After the Rain

by John Bowen

  “You think we ought to?” he said.

  “Arthur would wish it.”

  “Right ho,” said Hunter. “Give us a hand, padre, will you?”

  Mr. Banner unwound himself from the table leg. His face was grey-green from fear and nausea. Tony joined him. I told them to hurry while there was still time to move, and they stumbled over to the door. There the shutter was a kind of screen, which slid across and was secured by a bar. While Banner and Tony were dealing with the door, Hunter moved swiftly around the cabin, pulling down the shields of metal that reinforced the glass of the port-holes.

  When they had finished, the cabin was in darkness, for Hunter had forgotten to turn on the light. The three men could not find their way back to the table. We heard them fall, and a bumping as they were thrown about. Then there was a cry from Gertrude.

  After we were over the worst of it, I said, “Is everyone all right?”

  “Hit my bloody head,” said Hunter.

  “Mr. Banner?” There was no reply. “Banner! Is he hurt? Can you find him in the dark?”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s dead or anything, because he’s just been sick,” said Sonya. Banner groaned.

  “Is he within reach?”

  “Yes.” I heard Sonya’s voice, comforting in the temporary calm. “Here, hold on to me; you’ll be all right. Goodness, don’t bother about that.”

  “What have you done with my husband?” Muriel said.

  There was no more calm after that for a long time. The giant waves were done, and what remained was simple tempest. The raft was battered and thrown from side to side while we lay in the darkness and wet of the cabin, listening to the waves and the wind. I lay closer to Arthur than a lover, keeping both him and myself on the bunk; my neck and arms and the backs of my knees ached with the tension. Ridiculously, I began to feel sea-sick, and so, I could hear, did the others; the cabin was filled with the stench, and became suffocatingly hot.

  The suffocation and the stench. It was as if God had decided to take the intending suicide with his head in the gas-oven of a shabby basement flat, and give him a good shaking to bring him to his senses, but had neglected first to open the windows, so that Divine anger was only added to the physical discomforts a suicide has to bear already. In that close air, I seemed to see the whole raft caught up in God’s hand to be rattled and shaken and tossed petulantly aside, falling again through the air, and turning over and over as it fell into a darkness that had no end. Down and down I fell through that darkness into sleep, knowing as I fell that it would be my last’ sleep, and sure enough, when I awoke we were at peace.

  So I am dead, I thought. There was a sour taste in my mouth. My head ached, and my eyes were swollen; my body was stiff and sore. The cabin was hotter than ever. If this was Hell, it was only human discomfort aggravated a little. All things were the same, I noticed, save one—we were at peace. And when I groped for the shutter over the port-hole, and opened it, a shaft of sunlight illuminated the wall beyond.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Ark

  “Couldn’t I have a drink of water?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Arthur said. “You are not allowed more than your ration.”

  “Ration?”

  “We are becalmed, Mr. Clarke. The batteries are not charging, and will not until there is a wind again. I have instituted a strict rationing of all electrical power for the time being.

  Inside the cabin pieces of cloth, moistened with sea water, had been draped over the port-holes for shade and coolness. Outside the sun shone steadily, and its rays were reflected upwards from the water, so that anyone on deck seemed to be caught in a cross-fire from the sun. All of us had burned and blistered except Hunter who was used to the sun and Arthur who, being already bruised a yellowish purple, could take no other colour.

  On the second day of sunshine, I had come down with sunstroke, and now I lay on a bunk in the gloom of the cabin, drifting between sleep and waking, feverish, and with a steady pain at the back of my eyes, and Arthur visited me at regular intervals to take my temperature. “I don’t know why you bother,” I said. “You haven’t any penicillin or anything. You can’t bring it down.”

  “It does no harm to know,” Arthur said, and he made a mark on the temperature chart he kept hidden from me in a folder.

  “How is it going to end up, Arthur?”

  “First the fever will go; in fact, I may as well tell you that it is already subsiding. Then you will be very weak for a little while, and——”

  “I don’t mean that. How are we going to end? All of us on board.”

  “Why, we shall survive, as I told you.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “That is because you have no vision.” Arthur sat down on the side of the bunk. “Now that the rain has stopped, the waters will subside, and eventually we shall come to land. Then we must begin all over again.”

  “Without seed? Without livestock?”

  “There is no alternative, Mr. Clarke. We must do what we can with what we have. I intend, when you have recovered, to call a meeting, and I shall put to them—I shall tell them—But let that keep; we must not anticipate. I shall survey our resources; I shall plan; everything will be arranged. Believe me, Mr. Clarke, I do not doubt that we shall survive. Taking the long view, there are no accidents in nature. Our survival so far has not been accidental; you cannot think that. Of course, we do not know how many other people may also have survived, where they may be, and what kind of people they may be. Such people may be our rivals. Survival in the natural order is often a matter of competition. Each group, each species, has certain advantages and opportunities. If we do not grasp our opportunities as they arise, we may not be judged fit to continue.”

  “Judged?”

  “I use the word loosely, of course.”

  “I thought you never used words loosely.”

  “Sometimes. I have so many things to think of, so much to plan. My dear Mr. Clarke, you have no idea. It is not that I complain of strain; in work, man finds his justification. And if we are to begin Society all over again….” He took off his spectacles, and I noticed that, now they were no longer shielded by the lenses, his eyes seemed a little out of focus. “What is man, Mr. Clarke?” he said. “Man is an animal with intelligence. That is his survival weapon. On the one hand, we must see that it is properly used as a weapon; that it is developed to the highest pitch of efficiency. And on the other, we must remember that it is only a weapon, if you understand me, and that it is to the welfare of man as an animal that our society must be devoted.” He repeated the phrase slowly, “The welfare of man as an animal.”

  “I’ve never thought of you as an animal, Arthur.”

  He ran his tongue over his lips. “There you make your mistake,” he said. “Because a man fits himself to lead…. But that, you see, is precisely—I do not often share my thoughts, Mr. Clarke; it is not a characteristic of leadership. But I have been thinking a great deal. Imagination, you see, is the enemy. There is no place for that. We shall not be concerned, therefore, with gods or devils; there is no place for the supernatural.”

  “But you’ve always encouraged Banner to say Grace.”

  “Many arrangements that govern our existence on this raft must be jettisoned once we are ashore. An element of formality at this time gives shape to lives that are in danger of being made shapeless by ennui. But once we have landed, there will be plenty to do; everyone will see that, you may be sure. We shall have no time for dreams. An animal does not allow itself to dream, for if it does, it dies.”

  My head ached. “Look,” I said. “What’s the point of living without imagination? Or without God or whatever? You’ve got to have a point. Look at all those tribes in the South Seas that just died out. Look at all the people who commit suicide. It isn’t keeping alive that makes one want to live; it’s the trimmings that go with it.”

  “I shall not allow anyone to die out,” Arthur said. “I shall not allow it. You talk of sui
cides. A suicide is a neurotic by definition, and neuroses of any sort spring from the imagination, Mr. Clarke. It is the fifth column. We must stamp it out. Don’t you see, it is all part of the test. Imagination, you may say, exists within us like a cancer. When we have destroyed it, we shall have proved ourselves worthy of survival.”

  “Test … prove … worthy,” I said. “You make the whole thing sound like an entrance examination.”

  “If it will encourage you, Mr. Clarke, let me tell you that I have never failed an examination in my life.” He smiled, put on his spectacles, and patted the sheet paternally. “We must talk again,” he said. “Intelligent discussion is a great stimulus to me. But perhaps you should rest now. I have already excited you too much.” And he rose briskly from the bunk, and left the room, taking the temperature chart with him.

  After he had gone, I lay in the gloom of the darkened cabin, and my head ached. All this talk about survival, when there was so much against us. I thought about the batteries, no longer charging. What should we do when we could no longer distil drinking water? And food? How long could we exist on Glub and fish? Even if we were to come to land, what then? We had no seed! No livestock! Even the International Unitarian Breakfast Food Company did not suggest that Glub was self-propagating. And tools? Would Intelligence conjure a plough for us out of the mud of some eventual island? Clothes? We were wearing trunks and bikinis improvised from Hunter’s spare shirts, and when they wore out, I supposed we should go naked like animals, like Arthur’s intelligent animals, whom he would lead, naked and without possessions, into the Promised Land.

  All right; so all right, I thought. We’re going to survive the voyage, and we’re going to reach land, and there’ll be enough to eat, and we’ll settle down together to make a fresh start for the human race. And what kind of job shall we make of it? What shall we teach our children?—what do we know between the eight of us? —what of medicine, chemistry, engineering? Who are we to make a fresh start, I thought. Even if Arthur were preposterously right, and Nature had selected us, what a poor selection the silly lady had made! In this sort of picking a new team, the convention was to begin with the scientists, just as the first of the books one took to a desert island in the newspaper competitions was always the Bible, because it was holy and because it was long. Once upon a time, I thought, there were a doctor, a chemist, a farmer and an electrical engineer, and they took four healthy girls with degrees from the University of London, and settled down together on a desert island, where they were very happy and founded the New Jerusalem. But not us. Not Arthur Renshaw, Sonya Banks, Gertrude Harrison, Muriel Otterdale, Geoffrey Hunter, Harold Banner, Tony Ryle and John Clarke. Why, even the balance of the sexes was uneven, unless Arthur intended to reintroduce a celibate priesthood among his rational animals.

  And yet we could not live except by the belief that in some way we should survive; otherwise we might as well start now to decide upon the least unpleasant way of dying. If Arthur’s dottiness about our being intelligent animals would keep us going, I had better encourage it. Arthur was a good sort of man, and an excellent nurse, in spite of his formality and fussiness. His insistence on “Visiting Hours” had led to my practical isolation for most of the time. Even Sonya’s visits had been restricted. I found myself obsessively concerned to know how she was passing the time. How long ago was it since she had come to see me? When would she come again? What did they do out there all day long, those intelligent animals under Arthur’s command?

  Faintly from outside the port I could hear their voices. Gertrude’s laugh. Sonya: “Tony’s got a fabulous tan when you consider he was all pink and peeling two days ago.” Banner: a phrase in which I caught the words, “the sons of Ham”. Then Sonya again: “Well, you’re not to send him out into the wilderness just because he’s darker than the rest of us. I won’t have it.” And nearer at hand (they must have been passing just underneath the port as they strolled on deck together), Muriel’s voice: “Of course we’d always do anything you told us to, Arthur. You know that.”

  I closed my eyes again, and turned to face the wall of the cabin. Encourage Arthur, I thought; Arthur did not need encouragement from me or from any of us. Like Muriel, I would do what Arthur commanded, because of us all only Arthur knew where he was going. And for all my civilized reservations, I had neither the will to oppose him, nor the vision to lead in his place.

  *

  I recovered, and lay on the deck in the sun with the others. The sun shone, and the air was still. Arthur called a meeting, and we elected him President of the New Society, nemine contra dicente. He told us we should each have a part to play, and that in the meantime he would continue to make rules that should govern our conduct on board. I asked whether there was any provision for a Deputy in case anything should happen to him; Arthur replied that nothing was likely to happen to him. There being no further business, the meeting ended.

  We lay becalmed, and the sun shone steadily down. We had hoisted sail, but there was no wind to fill it; a lug sail, it hung from the mast like old washing. We had no idea how far the storm had carried us, knew that we were in the northern hemisphere, but could not tell if we were over Switzerland or the Atlantic Ocean, for none of us had skill with the stars. From the length of the nights, we could judge that we had not reached either the tropics or the Arctic Circle.

  The heat made us languorous, and Arthur’s conserving the batteries was an inconvenience. We washed and shaved in cold salt water, which left us sticky; Banner and I in particular were corrugated with cuts. We ate once a day only, a mess of stewed fish and Glub. Fish, indeed, were abundant, and many were of kinds we could not recognize; once we caught a strange creature, half-eel, half-dragon, which, skinned and then broiled on the electric plate of the stove, proved to have flesh as succulent as veal. During the nights the water shone with phosphorescence, and the fish would come up to sport on the surface. Silver-green and silver-blue, they would leap in the air or chase each other the length of the raft; sometimes the same fish might seem to be swimming ceaselessly round and round us as if curious to examine so unfishy a fellow-traveller.

  One morning when Gertrude and I were first out of the cabin, we found a seal lying on deck, basking belly upwards in the sun. Gertrude gripped my arm. “Don’t tell Arthur,” she said. “He will want to kill it for food.” Slowly, but with a beautiful sureness in her gait, she approached the seal, and laid her hand on its head. The seal’s whiskers twitched under the shadow of her arm, and I believed it purred. It lay there quite still, allowing her to stroke it while I stood apart, until the cabin door opened and we were joined by Banner. Instantly the seal dived overboard, and, as I glanced at Gertrude, I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  Arthur, when Banner told him of the seal’s visit, was pleased with Gertrude. “It is clear that you have a way with animals, my dear,” he said, “I am sure we shall be able to make use of it.” I had never heard him call any of us but by our given names, and Gertrude was almost as pleased by the “my dear”, I think, as by his praise.

  That was the happiest time of the voyage. In the bright sunlight, it was almost as if we were on an extended houseboat holiday, with Arthur as scoutmaster-in-charge. The diet was meagre, the living conditions spartan, but that was to be expected. It was so pleasant to be warm again, and dry, and, now that the blistering and the sunstroke were over, to he like lizards soaking up the sunlight, and in the evenings to watch the great set-pieces of green, and orange and violet that were our sunsets. Arthur kept telling us that we must fit ourselves to become citizens of the New Society, but this seemed to mean no more than that we must perform the tasks he set us. We ourselves never thought about the New Society, and our talk was of the world as we had known it far more than of the future. We lived from day to day, and were contented. We had resigned our wills to Arthur, and were no more than engines, not yet harnessed, lying in readiness for the time when their creator would put them to use.

  And we were healthy enough at that
time, in a low-keyed way; we had not yet begun to suffer from short commons and too little water. We were healthy, with one exception. Muriel had gone broody since her husband’s death. Where the rest of us were obedient, she was servile. There was something suspect and fawning about her manner to Arthur, something possessive as if they shared some shameful secret from which the rest of us were excluded.

  *

  “No,” Banner said, “It is true I had no vocation, but I thought I might be able to do some good in the world.”

  We were lying on deck, Gertrude and Banner stretched out in the sunshine, myself in the scanty shade the sail afforded. Somewhere below us in the hold, Sonya was doing her barre and Tony lifting his weights or bending himself backwards over a piece of board. Arthur was writing up the log in the cabin, while Muriel watched him. Hunter was fishing.

  Banner said, “Like Captain Hunter, I was never cut out for an office job.”

  Gertrude propped herself on her elbows, and said seriously, “A free soul needs expression, Harold. How well I know that.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Banner said, “I wanted to do something.”

  “Ah, the Life Lie,” I said.

  “Life Lie?”

  “Ibsen,” Gertrude said. “The Wild Duck. A hopeless, hopeless message,” and she sighed.

  Banner said, “I don’t understand.”

  I said, “Well, Ibsen’s thesis in The Wild Duck is that everyone needs a lie to live by. Whatever Arthur may say, most human beings are not absolute fools. They know that human life is a pretty pointless business. They are born, and grow old, and die. They eat and drink, and go to work every day, and take one, two or three weeks’ holiday every year. They raise children, and the children grow up and leave home, and the parents are left alone. Much of their life is spent in pain, and more in boredom, and most in indifference. All they have to expect is monotony and struggle for most of their working lives, and loneliness and fear in their old age. And what’s it all for? They don’t really believe that making things, and packing them in cans or boxes, and loading them in cars and ships and planes, and transporting them, and writing advertising copy about them, and selling them, and buying them, and using them, and disposing of what is left, and making new things to replace them are ends in themselves. Yet if life is to be tolerable, they must believe in some sort of purpose to it, and that’s where the Life Lie comes in. A religious vocation, dedicating oneself to the good of society, adding to the store of human knowledge, painting a picture or writing a book, winning battles or finding a cure for cancer—it doesn’t matter what it is as long as you believe it, Ibsen would say. But of course once you recognize your need for a Life Lie, once you write about it or talk about it or bring it out into the front of your mind, then it becomes more difficult to find a Life Lie that will work for you, because it is only a lie after all, and once you know that, it has no power any more, and all is emptiness again.”