‘I was beginning to despair, sir,’ the Captain said after he had introduced himself. ‘I could hardly believe we had only one decent sailor at this table. It seems we have two. Now you will think it rude of me, sir, but I really must be excused. This weather has us all aback – or it would have if we had sails.’
‘Of course,’ said Edward. ‘Besides, I’m sure Miss Air and I etc … will feel all the safer knowing you’re going back to the bridge to steer this tub.’
‘In that case you’ll be distressed to learn that I’m going to do no such thing. As a matter of fact I’m going to bed. I’ve been steering this tub, as you put it, all night and it’s time to turn in. But don’t worry; you’ll be in good hands. Why don’t you pay us a visit later on if you’re interested? See how the old Hildebrand runs?’
‘Oh, I’d like that. How do I get to the bridge?’
‘Just ask any of the stewards or an officer. You’d be most welcome. If you’re feeling really intrepid we might even be able to say that the Master of the King’s Musick actually took the helm.’
‘I say,’ said Edward when the Captain had left, ‘there’s a forthright sort of cove. Nary a word minced. That’s quite jolly. I love bridges, especially when there’s a bit of a swell … I’m sorry we didn’t talk last night. I’m not much at meeting people, you see. All I know about you is that you’re Miss Air the artist.’
‘Please do call me Molly, Sir Edward. I imagine it’ll prove quite difficult to keep up an indiscriminate formality all the way to Brazil and anyway, one needs to reserve the right to be formal for those special cases one wants to keep at arm’s length.’
‘Well, thank God for an honest person. That’s two in as many minutes. If this keeps up I’m going to enjoy this trip. Do you suppose it’s the proximity of a watery grave which knocks the bunkum out of people?’
‘Not in my case, Sir Edward, though I can’t speak for the Captain. I’m afraid I’m seldom less frank than I am at this moment. It has never done me the least good.’ She could hardly interpret the look she caught coming from, it seemed, his very skull so deep-set were his eyes.
‘Oh, I …’ he began. Then, ‘I really can’t resist your name. Might I pass you the marmalade imaginaire?’ With a courtly gesture he set the earthenware marmalade pot on the dampened cloth in front of her.
‘I thought I’d already heard them all. I think it’s very dashing of you to be original while breakfasting on a sinking ship.’
‘Oh, are we really? Mightn’t the Captain have told us?’
‘Captains don’t like panic. It scares them more than drowning. But it’s true I don’t know that we’re actually sinking. We keep going up and down but on balance I’d say we go down further than we come up. These things are cumulative.’
Later he took from his trunk a blank leather-bound book portentously labelled ‘Journal’ in gold lettering on its spine. He had decided to keep a diary of the voyage, although ‘decided’ was perhaps too intentional a word to describe having bought it impulsively on seeing it in a stationer’s. It had been the day he booked his passage – equally on impulse, since here he was on the high seas barely a fortnight later. Despair had a way of making one do things which then took on an air of spurious purpose. A ticket to a far place, a new leaf … It seemed implausible. And yet …
I
Boarded in terrible weather. Lost my hat. What idiotic phantasy was it of a little steel island detaching itself from these depressing shores & sailing away into sunshine with a select complement of souls aboard? The ship’s a monster – well over a hundred yards long – albeit an elegant one & seems full of cocky stewards, shifty men & made-up women smoking. Unsure about my immediate fellows since most are too busy down below trying to turn themselves inside out. Molly Air has style & a fine name (?ch. in opera?). Capt. Maddrell’s breezy & I think mayn’t be above poking fun at us. Difficult to mind much. His job isn’t to be sociable but an expert ship-driver. Ancient landlubbers like me must be as trying as those people who used once (once!) to come up after concerts & start off, ‘I’m afraid I’m thoroughly ignorant about music, Sir Edward, but I want to tell you …’ Still, Maddrell has invited me up to the bridge later – his organloft – so I ought to be flattered & am.
Hempson and Pyce were enjoying a cigarette and a bottle of sherry filched from the bar. They were comfortably asprawl on First Class sheets and tablecloths in no. 1 Linen Store, a warm and rocking nest with a good many steampipes crossing its walls and ceiling. Each lay on racks on either side of the narrow gangway dividing the room, Pyce with his boots on a pile of face towels, Hempson with his on a heap of pillow cases. Now and then they would stick out a hand and the bottle or a cigarette would be passed across. This was only one of several bunk-holes scattered throughout the ship where members of the crew could go into illicit retreat, chiefly to smoke and drink and philosophise. On this particular morning the two men had company: a pregnant cat asleep on a deep litter of freshly-laundered table napkins.
‘They’re here again,’ Pyce was saying. ‘Dickins and Jones.’ This was their nickname for an unlikely pair of confidence tricksters who from time to time joined the cruises under a variety of names.
‘I saw ’em. Same cabin as last time, if I remember right. Gave ’em a wink, too, as an old pal.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Nah, po-faced. Professionals, aren’t they? They’ve got their job, we’ve got ours. Live and let live, say I.’
‘Right, and good luck to ’em. Except I hope it’s not my passengers they fleece. I don’t need the bother, I really don’t. It’s always the rich ones who cut up worst.’
‘Like that Yank you picked on?’
‘How in hell was I supposed to know he was a ruddy magician, Hemp? Bit of a misunderstanding, that’s all.’
‘You said. Still, probably best to keep your nose clean this time around. Otherwise Chiefie’ll dump you. You watch him, Ernie. That one’s got a streak of meanness in him.’
‘Not the only streak he’s got. Seen that new waiter with the hair he’s put aboard? Blimey.’ The two men smoked in silence for a bit, staring up at the wood slats supporting the linen on the shelf above. When Pyce next spoke the suddenness of the sound made the cat stretch all four legs stiffly out without opening an eye and then twist its head still deeper into the linen so its throat lay uppermost with a somnolent pulse ticking. ‘And what about this new MO, eh? A rum ’un all right. Shouldn’t fancy his sick parades.’
‘Douggie says he’s knife-happy. Likes a drink now and again, too, so I’ve heard. And they say there was something funny about him resigning the Army. He’s dark.’
‘What was that, then?’
‘Nobody seems to know. Could be a streak there, too.’
‘Ah, the old Hildebrand gets worse and worse … Do you ever wonder what we’re all doing? I mean, tooling backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. Of course, I know what we’re doing, making a living, but …’ Pyce blew an inarticulate cloud of smoke over the sleeping cat. ‘Sometimes I get thinking about it and it suddenly seems funny. But when I try to explain, like now, it all goes back to being obvious. We’re making a living. But the Old Man’s only a bus driver, isn’t he? This is just the number 11, except it goes to Brazil instead of the Town Hall or the Red Lion. So what’s all this stuff for?’ He gestured largely with the nearly empty bottle. An amber ejaculation of sherry flopped across the bedsheets. ‘All this classy stuff, all that champagne and oysters and caviar and dance bands. You don’t get caviar and dance bands on the number 11. Know what I mean?’
‘I know what you are,’ his friend told him kindly. ‘Bit squiffy.’
‘You do know, Hemp. You know exactly what it’s like when we get to the other side. The sun beating down and the shithawks up in the sky and trees as far as the eye can see and the blokes there just living their lives when up comes the Hildebrand, the old number 11, regular as the timetable promises. I mean, what do they think about it all? About us? Where do
they think we’re going? We just sail past chucking stuff over the side and laughing and giggling. You’ve seen ’em, Hemp. You can’t throw a dried pea over the rail without some little brown scrawny bugger paddling up in a tree trunk to nick it. There’s nothing we chuck over they don’t go for: empty tins, old crates, ends of rope. They can use it all. I dunno. What is it we’re doing, driving round the ruddy globe dancing and giggling and throwing stuff away?’
‘Do give over,’ Hempson said. ‘And pass me that bottle before you spill it all … You rotten blighter, you’ve scoffed the lot.’
‘It spilt a bit.’
‘Know what you are, Ernie?’ Hempson’s tone was half cross, half affectionate and something like envy gave an edge to his accusation. ‘You’re a trouble-maker. You’ve got the mind of a trouble-maker, you have. Me, I’ve had enough trouble.’ And he stared at his own gappy hand. But Pyce wasn’t looking. He was following the contours of the lumps in the cat’s belly very gently with a fingertip.
‘Am-az-on,’ he murmured in time with his caresses. ‘Am-az-on.’
Edward, exploring, found the ship’s library empty but for a man in a white mess-jacket busy with a rag and a pot of beeswax. For all its overtones of clubland – reinforced by the ghosts of half a million cigars and pipes wafting in from the carpet and furnishings of the smoke room next door – the place had the air of being used rather than consulted. A brisk marine smell hung about the pages of the books he took down at random. Also quite different from the volumes in London clubs (which seemed to acquire a uniform walnut hue as if they had become pickled in gloom) these were unusually pale about the cover and spine, presumably from having been taken up on deck.
And a weird selection they were, too, shelved without much attempt at classification. Between a Baroness Orczy and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World he found the same edition of Longfellow he remembered his mother having. There was a shelf labelled ‘Geography and Exploration’ on which were a handful of novels as well as books dealing largely with South America: Bouncing Gold: the Story of Rubber, In the Jungles of Venezuela, Where Stood Stout Cortez, An Economic and Regional Geography of South America (in excellent condition), Secret Rites of the Amazon Tribes (all the photographs torn out).
Browsing with amusement and pleasure he selected a couple of good yarns for bedtime reading. Looking up he caught sight of a handsome brass ship’s chronometer on the bulkhead above the shelves. Ten-thirty surely counted as mid-morning, a reasonable time for visiting bridges? He was just turning away when something made him look more closely at the books in the top shelf. There, outwardly no different from any of the dozens like it on either side, was volume 1 of Caroline Alice Roberts’ Marchcroft Manor. On tiptoe he reached it down. Inside the cover he found a cancelled Ex Libris sticker for someone in Gloucester he had never heard of, then a rubber-stamped rubric in violet ink: not for troops, itself cancelled and ‘The Booth SS Co. Ltd’ printed opposite. Opening it haphazardly he found Julian De Tressanay’s sentiments on discovering that he had just inherited the Marchcroft estate:
‘I, who have never thought of landed property, except to expatiate on the criminality of its tenure in general, and now I, of all people, I suddenly find myself the possessor of a large domain and old Baronial mansion, every stone of which could probably bear testimony to the dread of violence and oppression committed by its rapacious feudal owners …’
Poor Alice. How painful to recall her second-hand radicalism from that distant era of Ruskin and Octavia Hill. Even more painful to wonder whether he might not have caused its demise as well as that of her writing itself. One more damned sacrifice … He searched, not over-zealously, for the second volume but failed to find it. He had never known what to say about her own stuff. She had given up novels on their marriage and from then on he had avoided having to pass judgement on her poetry by setting it from time to time. As he left the library he pondered the Arch-Jester’s nasty little jab. Why that particular book of all books on board this particular ship of all ships?
A short time later as Pyce conducted him to the bridge there were other things which welcomely claimed his attention. Having passed from panelled and carpeted reaches through iron doors into more workaday regions thickly covered in sticky white paint he vaguely expected the bridge to be windswept and was surprised to find it calm and warm. Nobody staggered in and out with running oilskins. Mugs of tea tilted their circular brown puddles securely in metal holders. Neatly-pressed trouser-legs braced themselves easily apart; peaked faces stared ahead through streaming rectangular panes. They might all have been watching a motion picture of a tumultuous seascape but for the movement of the tea and the yielding at their hips. He clutched at a brass something and tried to foresee the Hildebrand’s various tilts and plunges.
Captain Maddrell, evidently a short sleeper, was standing slightly to one side of the helmsman on his grating, glancing into the binnacle as the man held the bows as nearly head-on to the south-westerly advance of waves as possible.
‘I think we can ease off a point or two southwards, Skinner,’ he said.
‘Aye-aye, sir.’ The spokes twirled.
The Captain went into the chart-room whose louvred door was dogged ajar and could be seen bending over a lit table on which lay maps, dividers, protractor, ruler. Looking round, Edward could see into another, similar room full of ebonite panels, knobs, switches and ranks of glowing valves. The Marconi man sat at his wireless, his back to the bridge, earphones on his head, away in some aetherial world of his own where electric blips and scratches announced human presences also abroad on these tossing wastes of ocean. Now and again his hand flexed on the Morse key as he added his own instrumental voice to some arcane dialogue. Abruptly the Captain reappeared, uncapped a speaking-tube, blew into it and spoke. The inscribed plate above the speaking-tube – one of a bank arrayed like little organ-pipes – read ‘Engine Room no. 2’. Then he turned.
‘Mr Mushet, Mr Mushet. You’re a lucky fellow and no mistake. A free holiday in Madeira. Next time we’ll arrange to bring the wife and nippers.’
But the man he was addressing, standing to one side in a white jersey and stained cap, was maybe soured by the news. Eloquent as to his dismal thin beard he only stared out of a side window back to where the tip of Cornwall might have been many hours ago.
‘It’s not to be helped, Mr Maddrell,’ he said at last. ‘Not if a man will sail in the first place, that is.’
‘You’re an old woman, Mushet.’ The Captain was clearly not put out. Cap pushed well back on his head so that the stubby black visor winked over his fringe in the light he was mischievously at ease – at home, Edward thought, in a way he had not been down below in the restaurant at breakfast. In the air these men shared was an equable passion. Their least movement – hand on brass, twirl of wooden spokes, raising mug to lips – had something in it of loyalty to each other and to their living island. Sir Sidney Colvin, as much Conrad’s friend as Edward’s, had recently read him a passage in which one of that writer’s sentences had stuck in his mind as a true perception of a world from which he felt himself excluded. ‘The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life.’ Moral. Where was its equivalent in the lonely business on which he had expended his own years? Where the morality in such untrammelled selfishness? His mind gave something like a mutter of envy for whatever crucial experiences of muscle and eye and instinct that writer must have had with whom he shared a birth-year. One could so easily tire of the inner voice, always unassuaged like a bully yapping and baiting. Wistful bully, wishing now to have lived more brightly, to have had time off in the unequivocations of action.
‘Sir Edward,’ the Captain interrupted his self-disgust from across the bridge. ‘Come and meet a miserable man.’
It was that, it occurred to him as he went over: not for many years had he remained in a room ungreeted for so long, nor had he been summoned so amiably by a stranger. There was something in the Captain which reminded him of the old
gardener at Birchwood who had taught him hedging, coopering, a dozen other basic crafts, now scornful, now taciturn, very occasionally shedding a word of praise like a dead scale. But how Edward – hands scratched and blistered, sweating in his thorn-proof trousers – had glowed at the word! Such men were in charge of their lives, responsible for what befell them. They might really say anything to anyone with impunity. Absurdly, he yearned for their acceptance as he had never longed for applause, never had wished to throw himself upon those vegetable rows of fur and feather receding into an auditorium’s shadows, gloved hands whirring against glittering bosoms like things dead and dry fretted in a hedgerow.
‘Mr Mushet, I’d like to introduce the Hildebrand’s most illustrious passenger: Sir Edward Elgar, Master of the King’s Musick – Mr Mushet. The unfortunate Mushet is our pilot – or rather he was when he was needed. Normally a cutter takes him off at Holyhead but in these conditions it couldn’t be done. We might have carried him on to Le Havre, but the French coast is as bad as ours at present. The tales the wireless man is telling nearly make us inclined to skip Oporto and Lisbon and plough straight on to Madeira. His best chance of a short holiday is in Madeira.’
‘But couldn’t you have put him off on the South Coast safely to the east of the Isle of Wight, say?’
‘Good heavens, Sir Edward, ours is a commercial shipping line. We don’t make wide detours, burn up valuable coal and delay our passengers for the convenience of the world’s Mushets. He’s a vagabond, is Mushet. Never boards a ship without a toothbrush, a spare pair of socks and his papers. For all he knows an hour’s trip down the Mersey can turn into a passage to the Ivory Coast. That’s the life, eh?’
Gerontius Page 5
