The crew sat staring at the passengers with a half-dreamy incredulity bordering on insolence.
‘Yes,’ he assured her, baring his teeth in the convention of a smile.
The sun was blinding in its last moments. It provided Austin Roxburgh with an excuse for closing his eyes and shutting out at least the visible signs of his wife’s solicitude for him. What he could not shut out was the sight of Captain Purdew. So he opened them again. Did this scarecrow of a man, under whose command they had placed themselves, still possess the wits and the self-respect required in an emergency? Involved in a personal disaster, the loss of his ship, the captain sat grinning at the horizon, until suddenly taking off his cap, and producing a comb, he started attacking his surviving strands of hair.
Something occurred so forcibly to Mrs Roxburgh that she elbowed her husband in the ribs, twisting and turning in the cramped space in which she was sitting. ‘Mr Roxburgh,’ she called, although he was beside her, ‘where is the bag?’ as she felt or kicked around with sodden feet for the dressing-case which should have been there.
He answered slowly, ‘I’ve forgot it, I think. But what use, Ellen, would it be?’ The fragment of a so-called ‘memoir’, the bilious journal! (His Elzevir Virgil was buttoned safely inside the bosom of his coat.)
Again Mr Roxburgh bared his teeth.
‘Oh dear!’ She began openly to cry, however he might deplore the show she was making of them. ‘The bag! We have so little!’
Like a lover, the boy could not gaze at her enough.
‘Ellen! Ellen!’ Mr Roxburgh coaxed.
None of those who were listening understood, least of all Captain Purdew, his eyes trained on distance in the abstract, or the pinnace ploughing on ahead.
Mr Roxburgh had taken his wife’s hand, plaiting his fingers together with hers, grinding the rings into them. It was a source of deep interest to the boy. He watched until darkness came down upon their heads.
6
It was becoming evident, not only to the sailors, but to the landsmen in their midst, that the long-boat was barely seaworthy. Her jury-rig was of little more use than a broken wing to a bird, and in the absence of a rudder, a boat’s oar had to be pressed into service. By their first dawn, with the sleep still sticky on their faces, the most optimistic of the company could not very well ignore the fact that their vessel was leaky. So that bailing was included in the orders for the day. Those who were detailed for the duty set to it, not so much with a will, as with the hope that monotony would drug their minds. The Roxburghs were secretly glad of a forced labour in which they might join. Mr Roxburgh even discovered a method which he first demonstrated to his wife, and later went so far as to explain to members of the crew. (Ellen Gluyas simply bailed, head bowed almost to her knees; until the random twinge of pain began darting through the disused muscles of her back.)
Some of the men had taken to the Roxburghs, or else their contempt would not stand the strain of long keeping.
It was a fitful progress, by human as well as nautical standards. From time to time intangible cats’-paws made a play for the improvised sail, which would start to fill, and falter, and subside, along with unwarranted hopes. Manpower was Captain Purdew’s only recourse. The arms of those pulling on the oars bulged and cracked, while teeth bit on oaths the rowers refrained from releasing out of deference to a lady.
If an occasional expletive escaped from between the crew’s overworking lips, it was not that of a dead language, but one she had forgotten on emigrating, as it were, from the country of her birth. Mrs Roxburgh mused on the false impression it seemed her fate in life to give, to rough sailors, refined acquaintances, even her own dear husband — and one she preferred not to remember. Trapped between the walls of a room she might have gone on to torment herself with speculation on the nature of the seed which had been planted in her body, whether it would grow to reveal her better or her worse side, and whose face it would wear. Here on the open sea she was more distressed to observe the superior performance given by the pinnace, and in her disheartenment, found herself resenting Captain Purdew’s unwise choice of a boat for his command.
Towards the close of the morning, when condescension on the part of Mr Pilcher had allowed the distance between the vessels to decrease appreciably, Captain Purdew stood up, and with a hand on the improvised mast for support, signalled with the other to the captain of the pinnace. After much hailing, there took place a discussion laced with such professional detail the passengers could only take it on trust. Mr Roxburgh had his crypto-faith in those who perform feats of manual dexterity and technical miracles which might contribute to his personal welfare, while Ellen had the frivolous mind of which he accused her, and which she had ended by accepting. At least it allowed her to be less affected by the flow of arcane language. During the discussion she was drawn rather, to the boiling and bubbling of the sea, and recalled a glass door-stopper she had acquired with her rank of wife and lady, and which had become a source of innocent pleasure as it lay on the carpet of the morning room at ‘Birdlip House’.
‘You will have to take us in tow,’ Captain Purdew was shouting at his second mate.
Although Mrs Roxburgh could sense that the mate’s attitude to this decision was disrespectful, he was preparing to obey the captain’s order, while she, so delighted by her vision of the green door-stopper, continued rounding it out, partly in her mind, partly in the sea water undulating beyond the gunwale. There was a girl called Matty Somerton, only briefly in her service, who had stumbled over the stopper while carrying a trayload of cordial. It had been something of a speciality with Matty to stumble and fall, tray in hand. She could not help it, she confessed, and on the stairs, always up, but never yet down.
Narrowing her eyes in the sunlight, in this seascape from which she remained detached, Ellen Gluyas knew that she should have felt more sympathy for her maid, from having brought suppers to the lodger on a tin tray, and almost dropped it out of nervousness, in the refined atmosphere of books and medicine bottles. Sucked deeper still into the whorls of memory and water, she was less than a maid: her mother’s drudge and her father’s unpaid hand.
She was dragged back to the surface by seeing that the two boats had been manœuvred to within a short distance of each other, and that Mr Pilcher himself was securing a hawser which one of the long-boat’s crew flung across the gap.
Captain Purdew remained upright and unemployed, holding to the mast, grinning, and trying to suppress a moral anguish he was not yet prepared to admit. Since Pilcher’s head was at an angle which allowed him to concentrate on the hawser, it was impossible to observe the lines, so deep as to be black, which fascinated Austin Roxburgh when he was in a position to examine the second officer’s face. He felt peculiarly drawn to Pilcher, compelled by repulsion rather than inspired by the spark of positive attraction. He would have liked to find favour with this offensive individual, but could not feel that his aspiration would be recognized.
Having knotted the rope, the fellow suggested by the hang of his head and a thin-lipped shamefaced smile, that he was preparing to launch a joke. But humour could only have eluded Pilcher, and he turned to resume command of the pinnace.
They struggled on.
In the hands of others, and without compensating books or needlework, the Roxburghs were left pretty much with their thoughts. The solace of conversation was more or less denied them since both sensed that the foreign language they spoke might cause surprise, or worse, arouse resentment. So they confined themselves to such unexceptionable banalities as, ‘Look, Mr Roxburgh, would you say that is an albatross?’ or, ‘It must be midday, Ellen, don’t you think? by the position of the sun.’