The ship tossed and tunnelled through the dark waters towards this radiant sanctuary.
“I wonder if anyone is doing anything about those dogs,” said the genial passenger, arriving at his elbow. “I'll ask the purser tomorrow. We might exercise them a bit. Kind of mournful the way they go on.”
Next day they were in the Atlantic. Ponderous waves rising over murky, opaque depths. Dappled with foam at the crests, like downland where on the high, exposed places, snow has survived the thaw. Lead-grey and slate in the sun, olive, field-blue and khaki like the uniforms of a battlefield; the sky overhead was neutral and steely with swollen clouds scudding across it, affording rare half hours of sunlight. The masts swung slowly across this sky and the bows heaved and wallowed below the horizon. The man who had made friends with Tony paraded the deck with the two beagles. They strained at the end of their chains, sniffing the scuppers; the man lurched behind them unsteadily. He wore a pair of race glasses with which he occasionally surveyed the seas; he offered them to Tony whenever they passed each other.
“Been talking to the wireless operator,” he said. “We ought to pass quite near the Yarmouth Castle at about eleven.”
Few of the passengers were on their feet. Those who had come on deck lay in long chairs on the sheltered side, pensive, wrapped in tartan rugs. Dr. Messinger kept to his cabin. Tony went to see him and found him torpid, for he was taking large doses of chloral. Towards evening the wind freshened and by dinner time was blowing hard; portholes were screwed up and all destructible objects disposed on the cabin floors; a sudden roll broke a dozen coffee cups in the music and reading room. That night there was little sleep for anyone on board; the plating creaked, luggage shifted from wall to wall. Tony wedged himself firm in his bunk with the lifebelt and thought of the City.
… Carpet and canopy, tapestry and velvet, portcullis and bastion, water fowl on the moat and kingcups along its margin, peacocks trailing their finery across the lawns; high overhead in a sky of sapphire and swansdown silver bells chiming in a turret of alabaster.
Days of shadow and exhaustion, salt wind and wet mist, foghorn and the constant groan and creak of straining metal. Then they were clear of it, after the Azores. Awnings were out and passengers moved their chairs to windward. High noon and an even keel; the blue water lapping against the sides of the ship, rippling away behind her to the horizon; gramophones and deck tennis; bright arcs of flying fish (“Look, Ernie, come quick, there's a shark.” “That's not a shark, it's a dolphin.” “Mr. Brink said it was a porpoise.” “There he is again. Oh if I had my camera.”), clear, tranquil water and the regular turn and tread of the screw; there were many hands to caress the beagles as they went loping by. Mr. Brink amid laughter suggested that he should exercise the race-horse, or, with a further burst of invention, the bull. Mr. Brink sat at the purser's table with the cheery crowd.
Dr. Messinger left his cabin and appeared on deck and in the dining saloon. So did the wife of the archdeacon; she was very much whiter than her husband. On Tony's other side at table sat a girl named Thérèse de Vitré. He had noticed her once or twice during the grey days, a forlorn figure almost lost among furs and cushions and rugs; a colourless little face with wide dark eyes. She said, “The last days have been terrible. I saw you walking about. How I envied you.”
“It ought to be calm all the way now,” and inevitably, are you going far?”
“Trinidad. That is my home … I tried to decide who you were from the passenger list.”
“Who was I?”
“Well … someone called Colonel Strapper.”
“Do I look so old?”
“Are colonels old? I didn't know. It's not a thing we have much in Trinidad. Now I know who you are because I asked the head steward. Do tell me about your exploring.”
“You'd better ask Doctor Messinger. He knows more about it than I do.”
“No, you tell me.”
She was eighteen years old; small and dark, with a face that disappeared in a soft pointed chin so that attention was drawn to the large, grave eyes and the high forehead; she had not long outgrown her schoolgirl plumpness and she moved with an air of exultance, as though she had lately shed an encumbrance and was not yet fatigued by the other burdens that would succeed it. For two years she had been at school in Paris.
“… Some of us used to keep lipstick and rouge secretly in our bedrooms and try it on at night. One girl called Antoinette came to Mass on Sunday wearing it. There was a terrible row with Madame de Supplice and she left after that term. It was awfully brave. We all envied her … But she was an ugly girl, always eating chocolates …
“… Now I am coming home to be married … No, I am not yet affiancée but you see there are so few young men I can marry. They must be Catholic and of an island family,. It would not do to marry an official and go back to live in England. But it will be easy because I have no brothers or sisters and my father has one of the best houses in Trinidad. You must come and see it. It is a stone house, outside the town. My family came to Trinidad in the French Revolution. There are two or three other rich families and I shall marry one of them. Our son will have the house. It will be easy …”
She wore a little coat, of the kind that were then fashionable, and no ornament except a string of pearls. “… There was an American girl at Madame de Supplice who was engaged. She had a ring with a big diamond but she could never wear it except in bed. Then one day she had a letter from her young man saying he was going to marry another girclass="underline" How she cried. We all read the letter and most of us cried too … But in Trinidad it will be quite easy.”
Tony told her about the expedition; of the Peruvian emigrants in the middle age and their long caravan working through the mountains and forests, llamas packed with works of intricate craftsmanship; of the continual rumours percolating to the coast and luring adventurers up into the forests; of the route they would take up the rivers, then cutting through the bush along Indian trails and across untravelled country; of the stream they might strike higher up and how, Dr. Messinger said, they would make woodskin canoes and take to the water again; how finally they would arrive under the walls of the city like the Vikings at Byzantium. “But of course,” he added, “there may be nothing in it. It ought to be an interesting journey in any case.”
“How I wish I was a man,” said Thérèse de Vitré. After dinner they danced to the music of an amplified gramophone and the girl drank lemon squash on the bench outside the deck bar, sucking it through two straws.
A week of blue water that grew clearer and more tranquil daily, of sun that grew warmer, radiating the ship and her passengers, filling them with good humour and ease; blue water that caught the sun to a thousand brilliant points, dazzling the eyes as they searched for porpoises and flying fish; clear blue water in the shallows revealing its bed of silver sand and smooth pebble, fathoms down; soft warm shade on deck under the awnings; the ship moved amid unbroken horizons on a vast blue disc of blue, sparkling with sunlight.
Tony and Miss de Vitré played quoits and shuffleboard; they threw rope rings into a bucket from a short distance. (“We'll go in a small boat,” Dr. Messinger had said, “so as to escape all that hideous nonsense of deck games.”) Twice consecutively Tony won the sweepstake on the ship's run; the prize was eighteen shillings. He bought Miss de Vitré a woollen rabbit at the barber's shop.
It was unusual for Tony to use `Miss' in talking to anyone. Except Miss Tendril he could think of no one he addressed in that way. But it was Thérèse who first called him `Tony,' seeing it engraved in Brenda's handwriting in his cigarette case. “How funny,” she said, “that was the name of the man who didn't marry the American girl at Madame de Supplice's”; and after that they used each other's Christian names to the great satisfaction of the other passengers who had little to interest them on board except the flowering of this romance.