In Hazard (22 page)

Captain Edwardes by now had grown a beard like the porpoise's. But he drew a dart from his belt and flung it at the figure on the unicorn. It snatched the yelling demon from the tree, and yelling also vanished in the clouds.

A great mouth rose out of the water, as wide and as deep as a well, against which the waves could be heard splashing. Captain Edwardes drew another dart from his waist and flung it at the mouth: and with a blasty breath that drove the ship sideways through the water it too vanished.

But the sea, where was the sea? No longer any water, only the seething of innumerable dragons. How welcome they were! Each had a fifth foot growing from his navel, and no black beards under their long snouts. They flailed with their shaggy legs and lashed their hairy tails.

Then one dragon, in a fine armour of golden-glowing scales, flung itself onto the ship, and crawled up the sloping deck. As it moved the deck was depressed with its weight, like a tent-roof when a cat walks upon it. Its forehead projected over its blazing eyes: its ears were small and thick: its tongue was long, and its teeth were sharp.

But Captain Edwardes drew from his trousers thousands of balls of fire, which flew from his hands and struck it, so that it lay cowering down. Then the Captain straddled over it, cruelly tearing off its scales one by one, so that it cried in agony, shrinking all the time smaller and smaller, and at last weeping with the hopeless, shuddering sobs of a despairing child.

The voice was his own infantile voice, weeping to him out of the far years of the past.

They were in the open sea, now, heading for the Gulf of Honduras; more than a hundred miles from any land. Ahead lay the small black silhouette of the “Patricia,” her smoke seen only as a black blank in the myriad of stars, three vertical lights at her mast-head. Between, the tow-rope dipped occasionally in the water; then lifted, dripping trickling phosphorescent drops along its whole length.

Next came the jagged bows of the “Archimedes,” still tip-tilted over to one side. Right up in the peak the look-out stood, occasionally shifting his position from side to side. Presently he came aft a little, and rang six bells: the only bells ever tolled over the grave of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, once a chief engineer.

FINIS

When this novel was first published, the line taken in a brief prefatory note was this: “The events in this story have been kept ... strictly within the bounds of scientific possibility: the bounds of what has happened, or can happen....”

That note, which is also found in this edition, was written a long time ago. There were good reasons then for this mere half-truth; but today there can be none for not being more explicit. This
is
a novel, a story about people who never existed; but the whole inanimate side of it is fact.

Once, in recent meteorological history, there really had been a hurricane as stupendous and as unpredicted as the one here recorded, and a British cargo steamer very like the
Archimedes
did live through it—just. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute that storm did behave in detail as is here narrated.

But there fact ends. For purposes of my novel I signed on a new and wholly imaginary crew. There are no
human
portraits here, for this would neither have been decent behavior to the men themselves nor would it have served my purposes as a novelist.

I examined that steamer from stem to stern while a crusted water line (from the 1,000 tons of sea she had shipped), slanting diagonally up the bulkheads dividing her holds, was still there to prove the incredible angle of the list she had taken and how near she had been to filling; while one could still see and handle cold steel torn and twisted like paper, tangled like string. I studied her logs and track charts. I questioned deck officers and engineers while their experience was still liquid in them so that, however reticent their normal natures, for the time being they could not help but talk and talk and talk. A little later, and in another command, I went to sea with her master. Thus I was able to piece together their several stories until possessed of the complete narrative of everything which had happened, in the material sense, in every several part of her: until I knew more about the total effects of that wind than any one of them separately knew.

How did I get this rare chance? The answer is simple: her owners felt that an event so extraordinary must never be forgotten. They had sent for me, as for some kind of tribal bard.

But why did I jump at the chance when I got it?

Here the answer is much less simple. I was already in the throes of another novel which this new project would have to elbow into limbo. The book moreover would be utterly unlike anything else I had written or expected to write—or, indeed, was fitted by experience to write, for I had never been to sea in steam (any more than, before writing
A High Wind in Jamaica
, I had ever been a little girl). The work involved would be immense. Why, then, this interest in an alien and merely true event so compulsive that I felt under the Muse's explicit orders to drop everything else and write it?

At the time of writing I was only aware of the compulsion: I had no glimmer of a notion
why
. Now, looking back, I do think I begin to see at least one reason. But to explore it calls for some rather recondite delving into the general motivation of imaginative writing; and perhaps at this point even the thoughtful reader (the other sort skips introductions anyway) would rather turn on to the story itself.

He will find a plain sea story about men in a storm (it is quite short and, although it took four years to write, can be read at a sitting). He can then come back, if he still wants to, abler to judge whether what follows here has a likely ring; but unless he has a real lust for taking the lids off writers to see how the wheels go round he had better not come back at all, for he may find what follows a rather rarefied and theoretical introduction to any plain sea story about men in a storm!

My own inclination in any such inquiry is to start from the premise of those who hold (the young Robert Graves was among the first to suggest it) that the writing of poetry does for the poet what dreaming does for Tom, Dick and Harry: it allows a safe outlet for conflicts and tensions too painful for his conscious mind to face, disguised so impenetrably in symbol that the poet himself has no inkling of what his poem is really “about”—just as the dreamer has none till his analyst tells him. The tension both determines the symbol and generates the compulsive force. Moreover, let me stress from the start the fundamental difference between symbol (in this dream sense) and conscious allegory: the poet's absolute ignorance of what he is really saying seems to be necessary if the magic is to work. A classic example is Keats's
La Belle Dame sans Merci;
the poet's agonized mind has palpably fused Fanny Brawne and Consumption in a single image, yet his own comments at the time (and his revisions are even more symptomatic) seem to show him quite unaware of this at a conscious level.

Usually these same critics (again with Robert Graves among the most emphatic) downright deny the same to be true of prose, that the roots of a prose piece ever run right down “under the threshold” as poetry does. But why? If an imaginative prose work has also insisted on being written—in its humbler way yet still just as irresistibly as a hen's egg insists on being laid—why must the novelist's compulsion be assumed to differ in kind from the poet's? An almost instantaneous flash of lightning and the steady illumination of a lamp are both electric light.

Mostly these multiple generating tensions are private and personal, like Keats's; and in this field, I should probably be the last to know even today what private neuroses of my own saw themselves reflected in these twin symbols of ship and hurricane, or constructed this varied picture of men enduring prolonged inanimate danger to be their escape hatch. But tensions can also derive from the situation of a whole society, and it is here that I think I do begin to see daylight.

For the period when this hurricane story reached and so instantly obsessed me was those early 1930s when the fading smell of remembered death in Britain was just beginning to be replaced by a new stench that was death prefigured. War, we had thought till then, was so safely behind us—the Great War, the “war to end all wars”; for more than 12 years we had been believing that with this final holocaust civilized man had worked war right out of his system. Indeed to many it had seemed an overinsurance that we had even bothered to set up a League of Nations at all, with adequate powers to withstand any risk of war in the impossible event that risk arose! When, step by step, that old postwar world was changed under our eyes into a new prewar one, how
could
we believe it? Reason forbade (for in really important matters Reason always is nine parts wishful thinking).

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and the League failed to stop it. In 1933, Hitler came to power and began to rearm. The next year, his abortive coup in Austria meant that henceforth Mussolini was needed on the Brenner Pass, and Italian designs on Abyssinia had to be winked at. But in Manchuria, we told ourselves, white men weren't involved (and yellow men are a different species from ours—don't quite count). As for Germany rearming, surely she'd a right to resume her place among the Powers, and this would content her? Abyssinia involved only one European nation, so still hardly counted. Spain, then, where white men did fight each other? We were knowing enough Freudians by now to see Spain as a grim football ground where (for the better security of world peace) the Communist and Fascist Powers could sublimate in semiprivate.

Right till the end all 10 parts of Reason went on telling us the final cataclysm would be dodged. Even in the summer of 1938, when Chamberlain waved “Peace in Our Time” in our faces, most of us believed him—or thought we did. “Or
thought
we did”—for that is the point I am making, that all this time, the bottoms of our minds knew better; that in our bones we had foreseen from the very beginning this hurricane of preternatural power which no maneuvering could dodge. Under this threshold of consciousness we were well aware that it would prove worse than even imagination could envisage but that we should endure, somehow reviving in ourselves that trust in stubbornness and Providence supposedly long since leached out.

When Reason plays the deaf adder—one ear in the sand and her tail plugging the other—then only symbol can serve; and a true-life story serves best of all as symbol, since even the inward censor has to admit its “truth.” Moreover, the text bristles with clues (which is typical of the workings of the subconscious): for example, how could I have written even that first page of the book without recognizing what my “ship” really stood for? Certainly no dream-analyst could.

Of course, had this been allegory and a conscious attempt to foretell the future couched in the terms of allegory, then I could claim to be a prophet of no mean rank: for little ingenuity would be needed to read into the story not only a foretelling of the onset of the war and its violence but even details of its future course—right down to the final
American
salvage ship! But that would be to misread it entirely, since this is not allegory at all but symbol; and symbol (in the dream sense) is never concerned primarily with the future
qua
future but with a much more timeless kind of truth.

All the same, this brings me to my final point: my symbol's eventual impact on my readers.

Till now, we have been concerned only with those motions in the writer's mind which went to make the book. But our initial premise can be applied also to those motions in the reader's mind to which a poem or a book gives rise. For where some tension in the writer's mind has eased itself in symbol, then that symbol may couple itself to a like tension in the reader or even (for that is the ambiguous nature of symbol) to some wholly different one. Indeed, perhaps the real reason we like reading is to have our therapeutic dreaming supplied us, thus, from outside.

It follows that at times of exceptionally deliberate self-deception people tend to shun all poetry and fiction; indeed it is symptomatic of a fear of the naked truth to prefer nonfiction.

From these last two paragraphs, what happened when the book first appeared, and again a little later, can perhaps be imagined. For it was published in 1938. The literary notices it got could hardly have been better, but initially it failed entirely to excite the general reader as, nine years earlier,
A High Wind in Jamaica
had done. For this was Munich-time, and people had something other than mere novels to think about—or supposed they had; and anyway, here was Chamberlain back from Germany with the blessed news that the hurricane
had
been dodged!

Thus initial sales were merely respectable. But when war after all did come and disaster followed disaster, something rather curious happened. Without being any more talked-about than before (for I doubt if readers knew why they were reading it any more than the writer had known why he wrote it), the book became more and more widely read. When at last the war was over and the British publisher checked his sales figures, he rubbed his eyes: he could hardly believe that in fact his sales of this book by that time had actually outstripped his total sales of the far more widely talked-of earlier one—in spite of paper-rationing and all.

So let me sum up, thus: I believe the theme of this book and of the “historical novel of my own times” I am engaged on now to be fundamentally the same. But what
The Fox in the Attic
(and the succeeding volumes still to come) looks at consciously with hindsight,
In Hazard
had already looked at 30 years ago quite unconsciously—with foresight.

—R
ICHARD
H
UGHES

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