As for Fearmax, he was concerned with problems of a different order. He lay for hours in his cabin with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His door was always open, so that whenever he passed Baird could look in and see him there, hands crossed on his breast, collar open, staring at the paintwork. He did not appear to any meals for the first twenty-four hours and Baird wondered idly if he were having a severe bout of seasickness; yet his door stood open, and whenever Baird passed it he saw him lying there. Led by the promptings no less of curiosity than of courtesy, he at last tapped at the door and put his head in, asking Fearmax in his pleasant way if he could be of any use to him. For a time he did not seem to hear — but at last, with an effort, he turned in the bunk and raised himself on one elbow.
“That’s kind of you,” he said hoarsely. “Very kind. No. I am just resting, that’s all. I do not suffer from sea-sickness. But I hate journeys. Do come in.”
The cabin was heavy with the smell of cigar-smoke. There were several large stoutly-bound books lying beside the bunk, a rosary, and a number of yellow envelopes full of papers. Fearmax looked pale and weary.
“I’ve never been out of England before,” he said. “It’s rather a big adventure for me — like the start of a new chapter; and I am trying to read the omens. They are very strange, very strange.”
Between the wall and the bulkhead lay a bound set of Ephemerides, and a notebook covered with jottings. “Omens?” said Baird. (“Omens?” said Graecen later in a much higher key of superstition, of anxiety, when Fearmax made the same remark.)
“You probably don’t believe in astrology?” said Fearmax. What was one to say? It was on the tip of Baird’s tongue to reply, “Not since the atom bomb was discovered,” but he checked himself. Fearmax went on in his hoarse voice.
“I didn’t myself once, but even if it’s an inexact science I’ve found that it could tell me things: potentialities of my own character, for example: forces inherent in the world around me. At any rate I worked out a progressed chart today in the train for the next few months. It shows some curious things. As far as I can see I am in danger of being lost in one of the tunnels of the Great Pyramid.”
Baird stifled his amusement. There was something oddly impressive about Fearmax. He did not talk like a quack, but like a man who had been genuinely in search of something — some principle of truth or order in the world: and who had failed in his quest. With a bony finger the medium traced out the houses and planets on his chart, talking of conjunctions and trines. The influence of Saturn caused him considerable anxiety it appeared. He had no fear for the journey while he was at sea — the influences are favourable. But somewhere on land, in the company of others, there was to be an accident. The nature of that accident he could not guess as yet — nor whether it would be fatal. He simply knew it would assist him in his discovery of “The Absolute”.
It was an odd word to hear at such a time and place, Baird thought. But then Fearmax, as Hogarth said, was an odd person. To be engaged in a search for The Absolute was, however, a fine medieval conception. He wondered what it could meant
The Voyage Out
It was some few days before Fearmax emerged from his seclusion; indeed he was not the only one that sunlight persuaded to emerge from the privacy of his cabin. Yet Graecen found the sight of him a little distressing; his nervous habit of pacing the deck, as if he were on the look-out for expected catastrophe; his habit of sitting for long intervals with his head sunk on his breast, of making notes in a leather-bound notebook. His preoccupations seemed to match so little with those of the rest of them that even Miss Dombey was abashed in his presence. He confessed to a slight knowledge of palmistry, and once he took Graecen’s hand, without a word, and studied its lines and curves with great attention. “You have a bad heart,” he said, and Graecen felt the sudden grip of an icy hand upon his throat. Nothing more.
The Trumans, despite their unprepossessing appearance, turned out to be rather a find. They were not only amusing in their way, but self-sufficient and out to enjoy the journey. Truman, they discovered, played and sang comic songs at the piano in the saloon, and enjoyed nothing better than an audience. He had once been a member of a concert party, he said (“a real proper black coon”) and his repertoire was inexhaustible. In particular Baird enjoyed a comic recitation entitled “A Martyr to Chastity”, which he produced whenever Miss Dombey was around. The rawness of the jests usually made her run for cover. Indeed they found that the only way to shake off Miss Dombey was to be seen with the Trumans. She could not bear them. An attempt to interest Mr. Truman in the Second Coming had been a failure.
Fearmax, however, seemed already to have established some sort of link. No sooner did he appear on deck than Mrs. Truman nudged her husband with evident excitement. They converged upon him. Did he remember them? He did not. Once, long ago, he had got in touch with Mr. Truman’s elder sister at Shrewsbury during a séance. The medium passed his hand over his forehead and muttered something about having met so many people; but he seemed flattered. Mrs. Truman had even read a book of his on the astral self.
On the whole the company was not uncongenial, thought Graecen as he lay in his bunk to take the afternoon nap prescribed for him by London’s most fashionable doctors. He had been keeping a diary for the first time in his life and he was propped up by three pillows, his fountain-pen poised over the page on which he was to account for his actions of today. “Account for.” There it was again. That hell-fire note, influenced by Miss Dombey’s preaching no doubt. He ruffled the pages slowly, reading his own large feminine handwriting with slow pleasure.
“Little enough”, he noticed on one page, “have I done to render, as it were, a tidy account of my stewardship on earth, before taking leave of it (the earth). A peculiar sense of emptiness fills me. What am I? What have I been? I can think of little on either score to interest a recording angel. I have been neither good nor bad. The few sins of my grosser nature (Anne, Mrs. Sanguinetti, etc.) would, I am sure, all but cancel out with those few virtues, a quiet life, acts of kindness to friends, etc. I cannot see myself being damned.…”