Hollow Sea
Authors: James Hanley
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
HOLLOW SEA is
'The best novel I have yet had to review in this newspaper.'
Malcolm Muggeridge
in the
Daily Telegraph
'A magnificent book.'
Elizabeth Bowen
'Hanley at his most impressive. He is the only living English writer who knows how to write about the sea.'
V. S. Pritchett
'Tolstoyan
.
.
.
It has an epic quality'
L. P. Hartley
in the
Observer
J
AMES
H
ANLEY
Hollow Sea
A Panther Book
HOLLOW SEA
A Panther Book
First published In Great Britain by John Lane
1938
Nicholson
&
Watson edition published
1950
Panther edition published July
1965
Table Of Contents
HOLLOW SEA
W
HEN
some angry thoughts had cooled he moved his finger. It was a long finger, thin, covered with a film of reddish hair. His face was so near to it that when he breathed one could see the slight wavering of the hairs on it. The nail was thick, long, and had two white spots on it. The finger traced a line down the paper and then stopped.
The philosophy of high explosives was a negative, an absolutely mad philosophy. He thought it came to fruition in the face of the grinning monkey sitting under the swinging yellow light. Something in him seemed to cry 'Stop'.
His finger was moving again. Suddenly he said 'Probable'. It was as though his finger was a sort of fish caught between two tides, the tides of memory and actuality. When he remembered his finger ceased to move. His mind was lifted up, carried far away, beyond the unrest, the ceaseless movement, the incessant hammering, the monotonous 'one, two, three'
.
.
.
'Steady there', the whisperings, the creakings of wood, the sudden vision of a great area of wood, upon which something huge performed phantom-like movements. Beyond the grinning face beneath the swinging light.
But when his finger moved he was caught in the other tide; he was sunk in the unrest; he was part of the mass of desperate life. Three words remained engrained upon his brain. Possible. Probable. Certain. They were like pendulums, swinging to and fro, aimlessly, violently, without easy flow and rhythm.
His finger had now covered the whole area of the chart. The paper itself was covered with lines: red and green and blue. At that moment the hammering ceased. He sat back. When he looked at the chart again it was a mere blur. The colours had run into one another, the lines moved. He put his finger down on the paper. He thought it had moved. He jumped up and closed the port-hole. Maybe it was just wind. Then he rolled up the chart, put it in the drawer, and remained standing there, staring at the drawer into which he had placed it.
The hammering began again. He put on his hat and went out. It was very dark. He saw the light swinging in the wind, but he did not go near it. He went along another way. The hammering was deafening. The voices had ceased but they still rang in his ears. 'One. Two. Three. Steady there.' Then the wild movement of the large object on the patch of slain wood. He spat into the water.
Rain poured down, making a strange pattering sound on the deserted decks. It was like the sudden stamping of tiny feet.
Then a whistle blew. Where the darkness seemed thickest huge shapes moved, up and down, this way and that, slow and sombre in their movements. He gripped the rail, thinking 'If I go through that door and come out on to the other side I will see that monkey's face.' He laughed then, remembering that a certain madness upon which he had been meditating was personified in the monkey's face. It had a bald head that shone like dull ivory. Above it the light swung to and fro, sentinel-like. He thought of the light and remembered how it threw a dull sickly glare upon a certain patch of bulwark. That was just where one of the men had been careless, leaving a bad patch unpainted. From stem to stern there were five huge eyes. He remembered that when he looked into one of these eyes figures were moving about. He could not get rid of the sounds in his ears. 'One. Two. Three. Steady.' Then the chart appeared, clouded his vision of the movements inside the large eye, and he swung round and walked slowly back to his cabin. He hung up his hat, went to the drawer of the oak chest and withdraw the chart from it. He laid it out on the table and sat down again.
He did not put his finger on the line this time because a voice kept whispering in his ear: 'It is risky.' He kept his hands in his pocket and stared at the map. He remembered that after he had stared at it for some time he realized the power hidden under the lines. The red, green and blue lines. All human activities were centred there, the chart was like a powerful magnet. Darkness could not wipe it out. If he switched off the light it would still be there, his eyes would still remain riveted upon it, and he would still see the lines moving. Once he thought it might even breathe, become humanized; it drew everything unto itself, everything but the unrest. The unrest was something in the air that could not be seen, nor felt. It was just there and the darkness magnified it. The chart was a world, a wall, a prison, a well.
He pulled his right hand from his pocket and put his finger there again. The tip of the nail rested on a little red ball. He bent down and looked at it. 'Possible,' he said to himself, and smiled. He imagined Necessity's great hand had placed the little red ball there. He knew that it represented something called X. He exclaimed under his breath, 'X possible.' He knew it was really land, sky, water, air, people living and moving about; a place on the earth's surface, but it was called X. He thought: 'Perhaps conundrums are the square root of their crazy philosophy.'
His finger moved higher still, then stopped again where a green wavy line began. That was L. He laughed aloud, thinking how Necessity had come to their aid with conundrums. Higher still there was O. O and L and X. The possible, probable and certain. To which one? That was the question. Again his mind was lifted up, swinging pendulum-like between memory and actuality. It swung towards L. He remembered L and what it represented quite distinctly. It was like X, a place on the globe, but it seemed to him that people liked to deal in conundrums. It helped illusion. He folded up the chart, rose to his feet and crossed the cabin. He stood staring through the open port-hole. It was so dark outside that one could not see even a finger. He was still standing there when a knock came to the door. He scrambled to his table again before calling out, 'Come in.' At the same time the door opened.
'Ah!' he said. 'That you, Bradshaw? Come in.' The man named Bradshaw stepped into the cabin. He was smoking a pipe. He sat down on the greasy green settee. Soon the cabin was filled with clouds of bluish-black smoke from his strong-smelling shag. He pulled the pipe from his mouth and tipped its hot bowl into the palm of his large brown hand. 'Still at that game,' he remarked, and the man at the table swung round. Their eyes met.
'Yes,' he said. 'Still at it.' He watched the other man's lips. 'Yes?'
'The men have just gone ashore for their supper,' Bradshaw said.
The man at the table got up. He yawned and one saw that there were two teeth missing from the front of the upper jaw. He scratched his chin with his long fingers. Bradshaw said it was so dark you could not see an inch outside. A silence fell between them. Through the open port-hole they could hear the falling rain.
'It's quietened down,' the man said. Bradshaw rose to his feet. He laid his hand gently on the knob of the door. Something in his demeanour amused the man. He sat down to the table again, turning his back on Bradshaw. He smiled, knowing Bradshaw was watching him.
'They've finished numbers two and three then?' he asked.
'Yes, Mr. Dunford,' Bradshaw said. The brass ring in the knob of the door rattled.
'They're still at number four?'
'Yes, Mr. Dunford,' Bradshaw said. There was a long pause. Then he added quickly, 'They're going to run those boxes fore and aft in the early morning.
.
.
'
'Still reckoning we'll catch that tide?' Mr. Dunford turned round. He was not looking at Bradshaw, but at his hand on the door-knob. Somewhere in the distance a bell rang.
'You can go, then,' Mr. Dunford said. 'I know why you came. It's all right. Go!' Then he turned his back on him again. Bradshaw went away. The door banged. The man sat listening to the sounds of Bradshaw's footsteps on the bridgedeck. He heard him descending the companion-ladder. On the now deserted saloon-deck his footsteps rang out sharp and clear. Mr. Dunford followed him with his mind's eye. He was drawing near to the swinging light, to the crouched figure beneath it. He could see the bald head glistening below the yellow light. He thought: 'Nothing was ever so comical, putting him there on that box; below that light.'
He raised his head, stared at the bulkhead. He heard a tug blowing far out in the river. What was it that was more maddening than the unrest? More confounding? One could feel the unrest, but the other was beyond feeling. It was there, surrounding one, but illusive. What was it? 'The damned secrecy,' he said. 'The damned secrecy.' It puts something like a monkey at the gangway head. 'Yes. I simply can't rid my mind of that word "monkey". But they call him Rajah.' Where would the Rajah be when she slipped her moorings, catching that all-important tide?
He was still staring at the bulkhead. His eyes moved slowly until they rested on the electric clock. 'Ah!' he said. He got up and began pacing the room. Not a sound aboard. He had come up three hours ago. It was then he had seen the figure under the light. The face haunted and irritated him. Where had he come from? They knew, but he did not. They knew everything, he nothing. That's how it was. After a while he lay down. His mind wandered off again. L was possible, but O was certain. He fell asleep thinking of L.
The figure on the wooden box stood up and yawned. Mr. Dunford on first seeing him had imagined him to be a sort of figure-head. A figure-head for a mad ship. But of course it ought to be rigged up just under the eyes of her. His figure was short, the head seeming unusually small to be set on such powerful shoulders. He was dressed in an old reefer jacket, a pair of faded tweed trousers, and worn brown shoes. On the deck near the saloon door lay his greasy cap with its shiny bosun's peak. His bald head shone like dull ivory. The face was small, wizened. There was something peculiar about the features. They were wooden and expressionless. The eyes were almost hidden by the shaggy brows. The skin was yellow and stretched so tightly over the flesh that one imagined the bones might burst through at any moment. His arms were unduly long for so short a man.