Читать книгу Blenden Hall - John Gilbert Lockhart - Страница 7
ОглавлениеDOWN CHANNEL
With the arrival of Mrs. Painter the tale of passengers was complete. On Friday, May 13th (note the ill-omened date), the Blenden Hall weighed anchor and stood down Channel under a favourable wind. Off Dungeness, however, the wind shifted into the west again and blew a gale. So she anchored under the point in company with a number of other ships wind-bound like herself. At seven in the morning of the eighteenth she got under way once more with a favourable breeze, and in the evening lay off Brighton. The wind had fallen away, it was a beautifully clear night, and among the lights on the Marine Parade Alexander could clearly distinguish those of his father’s house, where his brothers and sisters were then living. The sight sent him to his bunk with a light heart, and the promise of an unlooked-for reunion the next day, as, failing another change in the weather, the Captain’s gig was to be alongside early in the morning to take father and son ashore.
But with daylight came disappointment. Alexander was awakened by the violent rolling of the ship, his swinging cot pitching so heavily that he expected every moment to be dashed against the upper deck beams. Presently his servant came in with the news that a fair wind had sprung up during the night and that the Blenden Hall was running before it at a speed of nine knots.
So there was no reunion of the Greig family, and, to add to his depression, Alexander began to suffer acutely from sea-sickness. He had felt squeamish directly the ship was out of the river, but now he met the real thing and liked it as little as any of us. ‘I experienced those unpleasant sensations arising from the motion of the ship, which I had frequently heard my friends attempt to describe, but which in point of suffering surpassed anything I could have conceived.’ All that day he lay prostrate and miserable, until, at ten o’clock in the evening, his father appeared with the news that the lights of the Lizard were just visible, and that if he wished for “a last view of Old England” he must come up at once. So Alexander struggled into his clothes and up on to the quarterdeck, where he found three of his fellow-passengers assembled for a similar purpose; and together they silently stood watching those lights of England twinkle out in the murk astern.
Alexander then returned to his cabin, flung himself on to his cot and abandoned himself to thoughts so gloomy that it takes him nearly a page of close type to tell us of them. What with sea-sickness and home-sickness, the prospects which had seemed so rosy a few days ago became as pale as the face of about as woebegone a youth as anyone would care to set eyes on.
At seventeen, however, troubles soon pass, and even the pangs of sea-sickness wear off, so that in twenty-four hours Alexander was well enough to venture on deck. The weather had cleared, though it still blew hard and the sea was choppy; and when, at three o’clock, the band struck up ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ he was able to go below to the cuddy and sit down to his dinner like a man. He was also able to take stock of such of his fellow-passengers as, like himself, were now sufficiently on their sea legs to leave their cabins.
We have already been introduced to Lieutenant Painter and the bride he had collected, almost as an afterthought, from the foreshore at Deal. It may be supposed that the affair of the Painters was the first to disturb the even tenor of the voyage. It was not. The privilege of providing the first scandal must be accorded to Mrs. Lock. This lady was the wife of a commodore in the Bombay Marine. A passage in the Blenden Hall had been booked for her, her two children, her niece and her native servant by an agent who showed a want of candour for which Alexander takes him severely to task. As the wife of a commodore Mrs. Lock’s standing was unexceptionable, but—the agent carefully omitted to mention one horrid little fact. The Commodore had married, not merely beneath him, but in the country, that is, in India. ‘The lady was of that colour which would preclude any of my fair countrywomen from engaging a passage in the same ship.’ Alexander does not tell us whether she was entirely native or merely lacked, as the saying has it, some annas in the rupee; probably the former, since there was apparently no possibility of pretending that she was a European. Her arrival at Gravesend had evidently been followed by a commotion of cancelled passages, several ladies preferring to wait for another ship rather than to travel in such doubtful company. This was not just snobbishness. In the course of the long voyage it would have been impossible to avoid intimacy, yet, on arrival at Bombay, an iron custom would have demanded that Mrs. Lock must be dropped like a hot potato. The ladies might get to know her—even to like her—very well in the Blenden Hall, but as soon as the ship berthed at Bombay they could not know her at all. We must therefore ascribe to Mrs. Lock the fact, upon which Alexander passes a pompous comment, ‘that the Blenden Hall should have been so unfortunate as not to have been honoured by conveying any among her female passengers coming strictly under the denomination of refined.’ This is mild language. Mrs. Lock is described as ‘an immensely corpulent woman of colour, who spoke very broken English,’ and had been in the employment of the Commodore before she married him. Her appearance at Gravesend, at any rate, was enough to scare all the refined ladies off the ship, and Captain Greig, indignant though he must have been at the trick that had been played on him, was powerless. The lady had booked her passage; she flatly refused to give way; there was no regulation excluding passengers of colour; and there was an end of it. She brought with her two children, a boy and a girl, and a niece, Miss Morton, who was as dusky as herself. The last was not fourteen, but old for her years, an attractive girl with an affable disposition and pleasant manners, so that, colour notwithstanding, she soon became a general favourite. She was sorely handicapped by her aunt’s unfortunate habit of blurting out her most secret thoughts. Her most secret thoughts about Miss Morton might be summed up in the one word ‘marriage.’ Like many other mothers and aunts who have since made the passage to India, Mrs. Lock was full of hope that Bombay would find her charge an engaged woman. This she made perfectly clear at the outset to her fellow-passengers, for in a business-like way she took an early opportunity of announcing across the dinner-table that a dowry amounting to many thousands of rupees was waiting for some lucky man. The bachelors of the Blenden Hall, however, did not regard this as a ‘firm offer’: the rupees were the Commodore’s and the niece was most obviously Mrs. Lock’s. So there were many rumours, but no takers. Peggy, the native servant, was a mere child, and as idle and slovenly as her mistress.
Next we must notice Quartermaster and Mrs. Hormby. Hormby himself was a promoted ‘ranker,’ who had received his commission in the 67th Foot only a few days before the Blenden Hall sailed. Starting as a private soldier, he had worked his way up into what was one of the most lucrative of military jobs; for it was an unenterprising regimental quartermaster in those days, indeed, as well as later, who did not make a modest fortune East of Suez. Hormby sprang to immediate popularity on board. He was one of those people who become at once the ‘life and soul’ of any company they join. They may be encountered any winter at one of the smaller Swiss hotels. He was bluff, friendly, and indomitably social; so gregarious that when he could not find a passenger to entertain he would stroll for’ard and tell ghost stories, of which he had a vast collection, to the crew, some of whom he put into a fine fright with his blood-curdling yarns. Mrs. Hormby was a quiet, respectable, unassuming girl of eighteen. Coming as she did from the same class as her husband, the prospect of Mrs. Lock had not roused in her any social apprehensions; and as she was exceedingly pretty and behaved with unvarying propriety, everyone came to like and respect her.
Then there was Dr. Law, ‘a very particular old bachelor.’ He had been for many years a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and when retired on to the half-pay list had obtained an appointment in the East India Company’s military service. He was on his way out to join his regiment, and in his less crotchety moments, which generally occurred after he had had a favourable encounter with a bottle of whisky, he was fond of alluding to the fact that he had once been attached to a ship which had been attached to the ship which had carried no less a person than Lord Amherst on his famous embassy to China.
As for the others, officers and passengers alike, let us deal with them as they enter the story; and let us pass at once to the unfortunate scene in the cuddy on the day when the Blenden Hall was burying her nose in the green seas of the Atlantic, and Alexander, with restored appetite, found himself able, for the first time since losing the lights of Brighton, to respond to the inviting strains of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England.’
They sat down sixteen to table, including the Captain, the chief and second officers, Dr. George Symmers (the ship’s surgeon), and a few of the stouter-hearted of the passengers. Among these, to the general surprise, was Mrs. Lock, who would have been a wiser woman to have stayed in her cabin. By an unfortunate error in tact, she had been placed next to Dr. Law, and although this is the sort of thing that happens inevitably to ‘particular old bachelors,’ he hardly troubled to conceal his distaste for his neighbour. So dinner began. The ship was rolling heavily; the menu was excellent—for people in normal health; Mrs. Lock grew more and more sallow of face; Dr. Law grew more and more apprehensive, particularly as the woman would turn and describe her symptoms to him. Presently there came a lee lurch of such violence as to throw several of the diners clean out of their seats. Mrs. Lock lost her balance and the last shreds of her control, ‘and falling with her arms round the Doctor’s neck, held fast for support and discharged over him at the same time that which she afterwards assured us she had fully intended to have bestowed on the fishes.’ It was a painful incident, on which the squeamish will not wish to linger. The Doctor, not unnaturally, was furious. He stamped, and swore in broad Scots, and struggled vainly to escape from his persecutor, who, overcome with confusion, hung on resolutely to him and poured out apologies. But as each apology was followed by a fresh spasm, and she never relaxed her embrace, and the rest of the company was by this time roaring with laughter, matters grew worse rather than better. At last, with a despairing effort, the Doctor tore himself loose from her grasp and stumped out of the cuddy in a towering rage. Captain Greig, with commendable chivalry, then led Mrs. Lock back to the cabin she should never have left.
Alexander tells us that no one’s appetite was any the better for this mischance, as we may well believe; but dinner did not end without a further contretemps, in which was involved that other lady of scandalous debate, Mrs. Painter. The cloth had been taken from the table when Mr. Gibson, a young cadet who was sitting next to Alexander, thought to pay her a compliment by calling down the table and asking her, in the custom of the time, to take wine with him. Mrs. Painter, who was a stranger to such courtesies, at once called back, “I’m much obliged to you, sir, but I’m not dry,” a reply which provoked a general titter. After dinner Painter evidently gave his wife a little instruction in the manners of polite society. But a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing, and the lady only learnt half her lesson. On the following day, anxious to return Mr. Gibson’s compliment, and to show that no offence had been intended by her refusal, she filled her glass and called down the table to him, “Sir, I drinks towards your very good health.” This time there was no titter, but a hearty roar of laughter, in which the newly married couple, in no way abashed by the solecism, themselves joined with gusto.
