of war—has determined we shall not have too much time left hanging on our hands. We have determined that the after end of the ship shall present the forrard end with a play! A committee has been formed with the captain’s sanction! This has thrown me will-he, nill-he, into the company of Miss Granham! It has been an edifying experience. I found that this woman, this handsome, cultivated maiden lady, holds views which would freeze the blood of the average citizen in his veins! She does literally make no distinction between the uniform worn by our officers, the woad with which our unpolished ancestors were said to paint themselves and the tattooing rife in the South Seas and perhaps on the mainland of Australia! Worse—from the point of view of society—she, daughter of a canon, makes no distinction between the Indian’s Medicine Man, the Siberian Shaman, and a Popish priest in his vestments! When I expostulated that she bid fair to include our own clergy she would only admit them to be less offensive because they made themselves less readily distinguishable from other gentlemen. I was so staggered by this conversation I could make no reply to her and only discovered the reason for the awful candour with which she spoke when (before dinner in the passenger saloon) it was announced that she and Mr Prettiman are officially engaged! In the unexpected security of her fiançailles the lady feels free to say anything! But with what an eye she has seen us! I blush to remember the many things I have said in her presence which must have seemed like the childishness of the schoolroom.

  However, the announcement has cheered everyone up. You may imagine the public felicitations and the private comments! I myself sincerely hope that Captain Anderson, gloomiest of Hymens, will marry them aboard so that we may have a complete collection of all the ceremonies that accompany the forked creature from the cradle to the grave. The pair seem attached—they have fallen in love after their fashion! Deverel introduced the only solemn note. He declared it was a great shame the man Colley had died, otherwise the knot might be tied there and then by a parson. At this, there was a general silence. Miss Granham, who had furnished your humble servant with her views on priests in general might, I felt, have said nothing. But instead, she came out with a quite astonishing statement.

  “He was a truly degraded man.”

  “Come, ma’am,” said I, “de mortuis and all that! A single unlucky indulgence—The man was harmless enough!”

  “Harmless,” cried Prettiman with a kind of bounce, “a priest harmless?”

  “I was not referring to drink,” said Miss Granham in her steeliest voice, “but to vice in another form.”

  “Come, ma’am—I cannot believe—as a lady you cannot—”

  “You, sir,” cried Mr Prettiman, “you to doubt a lady’s word?”

  “No, no! Of course not! Nothing—”

  “Let it be, dear Mr Prettiman, I beg of you.”

  “No, ma’am, I cannot let it go. Mr Talbot has seen fit to doubt your word and I will have an apology—”

  “Why,” said I laughing, “you have it, ma’am, unreservedly! I never intended—”

  “We learnt of his vicious habits accidentally,” said Mr Prettiman. “A priest! It was two sailors who were descending one of the rope ladders from the mast to the side of the vessel. Miss Granham and I—it was dark—we had retired to the shelter of that confusion of ropes at the foot of the ladder—”

  “Chain, ratlines—Summers, enlighten us!”

  “It is no matter, sir. You will remember, Miss Granham, we were discussing the inevitability of the process by which true liberty must lead to true equality and thence to—but that is no matter, neither. The sailors were unaware of our presence so that without meaning to, we heard all!”

  “Smoking is bad enough, Mr Talbot, but at least gentlemen go no further!”

  “My dear Miss Granham!”

  “It is as savage a custom, sir, as any known among coloured peoples!”

  Oldmeadow addressed her in tones of complete incredulity. “By Jove, ma’am—you cannot mean the fellow chewed tobacco!”

  There was a roar of laughter from passengers and officers alike. Summers, who is not given to idle laughter, joined in.

  “It is true,” said he, when there was less noise. “On one of my earlier visits I saw a large bunch of leaf tobacco hung from the deckhead. It was spoilt by mildew and I threw it overboard.”

  “But Summers,” said I. “I saw no tobacco! And that kind of man—”

  “I assure you, sir. It was before you visited him.”

  “Nevertheless, I find it almost impossible to believe!”

  “You shall have the facts,” said Prettiman with his usual choler. “Long study, a natural aptitude and a necessary habit of defence have made me expert in the recollection of casual speech, sir. You shall have the words the sailors spoke as they were spoken!”

  Summers lifted both hands in expostulation.

  “No, no—spare us, I beg you! It is of little moment after all!”

  “Little moment, sir, when a lady’s word—it cannot be allowed to pass, sir. One of these sailors said to the other as they descended side by side—‘Billy Rogers was laughing like a bilge pump when he come away from the captain’s cabin. He went into the heads and I sat by him. Billy said he’d knowed most things in his time but he had never thought to get a chew off a parson!’”

  The triumphant but fierce look on Mr Prettiman’s face, his flying hair and instant decline of his educated voice into a precise imitation of a ruffian sort threw our audience into whoops. This disconcerted the philosopher even more and he stared round him wildly. Was anything ever more absurd? I believe it was this diverting circumstance which marked a change in our general feelings
. Without the source of it being evident there strengthened among us the determination to get on with our play! Perhaps it was Mr Prettiman’s genius for comedy—oh, unquestionably we must have him for our comic! But what might have been high words between the social philosopher and your humble servant passed off into the much pleasanter business of discussing what we should act and who should produce and who should do this and that!

  Afterwards I went out to take my usual constitutional in the waist; and lo! there by the break of the fo’castle was “Miss Zenobia” in earnest conversation with Billy Rogers! Plainly, he is her Sailor Hero who can “Wate no longer”. With what kindred spirit did he concoct his misspelt but elaborate billet-doux? Well, if he attempts to come aft and visit her in her hutch I will see him flogged for it.

  Mr Prettiman and Miss Granham walked in the waist too but on the opposite side of the deck, talking with animation. Miss Granham said (I heard her and believe she intended me to hear) that as he knew they should aim first at supporting those parts of the administration that might be supposed still uncorrupted. Mr Prettiman trotted beside her—she is taller than he—nodding with vehemence at the austere yet penetrating power of her intellect. They will influence each other—for I believe they are as sincerely attached as such extraordinary characters can be. But oh yes, Miss Granham, I shall not keep an eye on him—I shall keep an eye on you! I watched them pass on over the white line that separates the social orders and stand right up in the bows, talking to East and that poor, pale girl, his wife. Then they returned and came straight to where I stood in the shade of an awning we have stretched from the starboard shrouds. To my astonishment, Miss Granham explained that they had been consulting with Mr East! He is, it seems, a craftsman and has to do with the setting of type! I do not doubt that they have in view his future employment. However, I did not allow them to see what an interest I took in the matter and turned the conversation back to the question of what play we should show the people. Mr Prettiman proved to be as indifferent to that as to so much of the common life he is allegedly concerned with in his philosophy! He dismissed Shakespeare as a writer who made too little comment on the evils of society! I asked, reasonably enough, what society consisted in other than human beings only to find that the man did not understand me—or rather, that there was a screen between his unquestionably powerful intellect and the perceptions of common sense. He began to orate but was deflected skilfully by Miss Granham, who declared that the play Faust by the German author Goethe would have been suitable—

  “But,” said she, “the genius of one language cannot be translated into another.”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

  “I mean,” said she, patiently, as to one of her young gentlemen, “you cannot translate a work of genius entirely from one language to another!”

  “Come now, ma’am,” said I, laughing, “here at least I may claim to speak with authority! My godfather has translated Racine entire into English verse; and in the opinion of connoisseurs it equals and at some points surpasses the original!”

  The pair stopped, turned and stared at me as one. Mr Prettiman spoke with his usual febrile energy.

  “Then I would have you know, sir, that it must be unique!”

  I bowed to him.

  “Sir,” said I, “it is!”

  With that and a bow to Miss Granham I took myself off. I scored did I not? But really—they are a provokingly opinionated pair! Yet if they are provoking and comic to me I doubt not that they are intimidating to others! While I was writing this I heard them pass my hutch on the way to the passenger saloon and listened as Miss Granham cut up some unfortunate character.

  “Let us hope he learns in time, then!”

  “Despite the disadvantage of his birth and upbringing, ma’am, he is not without wit.”

  “I grant you,” said she, “he always tries to give a comic turn to the conversation and indeed one cannot help finding his laughter at his own jests infectious. But as for his opinions in general—Gothic is the only word to be applied to them!”

  With that they passed out of earshot. They cannot mean Deverel, surely—for though he has some pretension to wit, his birth and upbringing are of the highest order, however little he may have profited from them. Summers is the more likely candidate.

  I do not know how to write this. The chain would seem too thin, the links individually too weak—yet something within me insists they are links and all joined, so that I now understand what happened to pitiable, clownish Colley! It was night, I was heated and restless, yet my mind as in a fever—a low fever indeed!—went back over the whole affair and would not let me be. It seemed as if certain sentences, phrases, situations were brought successively before me—and these, as it were, glowed with a significance that was by turns farcical, gross and tragic.

  Summers must have guessed. There was no leaf-tobacco! He was trying to protect the memory of the dead man!

  Rogers in the enquiry with a face of well-simulated astonishment—“What did we do, my lord?” Was that astonishment well-simulated? Suppose the splendid animal was telling the naked, the physical truth! Then Colley in his letter—what a man does defiles him, not what is done by others—Colley in his letter, infatuated with the “king of my island” and longing to kneel before him—Colley in the cable tier, drunk for the first time in his life and not understanding his condition and in a state of mad exuberance—Rogers owning in the heads that he had knowed most things in his life but had never thought to get a chew off a parson! Oh, doubtless the man consented, jeeringly, and encouraged the ridiculous, schoolboy trick—even so, not Rogers but Colley committed the fellatio that the poor fool was to die of when he remembered it.

  Poor, poor Colley! Forced back towards his own kind, made an equatorial fool of—deserted, abandoned by me who could have saved him—overcome by kindness and a gill or two of the intoxicant—

  I cannot feel even a pharisaical complacency in being the only gentleman not to witness his ducking. Far better had I seen it so as to protest at that childish savagery! Then my offer of friendship might have been sincere rather than—

  I shall write a letter to Miss Colley. It will be lies from beginning to end. I shall describe my growing friendship with her brother. I shall describe my admiration for him. I shall recount all the days of his low fever and my grief at his death.

  A letter that contains everything but a shred of truth! How is that for a start to a career in the service of my King and Country?

  I believe I may contrive to increase the small store of money that will be returned to her.

  It is the last page of your journal, my lord, last page of the “ampersand”! I have just now turned over the pages, ruefully enough. Wit? Acute observations? Entertainment? Why—it has become, perhaps, some kind of sea-story but a sea-story with never a tempest, no shipwreck, no sinking, no rescue at sea, no sight nor sound of an enemy, no thundering broadsides, heroism, prizes, gallant defences and heroic attacks! Only one gun fired and that a blunderbuss!

  What a thing he stumbled over in himself! Racine declares—but let me quote your own words to you.

  Lo! where toils Virtue up th’Olympian ſteep—

  With like ſmall ſteps doth Vice t’wards Hades creep!

  True indeed, and how should it be not? It is the smallness of those steps that enables the Brocklebanks of this world to survive, to attain a deboshed and saturated finality which disgusts everyone but themselves! Yet not so Colley. He was the exception. Just as his iron-shod heels shot him rattling down the steps of the ladder from the quarterdeck to the waist; even so a gill or two of the fiery ichor brought him from the heights of complacent austerity to what his sobering mind must have felt as the lowest hell of self-degradation. In the not too ample volume of man’s knowledge of Man, let this sentence be inserted. Men can die of shame.

  This book is filled all but a finger’s breadth. I shall lock it, wrap it and sew it unhandily in sailcloth and thrust it away in the locked drawer. With lack
of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.

  About the Author

  When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Foundation said of his novels that they ‘illuminate the human condition in the world of today’. Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor, a musician and a schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck.

  Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers and one literary agent. It was rescued from the ‘slush pile’ by a young editor at Faber and Faber and published in 1954. The book would go on to sell several million copies; it was translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. He wrote eleven other novels, The Inheritors and The Spire among them, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.

  www.william-golding.co.uk

  Books by

  Sir William Golding

  1911–1993

  Nobel Prize in Literature

  Fiction

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  THE INHERITORS

  PINCHER MARTIN

  FREE FALL

  THE SPIRE

  THE PYRAMID

  THE SCORPION GOD

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  THE PAPER MEN

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  CLOSE QUARTERS

  FIRE DOWN BELOW

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH