Golding

William Golding, Close Quarters

Phillips and Hawkins, the captain's servant, got me back to my bunk. I feigned as much unconsciousness as I could from policy. There must now be, I thought, a court-martial and I wanted to be no part of it as witness or anything else. I allowed myself to be revived with brandy, then grasped Phillips's sleeve to detain him.
"Phillips. Does my back bleed?" "Not as I've seen, sir-"
"I was struck over the head and shoulders with a flying rope and rendered wholly unconscious. I feel cut to the very bone."
"Oh," said he, with great cheerfulness, "you was struck with a rope's end-what we call a starter, sir. It's what the last man down gets across his back or his bum, begging your pardon, sir. That don't hardly more than bruise, sir."
"What happened to us?" "When, sir?"
"The accident, man, our broken masts-my aching head!"
So Phillips told me.
Taken aback. I was taken aback, thou wast, he, she or it was taken aback. I remember my mother telling her woman-"but when I heard what the creature wanted for a yard of the stuff, exquisite though it was, I declare to you, Forbes, I was quite taken aback!" That, from my dear mother who allowed me to travel on the Continent during the late peace but cautioned me against going too near the fence round the vessel! What a language is ours, how diverse, how direct in indirection, how completely, and, as it were, unconsciously metaphorical! I was reminded of my years of turning English verse into Latin or Greek and the necessity of finding some plain statement which would convey the sense of what the English poet had wrapped in the brilliant obscuration of figures! Of all human activities how we have chosen time and again to turn to our experience of the sea! To be three sheets in the wind, to sail too near the wind, to recognize someone by the cut of his jib, to be brought up all standing, to be adrift, to be on the rocks, to be halfseas over, to be sunk without trace-good Lord, we might fill a book with the elect on our language of the sea affair! Now here was metaphor come across at its origin. We, our ship, had been taken flat aback! Lying in my bunk I pictured it all. Deverel had nipped below for a dram, leaving the half-witted Willis in charge of the ship. Good God, as I thought of it my head throbbed anew. My country, said I to myself as I tried to attain to a state of good humour-my country might have suffered a notable deprivation. I might have drowned! So, with Willis on watch there had come. a change, a confusion of the waves on the leeward bow, some foam, a squall, the water cuffed rapidly with two invisible hands that came even more rapidly nearer-those two fellows at the wheel would glance from the shivering leach of the main to the compass-glance round perhaps for Deverel and find only Willis with his mouth hanging open-would look for authority and find none-had they borne down on the wheel and brought her bows round to meet the squall they might fear flogging for it-so they did nothing because Willis did nothing and the squall struck into the wrong side of our sails which being sheeted home stopped her dead, then bore her back and down; sails bellied the wrong way, bulwarks forced down till the sea tipped over them, our rudder working in reverse!
So, while the crew laboured to undo the work which Deverel and Willis had achieved between them by a few seconds' inattention, I lay and waited for the throbbing in my head to cease which it partly did at length but only when I had got to sleep. The last thing I remember thinking before I slept was what a wealth of unexpected experience had come to me through that simple phrase "taken aback!"
But strangely, once in my bunk I felt myself compelled to stay there and that not just for an hour or two but days and nights. Summers sometimes brought me news of our state. We were now being home back with an awful inevitability into the doldrums again: for if our vessel when fully rigged could make little way against the wind, in her crippled state she was helpless. Nor could we hope to set the same full sails as before. We lacked the spars, said Summers. And the reduction in sail area was more than equal to the improvement made by the scrubbing he was now able to give to that fringe of weed all round us at the waterline. It was another of those metaphors perhaps, a "set back". Three more days passed before I was able to get up for more than the most necessary of purposes. It was a tottering Edmund who at last made his way into the waist. We were, I found at once, back in a wilderness of heat, stillness and mist. Our very bowsprit was out of sight and if I was able to see the tops of our masts it was only because they were now lower than before. The setting up of new and temporary topmasts, as Summers assured me, was a business which was taxing the resources of the ship both in timber and muscle power. Meantime we were helpless.