After the Rain by John Bowen

wasn’t required to be a fundamentalist. Nobody wanted me to believe in God as a person, or in Christ as anything else. Nowadays, you know, Heaven is not a place, but a oneness with God; the individual soul dissolves into the God-soul, as it were—not very easy to communicate to one’s parishioners, but then one’s contact with them is not inchurch; one never sees them in church, and all the good work is done in the Clubs and on the playing fields.”
    “But the beauty of it. The stillness. The communion,” Gertrude said. “One has to believe in that.”
    Banner said, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not a thing I ever experienced, you see, except in other people’s churches sometimes, older than mine, and more—more
foreign
like Notre Dame or St. Peter’s. My church was a nineteenth-century construction in an industrial parish, and the choir—I don’t think I ever had more than six in the choir or sixty in the congregation.”
    At the edge of the raft, Hunter suddenly stood up, jerked his fishing line out of the water, and shouted, “Land ho!”
    *
    It was not land. It was an ark.
    We could not know this. We could see no more than its indistinct outline against the horizon. Long before Hunter sighted it, the ark must have been lying as we were, becalmed in the smooth sea, for it did not come any closer to us, nor could we approach it. Both ark and raft remained where they were, and the whole party of us, gathered on deck in response to Hunter’s call, strained our eyes to stare at it, still thinking it to be land.
    “It might be a mirage,” I said.
    “And it might not.”
    “Hadn’t you better send out a dove?” I said.
    Muriel said, “You’ve no reason to mock,” andArthur took off his glasses, and wiped them on the side of his trunks. “Are there any binoculars on board, Captain Hunter?” he said.
    “Oh Lord,” said Hunter, “I can’t remember where I left them.”
    “Try,” Arthur said, “And while you are trying, the rest of us will return to whatever we were doing. Mr. Ryle, if you have finished your exercises, perhaps you will take a turn at fishing.” He went back to the cabin, and Muriel followed him. The rest of us, once the door was safely closed, continued to stare out to sea.
    When the binoculars had been found, Arthur stood for some time, gazing through them at the distant shape. “It is a vessel,” he said.
    “Any sign of life?”
    “None. But at this distance one can distinguish very little.” Arthur lowered the binoculars, and put them away in their case. Nobody else asked to use them; they had already become a badge of leadership like an officer’s sword. “We shall have to go and see,” he said.
    “How?”
    “The dinghy.”
    The dinghy and paddles were still in the hold. “I’ll go,” Hunter said.
    “Wait,” Arthur said. “It is too far to paddle this afternoon; we should not be able to return in daylight. Captain Hunter, are you sure there are no other weapons on board beside your fishing spear?”
    “Sorry, Arthur.”
    Gertrude said, “Weapons?”
    “Miss Harrison, you must not assume that everyone has the same gentleness of spirit as yourself. If that should be a vessel as I think it, and if there should be a crew aboard, we may be attacked. We have food, which they may covet. We have seen them; perhaps they have also seen us. We must not rule out the possibility of piracy.”
    “But Arthur,” Banner said, “surely at a time like this we’re all in the same boat?”
    “Manifestly not, Mr. Banner. We are in our boat, they in theirs. If ours is the more seaworthy, they may wish to make an exchange. We shall mount a guard tonight.”
    That night Banner, Hunter, Tony and I stood watches. I do not know whether the others felt as foolish as I did as I paced around the deck, staring over the moonlit water. Together the moon and the phosphorescence made a silver world, so that it was easy to believe in the mermaids and sea-sirens who would coax a man down the