The Last Ship (28 page)

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More and more between watches, men may be seen topside, sometimes in twos or threes, more often alone, gazing at the empty sea, staring into its immense solitude from the equal solitude of the ship moving through it. Wrapped in those two solitudes, ship and sea, which define our existence. Seemingly looking at nothing. But in reality, I know, looking, with all intention, for the appearance of another ship to break that nakedness, nothing seeming more strange than the fact we have encountered none thus far; that we should have the sea all to ourselves. Above all they appear to long to see company, other ships, manned by fellow sailors, whatever nationality making no difference at all. Simultaneously, a curious, a remarkable thing from those excursions on the beaches. One sensed, for the first time, a kind of sexual tension move powerfully through the ship. It was almost as though ship’s company, seeing only human beings no longer capable of anything, could combat that pervasiveness everywhere of the darkness and the dying, of the horror, by one means only, asserting the life force which remained all-vigorous in themselves and which is the supreme gift of the carnality of men and women. A tension tangible, startling, yes, something primitive and frightening about it. A sexual strain, approaching urgency, which rose and fell, day by day, on its own barometer. Then the sighting itself seemed to dissolve it, or more accurately to put it back into its secret lair, but only with a further ominous sense one had of its certain reappearance at another time with an impulse to take a more active form.

For lo, as if to reward all our scanning, every hand, officer and bluejacket, at one time or another having become a voluntary and eager lookout: Not far S. by S.W. of Marseille, we raised our first surface vessel.

“T
hirty minutes, Captain,” Lieutenant (jg) Selmon said, facing me on the quarterdeck. He had gone over first and come back. “She’s pretty hot.”

We had raised her on the endlessly empty blue plain of the sea just as the sun was reaching down the western sky bound for evening waters. From the beginning I had ringed the ship with lookouts and it was one of these who, sighting but a speck on the far horizon, had given the word into the speaker attached to his chest, “Ship on the starboard bow.” I was on the bridge at the time and stepped out to the wing and removed the cover from Big Eyes and saw her standing white and solitary on the blue. I swung to her stern, looking for the white wake of a ship underway: she showed none at all. She stood motionless upon the sea. I stepped back into the pilot house and looked at the gyro repeater.

“She lays thirty degrees to starboard, Mr. Thurlow,” I said to the officer of the deck. “Come to course two eight five. Standard speed.”

“Course two eight five, aye, sir. Standard speed.”

As the ship heeled and made through the water I stepped back to the wing and, leaning to Big Eyes, studied her with methodical meticulousness as we approached. First up the mast where the tricolor hung limply in the languid air. From there I followed downward and forward and could make out the large script in royal blue on her bow,
Bonne-fille.
I swept her. About four hundred feet overall, a white ship with pretty lines, a somewhat low freeboard for her size—especially noting that—with davits for seven lifeboats on the starboard side, on which we were closing her, and presumably the same number on the port side. All that I could see snug in their cradles. I slowly swept the deck fore to aft and back again, then a third time, raking her with my eyes. Everywhere, stem to stern, she appeared shipshape, lines coiled properly, things in their places, Bristol-fashion, a smartly tended ship. Not a soul stood on her weather decks. I went back to the bow to reconfirm: Her anchor was housed. She lay still in the sea, with no sign even of drift, only because the Mediterranean itself was caught up in one of her times of consummate peacefulness. From the clean and cloud-free heavens not a breath of wind stirred the silent waters, which lay below unblemished by wave or ripple, sea and sky one almost perfectly matching pale-blue color, a departing sun casting its last dimming light over all. I stepped back into the pilot house.

“Mr. Thurlow,” I said. “I want us alongside, no closer than five hundred yards. Stem to stern. Slow speed.”

“Alongside, five hundred yards. Stern to stern. Slow speed, aye, sir.”

“And have Mr. Selmon report to the bridge.”

As the ship commenced her maneuvers I stepped into the chartroom and pulled down
Lloyd’s Register
from a shelf and found her: 370 feet overall, 4,000 tons, French registry, French-manned, a luxury yacht-vessel engaged in the enterprise of passenger cruises through the Creek islands. I replaced the volume, picked up the loud hailer in the pilot house, and along with Selmon went back to the bridge wing. Below us I was aware of the many hands who had come topside, lining the lifelines, to look at her in quiet solemnity across the water. As we slowly closed, together Selmon and I stood observing her intently. She stood immaculate and gleaming in her smartness, pristine, untouched. I conferred with Selmon and he approved the course I suggested, subject to his first reconnoitering.

“Four men,” I said. “With that freeboard I think you can get aboard her from the stern. Take Preston for your ladder. Meyer and Number Two boat.”

As he went below to see to it and as we came on I began to call her through the hailer in the language of her registry.
“Bonne-fille! Nous sommes le vaisseau américain U.S.S. Nathan James. Bonne-fille! . . .”
hailing her repeatedly, turning the hailer up to maximum volume so that my voice boomed out across the interval of sea separating us. Only the reply of silence came back across the stilled waters.

Thurlow was bringing us smartly around until we stood five hundred yards away and abruptly the ship stopped in a faultless maneuver: Man-of-war and yacht stood, our port to her starboard, sterns on line; even on except for our extra hundred feet of length. Below me I could see Number 2 boat being lowered away and our Jacob’s ladder dropped, then Selmon with four hands and Preston descending, the boat starting across, making for her stern. Then the boat idling there; Preston standing on the gunwale; Hardy climbing up the big boatswain’s mate as he would a tree until he stood on his shoulders; a quick leap; presently I saw him standing firmly aboard her. The three others climbed up Preston and stood alongside Hardy. The four of them moving smartly along the deck as the boat swung away and followed slowly along the ship’s side to where the four hands had reached midships; then doing their job of getting the short accommodation ladder over the low freeboard. Even as they did so I was astonished to see Selmon, ignoring the ladder, make a quick jump, grasp the ship’s rail, and hoist himself quite easily up and over onto her. Then my memory fetching up a line from his service record that he had been an Olympic-class gymnast. I smiled. It had been a rather fond bit of showboating. I watched him moving around the deck, taking his readings. They came back and I had Selmon’s report: Thirty minutes he would allow us. The others waited with me on the quarterdeck. “Chief Delaney. Four men, under sidearms,” I had told Sedgwick. “Also the doc.” I hesitated and added, “And Chaplain Cavendish.” I followed the others down the ladder into the boat and we made across the water for her. We came alongside and I led the way up the accommodation ladder and stood on the quarterdeck, the men around me.

“We’ll stay together,” I said. Even a quiet voice sounded loud in the hush of ship and sea. “No straying. Keep your hands off things, understood? Look sharp. Steady as she goes, men.”

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It was as though the ship were a tableau in microcosm of the most familiar and ordinary habits of the human species caught and frozen in a moment of time. The entire ship oozed the luxuriance of a routine and accepted moneyed elegance. In the dining room, which we first entered, the men were in dinner clothes, the women in evening gowns which spoke of the fashionable and the expensive as matters of course. Perhaps seventy-five of these sat at tables, set in clear munificence with silver and fine china, the diners variously in the attitudes which occur during the eating of a meal. At the table nearest us on which all our gazes now rested a man and a woman were turned, leaning toward each other as though in a moment of whispered even secretive conversation, their heads almost touching. One of the woman’s hands held carelessly to her wineglass, the other touched the sleeve of her dinner companion, while the man’s hands were affixed absently to a knife and fork in the position of cutting food, their ardent eyes staring steadfastly into each other’s in an oblivion to all else. It seemed a moment of planned assignation; made one think of a later, more important rendezvous. Across from them at the round table seating eight, a man’s head was thrown back in a manner suggesting that he had uttered an interesting remark, perhaps a witticism, at which he had just laughed, from the way his teeth were bared, all other faces at the table, save for the conspiratorial couple, being turned in expectant attentiveness toward him. On the raconteur’s starched white front lay a thin layer of brownish or tannish substance which somehow suggested a woman’s face powder of an exceptional fineness. Behind him and to his left—he appeared rather to be presiding over this particular party—stood a side table graced by a quartet of bottles of Bordeaux, lined up like files on parade, one empty, one half-empty, the others full but uncorked. I peered and read; all were Mouton-Rothschild, all vintage 1975. The diners had already passed the point at which substantial clues as to age remained save only for the color of hair that lay across their heads, from which the flesh, obviously with an infinitely unhurried leisurelessness, had begun to fall away in bits and pieces, in grayish-black strips, sprinkling table and food, in some instances the first evidences of bone structure beginning to appear. They made four couples, evenly divided as to men and women. Three of the men had gray or white hair, one of the women; another of the women reddish hair. Across this sedate and confidently formal scene the pure Mediterranean air, entering through the many opened ports, wafted in soft murmur, touching these terminal postures in a benison of final tranquillity; bringing also with it an almost essential assuagement for its viewers the living. But for that gentle evening breeze which had sprung up we would surely have found difficulty in standing there making our silent observations; as it was, hindrance enough that some of the men had pulled out handkerchiefs to clutch over their faces. We wandered among the tables, looking, as mute as they, at these various passengers who had boarded ship to witness the mighty and ancient artifacts of the Greek islands, the amphitheaters and the shrines, the marble temples, and to sail the wine-dark seas of the Aegean of Homer. There was a strangely gracile air of composure to the scene, a quality almost sacramental, as if the diners were waiting with a certain anticipation for the next course to be served, in the meantime well able to amuse themselves with lively conversation. Assorted nationalities surely? I tended, perhaps incorrectly, to think of such cruises as largely for Americans and kept looking for evidences. There was no way remotely to tell. Nationality, race, color, all had vanished in the common shared fate which with such evenhanded dispensation obliterates the last one of such distinctions. Though a few of those of possession, accumulation, of the ascendancy of material interests in these voyagers, as yet remained: A shaft of sparkling light flared into one’s eyes which followed it to a woman wearing an immense diamond choker which had caught and reflected a last scrap of sunlight entering through a port and which now, at the particular stage she had reached, hung considerably more loosely than when it had been fitted, the same oblique rays striking as well above the glistening jewels and directly into staring lusterless eyes which did not blink. Moving among the tables, one’s gaze rested a moment on this figure, that. A youngish-seeming woman with a Louise Brooks hairstyle and with a modeling of shoulders that seemed to mandate the unashamed display of proud nakedness extending to the line of her breasts before the blue gown began, this expanse now strewn delicately with that recurring, infinitely fine dust of Roman umber which clung everywhere. From every side their eyes regarded us, enormous and vacant in sunken sockets, the fixity of their stares in no way hostile, more of anticipation at the arrival of fresh and perhaps amusing company—one half-expected to be asked to pull up a chair. A certain languor, an unresentful indifference, lay over the entire setting. As one looked, eyes moving with an inexplicable wariness over these figures, a feeling of disconcertion as from a source unknown began to come over one, the riddlelike sense of a small mystery requiring elucidation. Their huge and ardent eyes seemed to look back at one as if about to wink. It seemed the last one of them had been grinning and even laughing uproariously when the moment arrived, as though the entire room had been caught at one instant in some universal merriment which had swept through and delighted the last table and the last diner . . . Then one became aware, in a monstrous chill of revelation, of nonexistent lips, smiles now made eternal as at some huge joke played on them and as it were on the human race . . . One then ceased to look anymore directly at individual faces.

Reaching the far end of the dining room, we stood surveying the curious pageantlike forcibleness of the scene, spell-like in its final immobility, its taciturn serenity, its company with their bared teeth joyous yet contemplative in their progressing emaciation, held in a kind of impenetrable, imbecilic beatitude, a splendid carelessness clung to in the face even of the invisible vandals that had attacked their ship and them with such ferocious stealth, the terrible plague that was even now ravaging them; felt, one did, an unreasoned moment of admiration for the manner in which they had met their fate, as if there had been choice; stood, our sailor company, looking at the scene’s insistent formality as at a world of the distantly privileged and elect, but without envy even at their previous lives or any desire for it; stood immensely hushed, feeling ourselves caught up in the great solitude of the living—we seeming more victims of loneliness than this loyally united company whom nothing could now ever separate. Only the plaintive trembling of the Mediterranean sea breeze through the ports troubled the profound stillness.

I turned to Selmon. “It doesn’t make sense.”

He seemed as perplexed as the rest of us, studious, mind working to solve a mystery. Then in tones of deliberation:

“I think they must have been closer to shore, sir, to a blast . . . the ship drifted here . . . Perhaps . . .” His voice trailed off in reflective uncertainty. There was an almost imperceptible shrug. “There’s so much we don’t know. People have never experienced anything remotely like that much radiation in one dose.” His eyes brightened with the possibility of solution. “It could have been a neutron bomb. Kills people. Leaves things alone.”

We weren’t there to solve mysteries, these, as Selmon said, unsolvable anyhow, and inexpressibly unimportant. Besides, I had in mind something that was important. Selmon as well had left the past, the irredeemable, the speculative, to return briskly to the present, where all our duties and allegiance lay. He looked up from his counter meter.

“Twenty minutes, Captain.”

I turned without a word and heard the steps of the others follow me down a passageway. I opened two or three doors to find staterooms emptied, beds turned down for the night with a precise neatness; in one a woman in the universal black and white of maid’s clothing, maid’s bonnet, maid’s white lace apron, seemed to have been in the act of doing so while the diners dined, her figure fallen like a rag doll, hunched, crumpled, face down, on the bed. I opened another and saw a couple in their nightclothes lying in twin beds, for some reason having retired at dinner time. Perhaps they were feeling ill, perhaps the sea had been a trifle rough for landsmen of their age. Perhaps simply they had dined at a first sitting. Only their heads were visible, their bodies otherwise sheeted to the neck. These were both propped up on double pillows, a manner of sleeping favored by some, and perhaps from being clearly elderly were at a stage of decomposition somewhat further along than was the case with any of the diners. From them white sparse hair sprung, like sprouting snow upon the sooty field which in thin and fine layer spread across the white pillows, spread across all. As with joint intention their eyes bulging from concaved sockets seemed to stare directly and with unspeakable outrage at this intruder who had dared burst into their bedroom with not so much as a knock and disturb their sleep. I closed the door, leaving them to resume it, and continued down the passageway, opened another. No one asleep here. Two naked bodies, one astride the other, not elderly at all. On a chair hung, neat and shipshape, the uniform jacket of an officer of the French merchant service—the single stripe, the leanness of dessicating loins of the topside nude figure authenticated his youth. Coition during the dinner hour! When least likely to be disturbed, caught at it. How I admired the French, their unfailing shrewd pragmatism. In all of these I backed out of the doorway and closed the door in quick silence, to shield my men from sights, and went on down the passageway, opening no more doors.