Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

  Dissolution, Noise, and Fear. Below-decks, reduced to nerves, given into the emprise of Forces invisible yet possessing great Weight and Speed, which contend in some Phantom realm they have had the bad luck to blunder into, the Astronomers abide, willing themselves blank yet active. Casualties begin to appear in the Sick Bay, the wounds inconceivable, from Oak-Splinters and Chain and Shrapnel, and as Blood creeps like Evening to Dominion over all Surfaces, so grows the Ease of giving in to Panic Fear. It takes an effort to act philosophickal, or even to find ways to be useful,— but a moment’s re-focusing proves enough to show them each how at least to keep out of the way, and presently to save steps for the loblolly boy, or run messages to and from other parts of the ship.

  After the last of the Gun-Fire, Oak Beams shuddering with the Chase, the Lazarette is crowded and pil’d with bloody Men, including Capt. Smith with a great Splinter in his Leg, his resentment especially powerful,— “I’ll have lost thirty of my Crew. Are you two really that important?” Above, on deck, corpses are steaming, wreckage is ev’ry-where, shreds of charr’d sail and line clatter in the Wind that is taking the Frenchman away.

  What conversation may have passed between the Post-Captain and the Commandant? He wore the Order of the Holy Ghost, the white Dove plainly visible thro’ the Glass,— St.-Foux, almost certainly, yet commanding a different Ship. What was afoot here? Had the Frenchman really signal’d, “France is not at war with the sciences”? Words so magnanimous, and yet . . . “Went poohpooh, he did. Sort of flicking his gloves about. ‘I’m westing my time,’ he says, ‘You are leetluh meennow,— I throw you back. Perhaps someday we meet when you are biggair Feesh, like me. Meanwhile, I sail away. Poohpooh! Adieu!’ ”

  “Nevertheless,” Capt. Smith had replied, “I must give chase.”

  One of those French shrugs. “You must, and of course, may.”

  But she is too wounded. They watch the perfect ellipse of the l’Grand’s stern dwindle into the dark. At last, well before the midwatch, Captain Smith calls off the Chase, and they come about again, the wind remaining as it has been, and with what sail they have, they return to the Plymouth Dockyard.

  Some at the time said there had been another sail, and that the Frenchman, assuming it to be a British Man o’ War, had in fact broken off, and headed back in to Brest as speedily as her condition would allow. Some on the Seahorse thought they’d seen it,— most had not. (“Perhaps our guardian Angel,” the Revd comments, “— instead of Wings, Topgallants.”)

  A Year before, Morale aboard the l’Grand, never that high to begin with, had seem’d to suffer an all but mortal blow with news of the disaster to the Brest fleet at Quiberon Bay. In calculating her odds vis-à-vis the Seahorse, the Invisible Gamesters who wager daily upon the doings of Commerce and Government must have discounted her advantage in guns and broadside weight, noting that a crew so melancholick is not the surest guarantee of prevailing in a Naval Dispute. Yet, considered as a sentient being, the French Ship continued to display the attitude of an undersiz’d but bellicose Sailor in a Wine-shop, always upon the qui vive for a scrap, never quite reaching the level of Glory it desir’d, always téton dernier of the Squadron, ever chosen for the least hopeful Missions, from embargo patrols off steaming red-dawn coasts below the Equator to rescue attempts beneath the Shadows of the mountainous Waves of winter storms in the Atlantic,— forever unthank’d, disrespected, laboring on, beating now alone at night back into Brest for new spars and rigging and lives.

  “Ooh,

  La,

  Fran . . .

  -Ce-euh! [with a certain debonair little Mordant upon “euh”],

  Ne

  Fait-pas-la-Guerre,

  Con-truh les Sci-

  -en-

  sceuhs!”

  — sung incessantly till the Ship made Port, and then by the Working-Parties at the Quai, with the sour cadences of Sailors in a Distress not altogether bodily,— humiliated, knowing better, yet unable to keep from humming the catchy fragment, its text instantly having join’d the Company of great Humorous Naval Quotations, which would one day also include, “I have not yet begun to fight,” and, “There’s something wrong with our damn’d ships today, Chatfield.”

  Long after Nightfall, Mason and Dixon, officially reliev’d of their Medical Duties, reluctant to part company, go lurching up on Deck, exhausted, laughing at nothing,— or at ev’rything, being alive when they could as easily be dead. Despite the salt rush of Wind, they can no more here, than Below, escape, caught in the Drape of the damag’d Sails, the Reek of the Battle past,— the insides of Trees, and of Men. . . . They have to prop each other up till one of them finds something to lean against. “Well, what’s this, then?” inquires Mason.

  “More like a Transit of Mars . . . ?”

  “With us going ’cross its Face.”

  “Were I less of a cheery Lad, why, I’d almost think . . .”

  “It has occurr’d to me.”

  “They knew the French had Bencoolen,— what else did they know? Thah’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Are you appropriating that Bottle for reasons I may not wish to hear, or,— ah. Thankee.” They pass the Bottle back and forth, and when it is empty, they throw it in the Sea, and open another.

  5

  If ever they meant to break up the Partnership, this would’ve been the time.” ’Twas all so out of the ordinary,” Mason declares, “that it must have been intended,— an act of Him so strange, His purposes unknown.”

  “Eeh,— that is, I’m not sure which one tha mean.”

  Mason instantly narrows his eyes. “Who else could— oh. Oh, I see. Hum . . . a common Belief among your People?”

  “All thah’ Coal-Mining, I guess.”

  In the crucial moments, neither Mason nor Dixon had fail’d the other. Each had met the other’s Gaze for a slight moment before Duty again claim’d them,— the Vapors rising from the Wounds of dying Sailors smoothing out what was not essential for each to understand.

  For the moment, they know they must stand as one, tho’ not always how. Arriv’d in Plymouth Dockyard, drafting the letter to the Royal Society, thro’ the dark hours, each keeps rejecting the other’s ideas. The Candles tremble with the Vehemence of their Speech. They are well the other side of Exhaustion, and neither has bother’d to keep his defensive works mann’d against the other. With what they’ve lately been through together, it seems quite beside the point for them to do so. At least they are past that. Each knows, that is, exactly how brave and how cowardly the other was when the crisis came.

  “Say, ‘If You might arrange for us each to have a Regiment,— a Frigate being impractical, given our Ignorance of how to sail, much less fight, one,— we should be happy to proceed to war upon any people, in any quarter of the Globe His Majesty should be pleas’d to send us to,—’ ”

  “Dixon, think,— what if they should say yes? Do you want to command a Regiment?”

  “Why, . . . say, ’tis nothing I’d rule out, at this stage of my life,— ”

  “You’re a Quaker, you’re not suppos’d to believe in War.”

  “Technically no longer a Quaker, as they expell’d me back at the end of October from Raby Meeting, just before I came to London,— so I guess now I may kill anyone I like . . . ?”

  Mason pretends interest, having already heard about it in his briefing by the R.S. “And will any personal difficulties attend that, do you think?”

  “We’ve all of us,— the same Quaker Families, Dixons, Hunters and Rayltons in particular, again and again,— a long history in Durham of being toss’d out for anything, be it drinking, getting married by a Priest, working for the Royal Society, whatever someone didn’t like. To some Christians, Disfellowship is a hard Blow, for they have been allow’d to know only others of their Congregation. But Quakers are a bit matier, the idea being to look f
or something of God in ev’ryone . . . ? The Denomination’s less important. Ah mean, Ah’ve met Anglicans before . . . ?”

  “I wonder’d why you never stare at me much.”

  “Eeh, Ah’ve even seen the Bishop of Durham. One of the very biggest among thee, correct? A Prince in his own lands. No,— I’ve no problem with Anglicans.”

  “Thank ye. I welcome the return of at least an Hour’s more Sleep each Night otherwise spent in Fretfulness upon the Question. Be assur’d, I have run across the odd Quaker as well,— Mr. Bird of course coming to mind,— and have ever found you Folk as peaceable in your private Discourse, as you are Assertive in your Publick Doings.”

  “That’s what people say, for fair.”

  There they sit, drinking up their liquor allowance, feeling no easier for it, trying to understand what in Christ’s Name happen’d out in the Channel. Neither is making much sense. They will talk seriously for half an hour about something completely stupid, then one will take offense and fall silent, or go off somewhere to try to sleep. Out in the hall they keep running into each other, Wraiths in night-clothes.

  “What if we said,” Mason appearing to have given it some Thought,” ‘In view of an apparent Design, by well-known Gentlemen, to put me in harm’s way—’ ”

  “ ‘Huz.’ ”

  “If you like.”— exposing an undermann’d Warship to a certain Drubbing, Questions must emerge. Why could not the French Admiralty have been advis’d, via Father Boscovich or another available messenger, of the Seahorse’s approximate Route, her destination and purpose?’ ”

  “Eeh, Mason, come, come. They would have attack’d anyway. Why would they believe any story from the English, be the Messenger King Louie Himself?”

  “A little Sixth-Rate! What possible mischief could it get into? What possible threat to France?”

  “ ’Tis call’d, in that jabber over there, Une Affaire des Frégates,— ‘An Affair of the Frigates.’ ”

  “Of Forces less visible, I fear.”

  “Here,— any more of that Golden Virginian about? ’Twill settle our wits.” In what each is surpriz’d to note for the first time as a companionable Silence, they prepare Pipes, find a Dish in the Cupboard and a live Coal in the Fire, and light up.

  Wrapt tightly, as within Vacuum-Hemispheres, lies the Unspoken,— the concentration of Terror and death of but two afternoons ago, transpir’d without one word, in brute Contempt for any language but that of winds and masses, cries and blood. Impenetrable, it calls up Questions whose Awkwardness has only increas’d as the Astronomers have come to understand there may be no way of ever finding the Answers.

  “Did the Captain signal? Did they read it, and attack despite it?”

  “Or because of it . . . ?”

  It seems not to belong in either of their lives. “Was there a mistake in the Plan of the Day? Did we get a piece of someone else’s History, a fragment spall’d off of some Great Moment,— perhaps the late Engagement at Quiberon Bay,— such as now and then may fly into the ev’ryday paths of lives less dramatick? And there we are, with our Wigs askew.”

  “Happen,” Dixon contributes in turn, “we were never meant at all to go to Bencoolen,— someone needed a couple of Martyrs, and we inconveniently surviv’d . . . ?”

  “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “ ‘Terrible,’ well, as to ‘Terrible’ . . .” And what they cannot speak, some of it not yet, some of it never, resumes breathless Sovereignty in the wax-lit Rooms.

  In swift reply comes a Letter of Reproach and Threat from the Royal Society. Someday Mason and Dixon may not dream as often of the Battle with the Frenchman,— but this Letter they will go back to again and again, unable to release it.

  “Not even the courtesy,— Damme! of a personal Reply,— ’tis rather the final draft of some faceless committee. To my Heart’s Cry, my appeal to Bradley for Guidance, Apprentice to master, confiding candidly my fears, trusting in his Discretion,— to a four years’ Adjunct, his Protégé even longer,— instead of Comfort or Advice, he betrays my Confession to some Gang of initial’d Scoundrels, leaving them the task of bringing us to the level of Fear needed to get us back aboard that dreadful Ship.”

  “Yet others,” carefully, “might hear in it a distinct Voice, indeed quite full of personal Heat.”

  Mason shrugs. “Who, then? ’Twas Morton his Signature,—” his Eyebrows rak’d a shade too high for it to be other than a request to let this go.

  “Ordinarily, Ah’d allow it to depart upon the Tides of Fortune . . . ?” says Dixon, “— but as I’m included in this charge of Cowardice, if it be a Matter between thee and Dr. Bradley, why, I hope tha’d tell me somewhat of it . . . ?”

  “You suppose this is Bradley’s voice? I think not, for I know him,— Bradley cannot write like this, even simple social notes give him trouble.’ . . . Whenever their circumstances, now uncertain and eventual, shall happen to be reduced to Certainty.’ Not likely.”

  “Eeh, thah’s deep . . . ? ‘Reduc’d.’ ”

  “As if . . . there were no single Destiny,” puzzles Mason, “but rather a choice among a great many possible ones, their number steadily diminishing each time a Choice be made, till at last ‘reduc’d,’ to the events that do happen to us, as we pass among ’em, thro’ Time unredeemable,— much as a Lens, indeed, may receive all the Light from some vast celestial Field of View, and reduce it to a single Point. Suggests an optical person,— your Mr. Bird, perhaps.”

  “Then tha may rest easy, mayn’t thee, if it’s I who’s being reprov’d by my Mentor, for a change . . . ?”

  Thus sleeplessly on both continue to rattle, whilst Plymouth reels merrily all ’round them, well illuminated, as a-scurry, thro’ the night.

  “Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” suggests Dixon.

  “Correct. It strikes once, as it just lately did for me out there. Now ’tis your turn.”

  “Hold, hold . . . ? Are tha sure of thah’ . . . ?”

  6

  “The Interdiction at Sea,” it seems to the Revd, “was patently a warning to the Astronomers, from Beyond. Tho’ men of Science, both now confess’d to older and more Earthly Certainties, being willing then and there to give up Bencoolen, offering rather to observe the Transit from any other Station yet in reach,— Skanderoon was mention’d,— but the Royal S. wrote back in the most overbearing way, on about loss of honor, strongly threatening legal action if Mason and Dixon were to break their contract, force majeure or no, even when it was pointed out yet again that Bencoolen lay in the hands of the French, anyway. No matter that the Astronomers were right and the R.S. wrong,— they had to comply.”

  “But why?” laughs Brae in exasperation, waving her Needle and Floss about. “Why weren’t they simply more flexible in London? Just send the Seahorse someplace else?”

  “So they did, when next our Astronomers put to sea.”

  “Having, I hope, splic’d their Main-Brace well,— g’d Evening, all.” ’Tis Uncle Lomax, sliding in from the day at his Soap-Works, smelling of his Product, allowing the cheeriness of the Sot to overcome the diffidence of a man in an unpopular calling,— for “Philadelphia Soap” is a Byword, throughout the American Provinces, of low Quality. At the touch of water, nay, damp Air, it becomes a vile Mucus that refuses to be held in any sort of grip, gentle or firm, and often leaves things dirtier than they were before its application,— making it, more properly, an Anti-Soap. He steers a Loxodrome for the cabinet where ardent Spirits are kept for Guests of the Wet Persuasion, and pretends to weigh his Choice.

  So off we sail again (the Revd continues), this time in convoy with another, larger Frigate,— the idea being, Children, always to get back up on the Horse that has nearly killed one. Especially if it’s a Sea Horse. I am quarter’d with Lieutenant Unchleigh, a rattle-head. “Damme, Sir,— a Book? Close it up immediate
ly.”

  “ ’Tis the Holy Bible, Sir.”

  “No matter, ’tis Print,— Print causes Civil Unrest,— Civil Unrest in any Ship at Sea is intolerable. Coffee as well. Where are newpapers found? In those damnable Whig Coffee-Houses. Eh? A Potion stimulating rebellion and immoderate desires.”

  I feel a certain Gastrick Desolation. What will be his idea of Diversion ashore? Nothing to do with Coffee, I suppose,— tho’ this Route to India is known as a Caffeinist’s Dream. What else may he not abide? My Berth a Prison, unseamanlike Behavior abounding, the very Ship a Ship of Death. How is any of this going to help restore me to the “ordinary World”?— the answer, which I am yet too young to see, being that these are the very given Conditions of the “ordinary World.” At the time, my inward lament goes something like this,—

  Where are the wicked young Widows tonight,

  That sail the East India Trade?

  Topside with the Captain, below with the Crew,

  Beauteously ever display’d.

  Oh I wish I was anyplace,

  But the Someplace I’m in,

  With too many Confusions and Pains,—

  Take me back to the Cross-Roads,

  Let me choose, once again,

  To cruise the East India Lanes.

  Frigate Captains are uncomfortable with sailing in formation,— ’tis to be turn’d to fussing about forever with Jib and Staysail, by someone senior with an oppressively tidy Theory of Station-keeping. The Aversion of the Seahorse’s new Captain to group manœuvres indeed extends to sailing with even one other warship, as the captain of the Brilliant, 36, will discover before they are out of the Channel.

  In the brisk weather, there seems little sense in dawdling. The impatient Capt. Grant keeps closing the gap between himself and the ship ahead, often drawing up to a distance that allows Sailors easily to converse in ordinary tones, till at last the Brilliant signals to the Seahorse, “Observe Standard Interval,— Comply.” After a moment’s Cogitation, Grant signals back, “Oh.” Having given orders to make to windward, he repairs to his Cabin to fetch from a Chest a curiously embellish’d Jolly Roger, said to be of the Barbadoes, won at Swedish Rummy of a Sailing-Master off the old H.M.S. Unreflective. Now, having gather’d enough open sea, he cheerfully comes about, hoists his black Announcement, and runs full before the breeze, knifing through the swell as if intending to ram the Brilliant. The other Captain returns this Jollification by clearing for Battle. If not for the timely appearance of sail in the direction of Brest, who knows how far the Affair might have been taken?