The unaccustomed susurration of the ventilators reminded me vividly of things I would sooner forget; and in any case, the enormous meals, the day-long indolence, had made great nature’s second course unattainable. It was not the Company’s fault, bless them. They tried, with the boundless but unimaginative good will of all nannies, to give their charges a routine which was what those charges wanted, and at the same time did them good. Nanny knew, (for she had been ashore once, when there was no servant problem and nice people had begun to accept the horseless carriage), Nanny knew that God had ordained the precise structure of Edwardian England, and that any change would be for the worse. She petted us. She prepared us for, then kept us in, that station to which the Company had called us. Moaning beneath the ventilator, I cursed the exactness of the social image which she called a ship.
Here the class system was axiomatic. You could not invade a plusher bar simply by readiness to pay more. Nor could you descend to a comfortable pub if you wanted to pay less. Where you were born, there you stayed. At the beginning — a sort of privileged babyhood — you could glimpse the other worlds. You could pass through doors marked First Class and see the wide bedrooms, the stupendous still lifes of sea food on the side tables of the dining-room. Perhaps this was a concession to our brief stop in republican France — for after that, the doors were locked. We had to be content with our middle station, right aft, where you got any vibration that was going. And I supposed there was some sealed-off hold where the base of our social pyramid rested; where tourists were chained to the kelson under the whips of savage taskmasters, while their flesh was subdued by a diet of weevily biscuit and stale water.
Nevertheless, I had to admit this was a Brave New World; for why should anyone repine at the more luxurious fate of another, or take thought for the unfortunate, when he was lulled by soft-foot service, by preposterous food and glitter into acquiescence? Turning restlessly beneath the ventilator, I fingered my belly again and understood why a photograph of an Edwardian shooting party is little more than a display of stomachs. Here, there were five courses for breakfast, with a coaxing steward who seemed genuinely disappointed if the master preferred only one; six courses for lunch; seven for dinner; in between times, cups of tea, bowls of nourishing soup; and all tendered with the gentle implication that you were convalescent after a long illness and should build yourself up. Then there was the bar — if you were inured to the bumble of a screw — where you could sit and subject the wake to an empty-headed examination.
Was it … not the sickness, but the sadness, the weltschmerz resulting from the constant movement of the ship which made me so drearily aware of our company? We were, as far as I could discover, the professional classes. We were doctors, lawyers, junior diplomats, supporting actors, scholars, writers not of best-sellers but of books with réclame. We were scientists — but not physicists, who by the logic of history, travel First. We had a fair share of American widows who had taken the trip because Elmer always wanted to go; and these were insultingly eager to get back to the States. We had many old people and few children. We could afford to fly, but either feared to or did not care to. Our drinking habits were abstemious, and if we had wine with our meals we generally ordered the half-bottle. Though full of good will, we did not make friends easily. We patronized neither the swimming pool nor the gymnasium, though we talked of doing both. Sometimes we went to the cinema, but with the avowed intention of passing the time. We knew we were not going to enjoy what we saw very much. We wore a darker lounge suit for dinner and found getting out of a deck-chair just that little bit difficult.
Dear Nanny — I thought, as I belched indelicately — should we ever escape from your lavender’d apron? There was Gala Night, for example, a festival for the whole ship. Perhaps deep in her bowels the tourists suddenly found their chains struck off, were given a double helping of pea-soup, a tot of rum and freedom till the clock tolled twelve. Down there, we had thought — with the nearest we permit ourselves to bitterness — down there, they were probably drinking Guinness and dancing Knees Up, Mother Brown, or doing The Lambeth Walk. Up there, on the other hand, and 200 yards nearer the bows, were lucullan orgies and neronian debauch. Film stars and directors, tycoons and Ministers of the Crown were vying with each other in gross expense. What gods and maidens loth? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
In our precise enclave we were hardly party-minded, for our migrant scholars were not wandering ones. Yet Nanny did her best. All her charges should have a party, like it or not. At the second sitting for dinner, each person was provided with a small paper hat. We wore miniature shakos, dunces’ caps, bonnets and top-hats, while our eyes avoided all human contact and a confused, British silence deepened, broken only by the steady champing of 400 sets of false teeth.
Really, it was too much! I sat up testily, felt for my watch and then I understood.
Going from east to west across the Atlantic, you catch up an hour a day on the sun. The day is twenty-five hours long, a fearsome consideration to me who already find days quite long enough. But this midnight that had come upon us was a hiatus, a suffocating interlude when the clocks stopped and stayed so for an hour. I scrambled out of my bunk, dressed and made my way up to the promenade deck, through a blaze of deserted lights. What lights they were, with their interminable multiplication in veneer and mirror! Austin Reed’s, the Library, the Main Lounge had everything but people. In the bar, when the ship felt a swell, a hundred cases of liquor clashed and rattled. This was The Strand Palace Hotel dumped on Brighton Pier and the whole cut adrift. Because there was no one about, the air was heavy with a sense of Grimm or Poe or SF.
‘Don’t you understand, Swithin? Formula X was too successful. We are the only men left alive in the universe!’
Was I the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail for ever without landfall? All the clocks, standing grimly to attention at midnight, had stopped time in its stride. Only one other thing moved. Astern, outlined against our stationary wake, a catwalk stretched from one side of the ship to the other; and here, a robot paced, its seaman’s hat sliding along the upper edge of the canvas windbreaker as it moved from side to side and paused occasionally to inspect the sheer walls stretching 300 yards ahead of it. It saw my lonely figure and stopped. It watched me closely. Had I perhaps lost my all at Bingo? Had my brain been turned by an hour’s talk with three aged widows? To reassure it, I tottered windy and splay-legged under cover again. I remembered those midnight liners one sees from the deck of a small boat. They draw their effulgent length across the night and seem so crowded, such a funfair, a town; but I knew now they were deserted automata with the minimum machine-minders about; and a robot pacing the catwalk astern lest one of the thousand sleepers should decide to end it all.
Still twelve o’clock. In the main lounge the headless chairs discoursed together. It would always be twelve o’clock and we were getting nowhere. We were going very fast on the treadmill, we were sitting immovably in the exact middle of that tilting, weltering, slopped seaplate which is all the sailor can ever know of the Atlantic Ocean or any other ocean. Up there, in the heights of our society at the captain’s table, they might hope for reassurance, and see their pilot face to face; and down there, in the hold, they could not care less; but here, here in half-way house with its marshal for suicides——
I was sweating absurdly when every clock in the ship gave a hiccup. Time started again. Already, it was thirty seconds past twelve. We were getting somewhere, of course we were. Was it my fancy that the figure on the catwalk relaxed at that moment, as if knowing we had passed some indefinable crisis, some danger? Twenty-eight knots, westward ho, and all was well. The Master-at-Arms emerged from some cave, on his rounds. He walked busily, but stopped to greet me.
‘Not able to sleep, sir?’
There was a shade of rebuke in the greeting, the implication that if Nanny could not rock you to sleep, your case was grave indeed. Firmly determined to be myself, in spite of Nanny, I returned to the promenade deck and started to stump up and down. Faster and faster I went along a hundred yards of careful caulking, from the open door at the afterdeck to the public-address system in the waist. Up and down I went — doing, after all, what Nanny would approve of — chasing, catching, outdistancing that ghastly procession of good meals, in puritanical fervour to crucify my belly — almost as though, since I was taking exercise, I might expect to hear from the public-address system my captain’s loud ‘Well done’. The clocks speeded up with me. Before I had noticed the trickles of sweat in the crooks of my knees, it was three o’clock. If I were not so learned a navigator, my trigonometry so spherical, I could have persuaded myself that the greyness over the wake was indeed the dawn. I was sleepy at last. Of course we were getting somewhere — onward, ever onward to some morrow which would be another today and so forth. In my bunk, the ventilators sounded positively soothing.