The Bible

The Bible enters the voyage as both a text repeatedly read for comfort and a practical gift offered in the face of suffering. Its significance shifts when Bella Baxter tests its promise of consolation against the starving people she has encountered: the book remains in her hands, but its answers do not settle her distress.

A Reading on the Ship

As the ship prepares to leave Odessa at noon, Duncan Wedderburn reads a French Bible in a nook between two ventilators, the one place outside their cabin where Bella can persuade him to go. The passengers’ lounge has books in Russian; because Wedderburn knows French, he and the Bible become inseparable. He returns to some passages repeatedly, then stares into space, frowning and whispering that he sees. Beside this concentrated devotional reading, Bella reads Punch, whose caricatures mock poor people, servants, Socialists, and other social groups. Her question about what Socialists are begins a conversation that makes the Bible’s presence part of a wider encounter with belief and social judgment.

Hooker’s New Testament

Later, Dr. Hooker lends Bella a New Testament in the hope that she will find peace in Jesus. The book is not an abstract emblem of faith: it is a loan placed in Bella’s keeping during the voyage. But reading it does not bring the peace Hooker intended. Bella understands Jesus as having been maddened by cruelty and coldness, and imagines that he, too, must have hated the prospect of making people better alone. She also identifies the decisive difference between them: Jesus could perform miracles, while she cannot.

The Limits of Consolation

Bella puts the text’s promise to a test through a concrete question. She asks Hooker how Jesus would have treated her starving little daughter and a blind baby. Hooker answers that Jesus made the blind see; Bella then presses him to consider what Jesus would have done if he had been unable to make them see, asking whether he would have hurried past like a bad Samaritan. The exchange turns the Bible from a source offered for comfort into the measure against which Bella challenges the distance between miraculous healing and the suffering that remains when miracles are unavailable.

Dr. Hooker leaves the Russian Cargo Ship Cut-use-off in Morocco without saying goodbye or asking for the book back. Bella suspects that her challenge about Jesus and the children helps explain his departure, but presents this as her own belief rather than certain knowledge. The New Testament thus remains bound to an unresolved encounter: Hooker offers it as a route to peace, while Bella’s questions expose how little consolation its promise provides in the face of suffering she has witnessed.