Here come the fooking chorus girls!
Kiernan, however, tailed the soldiers and drove them along and told them that they were guests—this wasn’t their ship. They told him to get—as they said it—fooked. And their rawness did own the Archimedes for now. Even so, the soldiery was relocated by their considerate officers and sergeant majors to places where it would be harder for them entirely to take away the purpose of the ship. Towards dusk the Archimedes pulled away from its mooring with a few blows of its whistle. Even the Currawong used to leave the Macleay with more ceremony.
Dr. Fellowes passed along the hospital deck, which was now restored to quiet. Ponies all over the cargo deck, he said. They’d built stalls and loaded them last night. How well would dung sit with medical supplies? Nurses went below and saw the mule lines and fed some sugar to the rows of ponies. They saw wagons and shoulder-high green boxes of munitions mysteriously numbered for war’s purpose. Young grooms in khaki shirts looked at the nurses with a blunt hunger unknown in the world of the town and the street.
On the promenade deck, Sergeant Kiernan and some orderlies were tying ropes from the inboard handrails to the ship’s railings to keep the men of the munitions train off the starboard promenade. The work with roping-off was done and the orderlies leaned back against the walls smoking or making their narrow cigarettes, seeing nothing in the haze.
You’re a fine fellow, Honora called to Kiernan, nearly as a tease.
Leo said beneath her breath once they had passed on, A man of beliefs. A Quaker.
Holy mother, said Honora. I can imagine a girl or two quaking for him.
Sally would remember this dusk—cramped in by haze—as having an air of uncertainty in which the Archimedes itself seemed to take part. She would think later that the day was like one in which a horse who could smell a cliff ahead, and had a purpose to avoid it, did not trust its rider to achieve the same level of wisdom.
Two destroyers appeared on either side of the ship. Surely this scale of naval seriousness wasn’t devoted to them. Was it a chance meeting at sea by vessels with the same landfall?
Sally heard Irishmen doing physical jerks on the afterdeck and an NCO telling them to put some elbow grease into whatever exercise he demanded of them. It was not a comfortable sharing that existed here. The nurses felt yarded in to their cabins and their salon lounge that night. The Irish soldiers loudly occupied the bunks on the hospital decks. All the ports were battened down to enclose any chance beam of light from inside. The nature of sleep seemed to Sally different from the usual. It meant—for a beginning—that when she woke she did not know whether it was day or night unless her watch inscribed TO DEAREST SALLY ON YOUR GREAT DAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 1911 was consulted.
Next morning the women stirred—ill-humored—from the enclosed humidity of dreams.
Oh God, said Freud, as if she’d turned up in a world less satisfactory than yesterday’s.
Honora slipped warm as a loaf of bread from her lower bunk and began whispering her mysterious prayers fast. They needed to open the ports now to verify the day. Air which had lain all night on the ocean swept in. They dressed in their white ward uniforms and went up on deck to diagnose the morning. It was growing bright out there, and the sea breeze fell away to let in a torrid offshore wind from the nastiest core of Egypt. It penetrated their nursing veils and lightly flapped the red borders of their capes.
Honora asked, Could you really believe that down there below, in that great water somewhere, there is a steely tube of men who would do us harm? I could believe in a lot of things. But I can’t believe in that. The tube of steel with men inside.
They sat in the lounge reading and playing euchre. Tomorrow—after the soldiers’ last night aboard—they would be busy cleaning and readying the hospital deck. Restless by nine o’clock, they went up on deck. Naomi remarked that the destroyers had vanished. That—she hoped—had no sinister naval meaning.
The Archimedes Gone
During the nurses’ visit to the promenade, the ship swayed in a way a person would not call alarming but that they were unused to. Some of the orderlies on deck stumbled and took their cigarettes from their mouths and looked at each other with a question. They did not return their fags to their lips until the balance of the ship had been regained.
My heaven, Honora told them, we’re swerving.
It’s to throw the fellows in your tube off, Honora, Freud asserted, narrowing her large eyes and sharing the joke with the glaring horizon.
They could see Lemnos—by now reduced from myth to the level of any other dreary island. The hot breath of land was left behind. The air had sharpened and there was that true sea again—that sea into which today the light dived and split apart and met again at some visible point far down—a gem of light beneath, hard to take your eyes off. It imbued Sally with a welcome if temporary joy.
They remained on deck that morning and Captain Fellowes—no surgery to perform—appeared looking grave and in the full authority of his uniform. He said, Ladies! But his nod—or so they liked to think—was directed at Leonora.
These Irishmen never stop saluting me, he said of the interlopers. I’m not used to that from orderlies. And have never had it from nurses.
They all laughed along a little creakily. He was almost too perfect a creature to exchange banter with. He tipped his cap and moved forward.
Oh well, said young Leonora then. She seemed happy with the exchange—if you could call it that. She nodded to them and went below.
Freud raised the old question. So do you think they’ve done it? You must understand what I mean. Fellowes and Leo?
There seemed no malice in the question. She appeared scientifically interested.
No, said Nettice. Nor should you ask.
Freud declared, Doctors are the men who know how to manage these things. Without damage to the girl, I mean.
What of the moral damage? asked Nettice dryly.
No one had asked Freud, Do you know these things from experience? But they presumed she did and gave her credit for her urbanity and the possibility of her glamorous sins.
Well, said Honora, moral damage or not, done it or not, she’s crazed for the man!
And why shouldn’t they have gone further? Naomi said as a sudden late challenge.
Oh, Mother of God, murmured Honora. Even the Methodists are voting for jig-a-jig.
Honora and Freud and Nettice and the Durance sisters decided amongst themselves to shift subjects by going to view the sea from the uppermost deck. They ascended a stairway or companionway and stood exposed totally to the sky with mysterious equipment and winches and piping for company amidst vibrating cowlings and heavy painted grilles. The two great funnels dominated, but the Egyptian painters had been here too and their red crosses were submerged behind a layer of white. The water seemed greener and vaster still. They all at once saw their future approach them like a fish—coming straight at them. You could faintly hear it thrash the water.
Look how straight it is, said Honora in a kind of doltish admiration.
There was a profound thud of impact and a shattering and steely explosion which, had they not been young women, would have knocked them off their legs.
Life belts, said Honora almost lightly then. Their life belts were in their cabins. Come on, she said.
They flowed down the stairs. On the main deck forward they could for a moment see the soldiers leaning over the bows and looking for enlightenment on what had happened to the Archimedes’s flanks. Below—running through the hospital decks nearly empty of soldiers—they reached their quarters and their life belts and calmly put them on. Sally felt an abstract and intense curiosity on what was to happen next and they all seemed averse to any rush. They walked in good order back to the companionway that would take them to the deck. On the way Naomi approached Sally and disapproved of the way her belt was tied. A double loop, I think, she said as she adjusted the belt with strange cheeriness.