MDDM Ch. 11 Summary

[jbor]

Night. Hail outside the parlour window. "Genial Uncle Lomax", younger than
Ives but older than Ethelmer, has joined the "Den of Parlor Apes": the
relations are gathering one by one.

Ives is "smug", cynical. Ethelmer is sceptical, maybe a little miffed.
'Brae, compassionate, flirts.

Euphrenia's attempt to hijack the role of narrator is subverted by Wicks,
though it quickly emerges that neither of them had ever been to St Helena.

Ives: "Then how are we ever to know what happen'd ... ?"

How indeed.

***

James's Town is a sinister, violent place. Human behaviour here mimics the
"Blows" of the Ocean, the fierce Rain-Storms, and the Wind, "brutal and
pure". 

To Mason it is as if "Darkness" has usurped the Sun as motive force in the
universe.

To the narrator, the town has "begun to climb into the Ravine behind it",
fearful, perhaps, of the "Creatures of the Ocean depths" which watch and
wait in the shallows. And, we are told, "travelers" in the highlands "have
reported" that the "the sea appears to lie *above the Island*".

Maskelyne has been here for over a year, joylessly observing the nightly
journey of Sirius, the Dog Star, across the Southern Sky.

A pair of gallows is poetically compared to St Paul's Cathedral in London.

The population comprises sailors, female convicts, young wives alone on
their way to join husbands in India, and "Company Perpetuals" ....

One of these women, Florinda, beautiful but with appalling fashion sense,
recognises Mason from a day at the Tyburn hangings. They sing a duet --
something of a hangman's lament in all -- commemorating a nobleman's demise
they witnessed when first they met.

We learn how Mason's melancholy after Rebekah's death drove him to
debauchery, though Wicks is both interrupted by 'Brae and egged on by the
Uncles, who are plying him with brandy it appears.

There is another song about the general spectacle at Tyburn, and a comment
on 32 year old Mason's irrational urge to "chat up women" there, before the
social gala accompanying the execution of Lord Ferrers for the murder of his
valet, and Mason's conversational gaucheness with the bawdy belle, are
described in satirical detail. The two stroll and take wine, while affecting
French mannerisms and speech. Florinda begins to lose interest when she
discovers Mason's vocation as an Astronomer. And, soon, as they banter,
poor, sad Mason realises that Florinda has only been practising her wenchly
wiles on him ....

Back to St. Helena. Florinda's intended appears in the darkling dusk, a
Bergmanesque apparition of Death with, like his fiancee, something of a
theatrical past. Mason, humiliated as before, introduces Dixon, who again
begins and again does not finish his (one and only?) Joak ....

best