Stella Benson: Submarine

Stella Benson

Submarine

There was a loud squealing in her ears and it was like the translation into sound of the hurried green twilight about her. Her head felt as if it was padded with vacuum like a thermos, but—also like a thermos filled with iced lemonade—cool, acid, and lucid inside. She watched Amos in front of her, cannon-ball-headed, waddling grotesquely, sticking out a large creased behind, like an offended rhinoceros, planting his immense feet on gardens and moving creatures and swaying flowers, flapping a portentous hand like a drunkard.

‘That’s the man I love,’ she thought, gaping at him through streaked unflattering space, and as she thought this, his foot moved carelessly and he sprang, sprawling askew, to a point outside her range of vision.

She could only see a blinkered view through the window in her helmet. She was not wearing the full diving-suit but only a headpiece with a rubber ‘bertha’ and her own bathing-dress. She felt like a top-heavy pawn on a drunken chess-board. The air-pipe was under her arm. The helmet was like a diving-bell with only a certain allowance of bubbling squealing air trapped inside it.

When she bowed forward to look at a little crab, the air receded up to her mouth; in fright she bent backward and the crisp line of the water slipped down at once to her Adam’s apple. Now she felt braver; she could bend her nervous weightless body a little—not too much—to allow her window to command a view of white coral branches, white craters, anemones like pianists’ fingers, green-black patches of matted weed, crabs and smiling open mussels, little glassy splinters of fish that moved off round her ankles like sun-touched midges round the pillars of a cathedral. Looking at her ankles, slim and pearl-green under a body that felt so top-heavy and undisciplined, she tried to dance a step of two. Instantly she soared by mistake—sideways—backwards—outspread like a spider—outspread like a little boy lifted by the seat of the trousers… She landed on one heel, unable for a moment to retrieve her aspiring right leg, in a white coral crater.

‘Who was that man like?’ came suddenly into her mind as she waved and slanted in the urgent water, unable to stan. She was thinking of the man in charge of the raft above her. ‘Who was he like?’

Her eyes remembered the man, standing in his shirt-sleeves in the sun on the raft, scowling at the negroes who worked at the pump, turning with an apologetic smile to her and Amos. Her eyes remembered him…

‘It’s not often we get a lady on this raft, wanting to dive for the fun of the thing, too. But you couldn’t wear the outfit, lady, well, look, you couldn’t move it—try one of the shoes… Well, look, there, you see—why, you couldn’t carry the weight over the side—three hundred and twenty-five pounds—of course it feels like a feather once you’re under water, but it’d be the getting there. Still… well, look, I’d like you to go down and see the Will o’ the Wisp—she lies so pretty, just twenty-eight feet under that buoy there; we shall get the whisky out of her hold by tomorrow night, I guess, if there really are only a hundred cases. No—she’s not worth salving, herself—she was only a dot-and-carry-one old schooner and she crumpled her bows right in running into that rock there—the sea was pretty high and the old man must have lost his head… It’s only the whisky the owners want out of her; well, look, right here, within a hundred miles of the Yankee buyers, whisky’s worth something, I can tell you. Well, look, lady, I’d like you to see her—well, why don’t you go down in this gadget here, what the niggers use when they don’t want to bother with the whole caboodle?—nothing but the helmet and the tube, you see—works just as well for the short trip.’

Well, look, he said so often—who was that like?—with that mumbled well, like wll, and the open throaty look—‘wll lok’. It was like Nana—he might be Nana’s son—that was why the connection—or disconnection—in her memory had made her so uncomfortable.

Everything connected with Nana was wounding. The thought of Nana brought in a rush into her mind a young lifetime of croonings and hummings and comfrotings and scoldings and rockings and forgivings… and then—crash—a day when Amos discovered that Nana, turned from nurse to housekeeper, had during these twenty years stolen eight hundred and thirty pounds out of the money given her for her charge´s upkeep. The widow profiting by the orphan’s trust. Nana turned out of the house. Amos shouting, ‘You’re lucky we don’t care to prosecute…’ Nana’s salilor son—who happened to be in Harwich—sent for in a great uproar.

‘Call yesself a gentleman—this is how you reward my old mother’s lifetime of service… Wait till I get you alone—I’ll get a chance to get even with you some day…’

She had only seen Nana’s son in that occasion—she had looked over the bannisters and seen him shaking his fist. The man on the raft looked like him. Amos would not notice it—he was so short-sighted. Besides, it was ten years ago. But ‘wll lok’—it was Nana’s exact intonation. Surely the coincidence could be too extraordinary. She and Amos were only here by chance, yachting in the West Indies—had come here idly to this lonely lagoon, having heard of the wreck of the little smuggler.

‘Why, there’s diving—oh, what fun, Vi, let’s dive…’

So here they were, by chance, at the bottom of the sea, at the mercy of a man on the raft—who was like Nana’s son. By chance. ‘I’ll get a chance to get even…’ Was it Nana’s son? Now, suddenly, she remembered that he had said to Amos. ‘Some people like diving, and some do it once and never do it again.’

Amos had said, ‘We shall never get a chance to do it again, whether we like it or not.’

And Nana’s son had replied, ‘Probably not.’ (It was Nana’s son). Then, to the negroes, ‘You goggling idiots, can’t you—aw hell—well then, get to hell out of here. I’ll do it myself.’ He could work the pump himself.

The young woman, alone in a squealing bubbling silence in the crater, looed about her in a panic, moving jointlessly like a cheap puppet. She thought thirstily of the safe dry air—of the light sky—of birds—of England—Oh, to be in England now that April’s here; there’s the wise elm he grows each twig twice over… She tentatively pulled her air-tube—the signal for help from the raft. There was no answering pull. She could probably swim upward unaided—indeed she had some difficulty in remaining down. But Amos in his leaden armour… Where was Amos? Where was the wreck of the Will o’ the Wisp—?—he would be there. She began to climb prancingly up the side of the crater, a mild slope of perhaps six feet but as difficult as a mountain to her unwieldy feet.

At the edge of the crater at last, she could see the wreck quite near, looking very different from her expectation. It looked like a little leaning house with a swinging door; the mast, with flags of blackish sea-weed, was like a dying tree over the little house, and the ominous green light added to its menacing look. A waltzing inverted Spanish onion bowing to the crushed bows was identifiable as Amos. As his wife approached, the unsuspicious Amos, in one flying stride like a slow-motion cinema study, aimed himself at the sloping deck of the schooner, reached it, slipped and fell, and lay in the scuppers. He did all this with absurd suspended ponderousness; his helmet, of course, could not change its expression to a smile, and this immobility gave him the earnest look of a puppy trying unsuccessfully for the first time to climb steps.

His wife, however, did not smile at his antics inside her own soberly grinning mask. Somehow she reached the lower side of the ship, bruising her shoulder against a stanchion. She could reach her Amos’s foot as he cautiously tried to get up. She pulled his foot! He sat down again as abruptly as the supporting water would allow him to, and bounced once. (What a field there is for a submarine low comedian!) Amos made a flapping gesture of irritation, like the “Don’t-bovver-me” of a baby.

‘Amos—come quickly!—that’s Nana’s son, we’re in danger,’ yelled his wife. Her ears cracked. The squealing in her headpiece changed its note and crackled; she felt almost suffocated; she reeled.

Amos could not hear a sound. He flapped foolishly again.

‘Amos—Amos—!’ She pulled his ankle in panic—it was all she could do to reach him.

He tried to draw it away. There was asperity in his flapping. She pointed upward like a Salvation Army preacher. He turned his mask towards her! She half saw his mouth moving behind the glass. He pointed at her and pointed upward as he lay along the rail at an impossible angle. He was evidently saying, ‘Go up yourself then, but leave me alone to enjoy this.’

This squealing instead of silence was a more frightful answer than silence. There he was, wrapped away in his own squealing sound-proof world. A fish swam between him and her.

‘Amos!—Amos!’ she screamed, and once more was checked by semi-suffocation. Was the air being cut off from above?

Amos withdrew his leaden foot from her reach. He regained a kind of perpendicularity and signed to her once more, peremptorily, that she should soar away from his. He took one step away from her.

As a step, it failed. As a flight, it was unexpectedly successful; the steep deck seemed to launch him backwards into space; he flew towards his wife and, for a second, sat lightly on her iron face.

She clasped him round the middle; he doubled up like a jointed foot-rule. She was saving him. She bounded about frantically. Amos managed to twist himself out of her grasp but she caught his arm.

‘It’s Nana’s son up there—an enemy!’

She clung with both hands to his rubber wrist, dragging him. Amos, she could see, was now quite alarmed—not suspicious of foul play but dumbfounded by the frenzied behaviour of his wife. He pulled his safety cord. They were instantly caught up to heaven together, floating sideways, intertwined, though the blowing current, like G. F. Watts’ Paolo and Francesca. Their two round steel heads collided at the surface, at the foot of the raft’s ladder. Some one lifted our young woman’s false head off; she was herself again—she was herself in her bathing-suit, unarmoured, safe, as though coming aboard after a common swim.

A face bent over her. Nana’s son? What had she been thinking of? This man was not in the least like Nana’s son; he was short and broad—Nana’s son had been tall and knock-kneed; this man on the raft was obviously Australia—he greeted her with an unmistakable accent, and his first words were not wll lok, but lok here, lidy… What madness of memory had caught her, down there in that new senseless shadowed world?

Amos was being helped up the ladder. Someone opened his little window and his voice leapt out like a bird out of a cage.

‘Good Lord, Vi, what in the world…?’ as the raftman helpfully wrenched his iron head off.