To the Ends of the Earth by William Golding

repeat, we had a handful of the common people with us. It is possible they had entered the after part of the ship in much the same spirit as those visitors who declare they wish to view your lordship’s Canalettos but who are really there to see if they can how the nobility live. But I think it more probable that they had come in a simple spirit of devotion. Certainly that poor, pale girl could have no other object than to find the comforts of religion. Who would deny them to such a helpless sufferer, however illusory they be? Indeed, the trashy show of the preacher and his painted Magdalene may not have come between her and the imagined object of her supplications, but what of the honest fellows who attended her? They may well have been stricken in the tenderest regions of loyalty and subordination.
    Truly Captain Anderson detests the church! His attitude has been at work on the people. He had given no orders, it is said, but would know how to esteem those officers who did not agree with him in his obsession . Only Mr Summers and the gangling army officer,Mr Oldmeadow, were present. You know why I was there! I do not choose to submit to tyranny!
    Most of the fellow’s address was over before I made the major discovery in my, as it were, diagnosis of the situation . I had thought when I first saw how the painted face of the actrice engaged the eye of the reverend gentleman, that he experienced disgust mingled perhaps with the involuntary excitement, the first movement of warmth—no, lust—that an evident wanton will call from the male body rather than mind, by her very pronouncement of availability. But I soon saw that this would not do. Mr Colley has never been to a theatre! Where, too, would he progress, in what must surely be one of our remoter dioceses , from a theatre to a maison d’occasion ? His book told him of painted women and how their feet go down to hell but did not include advice on how to recognize one by candlelight ! He took her to be what her performance suggested to him! A chain of tawdry linked them. There came a moment in his address when having used the word of all others “gentlemen”, he swung to her and with a swooning archness exclaimed, “Or ladies, madam, however beautiful ”, before going on with his theme. I heard a positive hiss from within Miss Granham’s bonnet and Summers crossed then uncrossed his knees.
    It ended at last, and I returned to my hutch, to write this entry, in, I am sorry to say, increasing discomfort though the motion of the ship is easy enough. I do not know what is the matter with me. I have written sourly and feel sour, that is the fact of the matter.

(?)
    I am up and about, pale, frail, convalescent. It seems that after all I may live to reach our destination!
    I wrote that yesterday. My entries are becoming short as some of Mr Sterne’s chapters! But there is one amusing circumstance that I must acquaint your lordship with. At the height of my misery and just before I succumbed to a large dose of Wheeler’s paregoric there came a timid knock at my hutch door. I cried “Who is there?” To which a faint voice replied, “It is I, Mr Talbot, sir. Mr Colley, sir. You remember, the Reverend Mr Colley, at your service.” By some stroke of luck rather than wit I hit on the only reply that would protect me from his visitation .
    “Leave me I beg you, Mr Colley—” a dreadful convulsion of the guts interrupted me for a moment; then—“I am at prayer!”
    Either a decent respect for my privacy or Wheeler approaching with the good draught in his hand rid me of him. The paregoric—it was a stiff and justifiable dose that knocked me out . Yet I do have some indistinct memory of opening my eyes in stupor and seeing that curious assemblage of features, that oddity of nature, Colley, hanging over me. God knows when that happened—if it happened ! But now I am up , if not about , the man surely will not have the impertinence to thrust himself on me.
    The dreams of