Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [181]
What reflections he made in the silence of his cabin and how far he seriously attempted to foment revolt, or even hoped for it, was never made clear – he did not himself declare it. But there is no doubt that in this waste of sea, as the ship dragged her stench through the water and dead negroes continued to be cast over the side, Delblanc underwent a sort of conversion, of profound consequence for all of them, slaves and seamen alike. And the first sign of it was the way he sought to make converts.
A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself; he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact, because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it. Perhaps this is true for most of us. Delblanc had regarded himself as an artist of a sort, a drifting person, rather a failure. He had espoused theories of liberty and equality, as many do who feel they have made no mark on the world; but these had been diluted in society at large and by his own diffidence. Now, in the present circumstances of the ship, he found a world reduced, concentrated, the perfect model of a tyranny. He was driven to question his life’s purposes.
Quite frequently, on some corner of the deck or in Delblanc’s more spacious cabin, he and the surgeon would continue the discussions that had begun with their first meeting. Paris’s liking for the other persisted, grew stronger. There was a warmth, a personal attractiveness about him and a patent sincerity impossible to resist. Even without this Delblanc would always have held a special place in his affection and regard: it was to Delblanc that he had laid bare his soul that night at the fort, in the moonlit room, with the death-mask of the governor seeming to follow his every word and movement …
However, they could never altogether agree. Delblanc’s contention was that any people, any nation or group, could change their condition immediately and radically by changing their habits of mind. ‘Let the most oppressed people under heaven once change their thinking and they are free,’ he said, his brown eyes shining with that extraordinary openness and un-defendedness of expression, his hands – which were shapely and strong – gesturing sharply. He had recently developed a habit of gesture curiously at odds with the gentlemanly nonchalance of his bearing, abrupt, almost fierce, controlling and delimiting, cutting off possible dissent. ‘Even these people on the ship,’ he said, ‘both black and white, for they are imprisoned both.’
And Paris, weary and oppressed, suffering these days from a sort of feverish insomnia, would marvel at this pristine shine of Delblanc’s, the freshness of his face and clothes, his philosophical empressement, the increasing eagerness of his manner, in which, though this was not to occur to the surgeon until later, there were already the signs of that fanaticism which would so profoundly affect them all. ‘We can change our situation by thinking, you say,’ Paris would reply. ‘But whence comes this faith of yours that thinking can be changed? You are like a man who wants to build the upstairs rooms before he is sure of the foundations. Do you believe that habits of mind can be so easily reversed? For myself, I do not believe so.’
‘If ideas are not innate – and they are not – they cannot be so deeply lodged as to be beyond uprooting,’ Delblanc would say, with one of his eager, delimiting gestures. ‘It is only a question of supplanting one set of associations with another. I am convinced of it … I know it in my heart and mind, Paris. Man can live free and not seek to limit the freedom of others so long as no one seeks to limit his.’
So these discussions between them took usually an accustomed course. But Delblanc’s sense of mission was growing and he did not limit himself to Paris. Anyone at all – the weasel-faced Tapley, swabbing down the decks, a disgruntled Billy Blair coming up from scraping the slaves’ quarters, Morgan in his galley trying to find some new disguise for the rotten beef