‘Ho-ya ho-ya! ho-ya!’ the crews encouraged one another as they heaved the boats on to the beach.
Mrs Roxburgh succeeded briefly in escaping out of the boatswain’s arms, to flounder a few steps before stubbing her boots on what must have been a coral hussock. Thereupon she sank, the boatswain resuming possession of her as she rose, more a wet hen than a woman, whose clucking cries remained mercifully unheard by any but her silent rescuer.
Long after the boats were beached, the sailors continued to curse the bleeding coral for lacerating their feet, while Mrs Roxburgh, deposited on land by the gallant efforts of the boatswain, saw that her pretty little boots (glacé leather with cloth uppers) were slashed beyond repair due to her own foolishness.
Still exhilarated by his tumultuous, and at the time alarming, experience in the surf, Mr Roxburgh glowed, and breathed deep. ‘Who would have thought it possible!’ until remembering his wife, he approached and put his arm round her, ‘Ellen, you might have been injured!’ with a sincerity she did not doubt.
‘I am not,’ she assured him, and formally added as she had been taught, ‘thank you, Mr Roxburgh.’
It was at once evident that ‘land’ was too ambitious a word for the reef on which the castaways found themselves, though a beach of pulverized coral would make it possible to repair the long-boat at their leisure provided they could muster the materials. But of vegetation or shade there was little: nothing of that pastoral green Mr Roxburgh had hoped to find, in which to re-live the pleasures of the Georgics. Anything in the way of cover was of a grey, tough, sea-bitten variety: wiry bushes tortured by the wind, scurf of dead-green lichen, and fleshier shoots of a bitter weed which those of the men who were bred along the Bristol Channel and the Norfolk coast compared nostalgically with the samphire their women harvested at low tide from fields of mud.
For the most part level, the coral excrescence tended to rise towards the north-east, in which quarter alone, any who looked forward to solitude might hope to renew themselves. There the brush grew thicker, taller, but cowering before the strong winds to less than an average man’s size, and nowhere concentrated enough to provide an adequate refuge for introspective souls.
Even so, there was an immediate dispersal, for physical as well as spiritual reasons, of those whom the two boats disgorged, everybody consoled, not to say dazed, by a freedom they had undervalued in the past. The men set out in opposite directions, on spidery, needled legs (there were cases where one leg might have been born shorter than the other, or else deformed by grappling the deck of a listing ship) their mouths thinned by desperation or thirst, the eyes of some closed on and off in an attempt to shut out an experience which still visibly flickered in their minds. But with all, the overruling impulse was to get away from one another.
They were brought to a halt by a revival of Captain Purdew’s sense of his own authority. He proceeded to deliver something of an oration to emphasize that they had beached out of necessity, not for pleasure, and that once they were rested and refreshed, their prime concern was the repairing of the boats.
The seamen listened for the simple reason they could see no avenue of escape.
‘And re-victualling — if foodstuff of any kind is offering,’ the captain’s voice persisted, high, dry, vibrating like sail with a wind in it. ‘In that event’, he warned, ‘remember we are a community, whose duty it is to pool our resources.’
Listening to this upright old man made Mrs Roxburgh melancholy. She suspected that those who are honourable must suffer and break more often than the others, which did not absolve the honourable from continuing to offer themselves for suffering and breakage. It started her looking for her husband, who must already have gone in search of the privacy his temperament craved.
After enjoying the luxury of a postponed, ungainly, and not unexpectedly, painful stool, Austin Roxburgh was wandering with little regard for purpose or direction, kicking at the solid though harsh ground for the simple pleasure of renewing acquaintance with primordial substance. Still walking, he unbuttoned his steaming overcoat to let in the sun and wind, then removed the garment and hung it on his arm. On or off, his overcoat seemed as incongruous as most human needs; human behaviour in its niceties must only excite derision on this desert island. Thus warned against acts of feckless self-assertion he resisted the urge to bare the leaves of his saturated Elzevir in the hope that the sun’s blaze might dry them, and continued strolling through a park from which the statues had been removed.
At the island’s southernmost tip, which had been whittled down to a narrow spine of razor-edged coral, opposing currents raised their hackles in what was probably a state of permanent collision. Much as he had grown to hate the sea, Austin Roxburgh felt drawn to this desolate promontory by something solitary and arid, akin to his own nature (if he would admit it, as he sometimes did). Overhead, the voices of invisible sea-birds sounded hollower, more ominous, in calling through infinity; the waves assumed ever more vicious shapes for their assaults on the coral; something — a sea-urchin must have died; and a white light threatened to expose the more protected corners of human personality. Mr Roxburgh was fully exposed. In advancing towards this land’s end, he felt the trappings of wealth and station, the pride in ethical and intellectual aspirations, stripped from him with a ruthlessness reserved for those who accept their importance or who have remained unaware of their pretentiousness. Now he even suspected, not without a horrid qualm, that his devoted wife was dispensable, and their unborn child no more than a footnote on nonentity.
So the solitary explorer gritted his teeth, sucked on the boisterous air with caution, and visibly sweated. He might have been suffering from a toothache rather than the moment when self-esteem is confronted with what may be pure being — or nothingness.
Arrived at his destination, the dwindling headland on which he might have erected a moral altar for the final stages of his martyrdom, Mr Roxburgh discovered that he had taken too much for granted. Stretched on the ground as though consigning his meagre flesh to decomposition by the sea air, lay Spurgeon the steward. It could not have been an unpleasanter surprise.
‘Ha, Spurgeon!’ he managed to address the fellow. ‘You have forestalled me!’
The steward did not attempt to move, but ejaculated, ‘Eh?’ from out of his emaciated, putty-coloured face and sparse tufts of beard.
‘I mean,’ the intruder continued, ‘I hardly expected a human being here where the land has almost become sea again. Are you so attracted to what we have just escaped?’
‘How about yerself?’ Spurgeon answered.
It did seem to place them in the same category, but Mr Roxburgh rejected that.
‘Ah, no!’ Slowly Spurgeon rubbed his head against the crushed coral which for its next phase would be converted into sand. ‘Not a “’uman being”. No one can accuse me of that — where there isn’t no more ’n skin an’ bone, and a fart or two. I won’t inconvenience you, sir, much longer.’
‘Are you sick, then?’ it was Mr Roxburgh’s duty to ask.
Holding his precious book, he had seated himself on a stone beside this thoroughly repulsive object.
‘Not sick,’ the steward replied. ‘The way I see it I’m simply fizzlin’ out.’
He sat up, and proceeded slowly to turn his neck, which his companion quite expected to creak.
‘’Ere,’ he said, parting the hair to exhibit a place above the nape, ‘I’ll be blowed if I’m not startin’ a boil. And that’s the worst sign of any. The sea-boils. See it?’
Mr Roxburgh would not let himself.
‘Feel then,’ Spurgeon invited.