“You amaze me, Mr Benét.”
“Prose? It is the speech of merchants to each other, sir, the language of war, commerce, husbandry.”
“But poetry—”
“Prose will do for persuading men, sir. Why, only yesterday I was able to persuade the captain that a small alteration of course would be beneficial. Now had I represented in verse to the captain that he was wrong—”
“I am surprised you are still alive.”
“No—no! Do you not see that our motion is easier?”
“I had thought my ability to keep my feet and in fact to be cheerful was the result of my complete recovery.”
“We have come a point off the wind and the increase in our speed, however slight, compensates for the extra distance. But the absence of the Beloved Object—”
“You refer to Lady Somerset.”
Lieutenant Benét took off his sou’wester and shook out the golden fleece.
“Who else?”
“I did suppose,” said I, laughing, “that you might have had Another in mind—”
“There is no other!”
“In your eyes, no, but to mine—”
Lieutenant Benét shook his head, smiling kindly.
“There cannot be.”
“It did occur to me that perhaps you had an opportunity of forming some opinion on the character of Miss Chumley.”
“She has none.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She can have none. She is a schoolgirl, Mr Talbot.”
“Miss Chumley—”
“I have no opinion of schoolgirls. It is useless to look to them for sympathy or understanding or anything. They are blown by every wind, sir. Why, my own sisters would follow any redcoat if dear Mama did not have an eye to them.”
“Miss Chumley is no longer a schoolgirl!”
“She is pretty, I grant you, amiable with a trace of wit—”
“A trace!”
“Malleable—”
“Mr Benét!”
“Why—what is the matter?”
“Lieutenant Deverel is aboard Alcyone—he is notorious—”
“A cockerel, Mr Talbot. I did not like the man even the little I saw of him.”
“Mr Askew told me, Mr Askew said that Handsome Jack—”
“At least I must thank him for allowing me to choose this melancholy exile!”
“But, Mr Benét—forgive me. Exile! You seem a happy man! Your accustomed attitude, your very facial expression—it is sunny, sir!”
Lieutenant Benét looked astonished and revolted. He put on his sou’wester again.
“You cannot be serious, Mr Talbot. I happy!”
“Forgive me!”
“Were I small-minded enough, Mr Talbot, I should at this very moment envy your condition! You love Miss Chumley, do you not?”
“Indeed.”
Mr Benét’s face was wet but it was with rain or seaspray not tears. His golden locks beat about his brow. The spyglass under his arm seemed so mechanically and professionally a part of his character that when he suddenly whipped it out and ran back up to the quarterdeck, it was as if he had extended another limb which until then had been folded in like the leg of an insect. He levelled it at the horizon. He spoke to Cumbershum and for a while the two gentlemen aimed their parallel glasses, all the while contriving to remain upright in a way I found admirable. Mr Benét shut up his glass and came back to me at the run.
“A whaler, Mr Talbot. She would avoid us even if we made signals of distress.”
“But, Mr Benét—you said ‘My condition’?”
“Why, the letter, sir. I was to put it into your hand but you were indisposed. I gave it to your servant.”
“Wheeler!”
“No—no. The other one. You slab-sided son of a sea cook! Keep your eyes on the horizon or I’ll have the skin off your back! You never reported that sail!”
This was with a roar much like Captain Anderson’s but it issued from the throat of Lieutenant Benét. He had his head back and was addressing the top of what was left of our mainmast. Then he turned and spoke to me in his ordinary voice.
“The man is a half-wit. We shall talk together again, I hope.”
He raised his hand in salute and then was racing away down the ladder before I had time to return it. I myself fairly ran to the lobby and shouted for Phillips. He came and when I demanded the letter he struck his head with his open palm and rebuked that organ for being, as he said, a sieve. But I had been sick and he had been this and that—I heard him with impatience and finally sent him off to find the missive which he passed some considerable time in finding. This enabled me to anticipate what impossible treasures it might hold! There would be a long letter from Miss Chumley, written after the ball in a sleepless night! In a confession of attachment, franker than mine, she would have given me her journal. It would be franker also than mine—which had been limited by a sense of masculine decorum! Here was a most affecting account of the death of her dearest mama! A pressed flower from the gardens of Wilton House, an endearingly inadequate sketch of her music master, that old, old man! Oh, the optimism and phantasy of a young man in love! The state heats every faculty like water in a saucepan on a fire! But for all the time he took, Phillips brought the missive to me too soon and it was small, thin, expensive and so heavily scented I recognized it at once with a downward lurch of the heart for what it was. But then, how could I have been so foolish as to expect anything more than a note from Mr Benét’s “most adorable of women”?
I hurried into my hutch.
“Get out, Wheeler! Get out!”
I unfolded the paper and a wave of scent took me by the throat. I had to blink water out of my eyes.
“Lady Somerset presents her compliments to Mr Edmund FitzH. Talbot. Lady Somerset consents to a correspondence between him and Miss Cholmondeley subject to Lady Somerset’s supervision. She assumes, nor would Mr Talbot wish her to do more, that the exchange of missives is one between acquaintances and may be broken off or suspended at the wish of either party.”
Did the woman think I would not write, permission or no? But it was something—and then! Before me on the bunk lay another smaller piece of paper. It had been, for sure, folded into the larger missive. It had no scent but what it had acquired by contact with the more expensive wrapping. With a folly and ardour of which I should never have suspected myself, I pressed it, unread, to my lips. I unfolded it with trembling fingers. What man or woman whose heart has ever beaten more quickly at the sight of such a communication will not understand my joy?
A young person will remember for the rest of her life the meeting of two ships and prays that one day they may put down their ankers in the same harbour.
Foolish rapture, even to tears! I will not repeat the generous and copious and spontaneous promises that sprang unbidden to my lips at the thought of that dear, distant Vision! Those who run may read. This must be the crown of life and I would not have it otherwise!
A young person will remember for the rest of her life—She had written—perhaps in tears—there were marks too on the back of the paper. It had lain on another while that was still wet and unsanded. The words were none of them plainly to be read for they were smudged and backwards at that. There were blots too. It gave me a most complete and devout sense of nearness to her. What would I have not given to kiss the ink from her slender fingers? I seized my mirror, angled it and peered at what had been written. The mind had to restore a whole word from one letter and a smudge, divine the sense with a passion rare in scholarship! At last I made out what was surely the first line. “Her faults are legion and her virtues small.” (I made the word “virtue” to be plural myself. I did not think that Miss Chumley would have written anything so improper for her sex and years as a comment on a lady’s “virtue”.)
Indeed ’twas rumoured she had none at all.
When gentlemen appeared she straight begun
To turn her face as sunflowers to the sun.
And if—
Here the manuscript became quite illegible. But it was an enchanting fragment from that hand. I swear my first opinion was that Pope himself could have done no better than these gently satiric lines! I could hear her very voice and see her smile! She, like Lieutenant Benét, was an addict of poetry. Had he not said that the Muse is the shortest way to the female heart—or words to that effect?
I do not know if I have the boldness to describe what now occurred. I have always, and alas rightly, thought myself to be a prose person! Yet now and with no more ado, but with an ear-tingling sense almost of shame I entered those lists myself! Or tried to! It was the nearest way to her heart and what else could I do in a ship lost amid this waste of miles, this ocean of time, this separation from all that makes life—tolerable I would say, had I not now this overwhelming reason for living! for living. I lay my hand on my heart and declare that the very movement of the planks beneath my feet, evidence of our slow peril, begot in me no more than an impatience with such trivialities as stood between me and what I desired.
But my only experience of the Muse as they would call it was in Latin and Greek, elegiacs, fivers and sixers as we used to say. However—I blush confoundedly at the memory but the truth will be out—and even now I had some confused sense that it was to you, my dear, my clever Angel, that this journal should be written! I got out of my oilskins, sat at my flap, kissed her missive a few times and set out—let me make the confession—to write an Ode to the Beloved! Oh, indeed, Mr Smiles is right! We are all madmen! It is true—I am a witness to it that not poetry but the attempt at poetry is a substitute however poor for the presence of the beloved. I was above myself and saw things plainly as from a mountain top. Whether it be Milton’s God or Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and even darker Gentleman—whether it be Lesbia or Amaryllis or devil take it, Corydon, the Object lifts the mind to a sphere where only the irrational in language makes any sense. So then I, half-ashamed, with feelings of utter folly yet real need, stared at the blank white paper as if I might find at once relief and achievement there. I examine it now with its poor traces of real passion—those blots and crossings-out, those emendations, alternatives, laborious markings-down of shorts and longs, suggestions to myself or to her—these in their incompetence for those who understand were my real poetry of passion!
Candida for “whiteness”. Indeed, an air of whiteness surrounded her, enhaloed her, the fit surround for an innocent girl whose beauty is known to others but not yet to herself! Candida, oh, nothing whiter—Candidior lunâ, therefore, a light to me, mea lux—vector is a passenger no, no, nothing so dusty, so drear, puella, nympha, virgo, is there not nymphe too?
So suddenly from nowhere I had my hexameter!
Candidior lunâ mea lux O vagula nymphe
But is not nymphe a bride? It makes no matter. Then—Pelle mihî nimbos et mare mulce precor—the pentameter came all with a rush but I did not like it, there was no smoothness, all was rough and dull. Marmora blanditiis—better; and so:
Marmora blanditiis fac moderare tuis!
No—moderare mihî!
So there I had a hexameter and a pentameter, what you might call an elegiac couplet. The effort seemed temporarily to exhaust not so much my Latin as my invention. Having besought Miss Chumley to take care of the seas for me there seemed little left for her to do except—
No. I would not touch that innocent image with the furthest off intimation of physical desire!
If we should reach land; and if at some time in the future I should reread this book—if we should reread it together, oh, devoutly to be desired! Shall I believe what I now set down as the plain truth? For it was only when I sat back and relaxed the tension consequent on my poetic endeavours that I remembered Latin was not in the list of accomplishments with which Miss Chumley had favoured me! It was English or nothing, for my French was certainly not up to verse!
Brighter than moonlight, wandering maid,
By thy charms be the white seas allayed!
Turned into English my first efforts at the lyric seemed on the thin side. I had read much poetry in an endeavour to understand a side of life which I thought closed to me by the extreme rationality of my mind and coolness of my temperament! I had heaped other men’s verses up and “struck them down below” as we Tarpaulins say, as if mere quantity of lines was anything to the purpose. Now, with my first glimmer of its real purpose and source, here I was, reduced by fate to puttying together the elements of a dead language, when only a living one had any use. The effect was plainly to be read in these Latin lines. Now indeed I understood those strictures on my tasks which I had accepted so carelessly and with no real intention of amendment—
“No no, Mr Talbot. The lines are constructed according to the rules but Propertius would never have written them!”
So much for the rules. With what a moved understanding did I now see that poetry is a matter of enchantment. It is folly but a divine folly.
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
That is impossible, that is nonsense, but that is what happens, is as the clear and inarticulate voice of every young fool who has been struck by lightning, had all his previous convictions cancelled, erased; and let us add at last in the tail of the number, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, MAGISTER ARTIUM!
It was evident I had shot my poetic bolt. It was only then that I made another discovery which set me laughing like a jackass. I had asked Miss Chumley to flatten the seas for me when the poor girl was even less able to avoid mal de mer than I myself! She might in her turn have been more likely to address her lines to Sir Henry! I returned to her little paper and quickly knew the simple sentence by heart. I turned it over and reread the few words I had so laboriously made out there.
Another few words met my gaze. These were not of blotted ink. They had been—and as if to escape me they vanished again—they had been pressed into the page, pressed through a previous page by a lead or silver point, which was why they became visible only when the paper was held at a certain angle.
He has left the ship and I
Who had left the ship? The only people to have left the ship were Wheeler—and Benét! Was he—could he be—had he been—
Benét was personable. He was far more personable than I. He was a poet—his hair—his fair complexion—his agility—
An impressionable girl—malleable—and with no prospects but what lay in marriage!
I started to my feet. It was an infatuation! Nothing more! There was, however, and before I had abandoned and forgotten this lamentable episode, one person who might throw light on the situation. I went quickly to the waist. The clouds had lifted and Mr Benét’s new course meant that the ship was labouring indeed but more regularly. The horizon was dense blue and clipped all round in little curves as by a pair of nail scissors. Mr Benét himself was now returned from his “bite to eat” and stood by the mainmast talking to a seaman. The ship seemed to be all festooned by ropes, cables, lanyards which lay mostly on the fo’castle but led down from it also. Mr Benét finished his colloquy, turned, saw me and came to the break of the quarterdeck with his usual agile run. He seemed beamingly happy.
“All goes well, Mr Talbot. Soon we shall be able to experiment with the dragrope and after that get on with Mr Summers’s frapping.”
“Mr Benét, I wish to speak to you on a serious matter.”
“Well, sir, I am at your service.”
“A schoolgirl, you said—”
“Did I? I’m sorry, Mr Talbot, but my mind is all tied up in the dragrope if you see my drift. Were we talking of my sisters?”
“No no.”
“Ah—now I remember! You were asking my opinion of young Marion, were you not? She is entirely undeveloped, sir, as they all are. She is a sporty girl though, I give you that. Why, as man to man”—and here Lieutenant Benét looked round briefly then back again—“had little Marion not detained her ‘uncle’, as they agree she calls Sir Henry, with some plea about the conduct of the ship—s
he wanted sail reduced, I think—I don’t mind telling you I should have been a devil of a sight nearer being detected in flagrante delicto than I was!”
“She knew! She understood! A criminal connection!”
“She was accustomed to keep cave for us.”
There was what might be called a moderate roar from the companionway to the captain’s quarters. Lieutenant Benét answered it as cheerfully and promptly as he had answered me.
“Immediately, sir!”
He raised his hand towards his forehead, gave what is fast becoming a kind of “salute to be employed at sea”, then with his usual cheerful agility raced away along the sloping deck.
My own hand was lifted too. The scrap of paper with Miss Chumley’s message on it escaped from my fingers. It went whirling aloft to cling shuddering in the shrouds. With a savage passion I determined to let it go—go, go! But without an order given a seaman put aside his swab, scrambled aloft as quickly as Mr Benét might have done and brought the paper back to me. I nodded my thanks and stood there, paper in hand. How had I made a phantom out of thin air? How had that phantom become the most important thing in the whole world? It was driving me, a sane and calculating man, to acts of sheer folly—versifying—dragging unwelcome truths out of such as Lieutenant Benét—why (and this was a new dash of poison in the mixture) she might well be devoted to the man himself and he not know it in his foolish obsession with a woman old enough to be his mother!
“Get out, Wheeler! Devil take it, man, are you to be always under my feet?”
“Sir.”
“In any case, Phillips should be serving this side of the lobby!”
“No, sir, with respect. The first lieutenant said as we was agreed, Phillips and me, the arrangement could stand since you changed cabins, sir.”
“You’ve become too devilish long-faced for me!”
I flung out of the cabin, nearly brained myself on the mizzen and shouted for Phillips. But it was unnecessary, for he was making a careful way along the lobby to the saloon with a broom.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 39
