Authors: John Bowen
We had passed the most unpleasant period of our gastronomic history; there was no more raw fish. By experimenting with different kinds of fish, by broiling and boiling and steaming and frying and baking in the ashes of the fire, by varying the quantities of Glub and sea-water, I managed to prevent our supper menus from becoming monotonous; “Surprise us,” Sonya had said in the early days, and so I had, and surprised myself as well. For this evening I had prepared flying fish, fried crisp until you could eat the bones. Muriel looked at them with disrelish. “The god doesn’t care for flying fish,” she said.
Gertrude said, “How do
you
know?”
“He never has them for his first fruits.”
“He has what we catch. We never catch flying fish. They catch themselves.”
“The god doesn’t like them.”
“You’re not an authority on what the god likes and doesn’t like. Just because you say you’ve been possessed, that doesn’t make you an authority.”
Muriel did not reply.
Banner came out of the temple. “Well,” he said, “the god has been pleased to accept our little offering, and now we can all tuck in.”
“You see? He does like them.”
“He respects our feelings.”
“The god doesn’t have to respect our feelings. He doesn’t think about them. We’re supposed to respect him and his feelings. If he didn’t like flying fish, he’d throw them back. Isn’t that right, Harold?”
“Well——”
Muriel said, “I don’t pay any mind to you. You’re only jealous.”
“What have I got to be jealous about?”
“Because the god possesses me.”
Gertrude said, “I was possessed a long time before you were, if you want to know. The god possessed me before he
was
a god.”
“He was always a god. We didn’t know it before.”
“Well then.”
“Well then what?”
“He was a god when he possessed me then.”
“He never possessed you.”
“I know whether I was possessed or not.”
Banner had been making little ineffectual movements of pacification, but he was hampered by his sheet. “Ladies, ladies!” he said.
“Why do you let her walk all over you, Harold?”
“I don’t pay
any
mind,” Muriel said. “Jealous bitch!”
Gertrude picked up a flying fish with her fingers. She leaned across the table, and slapped Muriel in the face with it. The fish was so crisp and brittle that it broke at once into pieces. I said, “You see? I said you could eat the bones.” Muriel picked up a cup.
“No,” Banner said, “don’t throw anything. I’ll tell the god.” The cup missed Gertrude, and was shattered against the cabin wall.
Gertrude pushed back her chair, and stood up. I said, “For goodness’ sake, hold on to them.”
Tony said, “I don’t like to.” Muriel stood up also.
“Harold!”
“Ladies! Ladies!”
Gertrude said, “I’ve some pride left, Harold. I won’t be insulted in front of all of you. I’ve had a lot of cruelty and inconsiderateness to put up with in my life—” she was shaking, and had to hold on to the table for support—“Parts that should have come to me have been given to someone else, because I’ve always told people what I thought, and never pretended. I’ve sat alone in a tiny room, waiting for the telephone to ring. I’ve made myself ask for favours sometimes; I’ve eaten dirt, and been refused. I’ve watched my own pupils pretend not to see me in the foyers of theatres. I’ve been ignored in the street.”
“Now, Gertrude.”
“This woman. What right has she to insult me? She falls down in a fit, and calls it possession.”
“That’ll do from you,” Muriel said. “You keep your place. If the god prefers me to you, then you ought to take your medicine and keep quiet about it, instead of——”
Gertrude launched herself across the table, and stabbed with a fork at Muriel’s stomach. But the
distance
was too great for her, and only one of the tines of
the fork penetrated Muriel’s skin, while Gertrude
herself
landed with her face in a plate. Muriel gazed at the single drop of blood raised by the wound. “I’m
bleeding
,” she cried. Gertrude recovered, and put herself in position for another attack, but Muriel, crying, “I’m bleeding. You bitch, I’m bleeding,” left her place, and came around the end of the table to grapple with her.
She had not even paused to arm herself with cutlery. She seized Gertrude’s wrist, and twisted it until the fork dropped to the floor. Gertrude bit Muriel’s shoulder. Muriel howled, and pulled Gertrude’s hair with both hands. I moved protectively towards Sonya’s chair, and so did Tony. “Ladies! Ladies!” Banner said again. The door of the temple opened, and Arthur came into the cabin.
He was wearing neither his frowning nor his smiling mask. His beard had been cut, and his hair combed; his spectacles glittered. His voice dominated the confused noises of the fighting women. “Mrs. Otterdale! Miss Harrison!” he said, “Stop it at once, and behave.”
Muriel and Gertrude rolled apart; their faces were scratched and bleared with tears. Gertrude was the first to recover. She curtsied, and said as steadily as she could, “I’m sorry, god Arthur. The woman provoked me.”
“I am not the god Arthur,” Arthur said. “The god Arthur has gone back to heaven. I am the god Arthur born man.”
In the silence, Banner began to pick up the broken pieces of the cup Muriel had thrown, and put them on
the table. We moved back to our places, keeping our eyes lowered. Muriel stepped on the pieces of fish with which Gertrude had struck her, and they made a loud crunching sound.
Arthur took his place before the altar. “You can take off that silly sheet,” he said to Banner, “I shall be the god’s high priest from now on.”
*
Life went on. The inner cabin continued to be used as a temple, and only the high priest Arthur was allowed to enter it. First fruits were still offered to the god Arthur, and the whole of our evening meal was placed on his altar to be blessed before being distributed among us. The first fruits themselves were now cast into the sea. High priest Arthur would put on his vestments, walk briskly to the edge of the raft, lift the dish in the air, say, “God Arthur be pleased to accept these first fruits,” and into the water the fish would go. The gift was always accepted.
In the evenings, the high priest Arthur would often read to us from the Sacred Books. These had been much rewritten since he had first begun to enter up the log; indeed, he would often make alterations in the manuscript as we went along. I am sure that the first sentence of the log did not originally read, “In the beginning the god Arthur came out of the great rain,” but that was how it read now. Mixed in with this sort of apocryphal statement, there were still traces of the old Arthur. “The god spoke to the people about the functions of rational man,” he had written, and followed it with a string of
Arthurisms; there was also a long piece about the god’s concern with sanitation when it should have pleased him to bring us safely to land, and a discussion of the value of
tabu
in maintaining standards of cleanliness. His account of the storm was very highly coloured. “There came a great wind over the surface of the waters,” it ran, “and the face of the sky was blackened by the waters, and the voice of the god was heard in the wind, crying ‘Woe, woe to the sons of men’, and many of those who were not of the Chosen were swallowed up by the waters, but the god held over the Chosen the shield of his hand, and all save one were saved.” (Here the high priest paused, and continued reading on a different note.) “Tidal waves have, of course, been known from the earliest times, and have done great damage to life and property. There is a natural
explanation
of their occurrence, having to do with the activity of underwater volcanoes, but never before have tidal waves followed each other in so long a series, and in this was the hand of the god shown.” (He wrote in a sentence.) “In any case, the god would have created the volcanoes in the first place, being the prime mover of all things.” The high priest looked up from his reading, and said to us, “Thus we may see that the god Arthur may appear, either, as in this case, as the immediate cause, or, as in the case of most other natural phenomena, as the ultimate cause, but cause he must be, and is.”
The Sacred Books are lost now (I think Harold burned them), so I do not know how Arthur described the night of the squid. We had seen squid before, of
course. Indeed, I had once tried to cook one in its own ink by a recipe only partly remembered from Elizabeth David’s
Mediterranean Cooking
; it had turned out to be one of the dishes Muriel did not fancy. But we had never seen a squid like this.
Let me remember the date; it was on October 24th, and Sonya was within a month of her time. Though the weather was still warm, the evenings were shorter now, and supper had turned into high tea, for we continued to eat a little before sunset. The sea was calm, and the only happening out of the ordinary was that Hunter reported that all the fish seemed to be swimming in the same direction. We thought little of this, and ate our meal indoors as usual. Arthur read to us for a while from the Sacred Books. Then we went out on deck into the dusk to take the air.
We saw that the sea was no longer smooth. It looked like cobblestones. The water was covered with squid, little squid, harmless squid, cuttle-fish that we had caught and tried to cook, but now blanketing the
surface
of the sea all around us in the dusk. Many of them were eaten by the fish that their presence in such large numbers had attracted, so that it was as if the
cobblestones
were under a mock shell-fire; wherever we looked, we could see them seeming to disintegrate in a swirl and a flash of foam, yet the surface remained unchanged, and there were always as many
cobblestones
as before. The sight was fascinating, but not frightening. Gertrude said, “It’s almost as if you could step on them, and walk to land.”
We remained on deck for a long time, watching the squid. Dusk thickened into night. The moon rose in a clear sky, and the bodies of the squid gleamed, a
silver-grey
in the moonlight, and we sat there, silently watching.
“But this is ridiculous,” Arthur said. “It is past your bedtime. There is nothing to see.”
“Please.”
“Oh, you may stay if you wish.”
In the silence we could hear each splash and gulp quite clearly. A little thread of wind came up, a little cold thread that seemed to pass from one to another of us, and then die. Sonya shivered. I put my arm around her shoulders, and felt her stiffen for a moment before relaxing within its warmth.
I said, “A clock ought to strike or something.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s as if we were waiting for
something
to begin. Don’t you feel that?”
“We are always waiting, Mr. Clarke. We should be waiting and ready at all times to do the god’s will.”
A long black serpent uncoiled from the water close to the raft, rose for a moment in the air, regarded us, and then returned to the water.
We did not speak. I think each of us felt that as long as we kept silent, we might be able to believe that we had seen some private hallucination, and there would be nothing. The serpent reappeared, and was joined by another. In the moonlight, we could see that the surface of their skins was not smooth, but rough and
indented like tentacles. Gertrude said breathlessly, “Lord Arthur, tell them to go away”.
The serpents fell back into the sea. Arthur said, “I must consult … I must ask….”
Muriel said, “Tell the god to make them go away.” Sonya turned her head in to my shoulder, and I could feel that she was shaking, and hear the tiny chattering of her teeth. One of the serpents began delicately to explore the edge of the deck.
Banner said, “High priest Arthur, please exorcise the demons before they eat us.” None of us had raised his voice at all up to now, but Gertrude said, “I’m going to scream. I can feel it inside me. Please do something, Arthur, before I scream, because if once I start, I don’t think I shall be able to stop.”
There was a disturbance on the surface of the water some way from the raft. The serpent on deck was whipped back like a fishing-line, and was seen to be part of a nest of serpents, clustering around the head of a sea creature which lay not more than sixty feet away. There were eight other serpents as well as the two we had already seen, but they were much smaller. They writhed above a hooked beak of a mouth, as the creature raised its head to look at us.
Banner said, “Medusa!”
“If I’d been turned to stone, I shouldn’t feel so frightened.”
“Arthur! Arthur!”
Hunter said, “It’s a squid. A giant squid.”
“Make it go away.”
We could see the creature’s body now. It must have been about twenty feet long, and perhaps six feet wide, tapering away to a tail from which sprouted two vestigial wings. It was longer than any squid we had ever seen, or could have imagined. One of its tentacles flicked again towards the raft, lay for a while on deck, and was joined by its mate, which vanished again almost at once below the waterline. The two tentacles found a purchase, and began to pull, and we felt the raft shudder and then move towards the squid.
“Arthur!”
But Arthur could do nothing. His body was rigid. Only his hands moved, and they seemed slowly to be pulling the squid towards us, just as it pulled us towards it.
“Arthur!”
The movement stopped. The squid had amused itself by playing for a while with the raft, but perhaps we were not texturally interesting enough to be sport for long. We saw again from a much closer range the great horned beak and the vacancy of an eye. All ten of the serpents writhed again, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the creature was gone. Slowly the tension ran out of us. Sonya stopped shivering. Banner cleared his throat. Only Arthur remained as rigid as before, staring at the place where the squid had disappeared.
“You’ll talk to the god?” Muriel said. “You won’t let it come back?”
Arthur turned slowly to look at her. “Woman,” he said. “That was the god. And he will come again.”