Mr Roxburgh decided against it.
Spurgeon continued rubbing the nape of his neck. ‘I knewed this mornin’ early that I’ll never come out of this. There’s nothin’ like the sea-boils for makin’ a man fall apart quick.’
Faced with this human derelict, Austin Roxburgh realized afresh that his experience of life, like his attitude to death, had been of a predominantly literary nature; in spite of which, it was required of him to exert himself as a member of the ruling class, for so he must still appear to others in spite of his recent enlightenment.
‘Cheer up, old chap!’ he encouraged, and his voice echoed the accents of some forgotten tutor. ‘Don’t you feel — I mean — that you owe it to your wife?’
This initial piece of advice only made the steward glummer. ‘If I ’ad one,’ he mumbled.
‘Never?’ his companion asked.
‘No,’ said Spurgeon. ‘Or not long enough to notice. But wot’s the odds? A man sleeps the tighter without. There were never room for that many toe-nails in the same bed.’
The ridge of Mr Roxburgh’s distinguished cheekbones coloured very lightly. ‘Marriage’, he suggested, ‘is not entirely physical. I should hate, at least, to think it was.’
‘If it wasn’t, a man could settle for a dawg. I did too,’ Spurgeon remembered, ‘after a while.’
‘Of which breed?’ Although by no means doggy himself, Mr Roxburgh welcomed an opportunity for leading their conversation down a safer path.
‘Don’t know as she was any partickler breed. A sort of dawg. That’s about all. She’d sit an’ look at me — and I’d look back. There was nothin’ between us that wasn’t above board.’
‘The affection of a faithful animal is most gratifying,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded; he found himself stuttering for what must have been the first time, ‘but — mmmorally there is no comparison with the love of a devoted woman.’
‘Don’t know about that,’ the steward replied. ‘I weren’t born into the moral classes.’
If Mr Roxburgh did not hear, it was on account of a sense of guilt he was nursing, for the many occasions on which he had abandoned someone else to drowning by clambering aboard the raft of his own negative abstractions. Her hair floated out behind her as though on the surface of actual water instead of in the depths of his thoughts.
He recovered himself and informed his friend, ‘Salt water has medicinal properties. Or so they tell us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Have you tried rubbing it with salt water?’
‘Rubbin’ what?’
‘The boil, of course!’ Elated by his own inspiration Mr Roxburgh resolved to overlook obtuseness in another.
‘There’s no way out if you’re for it.’ Spurgeon snorted so contemptuously he might have attained social status without his companion’s realizing.
‘But who’s to know, my dear fellow, unless we try? The ability to correct wrong was vested in us for practical use.’
Mr Roxburgh would have been hard put to it to explain how he had come by a precept which was as reasonable as it sounded arcane; while Spurgeon looked the glummer for his own native ignorance.
The steward sat watching this ninny of a gentleman whose good intentions were driving him down the coral ramp towards the sea. After receiving a bash in the face from a mounting wave, Mr Roxburgh stooped to plunge his cupped hands.
There was little enough water in the cup by the time the physician reached the patient’s side.
‘Open up! Quick! The place!’ Mr Roxburgh cried; faith, once lit, was blazing in him.
Of a damper humour, Spurgeon failed to kindle, but submitted his neck to the virtues of salt water.
Mr Roxburgh who originally had no intention of touching the boil was now faced with doing so, or the meagre drop of water would escape. So he set to, gingerly at first, grimacing with a disgust his patient was fortunately unable to see, and rubbed with stiffened, bony fingers, till the activity itself began to soothe, not the patient necessarily, but without a doubt the physician.
For the first time since landing on this desert island Austin Roxburgh was conscious that the blood was flowing through his veins. To an almost reprehensible extent, he throbbed and surged with gratitude. He was grateful not only to this unsavoury catalyst the steward, but to his absent wife, and the miracle of their unborn child.
He went so far as to take a good look at the inflamed lump which the steward had predicted would become a boil.
‘Am I hurting, Spurgeon?’
‘Yes.’
It was reason enough for discontinuing the treatment, after which they rested awhile, side by side, when Mr Roxburgh became for the second time inspired.
‘Do you know what? Soap!’
‘Soap? What?’
‘If we could but lay our hands on some.’
‘There’s soap they brought along in case of caulkin’ the bloody long-boat.’
‘But sugar as well.’
‘I got a bit of sugar — if ’tisn’t melted — for sweetin’ up me rum ration.’
‘Soap and sugar, Spurgeon, have well-known drawing powers.’
The steward might have grown less inclined to humour an eccentric gentleman’s whims, but time hung half as heavy in a mate’s company, however undesirable the mate in the eyes of ordinary men. Either anticipation of their disapproval, or friction by salt water, or the prospect of a soap-and-sugar poultice, or the tingling of an inadmissible affection, had brought the gooseflesh out on Spurgeon.
While Austin Roxburgh tingled with his inspiration; in fact he was indebted to old Nurse Hayes for a method she had used in drawing the pus out of Garnet after his brother had scratched his arm on a rusty nail.
When she had satisfied her own needs, and failed to set eyes on her husband, Mrs Roxburgh went in search of him. At the same time she could not have denied that she experienced a delicious pleasure in being alone, even in her clinging, sodden garments, her slashed boots, and hair by now too wild and too matted to be dealt with by any means at her command. She must have looked a slattern stalking through the scrub. Her elegant boots, she suspected, might always have been what Aunt Triphena would have called ‘trumpery’. But the sun flattered her as she strolled, and the wind, although gusty, was less vindictive than while they were at sea. Each warmed and dried, and in performing its act of charity, enclosed her in an envelope of evaporating moisture, so that she might have been walking through one of the balmy mornings she remembered on her native heath, except that furze and hussock had been replaced by thickets which tore more savagely, and starved creepers set gins for unwary ankles, and lizards were more closely related to stone.
She was content, however — and hopeful at last for her child: that he would survive, not only the physical rigours of what was no longer a doomed voyage, but also the moral judgment of those who might ferret over his features. She did pray that, whatever her shortcomings, the child would be theirs and no one else’s.
A comparatively steep rise in the ground had reduced her gait to a dull and breathless plodding, when a change in the climate told her that she was emerging on the island’s weather side. She was blasted by a gale. It took her hair and tossed it aloft, and filled her clothes, and spun her round amongst the quaking, but more inured bushes. She would have turned at once and made her way back had it not been for a bird’s call becoming human voice. She looked down to where the land shelved towards the sea, and saw a figure, arms thrashing to attract attention. Again the cries were directed at her: it was Oswald Dignam’s voice she heard. Holding herself stiffly and sideways in the vain hope of evading the gale, she began climbing down to meet him, her stumbling once or twice caused either by spasms of fear, or waves of pleasure at thought of a companionship so undemanding it could but add a benison to solitude.