"It isn't mine to give. The poachers were out again last night, stealing Jordan 's catch as it came in. I found this pool near the channel this morning."
Hendry stood up. "Let's have a look at it." He led the way out onto the deck. "Where is it? _That_ one down there?" Shaking his head, he started back for his cabin. "Charles, what are you playing at?"
Ransom caught up with him. "Judith and I have been talking it over seriously, Captain… it's been seffish of us living alone, but now we're prepared to join the settlement. You'll soon' need all the help you can get to bring in the sea."
"Charles…" Hendry hesitated. "We're not short of water."
"Perhaps that's true, in the immediate sense, but a year or two from now-we've got to think ahead."
Hendry nodded to himself. "That's good advice." He turned in the door to his cabin. For a moment the old Hendry glimmered faintly in his eyes. "Thanks for the offer of the water, Charles. Look, you wouldn't like it in the settlement, the people have given too much. If you came here, they'd drain you away."
Reflectively he patted the white carcass of a small shark hanging in the sun outside the cabin, the shriveled face gaping sightiessly at Ransom.
Resting on the rail, Ransom pulled himself together. Hendry's refusal meant that he was acting on some decision already reached by the other captains.
The look-out stood by the gangway, watching Ransom's tall gaunt figure move restlessly along the rail. Ransom went over to him. "Where's Captain Jordan? Is he here?"
The man shook his head. "He's over in the cliffs. He won't be back till evening."
Ransom looked back at the distant hills, debating whether to wait for Jordan. Almost every afternoon he went out to the hills above the beach, disappearing among the sand-dunes that spilled through the ravines. Ransom guessed that he was visiting the grave of his foster-father, Mr. Jordan. The old Negro had died a few days after their arrival at the beach, and Philip had buried him somewhere among the dunes.
As he stepped past the look-out, the man said softly: "Miss Vanessa wants to see you."
Nodding to the man, Ransom glanced up and down the silent hulk of the ship, and then crossed to the port side. The look-out's feet rang softly on the metal rails of the bridge, but otherwise this side of the ship was silent.
Ransom walked along the empty deck. A rusty companionway led to the boatdeck above. Most of the lifeboats had been smashed to splinters in the bombardment, but the line of officers' cabins was still intact. In one of these small cubicles behind the bridge, Vanessa Johnstone lived by herself.
Ransom reached the companionway, then stopped to glance through a damaged ventilator. Below was the central chamber of the ship. This long, high-ceilinged room had been formed when the floor dividing the passenger lounge from the dining room below had rusted out. It was now the Reverend Johnstone's combined vestry and throne-chamber.
A few oil-lamps flared from brackets on the wall, and cast a flickering submarine glow on to the ceiling, the shadows of the torn deck braces dancing like ragged spears. The floor of the chamber was covered with mats of dried kelp to keep out the cold. In the center, almost below Ransom, the Reverend Johnstone sat in an armchair mounted in the bow section of an old lifeboat, the very craft from which Johnstone had led the first assault on the freighter. The conchlike bowl, with its striped white timbers, was fastened to the small dais that had once been the bandstand. On the floor beside him were his daughters, Julia and Frances, with two or three other women, murmuring into their shawls and playing with a baby swaddled in rags of lace.
Looking down at the two daughters, Ransom found it difficult to believe that only ten years had elapsed since their arrival at the beach. Their faces had been puffed up by the endless diet of herring and fish-oil, and they had the thickened cheekbones and moon chins of Eskimo squaws. Sitting beside their father, shawls over their heads, they reminded Ransom of a pair of sleek, watchful madonnas. For some reason he was convinced that he owed his exclusion from the settlement to these two women. The proponents above all of the status quo, guardians and presiding angels of the dead time, perhaps they regarded him as a disruptive influence, someone who had preserved himself against the dunes and saltflats.
Certainly their senile father, the Reverend Johnstone, could now be discounted as an influence. Sitting like a stranded Neptune in the bowels of this saltlocked wreck, far out of sight of the sea, he drooled and wavered on his throne of blankets, clutching at his daughters' arms. He had been injured in the bombardment, and the right side of his face was pink and hairless. The gray beard tufting from his left cheek gave him the appearance of a demented Lear, grasping at the power he had given to his daughters. His head bobbed about, and Ransom guessed that for two or three years he had been almost blind. The confined world of the settlement was limited by his own narrowing vision, sinking into a rigid matriarchy dominated by his two daughters.
If any escape lay for Ransom, only the third daughter could provide it. As he reached the deserted boatdeck of the freighter, Ransom felt that the climb had carried him in all senses above the drab world of the settlement.
"Charles!" Vanessa Johnstone was lying in her bunk in the cold cabin, gazing at the gulls on the rail through the open door. Her black hair lay in a single coil on her white breast. Her plain face was as smooth and unmarked as when she sat by the window of her attic bedroom in Larchmont. Ransom closed the door and seated himself on the bunk beside her, tentatively taking her hands. She seized them tightly, greeting him with her slow smile. "Charles, you're here-"
"I came to see Hendry, Vanessa." She embraced his shoulders with her cold hands. Her blood always seemed chilled, but it ran with the quicksilver of time, its clear streams darting like the fish he had chased at dawn. The cold air in the cabin and her white skin, like the washed shells gleaming on the beaches in the bright winter sun, made his mind run again.
"Hendry-why?"
"I…" Ransom hesitated, frightened of at last committing himself to Vanessa. If she opened his way to the settlement he would be cast with her forever. "I want to bring Judith here and join the settlement. Hendry wasn't very keen."
"But, Charles-" Vanessa shook her head. "You can't come here. It's out of all question."
"Why?" Ransom took her wrists. "You both assume that. It's a matter of survival now. The sea is so far out-"
"The sea! Forget the sea!" Vanessa regarded Ransom with her somber eyes. "If you come here, Charles, it will be the end for you. All day you'll be raking the salt from the boilers."
Ransom turned away, and for a few moments gazed through the porthole. In a tired voice he asked: "What else is there, Vanessa?"
He waited as she lay back against the white pillow, the cold air in the cabin turning the black spirals of her hair. "Do you know, Vanessa?"
Her eyes were on the gulls high above the ship, picking at the body of the swordfish hanging from the mast below the whalebone cross.
Chapter 10 – The Sign of the Crab
High above the dunes, in the tower of the lightship, Ransom watched Philip Jordan walking among the salt tips on the shore. Silhouetted against the white slopes, his tall figure seemed stooped and preoccupied, as he picked his way slowly along the stony path. He passed behind one of the tips, and then climbed the sandslopes that reached down from the ravines between the hills, a cloth bag swinging from his hand.
Sheltered from the wind by the fractured panels of the glass cupola, Ransom for a moment enjoyed the play of sunlight on the sand dunes and on the eroded faces of the cliff. The coastal hills now marked the edges of the desert that stretched in a continuous table across the continent, a wasteland of dust and ruined cities, but there was always more color and variety here than in the drab world of the saltflats. In the morning the seams of quartz would melt with light, pouring like liquid streams down the faces of the cliffs, the sand in the ravines turning into frozen fountains. In the afternoon the colors would mellow again, the shadows searching out the hundreds of caves and aerial grottos, until the evening light, shining from beyond the cliffs to the west, illuminated the whole coastline like an enormous ruby lantern, glowing through the casements of the cave-mouths as if lit by some subterranean fire.