Ultramarine: A Novel by Malcolm Lowry | eBook

Read an Excerpt

Ultramarine

A Novel

By Malcolm Lowry

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

"What is your name?"

"Dana Hilliot, ordinary seaman."

"Where were you born?"

"Oslo."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"Where do you live?"

"Sea Road, Port Sunlight."

"Any advance?"

"Yes—"

"Next please! What is your name?"

"Andersen Marthon Bredahl, cook."

"Where were you born?"

"Tvedestrand."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-nine."

"Where do you live?"

"Great Homer Street, Liverpool."

"Any advance?"

"Yes—"

"Next please. What is your name?"

"Norman Leif, galley boy."

"Where were you born?"

"Tvedestrand."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine."

"Where do you live?"

"Great Homer Street, Liverpool."

"Any advance?"

"Yes."

"Next please—"

... Had he arrived anywhere, having been blown through this six weeks' engulfing darkness of interminable ritual spelt out by bells and jobs, a six weeks' whirlwind of suffering? I am on a ship, I am on a ship, and I am going to Japan, Hilliot repeated over and over again. Why? Perhaps the answers were too copious and melancholy anyway, and even if he had once evolved reasons, probably by now they had long ceased to be true.

Two bells sharply interrupted his thoughts. Five o'clock. He had been knocked off an hour. In another hour they would be alongside. Then he would turn to with the lamptrimmer and the port watch on the poop when the Oedipus Tyrannus would be made fast fore and aft. After that he was free.

Below him on the well deck some able seamen were under the bosun, working at the derricks. He watched them thoughtfully. At Tsjang-Tsjang, he supposed, the same interminable performance would be gone through as before; the usual stream of hawkers would surge on to the ship; the stevedores would clamber up the side from the lighters, or swing in on the derricks; the winchmen would soon be seated on their straw mats, and a shore serang, having been given a cigar by the first mate, would be watching an opportunity to steal his watch—

"... Hilliot! Come and lend a hand here."

"Blast the bloody bosun," said Hilliot, but slid down the poop ladder to the well deck, and set to with the others. A thick rope roared and ripped on the drum end of a winch, and the yellow derrick slowly rose toward the sky.

"... All right! That's enough! Take in the slack!" shouted the bosun. "Square off them guys. Hilliot, you there! Take in the slack, take in the slack, I said! Somebody here, you, Horsey, show him how to do it, for Christ sake.... Hilliot, get out of that! Come here. Over here. Spell-oh, you others."

"Now Hilliot," he smiled, "you can go back and dream to your heart's content. What are you standing there for like that? Go on. Now men," he said, turning to the others immediately, "now for the standing derricks on the fo'c'sle head!"

As Hilliot was going he met Andy the cook coming down the poop ladder. Oh Christ, he thought. But perhaps today would be an exception. He smiled. "Hullo." Andy scowled darkly at him, blocking the companion ladder. He was rolling up his sleeves, his enormous arms were tattooed all over; a Norwegian flag, a barque in full sail, a heart, presumably, and God knows what. This was the sort of man to be, all right. But there was something weak about him, he had such a weak chin. Andy made no move to let Hilliot pass. He spat deliberately. "Now look here," he said, "I've been twenty years at sea. And that bosun's been about the same time at sea. I've sailed with him twice, and he knows bloody well same as myself it doesn't pay to shout and be unkind to youngsters, not if you want them to do well, and he told me that he thought at first you would be one of his star turns. Well, I didn't say anything—I know your type—see? You would be one of his star turns.... And now you've turned out nothing but a goddam nuisance. And he can't help it. He can't help shouting at you—see? He doesn't like it, and you don't like it. And Christ knows I don't blame him—he can't help it if you're just a bloody senseless twat—"

"Look there," Andy pointed over the side, "that's where you want to be. See that?"

"It's a shark that's been following the ship. They always say they do that when someone's going to kick the bucket on board. Well, I'm sure I don't know, but I've heard fellows say sharks like little boys—"

Hilliot went past him up the ladder. He had found out it was no good doing anything about this sort of abuse; but it was worst of all coming from Andy, who could never get over toffs who came to sea. Perhaps they reminded him too much of those days twelve years before, when he had lost his ticket as a second mate on a tramp steamer out of Christiania. Matt told them that he had struck the new skipper, a Stavanger man, for calling him a Bergener.

Oh, well, he had heard all of it before in the forecastle. Useless, we don't know what sort of bloody man you are at all. Just a nancy. Not all of it had been unkind, but he knew that they thought he wasn't one of them. He had offered to fight, but the men had pulled out combs, or drummed their knives on the table. They didn't much care about his making a hero of himself in that way. "We'll see you bloody well logged," they had laughed. He watched the shark again, for which he felt now almost a sort of affection: it reminded him just now strangely of a swift in flight, then of a boomerang he had once had in Frognarsaeteren. Now it had disappeared.

On the poop Hilliot found a coil of rope. Lighting his pipe he tried to think clearly about the situation. Looking round him as if for enlightenment, he suddenly discovered that he was staring aloft, where a bird—a kind of gull or dunghawk, was it?—perched like a finial on the swaying mainmasthead, was preening its feathers. But the sun hurt his eyes. Lowering his head, he tried to calculate how long it had been there. Today, or was it yesterday? Two days ago. All the days were the same. The engine hammered out the same stroke, same beat, as yesterday. The forecastle was no lighter, no darker, than yesterday. Today, or is it yesterday? Yes, two days it must be. Two days-two months—two years. Six weeks. How remote, how incredibly remote it all seemed. It was ridiculous, but he could not get a clearer vision of anyone or anything at this moment than of the clerk in the Board of Trade office, and of the desk at which the signing on had taken place. And really he felt that he might not have been questioned there within the space of time at all, but in some dreamed other life.... I am on a ship, I am going to Japan—or aren't I? I have been to a certain number of ports—Port Said, Perim, Penang, Port Swettenham, Singapore, Kowloon, Shanghai. This evening we reach Tsjang-Tsjang.... No, there was precious little meaning left now in this life which so surprisingly had opened out before him. Nor could he see why he had ever been fool enough to set this seal upon such a wild self-dedication. No meaning at all, he thought, as he shook out some ash from his pipe. Not, at any rate, to himself, a man who believed himself to live in inverted, or introverted, commas; to a man who saw the whole damned business in a kind of benign stupor. His recollections were suddenly enlivened and illuminated, and he remembered how he had almost at once picked out Norman, the galley boy, with his fair hair falling over his eyes, and Andersen, the tattooed cook, him whom they called Andy, whose weakness of chin was complemented by his extraordinarily dignified forehead, as those among the crew who would be his friends; he remembered just where he had stood, just what he had said, and how he said it, just how the silver compasses of the Liver Building clock had indicated half-past eleven. Norman and Andy—Norsemen (were they?). And once more his thoughts turned tenderly to Janet. She it was he apprehended in their voices, she, and no other. And he thought of that time when their families, for ten years neighbours in Port Sunlight, had met in Christiania when he was a boy, and how their love for each other had never changed. That winter they had seen an elk in the street, driven down from the mountains by starvation—everyone was on skis—all was white—

Then the ship's articles, meaningless to him, had been intoned by another sort of clerk— "Seamen and firemen mutually to assist each other," he had said, as though Britons and Norwegians, a Spaniard, an American, and a Greek would spend their watch below in a brotherly communion! A pale-faced fireman told him where he could get his clothes, and the two of them whiled away an hour lounging against the swimming bar of the Anchor.

"Nearly all of us are Norwegian our side of the fo'c'sle," he said, "but the two cooks are Norse too—the sailors are nearly all English on yours. I am the one they call Nikolai, but my real name is Wallae." And the little fireman wrote down his name, "Nikolai Wallae," on an envelope for Hilliot—

"I was born in Norway too," Hilliot had said when Nikolai had finished.

"I tink you are very much English all the same," the other smiled. "Our two cooks have been very long time in England, and now you don't tell them from Liverpool men. But Bredahl is the best cook I ever sailed with, I will say that," he added magnanimously. "Andy, they call him. Well, the ship is like that too, you knaw. She was built in Norway, but she has been under the English flag for years. Some of the notices are in Norwegian, nowadays—"

"It gives me such a queer feeling to think of that," Hilliot had said.

"Oh, I don't knaw," said Nikolai, "English or Norwegian all the same. In Falmouth I make a fire to my pipe, you knaw, and I stood listening to the children playing—laughing over the same troubles as Norwegian children, you knaw. But Falmouth left me a souvenir of my wisit," he added laughingly, "the third time I have had a souvenir in England."

"Did anything exciting happen last voyage?" Hilliot asked after a silence.

"Oh, well," smiled Nikolai, "the first mate got a dose. Going round the land in Finland we make a small wisit this trip to Helsingfors. The men they was all drunky—all the time, oh, there was much dispeace. They all had knives, you knaw, and they made a great fiest. But two mens and three womens they was all killed. By coffee time it is all forgotten. So this voyage we go to Japan again—long voyage. Oh, it will be a long voyage on our rotten ship."

After agreeing to meet Nikolai on the Oedipus Tyrannus, he had gone with some of the sailors to a "Mutual Aid Society Booth" in Cathcart Street, near the berth of the ship, a street dreary in the grainy rain, and loud with the clatter of shunting dockside engines and the shouts of floury stevedores; large drops had fallen in his eyes and down his neck, and he had felt desolate and miserable, wishing that he could have stayed in England with Janet forever. He had bought—good God, what had he bought?—a sea jersey, two singlets, a shanghai jacket and dungaree trousers, and a pair of sea boots. Norman, who bought a pair of Blücher boots, had advised him to get all those, as it was his first voyage. The boatswain, who was in the booth himself, crackling a huge yellow oilskin, had smiled at him kindly. "You always want to hang up an oilskin, son, when it gets wet. Don't throw it around anywhere, like."

But Andy, the chinless cook, yet with such a queer, gentle look in his eyes, from whom above all he would have liked a kind word, was unsympathetic and morose. "Well, I don't want to say anything at all. I suppose you think it's pretty good coming to sea. Well, you'll find out pretty soon what it's like; it's just a question of working as hell—one port's the same as another. Yes, you'll find out pretty soon too. The bosun won't give you all the tiddley jobs to do by a long chalk—"

But the boatswain had given Hilliot a sly wink. "You always want to keep in with the cook when you're in a ship."

Later that day, before he returned home to say good-bye to Janet, he had heard Andy remark to the boatswain, "I hate those bloody toffs who come to sea for experience...." And indeed, after his guardian had driven him up to the wharf where the Oedipus Tyrannus was berthed, and after he had clambered out of the car and slung his seabag (from which the drum of his taropatch protruded) over his shoulder, the misery of parting with Janet overwhelmed him.

He saw it all again vividly, imagined himself wearing his blue suit, saw again his guardian wave good-bye to him, for Janet would not come to the ship, saw the two detectives on the Oedipus Tyrannus, the night watchman and the dirty firemen carrying wrenches; saw himself enter the forecastle and put his seabag in a bottom bunk before looking into the sailors' messroom; saw the light burning, and the shadows which galloped over the long cedarwood table with forms round it, riveted to bulkheads, saw the stove with a twisted chimney on which a dishcloth and a pair of dungarees were drying. A skylight opened out on the poop. A crew list on a notice board contained his own name, spelt wrong—D. Heliot. There were some notices in English and others in Norwegian. It was all very strange, like a nightmare, but also exciting. At length one of the detectives came into the forecastle and invited him to the pantry for a cup of tea. The tea had condensed milk in it. The ship was not to sail till six o'clock the next morning—

After that he had continued, in the bitter watches when he knew the mind must be fixed on something or give way, to puzzle about Andy's attitude towards him. The way he reasoned to himself was as follows: unless he justified his presence on the ship in some way with the crew, Andy not only would never allow him into his companionship or turn to Hilliot's own, but also would resent his acceptance by Norman: he would remain a "toff," a someone who didn't belong: and until he shone in some particular way in his work, or performed some act of heroism, they would never be the contented trio whose formation alone would render life tolerable on the Oedipus Tyrannus.... After they had knocked off they would have met, and talked or sung wild songs, together they would have gone ashore for a deaf, blind debauch; or in the eyes of the other members of the crew enjoyed a sort of collective status, some distinguishing name for their trio.

For to be accepted by Andy, who seemed to rule amidships as he did the forecastle, was not that to be accepted by the crew? And to be accepted by the crew, was not that also to justify himself to Janet? Certainly he was willing to do anything, cost what it might, to show that he was one of them, that he did belong. How often, for instance, as now, he had looked up at that mast with extraordinary desire! Some day, he felt, someone would be up there and lose his nerve: he, Dana Hilliot, would bring him down. The captain would call for him and congratulate him. "My boy, I'm proud of you; you're a credit to the ship—" Actually on the ship they had taken very little notice of him except to put him in his place: as he was a first voyager he must go through the mill like any other bloody man on his first voyage, a man who went to sea for fun would go to hell for a pastime, that was the way of things. While Andy, pursuing logically his conduct in the Mutual Aid Society Booth, usually went out of his way to be cruel. He had called him "Miss Hilliot." "Hurry up there, Miss Hilliot, seven bells gone half an hour ago, your ladyship." And the stewards laughed. Yet he knew himself to be jealous of those splendid adventures ashore Andy boasted of so magnificently, adventures in which he himself would have dearly liked to have been included, and of which any first voyager might be truly envious: or was it, he asked himself, that he wished to boast of them merely, rather than to be included in them, to be part of them? Or was it that he really hated Andy, the "chinless wonder," that his interpretations of his attitude as friendly or jealous were both equally false? Anyway, it would be admirable to score off Andy sometime, about that particular physical defect. "You chinless wonder," he would snarl it out, with portentous contempt—

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry. Copyright © 1962 Margerie Bonner Lowry. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Ultramarine: A Novel

eBook

Customer Reviews

Read an Excerpt

Ultramarine

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Recently Viewed

Ultramarine: A Novel

eBook

Customer Reviews

Read an Excerpt

Ultramarine

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Recently Viewed

Related Subjects