by John Bowen
“I don’t follow you,” Banner said.
Gertrude said, “I do. Sometimes when I was feeling lonely, I would lie awake in Earl’s Court, you know, and wonder whether it was all worth while. But I had to decide that it was, or I could never have carried on. It is a wicked play in that way, The Wild Duck.”
“But it didn’t arise,” said Banner. “Of course it seemed worth while. I wanted to help people.”
“Why didn’t you become a social worker?” I said.
“The qualifications.”
Gertrude said, “What qualifications? A free heart, an open hand—surely that is all you need?”
“Some sort of degree in Social Science, I believe,” Banner said. “I had thought I would like to be a probation officer, but when I made inquiries, they would not take me. I was too young at that time, and lacked the proper academic background—I got a fourth, you know. It was not good enough to qualify me as a probation officer, but the Church of England was not so particular. Although of course I had to undergo further training in a seminary at St. Andrews.”
“But how did you——?”
“Begin? I suppose you might say I drifted into it—an apt enough method for a rowing man. I was given my Blue, you see, in my second year. Nobody had taken very much notice of me up to that time, but the Moral Rearmament people were keen to recruit athletic personalities; they believed that where we showed the way, the good college men would follow. They sent a chap round to see me, and he asked me to tea. There was a Rugger Blue and a Cricket Blue and a Boxing Blue and two peers and a don from St. Peter’s Hall. We had strawberries and cream, and confessed our sins. I had never gone in for that kind of thing before, and it did seem interesting.”
“You didn’t stay with that lot surely?”
“No. I was too bashful. I found the greatest difficulty in confessing even to very tiny faults. After all, if the faults were small, it seemed presumptuous to expect people to be interested, and if they were large I would rather keep them to myself. And you know, I didn’t greatly care for the people. So I dropped away after a bit, (though I’m bound to say they kept sending me very friendly letters) and confined myself to the University Christian Union; even that I began to find a bit evangelical, but I felt it better to keep in touch. And then when I began to consider ordination seriously, they were a great help.”
“How did you manage to swallow it all?” I said.
“Swallow what?”
“If you didn’t have a vocation, how did you manage to swallow all the dogma?”
“It didn’t seem important somehow,” Banner said. “There is a far wider latitude of belief in the Church of England than most people think. I had no more objection to conducting a service than I had to attending one; there was just rather more to say. After all, although my views have grown broader than they were, I’m not a heathen, you know.”
“No, of course not.”
“I simply wanted to do some good. And as a clergyman, I found that people came to me for advice, and then there were the Youth Clubs, and I was able to help in resettling some of my parishioners who’d had the misfortune to spend time in prison, and the days went by very swiftly. I was so busy that I had little time to think about religious questions, and when I did, you know, I discovered that most things were explicable in simple terms. All those doubts people used to have! There was never any need for them, since the Sunday papers have proved that virgin birth is perfectly possible, and most of the miracles have been duplicated by scientists. In any case, I wasn’t required to be a fundamentalist. Nobody wanted me to believe in God as a person, or in Christ as anything else. Nowadays, you know, Heaven is not a place, but a oneness with God; the individual soul dissolves into the God-soul, as it were—not very easy to communicate to one’s parishioners, but then one’s contact with them is not in church; one never sees them in church, and all the good work is done in the Clubs and on the playing fields.”
“But the beauty of it. The stillness. The communion,” Gertrude said. “One has to believe in that.”
Banner said, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not a thing I ever experienced, you see, except in other people’s churches sometimes, older than mine, and more—more foreign like Notre Dame or St. Peter’s. My church was a nineteenth-century construction in an industrial parish, and the choir—I don’t think I ever had more than six in the choir or sixty in the congregation.”
At the edge of the raft, Hunter suddenly stood up, jerked his fishing line out of the water, and shouted, “Land ho!”
*
It was not land. It was an ark.
We could not know this. We could see no more than its indistinct outline against the horizon. Long before Hunter sighted it, the ark must have been lying as we were, becalmed in the smooth sea, for it did not come any closer to us, nor could we approach it. Both ark and raft remained where they were, and the whole party of us, gathered on deck in response to Hunter’s call, strained our eyes to stare at it, still thinking it to be land.
“It might be a mirage,” I said.
“And it might not.”
“Hadn’t you better send out a dove?” I said.
Muriel said, “You’ve no reason to mock,” and Arthur took off his glasses, and wiped them on the side of his trunks. “Are there any binoculars on board, Captain Hunter?” he said.
“Oh Lord,” said Hunter, “I can’t remember where I left them.”
“Try,” Arthur said, “And while you are trying, the rest of us will return to whatever we were doing. Mr. Ryle, if you have finished your exercises, perhaps you will take a turn at fishing.” He went back to the cabin, and Muriel followed him. The rest of us, once the door was safely closed, continued to stare out to sea.
When the binoculars had been found, Arthur stood for some time, gazing through them at the distant shape. “It is a vessel,” he said.
“Any sign of life?”
“None. But at this distance one can distinguish very little.” Arthur lowered the binoculars, and put them away in their case. Nobody else asked to use them; they had already become a badge of leadership like an officer’s sword. “We shall have to go and see,” he said.
“How?”
“The dinghy.”
The dinghy and paddles were still in the hold. “I’ll go,” Hunter said.
“Wait,” Arthur said. “It is too far to paddle this afternoon; we should not be able to return in daylight. Captain Hunter, are you sure there are no other weapons on board beside your fishing spear?”
“Sorry, Arthur.”
Gertrude said, “Weapons?”
“Miss Harrison, you must not assume that everyone has the same gentleness of spirit as yourself. If that should be a vessel as I think it, and if there should be a crew aboard, we may be attacked. We have food, which they may covet. We have seen them; perhaps they have also seen us. We must not rule out the possibility of piracy.”
“But Arthur,” Banner said, “surely at a time like this we’re all in the same boat?”
“Manifestly not, Mr. Banner. We are in our boat, they in theirs. If ours is the more seaworthy, they may wish to make an exchange. We shall mount a guard tonight.”
That night Banner, Hunter, Tony and I stood watches. I do not know whether the others felt as foolish as I did as I paced around the deck, staring over the moonlit water. Together the moon and the phosphorescence made a silver world, so that it was easy to believe in the mermaids and sea-sirens who would coax a man down the silver walk to the ocean’s depths. And then? I stopped, my eyes turned inward, as I tried to decide which was more likely, the bleached bones on the siren’s rocks or the friendly underwater world of an E. Nesbit story in the Strand magazine.
“Have you had quiet guard?” Banner asked, coming to relieve me.
“Not a shrimp stirring.” Nevertheless I dreamed of wet mermen that night, their heads covered with spotted scarves, cutlasses between their teeth, their eyes red and bloody, water dripping from their scales and their wild
hair as they pulled themselves onto the raft from the shining sea.
Next morning we were ready to make up a boarding party, but Arthur had changed his mind. He did not wish, he said, to split our forces if there were any danger of having to fight. Instead he spent the day watching the other vessel through the binoculars, and by the evening he had decided it was deserted.
We stood guard that night also just the same, and in the morning we made ready for the expedition. Arthur himself would go with us; Hunter and I would paddle. “Darling,” Sonya said to me while she and I inflated the dinghy. “Could there really be anyone there?”
“Arthur doesn’t think so.”
“But there might be?”
“I suppose.”
She twitched her nose in thought. “Here, wait a sec,” she said, and went inside the cabin. When she returned, she had brought her little silver Christopher. She gave it to me. “I don’t believe in taking chances,” she said.
I said, “Oh, darling!” and Sonya said, “Well …” and Arthur came out of the cabin, and told us to hurry.
We set off. Arthur sat in the dinghy, and Hunter and I took up the paddles. We began to move away, watched by the others who had gathered on deck to see us go. The women put up their hands to wave. “Good luck, good luck!” Banner cried.
As the distance widened between us, for the first time I saw the raft in the context of the water that surrounded it, and realized how small it was, our floating home, which had seemed roomy and secure enough when we were on board. Now, on all that waste of water, there were only the raft and this other vessel on the horizon and the tiny rubber dinghy crossing from one to the other. It was going to be a painful crossing for me, I realized. Already the muscles of my arms and shoulders were aching, and as the sweat dripped into my eyes from my forehead, I began to feel dizzy. “Take ten,” Arthur said suddenly, and we rested.
We toiled on under the hot sun towards the vessel, and as we drew nearer we could see its outlines more clearly. It really did look as if it had been built from a model in a child’s picture book of Noah. There were open pieces of deck at the prow and stern, but the rest was covered with a peaked roof, partly torn away by the gale, and the ark rode high in the water, and lopsidedly as if the cargo were badly stowed. Nothing moved on board. Arthur shouted, “Ahoy! Ahoy there!” and the sound died on the open water without reply. He shouted again. The rubber dinghy bumped against the side of the ark. “Christ!” Hunter said, “what a pong!”
It was true; the stench was horrible. “Something has died,” Arthur said. “Will you see if you can find a place to tie up, Mr. Clarke?’ We paddled all round the ark, and found nothing, nor was there any sign of occupation other than the stench. “Perhaps if Captain Hunter were to hoist you on his shoulders, Mr. Clarke, you would be able to climb on board,” Arthur said. I climbed up, and pulled Arthur after me. We stood uncertainly on the empty deck at the prow, and Arthur shouted again, “Is anyone here?” This time we thought we heard a faint reply from the interior. There was a door in front of us, and I opened it.
Through the open door, the stench came out to overwhelm us. It was like something living, like warm flesh suddenly released from the constriction of a corset. I gave way before it, and, rushing to the side, was immediately sick; Arthur stayed where he was. Nothing else could be alive inside, I thought; there would not be room. But there was something. It appeared in the doorway, blinking against the light, its mouth and eyes opening contrapuntally. But no sound came from the mouth, and the eyes were red in a face encrusted with filth, and set in a frame of matted hair. Arthur said, “Get the water bottle,” and when I had hoisted it from the dinghy, and we had laid the scarecrow man down in the shade, and fed him gently with water, he spoke to us, and said, “They all died; they all died.”
“Your livestock?”
“Yes. There was no water. And they had fouled their quarters. I saved … saved grain,” he said. “I saved it for food and seed. Some of it was spoiled by the storm, and afterwards there was no water. There had been so much before. I could not think of everything.”
“You had better take a look round, Mr. Clarke,” Arthur said.
“I have drunk blood,” said the man. “Ham, Shem—both dead. My wife left me, you know, before the Word was fulfilled; she took Japhet, and went to her married sister in Ruislip. When we were very thirsty, we drank the blood of our Shetland pony, but the two boys died. More has occurred than was foretold.”
“Where is the grain?” Arthur said.
“Inside. And the seeds in tins. Flowers too. Beauty should not vanish from the earth. I bought nasturtiums since they were cheap, and marigolds, and London Pride. No gardens without flowers.”
“Let me know what you find, Mr. Clarke,” Arthur said.
Getting through that door was like walking into a grave. Each forward step I took built up the force within me that wanted to turn and run out again. I tried to cover my nose and mouth against the stench, breathing through the chinks between my fingers, but it did little good.
All the interior of the ark was one large room. The animals lay there, dead in their stalls, their bodies already bloated with decay and filthy with ordure. To one end were piled sacks of grain and roots; the rain had rotted them, but I could see a number of bins that must contain seed, and the contents of these would be in good condition. I made a move to open them, but before I could reach the bins I felt my dizziness begin again, and knew that I should faint if I did not return to the deck outside.
I made my report to Arthur. “Can we carry the bins away with us?” he asked.
“Not really. They’d sink the dinghy.”
“Very well. We must devise something else.”
“What about the man?”
“He is in no state to be moved,” Arthur said. “You can see that for yourself. Let us make him comfortable where he is.”
“And come back for him?”
“Unless you would care to stay.”
“I don’t think I could,” I said. “The stench … I suppose he’s grown used to it.”
“Yes.”
I bent over the man. “Look,” I said. “We’re going away now, but we’ll come back tomorrow. We’re going to leave the water bottle with you. We’ll bring food when we come.” The man did not reply; he had talked himself out, it seemed. But he stared up at me, and his eyes blinked, and I think he would have nodded his head if he could.
We returned to the raft more quickly than we had come. Except when he gave the order to rest, Arthur was silent, his lips tightly pressed together in thought. When the journey was almost over, he said, “I have decided. We cannot bring the grain to the raft as easily as we can tow the raft to the grain. We shall do it tomorrow.”
*
In fact, it was not a task that could be finished in one day; my promise to the scarecrow man was broken. First there was the straining and sweating at the paddles of the dinghy to get the raft to move at all; then, even after our effort had become effective, it could not be diminished, for the raft never gathered enough speed through the water to allow us to rest for a while as it coasted. We all took turns, even Arthur himself, in shifts of four while a leader chanted the time of the strokes. We rested only at night and during the fiercest heat of the day.
I did not expect the man still to be alive when, on the third day, we reached the ark, but he was. He lay where we had left him, and when he saw me he only said, “You were here before”. The water bottle was empty, and we gave him more, and the women brought sacking to make him more comfortable, and fed him with the fish stew that was our usual diet. The men, under Arthur’s direction, transhipped what of the ark’s cargo could be useful to us. When we had finished, the light was almost gone. “We must pull away a little for the night,” Arthur said. “This is not a healthy atmosphere to sleep in.”
Again in the dusk we strained to set the raft in motion, and took up our station about thirty yards away. “That should be enough,” Arthur said. That night, as
on the two nights before it, we went to bed as soon as we had eaten, falling asleep almost on the instant.
At perhaps two o’clock in the morning, I awoke from a dream of flames as Arthur stepped on my foot. He made his way to his own place, and lay down; I could see him clearly in the flickering orange light that filled the cabin, as I could see the sleeping faces of Banner, Hunter and Tony Ryle. I rose and went to the cabin door; Arthur half turned on his pallet, and I knew he was watching me. I went out on deck. The sky was bright with orange and yellow light from the burning ark. The fire had taken hold of the great central storehouse that we had rifled so short a while before, and the flames jumped high in the air from the hole in the roof, lighting up the whole of the forward deck where, it seemed to me, I could see the scarecrow man, his arms spread wide, his head flung back. He stood there for a moment like the figurehead of a doomed vessel. Then a dragon’s tongue of flame came from the open door behind him, licked him once, and he was gone.
