Maiden Voyage

THIRTY-ONE

Sir Peregrine was in the wheelhouse, standing stiff and relentlessly upright in spite of the Arcadia's chaotic pitching and rolling, his eyes fixed on a horizon which it was impossible to see through the salt-caked glass of the windows. The helmsman was gripping the ship's wheel close to his chest, as if he were Moses offering up his only precious son to the Lord. It was here, in this dim and greenly-illuminated grotto, that battle was done with whatever seas that God thought it pertinent to whip up.

Ralph Peel struggled in through the doorway, as slick as a seal, and then shut out the wind and the rain and the shrieking of the wires behind him. He stamped his feet on the sisal matting to shake the worst of the wet off him. Then he pulled off his sou'wester and crossed the wheelhouse to where Sir Peregrine was standing with such dignity and resolution.

"Mr Peel?" asked Sir Peregrine, without even turning to look at him. He scratched at the tip of his aquiline nose with his fingertip, as if he couldn't decide whether to pick it or not. When Ralph said nothing, he looked around at last and said, "Mr Peel?"

"With all due respect, Sir Peregrine, is there some way you can steer aslant to the waves, forty-five degrees, so that we don't pitch so violently? We're having a lot of trouble getting that young girl down from the crane, and the pitching isn't helping one bit."

Sir Peregrine cleared his throat. "We are making way as expeditiously as possible, Mr. Peel. We have nearly two hours to make up, after that wild goose chase, looking for that so-called drifting lifeboat. We have... well, nearly two hours to make up. So we're making full ahead. As fast as possible, and without wavering from our charted course."

Ralph Peel glanced towards the helmsman, but the helmsman was too preoccupied with the next gathering wall of water to worry about anything but keeping the Arcadia steady.

"With all due respect, sir," said Ralph Peel, "this doesn't make sense. Almost every passenger on board is sick as a dog, sir; and we've got a young lady stuck up a crane. Apart from that, it looks like we've torn away half of the front superstructure, rails and all."

Sir Peregrine swayed slightly, but by some miraculous balancing mechanism within his cochlear duct, he managed to stay upright. Ralph, however, was obliged to grab for the brass rail around the side of the wheelhouse with both hairy hands. There was another canon-like roar of seawater; and when the Arcadia's bows emerged yet again, like a surfacing shark, Ralph could see through the salty window that one of her knightsheads had been torn away.

"Sir Peregrine, this is insane! You're breaking the ship to pieces!"

Sir Peregrine stared at him beadily, and for the first time it occurred to Ralph Peel that the commodore was drunk. Not just drunk, but so overwhelmed by the effects of Haitian rum that he was acting out an existence which, when he sobered up, he would never even remember. He was in a fantasy world of his own, where the ocean raged at captains and their liners like a great grey monster, but could always be tamed; where boatswain's whistles forever blew a high-pitched accolade to the greatest heroes of the sea. His gilded destiny may have been denied to him by Rudyard Philip's miserable and grisly accident, but now he would live it out in the only realm where it could still be lived, within his mind. It was full ahead to New York, full ahead to champagne and cheers, full ahead to a blue riband and a place in English history books: "During the early 1920s, several liner captains made their mark on maritime legend. Perhaps the most illustrious of these was Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith, of Keys Shipping, whose..."

Sir Peregrine staggered and clutched Ralph's sleeve. "We must, uh—we have to make all speed."

"Sir," insisted Ralph, "we have to change course. It's imperative."

"No, no," said Sir Peregrine, tugging at Ralph's sleeve even more fiercely. "Won't hear of it. Can't be done. You make sure we're—well, you know what to do. You're a good man. Excellent Second Officer. Hairy, I suppose. Rather hairy. Not many chaps as hairy as you. But, well, you know what the Bible says about Esau and Isaac. Esau was a hairy chap, wasn't he? But no reason why he shouldn't have been promoted, all in good time."

"Sir Peregrine," said Ralph, quietly but very intently, "we have to steer a different course. We can't go on ramming these forty-footers head on."

Sir Peregrine stood upright and tugged at the knot of his necktie. "You're wrong," he said. "You're wrong. And... you're not only wrong, you're insubordinate. I arrest you. You're confined to your quarters. There now, what do you make of that? Go on, off you go."

"Sir Peregrine—"

"Don't bother me now! I'm busy! You're under arrest and that's all there is to it! Now clear off my bridge before I have you kicked off!"

Ralph hesitated for a moment, breathing as deeply as an organ pump. Then, with the bandy-legged walk of a man who has been negotiating angled decks for most of his life, he crossed the wheelhouse, tugged on his sou'wester, and opened the door. The spray lashed against the veneered woodwork, and the wind blew up a shower of charts.

"You're in trouble now, Commodore!" Ralph shouted. "You're really in trouble now! I'm going straight to Mr. Deacon!"

"Give him my dearest regards!" Sir Peregrine called back. "And shut that damned door!"

Ralph Peel struggled along the gusty deck to Rudyard Philips' quarters, and banged loudly on the door with his fist. Rudyard answered the door almost immediately, but would only open it two or three inches. He looked white and bedraggled, and from inside his cabin there blew a strong smell of cigarette smoke. Ralph hardly ever smoked: he thought it was bad for the performance.

"I've just been up to the bridge!" Ralph shouted. "Sir Peregrine's pissed as a parrot! He won't change course for anything! He's already smashed half the foredeck superstructure, and if this sea gets any worse, he's going to start buckling the plates!"

"Have you told Edgar Deacon?" Rudyard screamed back.

"I'm just going now! But you're the First Officer! Get up there and make sure he doesn't drown the whole damn lot of us!"

"I'm under arrest!" said Rudyard. "Confined to quarters!"

"So am I! But what the hell difference does it make? He's so drunk he doesn't know what he's doing!"

Rudyard bit his lips. "I don't know!" he said, against the wind. "I'm in enough trouble as it is!"

Suddenly the cabin door was tugged wider apart, and Mademoiselle Narron appeared in her wet negligee. Rudyard was shocked. it was strictly contrary to Keys regulations for a ship's officer "to entertain or to harbour a passenger, of either sex, in his personal accommodation". But Ralph Peel didn't even blink, except to shake the spray from his eyelashes. As far as he was concerned, the "no harbouring" regulation had been written solely for the moral guidance of junior officers straight out of college, or to spare the embarrassment of senior officers who were too geriatric to entice anything up to their bunks that could reasonably be described as tasty.

"The captain is drunk?" she asked in horror.

"Very," said Ralph Peel. "We could tap off his breath and use it to run the boilers."

Louise Narron threw her arm around Rudyard and clutched him tight. Rudyard looked helplessly at Ralph, like an explorer who had been mistaken for her long-lost offspring by an affectionate mother orang-utan. "My darling," said Louise, "this is your moment! This is the time when you can show me what a hero you are! We are sinking! You hear what Mr Peel says! You must go up to the bridge and take over the ship! You must!"

"All right," said Rudyard, desperately. "All right, if that's what I have to do! All right!"

He reached for his cap, which was swinging on a hook on the back of the door, and tugged it on to his head.

"My God, you're beautiful!" cried Mademoiselle Narron. "So stoical! But underneath, so full of courage! The English hero!"

Soberly, Rudyard told her, "Louise, you'd better go back to your stateroom. Borrow my coat, it's in the wardrobe there. And take care down the stairs. I'll come down later and tell you what's happened."

"I can't wait here?"

Rudyard shook his head. 'It's better if you go back to your cabin. Call your stewardess and ask her for a hot drink. Something with rum in, to calm you down.'

"Kiss me," she demanded.

Rudyard glanced at Ralph. Ralph was waiting by the door with a wide wet grin on his face. "Go on, kiss her, if it makes her happy," Ralph cajoled him. Rudyard gave her a quick, unsatisfying peck.

Once they were outside on deck, Ralph said, "That's a fair-sized beauty you've got there. Tits like tugboats. You been through it yet?"

"Don't be so damned vulgar," Rudyard snapped. He raised his collar against the wind.

"No offence meant, I'm sure," Ralph told him, and punched him affectionately and knowingly on the upper arm. "Opera singer, isn't she? Plenty of lung power, eh? Whoa-ho-ho-ho whoa-ho-ho!" He gave a coarse imitation of an operatic trill.

"Just go and get Edgar Deacon," Rudyard instructed him. "The sooner the company takes charge of this damned mess the better."

"I'm off," Ralph assured him, and went.

Rudyard was left on the boat deck on his own, the spray rising all around him in clattering white towers, the wind screeching through the rigging in an endless and hair-raising lament. His head was boiling with fear and indecision, but also with an extraordinary compulsion to show Louise Narron that he was worthy of her melodramatic expectations. Because now, quite suddenly, he could understand the key to his failure with Toy; the reason why he had so disastrously disappointed every woman who had ever loved him, and himself as well. He had the looks of a hero. That short, clear-eyed bearing of Captain Scott. He had the uniform of a hero. But when it came to heroic acts, either marine or sexual, he had never known what to do. Nobody at school had ever told him what was required of him, on board or in bed. One of his French masters, staring out of the window at the quad, had said, "When it comes to les jolies mademoiselles... well, it's all a question of panache." Yet it was only now, under chivvying and bludgeoning of Louise Narron, that he thought he understood what panache actually was, and how seriously he had lacked it.

Panache was letting Louise Narron beat him, and then beating her back. Panache was telling Toy that she was his, and nobody else's, and somehow arranging for her to sail on the Arcadia with him, away from Laurence. Panache was taking control of the Arcadia in the middle of this catastrophic storm, and proving his seamanship and his style.

He fought his way forward and slammed open the door of the wheelhouse. Sir Peregrine was sitting down now, and unsteadily attempting to light his pipe. The helmsman was doggedly holding the liner's course dead ahead, even though he was blinded by the salt on the windows, and obviously seasick. Dick Charles was there, too-on Sir Peregrine's instructions-but all he was doing was clinging on to the handrail and looking miserable.

Rudyard banged the wheelhouse door shut behind him, brushed the spray from his shoulders, and approached Sir Peregrine in three short steps. Sir Peregrine said, with a wry twitch of his lips, "You're confined to your quarters, Mr. Philips. Or am I mistaken?"

"Not mistaken, sir," said Rudyard. "Not in that matter, anyway."

"Aha," replied Sir Peregrine, turning sideways in his seat and sucking noisily at his meerschaum. "So I am to take it that I am mistaken in some other respect?"

"Your course, sir. You have to alter your course."

"Mr. Peel thought that, too. Would it be naive of me to think that Mr. Peel has put you up to this?"

"I have not been put up to anything by anybody, sir. But we must change course, or the Arcadia will be seriously damaged."

Sir Peregrine took his pipe from his mouth and peered at it closely, as if he found it difficult to focus. "Well, Mr. Philips, that's your opinion. But my opinion is that unless we face these waves head-on, we're liable to lose a great deal more than a few feet of railing."

"Sir Peregrine—"

The captain stared at him beadily. "You are under arrest, Mr. Philips, for your wanton handling of this steamer when she left Irish territorial waters. Simply by coming up here to the wheelhouse, you have committed an act of insubordination which could lead to your dismissal from the company. Well, because you're a good sailor, and because you have the Aurora to look after, and because I'm not a vindictive man, I'll forget this intrusion, and try to accept it in the spirit in which I hope it was intended. But unless you confine yourself to your quarters at once, and stop this interfering in my management of the ship, I shall have to make a full report on your conduct and recommend your dismissal."

"You're drunk," said Rudyard. "Look at you—you're drunk!"

Sir Peregrine put down his pipe. "When drunk," he said, "I am still ten times more proficient at handling a ship than you are when you're sober. Now get out of here before you make a greater fool of yourself than you already have."

Rudyard stood his ground, his hands by his sides, his brain chasing itself under his short back-and-sides like a mad dog.

"I'm taking over command, sir," he said.

Sir Peregrine struck a match and passed it backwards and forwards over his Three Nuns tobacco. At last the leaf lit up, and he began to puff bright blue smoke out of the side of his mouth with a noisy smacking sound.

"Sorry," he said to Rudyard, shaking out his match. "Did you say something?"

Rudyard found that he was shaking. He didn't want to shake. He didn't even think that he was frightened. But be suddenly realised what an impossible situation he was in. Louise Narron had seemed to make it a requirement of their continuing affair that he should stalk forward to the wheelhouse and prove himself a hero. What was more, he knew that if he couldn't impress Louise Narron, he would never be able to win back Toy. Yet, as a captain in his own right, and the First Officer on board the Arcadia, he knew that the price of his heroism could well be the finish of his entire seagoing career. To announce to Sir Peregrine "I'm taking over command, sir," was a prima facie act of mutiny, for which he could be liable to criminal charges, and even hanging. The Arcadia, after all, was a small but elegant fragment of the British Isles, and for him to usurp Sir Peregrine's authority was verging on treason against His Majesty. There would be leading articles in The Daily Telegraph, his family would be humiliated, and if he wasn't executed, he would be fined and imprisoned and ruined.

Rudyard was a straightforward man, not good at subtleties, but he was subtle enough to realise that Sir Peregrine's deafness was feigned, and that by asking, "Did you say something?" he was actually giving Rudyard just one more chance to step back from the yawning chasm of imprisonment and disgrace. And if he was prepared to give a chap that kind of a chance, then maybe he wasn't such a bad old stick after all. And maybe he wasn't wrong about the course on which the Arcadia was heading. Was Rudyard so sure that a forty-five degree slant to the direct onslaught of the waves would really save the ship from foundering?

There was a long pause, during which Sir Peregrine calmly continued to smoke his pipe. But Dick Charles, from the other side of the wheelhouse, pulled a contorted face at Rudyard and shook his head mechanically from side to side, as if to say, Please, for your own sake, don't risk it.

It was then that the wheelhouse door opened again, and Edgar Deacon stepped in, accompanied by Ralph Peel. Both of them were white-faced and dripping with seawater. Edgar took off his sou'wester and slapped it against his coat. He glanced at Rudyard briefly, but then, without any preliminaries, stepped straight up to Sir Peregrine's chair and demanded, "What's going on? Mr. Peel tells me you're steering a dangerous course."

Peregrine did Edgar the courtesy of taking his pipe out of his mouth. But he fastidiously licked his lips before he replied, "Mr. Peel is an officer of comparatively little experience. Most of his commisions have been on vessels of 20,000 tons or less. His idea of what constitutes a dangerous course in a 50,000-ton liner differs considerably from mine. And that is all."

"The front railings have been ripped away. We've lost all kinds of spars and rigging, even the company flag."

Sir Peregrine said, "Yes. You're quite right. But I would rather sustain two or three hundred pounds' worth of superficial damage then lose the entire vessel while steering on an ill-considered course, wouldn't you? To steer aslant to this particular storm would not only would not only lose us several hours' steaming time, but it would unquestionably expose us to the risk of swamping. The wind, as you might have noticed, is variable, and many of the worst waves have been taking us on our port quarter. That means that if we steer to starboard, we stand the risk of taking a wave broadside on, and foundering. So, I have made the decision to keep to our course, and make the best time possible, regardless of the temporary discomfort to our passengers."

He paused, so that he could draw on his pipe, and keep it going. "If you are concerned about the company colours," he said, "I have two or three spare flags in my locker. Along with the Jolly Roger, of course," he added, with heavy sarcasm.

Edgar said tersely, "You really believe that a slantwise course would be more dangerous to the Arcadia than the course we're heading on now?"

Sir Peregrine nodded. And puffed. And then puffed again.

Edgar turned to Rudyard Philips. "Mr. Philips, what's your opinion? Would it be wiser for us to steer aslant to this storm, or not?"

Rudyard hesitated. He was waiting for Sir Peregrine to look round at him—maybe to wink, or at the least to give him a confiding nod. But he should have known better. Sir Peregrine remained in his chair, sending up intermittent smoke signals, like a Red Indian in a Saturday matinee cowboy picture communicating the message "I Am Imperturbable". The Arcadia collided with another cliff of solid seawater and groaned aloud. Edgar, for all his businesslike dignity, had to cling on to the rail that ran around the wheelhouse, just as tenaciously as Dick Charles.

Rudyard avoided Ralph Peel's intent stare. He said, too quietly for anyone to hear, "This is probably the best course."

"What?" demanded Edgar.

"I said—" and here Rudyard lifted his head so that he was looking directly at Ralph Peel, "I said that this is probably the best course. The course on which we're heading at the moment."

Ralph Peel wiped his mouth with his hand; and then, not knowing what to do or say, propped his fists on his hips and blew out his cheeks in frustration.

Edgar said, "You're sure we won't suffer anything more than superficial damage, Sir Peregrine? The sort of damage that we can repair before we reach New York?"

"Weather permitting," concurred Sir Peregrine.

"And you agree?" Edgar asked Rudyard.

Rudyard, feeling hot and nauseous, nodded his assent.

"Well, then, Mr. Peel," said Edgar, "it seems, to say the least, that you were acting overzealously. If the captain is convinced that he is handling the vessel in the best possible way, and his First Officer agrees with him, then there isn't a great deal more that we can say, is there? Except that I'm going to need your help in getting the Foster girl down from that crane, and that I'm going to take a pretty dim view of this incident once we've outrun this storm."

"Don't worry, Mr Deacon," said Sir Peregrine in a tired and slightly patronising tone, "I'm sure that I can deal with Mr. Peel in the appropriate fashion when the time comes."

Ralph Peel was about to say something but changed his mind and pulled his sou'wester onto his head with such fury that he snapped the clasp. "Permission to carry on, sir?" he asked Sir Peregrine sharply; but without the slightest trace of irony or temper. He was a good enough officer to know when he had lost a battle both of politics and rank.

Rudyard continued to stare at the wheelhouse door long after Ralph and Edgar had pushed their way back out into the storm again. He believed that he had done the right thing; and yet how had the right thing proved to be so wrong? How could he go back to Louise and tell her that he had decided not to wrest the wheel out of Sir Peregrine's hands after all? That instead he had agreed with Sir Peregrine that he was steering the right course?

How could he tell Louise that he had betrayed a brother officer in front of the Arcadia's owners, and that his mealy-mouthed agreement with Sir Peregrine would probably lead to Ralph Peel's dismissal?"

Sir Peregrine fished under his chair and produced a bottle of white Haitian rum. "Drink, Mr. Philips?" he asked. "Just a little celebratory snifter?"

Rudyard said, "No." And then, more clearly, "No, I won't, thank you, Commodore. I don't usually drink on duty."

"Please yourself," said Sir Peregrine, and swigged a whole mouthful of rum straight from the neck of the bottle.

"Your very good health," he said cruelly.