TYPHOON
AND OTHER STORIES BY
JOSEPH CONRAD Far as the mariner on
highest mast
Can see all around upon the calmed vast,
So wide was Neptune's hall . . .
-- KEATS
TO
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM
THE main characteristic
of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not
only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in
which they appear in the book.
The period is that
which follows on my connection with Blackwood's Magazine. I had just finished
writing "The End of the Tether" and was casting about for some
subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume
of "Youth" when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies
from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to my recollection.
Years before I had heard it being talked about in the East as a recent
occurrence. It was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many
others of the kind. Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation
will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives
but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have
never had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not so
much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.
I never met anybody
personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of
course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the
ship's life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her
deck. Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that
company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The
financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a
mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle
talk for which it was not adapted.
From the first the mere
anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that such a thing had happened on the
high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation. Yet it was but a
bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to bring out its deeper significance
which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a
leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of
view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.
What was needed of
course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was
the man for the situation. I don't mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr
in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his
dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few
weeks, or a few months. He is the product of twenty years of life. My own life.
Conscious invention had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain
MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part
extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly
authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while
I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my
actual experience.
At its first appearance
"Typhoon," the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately
intended stormpiece. Others picked out MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a
definite symbolic intention. Neither was exclusively my intention. Both the
typhoon and Captain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of
the deep conviction with which I approached the subject of the story. It was
their opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to
discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages
themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for
themselves.
This is a belated
reflection. If it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away
with the existence of this Author's Note; for, indeed, the same remark applies
to every story in this volume. None of them are stories of experience in the
absolute sense of the word. Experience in them is but the canvas of the
attempted picture. Each of them has its more than one intention. With each the
question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the
question for itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity,
were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations.
And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own
way to the conscience of each successive reader.
"Falk" -- the
second story in the volume -- offended the delicacy of one critic at least by
certain peculiarities of its subject. But what is the subject of
"Falk"? I personally do not feel so very certain about it. He who reads
must find out for himself. My intention in writing "Falk" was not to
shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on
their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written
there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's
attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter
in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within
the boundaries of human emotions.
I may safely say that
Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters
combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral
delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest
misgivings as to his right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved
life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive
enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that
experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the
subject of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt
to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly
involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.
"Falk" shares
with one other of my stories ("The Return" in the "Tales of
Unrest" volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. I think
the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it indignantly
on the sole ground that "the girl never says anything." This is
perfectly true. From first to last Hermann's niece utters no word in the tale
-- and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason that whenever
she happens to come under the observation of the narrator she has either no occasion
or is too profoundly moved to speak. The editor, who obviously had read the
story, might have perceived that for himself. Apparently he did not, and I
refrained from pointing out the impossibility to him because, since he did not
venture to say that "the girl" did not live, I felt no concern at his
indignation.
All the other stories
were serialized. The "Typhoon" appeared in the early numbers of the
Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direction of the late Mr. Halkett. It was on
that occasion, too, that I saw for the first time my conceptions rendered by an
artist in another medium. Mr. Maurice Grieffenhagen knew how to combine in his
illustrations the effect of his own most distinguished personal vision with an
absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the writer. "Amy Foster" was
published in The Illustrated London News with a fine drawing of Amy on her day
out giving tea to the children at her home, in a hat with a big feather.
"To-morrow" appeared first in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of that story I
will only say that it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and
that I was induced to dramatize it under the title of "One Day More";
up to the present my only effort in that direction. I may also add that each of
the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on various
grounds as the "best of the lot" by different critics, who reviewed
the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a sympathetic
insight and a friendliness of expression for which I cannot be sufficiently
grateful.
TYPHOON . . . . . . . 3
AMY FOSTER . . . . 105
FALK: A REMINISCENCE .
. . . 145
TO-MORROW . . . . . 243
CAPTAIN MACWHIRR, of
the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in the order of material
appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it presented no marked
characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics
whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled.
The only thing his
aspect might have been said to suggest, at times, was bashfulness; because he
would sit, in business offices ashore, sunburnt and smiling faintly, with
downcast eyes. When he raised them, they were perceived to be direct in their
glance and of blue colour. His hair was fair and extremely fine, clasping from
temple to temple the bald dome of his skull in a clamp as of fluffy silk. The
hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of
copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he
shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface
of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bit round-shouldered,
and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked a shade too tight for his
arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is due to the difference of
latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a complete suit of a brownish hue, and
clumsy black boots. These harbour togs gave to his thick figure an air of stiff
and uncouth smartness. A thin silver watch-chain looped his waistcoat, and he
never left his ship for the shore without clutching in his powerful, hairy fist
an elegant umbrella of the very best quality, but generally unrolled. Young
Jukes, the chief mate, attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes
venture to say, with the greatest gentleness, "Allow me, sir" -- and
possessing himself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule,
shake the folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going through
the performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon Rout,
the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight, would turn
away his head in order to hide a smile. "Oh! aye! The blessed gamp. . . .
Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr, heartily,
without looking up.
Having just enough
imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he was
tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the
least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing,
and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the
floating abode of harmony and peace. It was, in truth, as impossible for him to
take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a
chronometer with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of
tools. Yet the uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of
the bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in Captain
MacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could have
induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in Belfast to run
away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the age of fifteen. It was
enough, when you thought it over, to give you the idea of an immense, potent,
and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of
shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the
multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt-of directions.
His father never really
forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. "We could have got on without
him," he used to say later on, "but there's the business. And he an
only son, too!" His mother wept very much after his disappearance. As it
had never occurred to him to leave word behind, he was mourned over for dead
till, after eight months, his first letter arrived from Talcahuano. It was
short, and contained the statement: "We had very fine weather on our
passage out." But evidently, in the writer's mind, the only important
intelligence was to the effect that his captain had, on the very day of
writing, entered him regularly on the ship's articles as Ordinary Seaman.
"Because I can do the work," he explained. The mother again wept
copiously, while the remark, "Tom's an ass," expressed the emotions
of the father. He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to
the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little
pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.
MacWhirr's visits to
his home were necessarily rare, and in the course of years he despatched other
letters to his parents, informing them of his successive promotions and of his
movements upon the vast earth. In these missives could be found sentences like
this: "The heat here is very great." Or: "On Christmas day at 4
P. M. we fell in with some icebergs." The old people ultimately became
acquainted with a good many names of ships, and with the names of the skippers
who commanded them -- with the names of Scots and English shipowners -- with
the names of seas, oceans, straits, promontories -- with outlandish names of
lumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports -- with the names of islands --
with the name of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy. It did not
suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the name pretty. And then
they died.
The great day of
MacWhirr's marriage came in due course, following shortly upon the great day
when he got his first command.
All these events had
taken place many years before the morning when, in the chart-room of the
steamer Nan-Shan, he stood confronted by the fall of a barometer he had no
reason to distrust. The fall -- taking into account the excellence of the
instrument, the time of the year, and the ship's position on the terrestrial
globe -- was of a nature ominously prophetic; but the red face of the man
betrayed no sort of inward disturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he
was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had
brought it home to his very door. "That's a fall, and no mistake," he
thought. "There must be some uncommonly dirty weather knocking
about."
The Nan-Shan was on her
way from the southward to the treaty port of Fu-chau, with some cargo in her
lower holds, and two hundred Chinese coolies returning to their village homes
in the province of Fo-kien, after a few years of work in various tropical
colonies. The morning was fine, the oily sea heaved without a sparkle, and
there was a queer white misty patch in the sky like a halo of the sun. The
fore-deck, packed with Chinamen, was full of sombre clothing, yellow faces, and
pigtails, sprinkled over with a good many naked shoulders, for there was no
wind, and the heat was close. The coolies lounged, talked, smoked, or stared
over the rail; some, drawing water over the side, sluiced each other; a few
slept on hatches, while several small parties of six sat on their heels surrounding
iron trays with plates of rice and tiny teacups; and every single Celestial of
them was carrying with him all he had in the world -- a wooden chest with a
ringing lock and brass on the corners, containing the savings of his labours:
some clothes of ceremony, sticks of incense, a little opium maybe, bits of
nameless rubbish of conventional value, and a small hoard of silver dollars,
toiled for in coal lighters, won in gambling-houses or in petty trading,
grubbed out of earth, sweated out in mines, on railway lines, in deadly jungle,
under heavy burdens -- amassed patiently, guarded with care, cherished
fiercely.
A cross swell had set
in from the direction of Formosa Channel about ten o'clock, without disturbing
these passengers much, because the Nan-Shan, with her flat bottom, rolling
chocks on bilges, and great breadth of beam, had the reputation of an
exceptionally steady ship in a sea-way. Mr. Jukes, in moments of expansion on
shore, would proclaim loudly that the "old girl was as good as she was
pretty." It would never have occurred to Captain MacWhirr to express his
favourable opinion so loud or in terms so fanciful.
She was a good ship,
undoubtedly, and not old either. She had been built in Dumbarton less than
three years before, to the order of a firm of merchants in Siam -- Messrs. Sigg
and Son. When she lay afloat, finished in every detail and ready to take up the
work of her life, the builders contemplated her with pride.
"Sigg has asked us
for a reliable skipper to take her out," remarked one of the partners; and
the other, after reflecting for a while, said: "I think MacWhirr is ashore
just at present." "Is he? Then wire him at once. He's the very
man," declared the senior, without a moment's hesitation.
Next morning MacWhirr
stood before them unperturbed, having travelled from London by the midnight
express after a sudden but undemonstrative parting with his wife. She was the
daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days.
"We had better be
going together over the ship, Captain," said the senior partner; and the
three men started to view the perfections of the Nan-Shan from stem to stern,
and from her keelson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts.
Captain MacWhirr had
begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on the end of a steam windless
embodying all the latest improvements.
"My uncle wrote of
you favourably by yesterday's mail to our good friends -- Messrs. Sigg, you
know -- and doubtless they'll continue you out there in command," said the
junior partner. "You'll be able to boast of being in charge of the
handiest boat of her size on the coast of China, Captain," he added.
"Have you? Thank
'ee," mumbled vaguely MacWhirr, to whom the view of a distant eventuality
could appeal no more than the beauty of a wide landscape to a purblind tourist;
and his eyes happening at the moment to be at rest upon the lock of the cabin
door, he walked up to it, full of purpose, and began to rattle the handle
vigorously, while he observed, in his low, earnest voice, "You can't trust
the workmen nowadays. A brand-new lock, and it won't act at all. Stuck fast.
See? See?"
As soon as they found
themselves alone in their office across the yard: "You praised that fellow
up to Sigg. What is it you see in him?" asked the nephew, with faint contempt.
"I admit he has
nothing of your fancy skipper about him, if that's what you mean," said
the elder man, curtly. "Is the foreman of the joiners on the Nan-Shan
outside? . . . Come in, Bates. How is it that you let Tait's people put us off
with a defective lock on the cabin door? The Captain could see directly he set
eye on it. Have it replaced at once. The little straws, Bates . . . the little
straws. . . ."
The lock was replaced
accordingly, and a few days afterwards the Nan-Shan steamed out to the East,
without MacWhirr having offered any further remark as to her fittings, or
having been heard to utter a single word hinting at pride in his ship,
gratitude for his appointment, or satisfaction at his prospects.
With a temperament
neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk. There
were matters of duty, of course -- directions, orders, and so on; but the past
being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general
actualities of the day required no comment -- because facts can speak for
themselves with overwhelming precision.
Old Mr. Sigg liked a
man of few words, and one that "you could be sure would not try to improve
upon his instructions." MacWhirr satisfying these requirements, was
continued in command of the Nan-Shan, and applied himself to the careful
navigation of his ship in the China seas. She had come out on a British
register, but after some time Messrs. Sigg judged it expedient to transfer her
to the Siamese flag.
At the news of the
contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as if under a sense of personal
affront. He went about grumbling to himself, and uttering short scornful
laughs. "Fancy having a ridiculous Noah's Ark elephant in the ensign of
one's ship," he said once at the engine-room door. "Dash me if I can
stand it: I'll throw up the billet. Don't it make you sick, Mr. Rout?" The
chief engineer only cleared his throat with the air of a man who knows the
value of a good billet.
The first morning the
new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-Shan Jukes stood looking at it
bitterly from the bridge. He struggled with his feelings for a while, and then
remarked, "Queer flag for a man to sail under, sir."
"What's the matter
with the flag?" inquired Captain MacWhirr. "Seems all right to me."
And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have a good look.
"Well, it looks
queer to me," burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, and flung off the
bridge.
Captain MacWhirr was
amazed at these manners. After a while he stepped quietly into the chart-room,
and opened his International Signal Code-book at the plate where the flags of
all the nations are correctly figured in gaudy rows. He ran his finger over them,
and when he came to Siam he contemplated with great attention the red field and
the white elephant. Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought
the book out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawing
with the real thing at the flagstaff astern. When next Jukes, who was carrying
on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness, happened on the
bridge, his commander observed:
"There's nothing
amiss with that flag."
"Isn't
there?" mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-locker and
jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.
"No. I looked up
the book. Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle. I
thought the people ashore would know how to make the local flag. Stands to
reason. You were wrong, Jukes. . . ."
"Well, sir,"
began Jukes, getting up excitedly, "all I can say --" He fumbled for
the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.
"That's all
right." Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a little canvas
folding-stool he greatly affected. "All you have to do is to take care
they don't hoist the elephant upside-down before they get quite used to
it."
Jukes flung the new
lead-line over on the fore-deck with a loud "Here you are, bo'ss'en --
don't forget to wet it thoroughly," and turned with immense resolution
towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spread his elbows on the
bridge-rail comfortably.
"Because it would
be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress," he went on. "What
do you think? That elephant there, I take it, stands for something in the
nature of the Union Jack in the flag. . . ."
"Does it!"
yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan's decks looked towards the
bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation: "It would certainly
be a dam' distressful sight," he said, meekly.
Later in the day he
accosted the chief engineer with a confidential, "Here, let me tell you
the old man's latest."
Mr. Solomon Rout
(frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout), from finding
himself almost invariably the tallest man on board every ship he joined, had
acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurely condescension. His hair was scant
and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale, his bony wrists and long scholarly hands
were pale, too, as though he had lived all his life in the shade.
He smiled from on high
at Jukes, and went on smoking and glancing about quietly, in the manner of a
kind uncle lending an ear to the tale of an excited schoolboy. Then, greatly
amused but impassive, he asked:
"And did you throw
up the billet?"
"No," cried
Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the harsh buzz of the
Nan-Shan's friction winches. All of them were hard at work, snatching slings of
cargo, high up, to the end of long derricks, only, as it seemed, to let them
rip down recklessly by the run. The cargo chains groaned in the gins, clinked
on coamings, rattled over the side; and the whole ship quivered, with her long
gray flanks smoking in wreaths of steam. "No," cried Jukes, "I
didn't. What's the good? I might just as well fling my resignation at this
bulkhead. I don't believe you can make a man like that understand anything. He
simply knocks me over."
At that moment Captain
MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the deck, umbrella in hand, escorted by
a mournful, self-possessed Chinaman, walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes,
and who also carried an umbrella.
The master of the
Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at his boots as his manner was,
remarked that it would be necessary to call at Fu-chau this trip, and desired
Mr. Rout to have steam up to-morrow afternoon at one o'clock sharp. He pushed
back his hat to wipe his forehead, observing at the same time that he hated
going ashore anyhow; while overtopping him Mr. Rout, without deigning a word,
smoked austerely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand. Then
Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward 'tween-deck
clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be put down there. The Bun Hin
Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-five bags of rice would be coming
off in a sampan directly, for stores. All seven-years'-men they were, said
Captain MacWhirr, with a camphor-wood chest to every man. The carpenter should
be set to work nailing three-inch battens along the deck below, fore and aft,
to keep these boxes from shifting in a sea-way. Jukes had better look to it at
once. "D'ye hear, Jukes?" This chinaman here was coming with the ship
as far as Fu-chau -- a sort of interpreter he would be. Bun Hin's clerk he was,
and wanted to have a look at the space. Jukes had better take him forward.
"D'ye hear, Jukes?"
Jukes took care to
punctuate these instructions in proper places with the obligatory "Yes,
sir," ejaculated without enthusiasm. His brusque "Come along, John;
make look see" set the Chinaman in motion at his heels.
"Wanchee look see,
all same look see can do," said Jukes, who having no talent for foreign
languages mangled the very pidgin-English cruelly. He pointed at the open hatch.
"Catchee number one piecie place to sleep in. Eh?"
He was gruff, as became
his racial superiority, but not unfriendly. The Chinaman, gazing sad and
speechless into the darkness of the hatchway, seemed to stand at the head of a
yawning grave.
"No catchee rain
down there -- savee?" pointed out Jukes. "Suppose all'ee same fine
weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside," he pursued, warming up
imaginatively. "Make so -- Phooooo!" He expanded his chest and blew
out his cheeks. "Savee, John? Breathe -- fresh air. Good. Eh? Washee him
piecie pants, chow-chow top-side -- see, John?"
With his mouth and
hands he made exuberant motions of eating rice and washing clothes; and the
Chinaman, who concealed his distrust of this pantomime under a collected
demeanour tinged by a gentle and refined melancholy, glanced out of his almond
eyes from Jukes to the hatch and back again. "Velly good," he
murmured, in a disconsolate undertone, and hastened smoothly along the decks,
dodging obstacles in his course. He disappeared, ducking low under a sling of
ten dirty gunny-bags full of some costly merchandise and exhaling a repulsive
smell.
Captain MacWhirr
meantime had gone on the bridge, and into the chart-room, where a letter,
commenced two days before, awaited termination. These long letters began with
the words, "My darling wife," and the steward, between the scrubbing
of the floors and the dusting of chronometer-boxes, snatched at every
opportunity to read them. They interested him much more than they possibly
could the woman for whose eye they were intended; and this for the reason that
they related in minute detail each successive trip of the Nan-Shan.
Her master, faithful to
facts, which alone his consciousness reflected, would set them down with
painstaking care upon many pages. The house in a northern suburb to which these
pages were addressed had a bit of garden before the bow-windows, a deep porch
of good appearance, coloured glass with imitation lead frame in the front door.
He paid five-and-forty pounds a year for it, and did not think the rent too
high, because Mrs. MacWhirr (a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a
disdainful manner) was admittedly ladylike, and in the neighbourhood considered
as "quite superior." The only secret of her life was her abject
terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good. Under the
same roof there dwelt also a daughter called Lydia and a son, Tom. These two
were but slightly acquainted with their father. Mainly, they knew him as a rare
but privileged visitor, who of an evening smoked his pipe in the dining-room
and slept in the house. The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of
him; the boy was frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward,
delightful, unaffected way manly boys have.
And Captain MacWhirr
wrote home from the coast of China twelve times every year, desiring quaintly
to be "remembered to the children," and subscribing himself
"your loving husband," as calmly as if the words so long used by so
many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.
The China seas north
and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of every-day, eloquent facts,
such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents -- tangled
facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language. Their
speech appealed to Captain MacWhirr's sense of realities so forcibly that he
had given up his state-room below and practically lived all his days on the
bridge of his ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in
the chart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of them, without
exception, contained the phrase, "The weather has been very fine this
trip," or some other form of a statement to that effect. And this
statement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfect accuracy
as all the others they contained.
Mr. Rout likewise wrote
letters; only no one on board knew how chatty he could be pen in hand, because
the chief engineer had enough imagination to keep his desk locked. His wife
relished his style greatly. They were a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big,
high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty, shared with Mr. Rout's toothless and
venerable mother a little cottage near Teddington. She would run over her
correspondence, at breakfast, with lively eyes, and scream out interesting
passages in a joyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the
warning shout, "Solomon says!" She had the trick of firing off
Solomon's utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the
unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations. On the
day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, she found occasion
to remark, "As Solomon says: 'the engineers that go down to the sea in
ships behold the wonders of sailor nature';" when a change in the
visitor's countenance made her stop and stare.
"Solomon. . . .
Oh! . . . Mrs. Rout," stuttered the young man, very red in the face,
"I must say . . . I don't. . . ."
"He's my
husband," she announced in a great shout, throwing herself back in the
chair. Perceiving the joke, she laughed immoderately with a handkerchief to her
eyes, while he sat wearing a forced smile, and, from his inexperience of jolly
women, fully persuaded that she must be deplorably insane. They were excellent
friends afterwards; for, absolving her from irreverent intention, he came to
think she was a very worthy person indeed; and he learned in time to receive
without flinching other scraps of Solomon's wisdom.
"For my
part," Solomon was reported by his wife to have said once, "give me
the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue. There is a way to take a fool;
but a rogue is smart and slippery." This was an airy generalization drawn
from the particular case of Captain MacWhirr's honesty, which, in itself, had
the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay. On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable
to generalize, unmarried, and unengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart
after another fashion to an old chum and former shipmate, actually serving as
second officer on board an Atlantic liner.
First of all he would
insist upon the advantages of the Eastern trade, hinting at its superiority to
the Western ocean service. He extolled the sky, the seas, the ships, and the
easy life of the Far East. The Nan-Shan, he affirmed, was second to none as a
sea-boat.
"We have no
brass-bound uniforms, but then we are like brothers here," he wrote.
"We all mess together and live like fighting-cocks. . . . All the chaps of
the black-squad are as decent as they make that kind, and old Sol, the Chief,
is a dry stick. We are good friends. As to our old man, you could not find a
quieter skipper. Sometimes you would think he hadn't sense enough to see
anything wrong. And yet it isn't that. Can't be. He has been in command for a
good few years now. He doesn't do anything actually foolish, and gets his ship
along all right without worrying anybody. I believe he hasn't brains enough to
enjoy kicking up a row. I don't take advantage of him. I would scorn it.
Outside the routine of duty he doesn't seem to understand more than half of
what you tell him. We get a laugh out of this at times; but it is dull, too, to
be with a man like this -- in the long-run. Old Sol says he hasn't much conversation.
Conversation! O Lord! He never talks. The other day I had been yarning under
the bridge with one of the engineers, and he must have heard us. When I came up
to take my watch, he steps out of the chart-room and has a good look all round,
peeps over at the sidelights, glances at the compass, squints upward at the
stars. That's his regular performance. By-and-by he says: 'Was that you talking
just now in the port alleyway?' 'Yes, sir.' 'With the third engineer?' 'Yes,
sir.' He walks off to starboard, and sits under the dodger on a little
campstool of his, and for half an hour perhaps he makes no sound, except that I
heard him sneeze once. Then after a while I hear him getting up over there, and
he strolls across to port, where I was. 'I can't understand what you can find
to talk about,' says he. 'Two solid hours. I am not blaming you. I see people
ashore at it all day long, and then in the evening they sit down and keep at it
over the drinks. Must be saying the same things over and over again. I can't understand.'
"Did you ever hear
anything like that? And he was so patient about it. It made me quite sorry for
him. But he is exasperating, too, sometimes. Of course one would not do
anything to vex him even if it were worth while. But it isn't. He's so jolly
innocent that if you were to put your thumb to your nose and wave your fingers
at him he would only wonder gravely to himself what got into you. He told me
once quite simply that he found it very difficult to make out what made people
always act so queerly. He's too dense to trouble about, and that's the
truth."
Thus wrote Mr. Jukes to
his chum in the Western ocean trade, out of the fulness of his heart and the
liveliness of his fancy.
He had expressed his
honest opinion. It was not worthwhile trying to impress a man of that sort. If
the world had been full of such men, life would have probably appeared to Jukes
an unentertaining and unprofitable business. He was not alone in his opinion.
The sea itself, as if sharing Mr. Jukes' good-natured forbearance, had never
put itself out to startle the silent man, who seldom looked up, and wandered
innocently over the waters with the only visible purpose of getting food,
raiment, and house-room for three people ashore. Dirty weather he had known, of
course. He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way, felt at
the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole he had been justified
in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never been given a glimpse of
immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that passes exhausted
but never appeased -- the wrath and fury of the passionate sea. He knew it
existed, as we know that crime and abominations exist; he had heard of it as a
peaceable citizen in a town hears of battles, famines, and floods, and yet
knows nothing of what these things mean -- though, indeed, he may have been
mixed up in a street row, have gone without his dinner once, or been soaked to
the skin in a shower. Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the
oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into
a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to
see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea
and land such men thus fortunate -- or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.
OBSERVING the steady
fall of the barometer, Captain MacWhirr thought, "There's some dirty
weather knocking about." This is precisely what he thought. He had had an
experience of moderately dirty weather -- the term dirty as applied to the
weather implying only moderate discomfort to the seaman. Had he been informed
by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally
accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have
assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no
other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not
necessarily imply comprehension. The wisdom of his county had pronounced by
means of an Act of Parliament that before he could be considered as fit to take
charge of a ship he should be able to answer certain simple questions on the
subject of circular storms such as hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons; and
apparently he had answered them, since he was now in command of the Nan-Shan in
the China seas during the season of typhoons. But if he had answered he
remembered nothing of it. He was, however, conscious of being made
uncomfortable by the clammy heat. He came out on the bridge, and found no
relief to this oppression. The air seemed thick. He gasped like a fish, and
began to believe himself greatly out of sorts.
The Nan-Shan was
ploughing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that had the surface
and the shimmer of an undulating piece of gray silk. The sun, pale and without
rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen
were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched, yellow faces
were like the faces of bilious invalids. Captain MacWhirr noticed two of them
especially, stretched out on their backs below the bridge. As soon as they had
closed their eyes they seemed dead. Three others, however, were quarrelling
barbarously away forward; and one big fellow, half naked, with herculean
shoulders, was hanging limply over a winch; another, sitting on the deck, his
knees up and his head drooping sideways in a girlish attitude, was plaiting his
pigtail with infinite languor depicted in his whole person and in the very
movement of his fingers. The smoke struggled with difficulty out of the funnel,
and instead of streaming away spread itself out like an infernal sort of cloud,
smelling of sulphur and raining soot all over the decks.
"What the devil
are you doing there, Mr. Jukes?" asked Captain MacWhirr.
This unusual form of
address, though mumbled rather than spoken, caused the body of Mr. Jukes to
start as though it had been prodded under the fifth rib. He had had a low bench
brought on the bridge, and sitting on it, with a length of rope curled about his
feet and a piece of canvas stretched over his knees, was pushing a sail-needle
vigorously. He looked up, and his surprise gave to his eyes an expression of
innocence and candour.
"I am only roping
some of that new set of bags we made last trip for whipping up coals," he
remonstrated, gently. "We shall want them for the next coaling, sir."
"What became of
the others?"
"Why, worn out of
course, sir."
Captain MacWhirr, after
glaring down irresolutely at his chief mate, disclosed the gloomy and cynical conviction
that more than half of them had been lost overboard, "if only the truth
was known," and retired to the other end of the bridge. Jukes, exasperated
by this unprovoked attack, broke the needle at the second stitch, and dropping
his work got up and cursed the heat in a violent undertone.
The propeller thumped,
the three Chinamen forward had given up squabbling very suddenly, and the one
who had been plaiting his tail clasped his legs and stared dejectedly over his
knees. The lurid sunshine cast faint and sickly shadows. The swell ran higher
and swifter every moment, and the ship lurched heavily in the smooth, deep
hollows of the sea.
"I wonder where
that beastly swell comes from," said Jukes aloud, recovering himself after
a stagger.
"North-east,"
grunted the literal MacWhirr, from his side of the bridge. "There's some
dirty weather knocking about. Go and look at the glass."
When Jukes came out of
the chart-room, the cast of his countenance had changed to thoughtfulness and
concern. He caught hold of the bridge-rail and stared ahead.
The temperature in the
engine-room had gone up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. Irritated voices
were ascending through the skylight and through the fiddle of the stokehold in
a harsh and resonant uproar, mingled with angry clangs and scrapes of metal, as
if men with limbs of iron and throats of bronze had been quarrelling down
there. The second engineer was falling foul of the stokers for letting the
steam go down. He was a man with arms like a blacksmith, and generally feared;
but that afternoon the stokers were answering him back recklessly, and slammed
the furnace doors with the fury of despair. Then the noise ceased suddenly, and
the second engineer appeared, emerging out of the stokehold streaked with grime
and soaking wet like a chimney-sweep coming out of a well. As soon as his head
was clear of the fiddle he began to scold Jukes for not trimming properly the
stokehold ventilators; and in answer Jukes made with his hands deprecatory
soothing signs meaning: "No wind -- can't be helped -- you can see for
yourself." But the other wouldn't hear reason. His teeth flashed angrily
in his dirty face. He didn't mind, he said, the trouble of punching their
blanked heads down there, blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think
you could keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the
blanked stokers about? No, by George! You had to get some draught, too -- may
he be everlastingly blanked for a swab-headed deck-hand if you didn't! And the
chief, too, rampaging before the steam-gauge and carrying on like a lunatic up
and down the engine-room ever since noon. What did Jukes think he was stuck up
there for, if he couldn't get one of his decayed, good-for-nothing
deck-cripples to turn the ventilators to the wind?
The relations of the
"engine-room" and the "deck" of the Nan-Shan were, as is
known, of a brotherly nature; therefore Jukes leaned over and begged the other
in a restrained tone not to make a disgusting ass of himself; the skipper was
on the other side of the bridge. But the second declared mutinously that he
didn't care a rap who was on the other side of the bridge, and Jukes, passing
in a flash from lofty disapproval into a state of exaltation, invited him in
unflattering terms to come up and twist the beastly things to please himself,
and catch such wind as a donkey of his sort could find. The second rushed up to
the fray. He flung himself at the port ventilator as though he meant to tear it
out bodily and toss it overboard. All he did was to move the cowl round a few
inches, with an enormous expenditure of force, and seemed spent in the effort.
He leaned against the back of the wheelhouse, and Jukes walked up to him.
"Oh,
Heavens!" ejaculated the engineer in a feeble voice. He lifted his eyes to
the sky, and then let his glassy stare descend to meet the horizon that,
tilting up to an angle of forty degrees, seemed to hang on a slant for a while
and settled down slowly. "Heavens! Phew! What's up, anyhow?"
Jukes, straddling his
long legs like a pair of compasses, put on an air of superiority. "We're
going to catch it this time," he said. "The barometer is tumbling
down like anything, Harry. And you trying to kick up that silly row. . .
."
The word
"barometer" seemed to revive the second engineer's mad animosity.
Collecting afresh all his energies, he directed Jukes in a low and brutal tone
to shove the unmentionable instrument down his gory throat. Who cared for his
crimson barometer? It was the steam -- the steam -- that was going down; and
what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse
than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse how soon the whole
show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but
after regaining his breath he muttered darkly, "I'll faint them," and
dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the
unnatural daylight, and dropped into the dark hole with a whoop.
When Jukes turned, his
eyes fell upon the rounded back and the big red ears of Captain MacWhirr, who
had come across. He did not look at his chief officer, but said at once,
"That's a very violent man, that second engineer."
"Jolly good
second, anyhow," grunted Jukes. "They can't keep up steam," he
added, rapidly, and made a grab at the rail against the coming lurch.
Captain MacWhirr,
unprepared, took a run and brought himself up with a jerk by an awning
stanchion.
"A profane
man," he said, obstinately. "If this goes on, I'll have to get rid of
him the first chance."
"It's the
heat," said Jukes. "The weather's awful. It would make a saint swear.
Even up here I feel exactly as if I had my head tied up in a woollen
blanket."
Captain MacWhirr looked
up. "D'ye mean to say, Mr. Jukes, you ever had your head tied up in a
blanket? What was that for?"
"It's a manner of
speaking, sir," said Jukes, stolidly.
"Some of you
fellows do go on! What's that about saints swearing? I wish you wouldn't talk
so wild. What sort of saint would that be that would swear? No more saint than
yourself, I expect. And what's a blanket got to do with it -- or the weather
either. . . . The heat does not make me swear -- does it? It's filthy bad
temper. That's what it is. And what's the good of your talking like this?"
Thus Captain MacWhirr
expostulated against the use of images in speech, and at the end electrified
Jukes by a contemptuous snort, followed by words of passion and resentment:
"Damme! I'll fire him out of the ship if he don't look out."
And Jukes,
incorrigible, thought: "Goodness me! Somebody's put a new inside to my old
man. Here's temper, if you like. Of course it's the weather; what else? It
would make an angel quarrelsome -- let alone a saint."
All the Chinamen on
deck appeared at their last gasp.
At its setting the sun
had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions
of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense
bank of cloud became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive
tint, and lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid obstacle in
the path of the ship. She went floundering towards it like an exhausted
creature driven to its death. The coppery twilight retired slowly, and the
darkness brought out overhead a swarm of unsteady, big stars, that, as if blown
upon, flickered exceedingly and seemed to hang very near the earth. At eight
o'clock Jukes went into the chart-room to write up the ship's log.
He copies neatly out of
the rough-book the number of miles, the course of the ship, and in the column
for "wind" scrawled the word "calm" from top to bottom of
the eight hours since noon. He was exasperated by the continuous, monotonous
rolling of the ship. The heavy inkstand would slide away in a manner that
suggested perverse intelligence in dodging the pen. Having written in the large
space under the head of "Remarks" "Heat very oppressive,"
he stuck the end of the penholder in his teeth, pipe fashion, and mopped his
face carefully.
"Ship rolling heavily
in a high cross swell," he began again, and commented to himself,
"Heavily is no word for it." Then he wrote: "Sunset threatening,
with a low bank of clouds to N. and E. Sky clear overhead."
Sprawling over the
table with arrested pen, he glanced out of the door, and in that frame of his
vision he saw all the stars flying upwards between the teakwood jambs on a
black sky. The whole lot took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a
blackness flecked with white flashes, for the sea was as black as the sky and
speckled with foam afar. The stars that had flown to the roll came back on the
return swing of the ship, rushing downwards in their glittering multitude, not
of fiery points, but enlarged to tiny discs brilliant with a clear wet sheen.
Jukes watched the
flying big stars for a moment, and then wrote: "8 P.M. Swell increasing.
Ship labouring and taking water on her decks. Battened down the coolies for the
night. Barometer still falling." He paused, and thought to himself,
"Perhaps nothing whatever'll come of it." And then he closed
resolutely his entries: "Every appearance of a typhoon coming on."
On going out he had to
stand aside, and Captain MacWhirr strode over the doorstep without saying a
word or making a sign.
"Shut the door,
Mr. Jukes, will you?" he cried from within.
Jukes turned back to do
so, muttering ironically: "Afraid to catch cold, I suppose." It was
his watch below, but he yearned for communion with his kind; and he remarked
cheerily to the second mate: "Doesn't look so bad, after all -- does
it?"
The second mate was
marching to and fro on the bridge, tripping down with small steps one moment,
and the next climbing with difficulty the shifting slope of the deck. At the
sound of Jukes' voice he stood still, facing forward, but made no reply.
"Hallo! That's a
heavy one," said Jukes, swaying to meet the long roll till his lowered
hand touched the planks. This time the second mate made in his throat a noise
of an unfriendly nature.
He was an oldish,
shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face. He had been
shipped in a hurry in Shanghai, that trip when the second officer brought from
home had delayed the ship three hours in port by contriving (in some manner
Captain MacWhirr could never understand) to fall overboard into an empty
coal-lighter lying alongside, and had to be sent ashore to the hospital with
concussion of the brain and a broken limb or two.
Jukes was not
discouraged by the unsympathetic sound. "The Chinamen must be having a
lovely time of it down there," he said. "It's lucky for them the old
girl has the easiest roll of any ship I've ever been in. There now! This one
wasn't so bad."
"You wait,"
snarled the second mate.
With his sharp nose,
red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he always looked as though he were
raging inwardly; and he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. All
his time off duty he spent in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still in
there that he was supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had disappeared; but
the man who came in to wake him for his watch on deck would invariably find him
with his eyes wide open, flat on his back in the bunk, and glaring irritably
from a soiled pillow. He never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news
from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it
was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate
charges of a boarding-house. He was one of those men who are picked up at need
in the ports of the world. They are competent enough, appear hopelessly hard
up, show no evidence of any sort of vice, and carry about them all the signs of
manifest failure. They come aboard on an emergency, care for no ship afloat,
live in their own atmosphere of casual connection amongst their shipmates who
know nothing of them, and make up their minds to leave at inconvenient times.
They clear out with no words of leavetaking in some God-forsaken port other men
would fear to be stranded in, and go ashore in company of a shabby sea-chest, corded
like a treasure-box, and with an air of shaking the ship's dust off their feet.
"You wait,"
he repeated, balanced in great swings with his back to Jukes, motionless and
implacable.
"Do you mean to
say we are going to catch it hot?" asked Jukes with boyish interest.
"Say? . . . I say
nothing. You don't catch me," snapped the little second mate, with a
mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning, as if Jukes' question had been a trap
cleverly detected. "Oh, no! None of you here shall make a fool of me if I
know it," he mumbled to himself.
Jukes reflected rapidly
that this second mate was a mean little beast, and in his heart he wished poor
Jack Allen had never smashed himself up in the coal-lighter. The far-off
blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry
night of the earth -- the starless night of the immensities beyond the created
universe, revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the
glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.
"Whatever there might
be about," said Jukes, "we are steaming straight into it."
"You've said
it," caught up the second mate, always with his back to Jukes.
"You've said it, mind -- not I."
"Oh, go to
Jericho!" said Jukes, frankly; and the other emitted a triumphant little
chuckle.
"You've said
it," he repeated.
"And what of
that?"
"I've known some
real good men get into trouble with their skippers for saying a dam' sight
less," answered the second mate feverishly. "Oh, no! You don't catch
me."
"You seem deucedly
anxious not to give yourself away," said Jukes, completely soured by such
absurdity. "I wouldn't be afraid to say what I think."
"Aye, to me!
That's no great trick. I am nobody, and well I know it."
The ship, after a pause
of comparative steadiness, started upon a series of rolls, one worse than the
other, and for a time Jukes, preserving his equilibrium, was too busy to open
his mouth. As soon as the violent swinging had quieted down somewhat, he said:
"This is a bit too much of a good thing. Whether anything is coming or not
I think she ought to be put head on to that swell. The old man is just gone in
to lie down. Hang me if I don't speak to him."
But when he opened the
door of the chart-room he saw his captain reading a book. Captain MacWhirr was
not lying down: he was standing up with one hand grasping the edge of the
bookshelf and the other holding open before his face a thick volume. The lamp
wriggled in the gimbals, the loosened books toppled from side to side on the
shelf, the long barometer swung in jerky circles, the table altered its slant
every moment. In the midst of all this stir and movement Captain MacWhirr,
holding on, showed his eyes above the upper edge, and asked, "What's the
matter?"
"Swell getting
worse, sir."
"Noticed that in
here," muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Anything wrong?"
Jukes, inwardly
disconcerted by the seriousness of the eyes looking at him over the top of the
book, produced an embarrassed grin.
"Rolling like old
boots," he said, sheepishly.
"Aye! Very heavy
-- very heavy. What do you want?"
At this Jukes lost his
footing and began to flounder.
"I was thinking of
our passengers," he said, in the manner of a man clutching at a straw.
"Passengers?"
wondered the Captain, gravely. "What passengers?"
"Why, the
Chinamen, sir," explained Jukes, very sick of this conversation.
"The Chinamen! Why
don't you speak plainly? Couldn't tell what you meant. Never heard a lot of
coolies spoken of as passengers before. Passengers, indeed! What's come to
you?"
Captain MacWhirr,
closing the book on his forefinger, lowered his arm and looked completely
mystified. "Why are you thinking of the Chinamen, Mr. Jukes?" he
inquired.
Jukes took a plunge, like
a man driven to it. "She's rolling her decks full of water, sir. Thought
you might put her head on perhaps -- for a while. Till this goes down a bit --
very soon, I dare say. Head to the eastward. I never knew a ship roll like
this."
He held on in the
doorway, and Captain MacWhirr, feeling his grip on the shelf inadequate, made
up his mind to let go in a hurry, and fell heavily on the couch.
"Head to the
eastward?" he said, struggling to sit up. "That's more than four
points off her course."
"Yes, sir. Fifty
degrees. . . . Would just bring her head far enough round to meet this. . .
."
Captain MacWhirr was
now sitting up. He had not dropped the book, and he had not lost his place.
"To the
eastward?" he repeated, with dawning astonishment. "To the . . .
Where do you think we are bound to? You want me to haul a full-powered
steamship four points off her course to make the Chinamen comfortable! Now,
I've heard more than enough of mad things done in the world -- but this. . . .
If I didn't know you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor. Steer four
points off. . . . And what afterwards? Steer four points over the other way, I
suppose, to make the course good. What put it into your head that I would start
to tack a steamer as if she were a sailing-ship?"
"Jolly good thing
she isn't," threw in Jukes, with bitter readiness. "She would have
rolled every blessed stick out of her this afternoon."
"Aye! And you just
would have had to stand and see them go," said Captain MacWhirr, showing a
certain animation. "It's a dead calm, isn't it?"
"It is, sir. But
there's something out of the common coming, for sure."
"Maybe. I suppose
you have a notion I should be getting out of the way of that dirt," said
Captain MacWhirr, speaking with the utmost simplicity of manner and tone, and
fixing the oilcloth on the floor with a heavy stare. Thus he noticed neither
Jukes' discomfiture nor the mixture of vexation and astonished respect on his
face.
"Now, here's this
book," he continued with deliberation, slapping his thigh with the closed
volume. "I've been reading the chapter on the storms there."
This was true. He had
been reading the chapter on the storms. When he had entered the chart-room, it
was with no intention of taking the book down. Some influence in the air -- the
same influence, probably, that caused the steward to bring without orders the
Captain's sea-boots and oilskin coat up to the chart-room -- had as it were guided
his hand to the shelf; and without taking the time to sit down he had waded
with a conscious effort into the terminology of the subject. He lost himself
amongst advancing semi-circles, left- and right-hand quadrants, the curves of
the tracks, the probable bearing of the centre, the shifts of wind and the
readings of barometer. He tried to bring all these things into a definite
relation to himself, and ended by becoming contemptuously angry with such a lot
of words, and with so much advice, all head-work and supposition, without a
glimmer of certitude.
"It's the
damnedest thing, Jukes," he said. "If a fellow was to believe all
that's in there, he would be running most of his time all over the sea trying
to get behind the weather."
Again he slapped his
leg with the book; and Jukes opened his mouth, but said nothing.
"Running to get
behind the weather! Do you understand that, Mr. Jukes? It's the maddest
thing!" ejaculated Captain MacWhirr, with pauses, gazing at the floor
profoundly. "You would think an old woman had been writing this. It passes
me. If that thing means anything useful, then it means that I should at once
alter the course away, away to the devil somewhere, and come booming down on
Fu-chau from the northward at the tail of this dirty weather that's supposed to
be knocking about in our way. From the north! Do you understand, Mr. Jukes?
Three hundred extra miles to the distance, and a pretty coal bill to show. I
couldn't bring myself to do that if every word in there was gospel truth, Mr. Jukes.
Don't you expect me. . . ."
And Jukes, silent,
marvelled at this display of feeling and loquacity.
"But the truth is
that you don't know if the fellow is right, anyhow. How can you tell what a
gale is made of till you get it? He isn't aboard here, is he? Very well. Here
he says that the centre of them things bears eight points off the wind; but we
haven't got any wind, for all the barometer falling. Where's his centre
now?"
"We will get the
wind presently," mumbled Jukes.
"Let it come,
then," said Captain MacWhirr, with dignified indignation. "It's only
to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you don't find everything in books. All these
rules for dodging breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes,
seem to me the maddest thing, when you come to look at it sensibly."
He raised his eyes, saw
Jukes gazing at him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his meaning.
"About as queer as
your extraordinary notion of dodging the ship head to sea, for I don't know how
long, to make the Chinamen comfortable; whereas all we've got to do is to take
them to Fu-chau, being timed to get there before noon on Friday. If the weather
delays me -- very well. There's your log-book to talk straight about the
weather. But suppose I went swinging off my course and came in two days late,
and they asked me: 'Where have you been all that time, Captain?' What could I
say to that? 'Went around to dodge the bad weather,' I would say. 'It must've
been dam' bad,' they would say. 'Don't know,' I would have to say; 'I've dodged
clear of it.' See that, Jukes? I have been thinking it all out this
afternoon."
He looked up again in
his unseeing, unimaginative way. No one had ever heard him say so much at one
time. Jukes, with his arms open in the doorway, was like a man invited to behold
a miracle. Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while
incredulity was seated in his whole countenance.
"A gale is a gale,
Mr. Jukes," resumed the Captain, "and a full-powered steam-ship has
got to face it. There's just so much dirty weather knocking about the world,
and the proper thing is to go through it with none of what old Captain Wilson
of the Melita calls 'storm strategy.' The other day ashore I heard him hold
forth about it to a lot of shipmasters who came in and sat at a table next to
mine. It seemed to me the greatest nonsense. He was telling them how he outmanœuvred,
I think he said, a terrific gale, so that it never came nearer than fifty miles
to him. A neat piece of head-work he called it. How he knew there was a terrific
gale fifty miles off beats me altogether. It was like listening to a crazy man.
I would have thought Captain Wilson was old enough to know better."
Captain MacWhirr ceased
for a moment, then said, "It's your watch below, Mr. Jukes?"
Jukes came to himself
with a start. "Yes, sir."
"Leave orders to
call me at the slightest change," said the Captain. He reached up to put
the book away, and tucked his legs upon the couch. "Shut the door so that
it don't fly open, will you? I can't stand a door banging. They've put a lot of
rubbishy locks into this ship, I must say."
Captain MacWhirr closed
his eyes.
He did so to rest
himself. He was tired, and he experienced that state of mental vacuity which
comes at the end of an exhaustive discussion that has liberated some belief
matured in the course of meditative years. He had indeed been making his
confession of faith, had he only known it; and its effect was to make Jukes, on
the other side of the door, stand scratching his head for a good while.
Captain MacWhirr opened
his eyes. He thought he must have been asleep. What was that loud noise? Wind?
Why had he not been called? The lamp wriggled in its gimbals, the barometer
swung in circles, the table altered its slant every moment; a pair of limp
sea-boots with collapsed tops went sliding past the couch. He put out his hand
instantly, and captured one.
Jukes' face appeared in
a crack of the door: only his face, very red, with staring eyes. The flame of
the lamp leaped, a piece of paper flew up, a rush of air enveloped Captain
MacWhirr. Beginning to draw on the boot, he directed an expectant gaze at
Jukes' swollen, excited features.
"Came on like
this," shouted Jukes, "five minutes ago . . . all of a sudden."
The head disappeared
with a bang, and a heavy splash and patter of drops swept past the closed door
as if a pailful of melted lead had been flung against the house. A whistling
could be heard now upon the deep vibrating noise outside. The stuffy chart-room
seemed as full of draughts as a shed. Captain MacWhirr collared the other
sea-boot on its violent passage along the floor. He was not flustered, but he
could not find at once the opening for inserting his foot. The shoes he had
flung off were scurrying from end to end of the cabin, gambolling playfully
over each other like puppies. As soon as he stood up he kicked at them
viciously, but without effect.
He threw himself into
the attitude of a lunging fencer, to reach after his oilskin coat; and
afterwards he staggered all over the confined space while he jerked himself
into it. Very grave, straddling his legs far apart, and stretching his neck, he
started to tie deliberately the strings of his sou'-wester under his chin, with
thick fingers that trembled slightly. He went through all the movements of a
woman putting on her bonnet before a glass, with a strained, listening
attention, as though he had expected every moment to hear the shout of his name
in the confused clamour that had suddenly beset his ship. Its increase filled
his ears while he was getting ready to go out and confront whatever it might
mean. It was tumultuous and very loud -- made up of the rush of the wind, the
crashes of the sea, with that prolonged deep vibration of the air, like the
roll of an immense and remote drum beating the charge of the gale.
He stood for a moment
in the light of the lamp, thick, clumsy, shapeless in his panoply of combat,
vigilant and red-faced.
"There's a lot of
weight in this," he muttered.
As soon as he attempted
to open the door the wind caught it. Clinging to the handle, he was dragged out
over the doorstep, and at once found himself engaged with the wind in a sort of
personal scuffle whose object was the shutting of that door. At the last moment
a tongue of air scurried in and licked out the flame of the lamp.
Ahead of the ship he
perceived a great darkness lying upon a multitude of white flashes; on the
starboard beam a few amazing stars drooped, dim and fitful, above an immense
waste of broken seas, as if seen through a mad drift of smoke.
On the bridge a knot of
men, indistinct and toiling, were making great efforts in the light of the
wheelhouse windows that shone mistily on their heads and backs. Suddenly
darkness closed upon one pane, then on another. The voices of the lost group
reached him after the manner of men's voices in a gale, in shreds and fragments
of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear. All at once Jukes appeared at his
side, yelling, with his head down.
"Watch -- put in
-- wheelhouse shutters -- glass -- afraid -- blow in."
Jukes heard his
commander upbraiding.
"This -- come --
anything -- warning -- call me."
He tried to explain,
with the uproar pressing on his lips.
"Light air --
remained -- bridge -- sudden -- north-east -- could turn -- thought -- you --
sure -- hear."
They had gained the
shelter of the weather-cloth, and could converse with raised voices, as people
quarrel.
"I got the hands
along to cover up all the ventilators. Good job I had remained on deck. I
didn't think you would be asleep, and so . . . What did you say, sir?
What?"
"Nothing,"
cried Captain MacWhirr. "I said -- all right."
"By all the
powers! We've got it this time," observed Jukes in a howl.
"You haven't
altered her course?" inquired Captain MacWhirr, straining his voice.
"No, sir. Certainly
not. Wind came out right ahead. And here comes the head sea."
A plunge of the ship
ended in a shock as if she had landed her forefoot upon something solid. After
a moment of stillness a lofty flight of sprays drove hard with the wind upon
their faces.
"Keep her at it as
long as we can," shouted Captain MacWhirr.
Before Jukes had
squeezed the salt water out of his eyes all the stars had disappeared.
JUKES was as ready a
man as any half-dozen young mates that may be caught by casting a net upon the
waters; and though he had been somewhat taken aback by the startling
viciousness of the first squall, he had pulled himself together on the instant,
had called out the hands and had rushed them along to secure such openings
about the deck as had not been already battened down earlier in the evening.
Shouting in his fresh, stentorian voice, "Jump, boys, and bear a
hand!" he led in the work, telling himself the while that he had
"just expected this."
But at the same time he
was growing aware that this was rather more than he had expected. From the
first stir of the air felt on his cheek the gale seemed to take upon itself the
accumulated impetus of an avalanche. Heavy sprays enveloped the Nan-Shan from
stem to stern, and instantly in the midst of her regular rolling she began to
jerk and plunge as though she had gone mad with fright.
Jukes thought,
"This is no joke." While he was exchanging explanatory yells with his
captain, a sudden lowering of the darkness came upon the night, falling before
their vision like something palpable. It was as if the masked lights of the
world had been turned down. Jukes was uncritically glad to have his captain at
hand. It relieved him as though that man had, by simply coming on deck, taken
most of the gale's weight upon his shoulders. Such is the prestige, the
privilege, and the burden of command.
Captain MacWhirr could
expect no relief of that sort from any one on earth. Such is the loneliness of
command. He was trying to see, with that watchful manner of a seaman who stares
into the wind's eye as if into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the hidden
intention and guess the aim and force of the thrust. The strong wind swept at
him out of a vast obscurity; he felt under his feet the uneasiness of his ship,
and he could not even discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it were not
so; and very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man's helplessness.
To be silent was
natural to him, dark or shine. Jukes, at his elbow, made himself heard yelling
cheerily in the gusts, "We must have got the worst of it at once,
sir." A faint burst of lightning quivered all round, as if flashed into a
cavern -- into a black and secret chamber of the sea, with a floor of foaming
crests.
It unveiled for a
sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds hanging low, the lurch of
the long outlines of the ship, the black figures of men caught on the bridge,
heads forward, as if petrified in the act of butting. The darkness palpitated
down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.
It was something
formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to
explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great
waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the
men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind:
it isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche,
overtake a man incidentally, as it were -- without passion. A furious gale
attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his
mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away
from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a great distance through the
air. Everything disappeared -- even, for a moment, his power of thinking; but
his hand had found one of the rail-stanchions. His distress was by no means
alleviated by an inclination to disbelieve the reality of this experience.
Though young, he had seen some bad weather, and had never doubted his ability
to imagine the worst; but this was so much beyond his powers of fancy that it
appeared incompatible with the existence of any ship whatever. He would have
been incredulous about himself in the same way, perhaps, had he not been so
harassed by the necessity of exerting a wrestling effort against a force trying
to tear him away from his hold. Moreover, the conviction of not being utterly
destroyed returned to him through the sensations of being half-drowned,
bestially shaken, and partly choked.
It seemed to him he
remained there precariously alone with the stanchion for a long, long time. The
rain poured on him, flowed, drove in sheets. He breathed in gasps; and
sometimes the water he swallowed was fresh and sometimes it was salt. For the
most part he kept his eyes shut tight, as if suspecting his sight might be
destroyed in the immense flurry of the elements. When he ventured to blink
hastily, he derived some moral support from the green gleam of the starboard
light shining feebly upon the flight of rain and sprays. He was actually
looking at it when its ray fell upon the uprearing sea which put it out. He saw
the head of the wave topple over, adding the mite of its crash to the
tremendous uproar raging around him, and almost at the same instant the
stanchion was wrenched away from his embracing arms. After a crushing thump on
his back he found himself suddenly afloat and borne upwards. His first
irresistible notion was that the whole China Sea had climbed on the bridge.
Then, more sanely, he concluded himself gone overboard. All the time he was
being tossed, flung, and rolled in great volumes of water, he kept on repeating
mentally, with the utmost precipitation, the words: "My God! My God! My
God! My God!"
All at once, in a
revolt of misery and despair, he formed the crazy resolution to get out of
that. And he began to thresh about with his arms and legs. But as soon as he
commenced his wretched struggles he discovered that he had become somehow mixed
up with a face, an oilskin coat, somebody's boots. He clawed ferociously all
these things in turn, lost them, found them again, lost them once more, and
finally was himself caught in the firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He
returned the embrace closely round a thick solid body. He had found his captain.
They tumbled over and
over, tightening their hug. Suddenly the water let them down with a brutal
bang; and, stranded against the side of the wheelhouse, out of breath and
bruised, they were left to stagger up in the wind and hold on where they could.
Jukes came out of it
rather horrified, as though he had escaped some unparalleled outrage directed
at his feelings. It weakened his faith in himself. He started shouting
aimlessly to the man he could feel near him in that fiendish blackness,
"Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?" till his temples seemed ready to
burst. And he heard in answer a voice, as if crying far away, as if screaming
to him fretfully from a very great distance, the one word "Yes!"
Other seas swept again over the bridge. He received them defencelessly right
over his bare head, with both his hands engaged in holding.
The motion of the ship
was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling helplessness: she pitched as if
taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. When
she rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted back by such
a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a clubbed man reels before he
collapses. The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as
though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air
streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated
solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep
her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end.
And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling
cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things coolly.
The sea, flattened down
in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in
snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on
this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a
bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny
specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the
heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of
his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate,
the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with the fear of being
swept overboard together with the whole thing in one great crash -- her middle
structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a coast. It was like an outlying
rock with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating round --
like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people cling before they let go --
only it rose, it sank, it rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a
rock that should have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone
wallowing upon the sea.
The Nan-Shan was being
looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of
the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean,
weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed -- and two of the
boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were,
in the shock and smother of the wave. It was only later, when upon the white
flash of another high sea hurling itself amidships, Jukes had a vision of two
pairs of davits leaping black and empty out of the solid blackness, with one
overhauled fall flying and an iron-bound block capering in the air, that he
became aware of what had happened within about three yards of his back.
He poked his head
forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it -- big,
fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now,
sir."
And again he heard that
voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in
the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace
beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice -- the frail
and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought,
resolution and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last
day, when heavens fall, and justice is done -- again he heard it, and it was
crying to him, as if from very, very far -- "All right."
He thought he had not
managed to make himself understood. "Our boats -- I say boats -- the
boats, sir! Two gone!"
The same voice, within
a foot of him and yet so remote, yelled sensibly, "Can't be helped."
Captain MacWhirr had
never turned his face, but Jukes caught some more words on the wind.
"What can --
expect -- when hammering through -- such -- Bound to leave -- something behind
-- stands to reason."
Watchfully Jukes
listened for more. No more came. This was all Captain MacWhirr had to say; and
Jukes could picture to himself rather than see the broad squat back before him.
An impenetrable obscurity pressed down upon the ghostly glimmers of the sea. A
dull conviction seized upon Jukes that there was nothing to be done.
If the steering-gear
did not give way, if the immense volumes of water did not burst the deck in or
smash one of the hatches, if the engines did not give up, if way could be kept
on the ship against this terrific wind, and she did not bury herself in one of
these awful seas, of whose white crests alone, topping high above her bows, he
could now and then get a sickening glimpse -- then there was a chance of her
coming out of it. Something within him seemed to turn over, bringing uppermost
the feeling that the Nan-Shan was lost.
"She's done
for," he said to himself, with a surprising mental agitation, as though he
had discovered an unexpected meaning in this thought. One of these things was
bound to happen. Nothing could be prevented now, and nothing could be remedied.
The men on board did not count, and the ship could not last. This weather was
too impossible.
Jukes felt an arm
thrown heavily over his shoulders; and to this overture he responded with great
intelligence by catching hold of his captain round the waist.
They stood clasped thus
in the blind night, bracing each other against the wind, cheek to cheek and lip
to ear, in the manner of two hulks lashed stem to stern together.
And Jukes heard the
voice of his commander hardly any louder than before, but nearer, as though,
starting to march athwart the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had
approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow
of a halo.
"D'ye know where
the hands got to?" it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the same time,
overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from Jukes instantly.
Jukes didn't know. They
were all on the bridge when the real force of the hurricane struck the ship. He
had no idea where they had crawled to. Under the circumstances they were
nowhere, for all the use that could be made of them. Somehow the Captain's wish
to know distressed Jukes.
"Want the hands,
sir?" he cried, apprehensively.
"Ought to
know," asserted Captain MacWhirr. "Hold hard."
They held hard. An
outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the wind absolutely steadied the
ship; she rocked only, quick and light like a child's cradle, for a terrific
moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed
furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth.
It suffocated them, and
with eyes shut they tightened their grasp. What from the magnitude of the shock
might have been a column of water running upright in the dark, butted against
the ship, broke short, and fell on her bridge, crushingly, from on high, with a
dead burying weight.
A flying fragment of
that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them in one swirl from their feet over
their heads, filling violently their ears, mouths and nostrils with salt water.
It knocked out their legs, wrenched in haste at their arms, seethed away
swiftly under their chins; and opening their eyes, they saw the piled-up masses
of foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like the fragments of a ship.
She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded, too,
before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her
desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.
The seas in the dark
seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There
was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She
was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly,
struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. Captain MacWhirr and Jukes kept
hold of each other, deafened by the noise, gagged by the wind; and the great
physical tumult beating about their bodies, brought, like an unbridled display
of passion, a profound trouble to their souls. One of those wild and appalling
shrieks that are heard at times passing mysteriously overhead in the steady
roar of a hurricane, swooped, as if borne on wings, upon the ship, and Jukes
tried to outscream it.
"Will she live
through this?"
The cry was wrenched
out of his breast. It was as unintentional as the birth of a thought in the
head, and he heard nothing of it himself. It all became extinct at once --
thought, intention, effort -- and of his cry the inaudible vibration added to
the tempest waves of the air.
He expected nothing
from it. Nothing at all. For indeed what answer could be made? But after a
while he heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the
dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant tumult.
"She may!"
It was a dull yell,
more difficult to seize than a whisper. And presently the voice returned again,
half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of
an ocean.
"Let's hope
so!" it cried -- small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of
hope or fear; and it flickered into disconnected words: "Ship. . . . .
This. . . . Never -- Anyhow . . . for the best." Jukes gave it up.
Then, as if it had come
suddenly upon the one thing fit to withstand the power of a storm, it seemed to
gain force and firmness for the last broken shouts:
"Keep on hammering
. . . builders . . . good men. . . . . And chance it . . . engines . . . . Rout
. . . good man."
Captain MacWhirr
removed his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and thereby ceased to exist for his
mate, so dark it was; Jukes, after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would
let himself go limp all over. The gnawing of profound discomfort existed side
by side with an incredible disposition to somnolence, as though he had been
buffeted and worried into drowsiness. The wind would get hold of his head and
try to shake it off his shoulders; his clothes, full of water, were as heavy as
lead, cold and dripping like an armour of melting ice: he shivered -- it lasted
a long time; and with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting himself
sink slowly into the depths of bodily misery. His mind became concentrated upon
himself in an aimless, idle way, and when something pushed lightly at the back
of his knees he nearly, as the saying is, jumped out of his skin.
In the start forward he
bumped the back of Captain MacWhirr, who didn't move; and then a hand gripped
his thigh. A lull had come, a menacing lull of the wind, the holding of a
stormy breath -- and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain.
Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong
to some new species of man.
The boatswain had
arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours against the wind, and had found
the chief mate's legs with the top of his head. Immediately he crouched and
began to explore Jukes' person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as
became an inferior.
He was an ill-favoured,
undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed,
resembling an elderly ape. His strength was immense; and in his great lumpy
paws, bulging like brown boxing-gloves on the end of furry forearms, the
heaviest objects were handled like playthings. Apart from the grizzled pelt on
his chest, the menacing demeanour and the hoarse voice, he had none of the
classical attributes of his rating. His good nature almost amounted to
imbecility: the men did what they liked with him, and he had not an ounce of
initiative in his character, which was easy-going and talkative. For these
reasons Jukes disliked him; but Captain MacWhirr, to Jukes' scornful disgust,
seemed to regard him as a first-rate petty officer.
He pulled himself up by
Jukes' coat, taking that liberty with the greatest moderation, and only so far
as it was forced upon him by the hurricane.
"What is it,
boss'n, what is it?" yelled Jukes, impatiently. What could that fraud of a
boss'n want on the bridge? The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves. The husky
bellowings of the other, though unintelligible, seemed to suggest a state of
lively satisfaction. There could be no mistake. The old fool was pleased with
something.
The boatswain's other
hand had found some other body, for in a changed tone he began to inquire:
"Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?" The wind strangled his howls.
"Yes!" cried
Captain MacWhirr.
ALL that the boatswain,
out of a superabundance of yells, could make clear to Captain MacWhirr was the
bizarre intelligence that "All them Chinamen in the fore 'tween deck have
fetched away, sir."
Jukes to leeward could
hear these two shouting within six inches of his face, as you may hear on a
still night half a mile away two men conversing across a field. He heard
Captain MacWhirr's exasperated "What? What?" and the strained pitch
of the other's hoarseness. "In a lump . . . seen them myself. . . . Awful
sight, sir . . . thought . . . tell you."
Jukes remained
indifferent, as if rendered irresponsible by the force of the hurricane, which
made the very thought of action utterly vain. Besides, being very young, he had
found the occupation of keeping his heart completely steeled against the worst
so engrossing that he had come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any
other form of activity whatever. He was not scared; he knew this because,
firmly believing he would never see another sunrise, he remained calm in that
belief.
These are the moments
of do-nothing heroics to which even good men surrender at times. Many officers
of ships can no doubt recall a case in their experience when just such a trance
of confounded stoicism would come all at once over a whole ship's company.
Jukes, however, had no wide experience of men or storms. He conceived himself
to be calm -- inexorably calm; but as a matter of fact he was daunted; not
abjectly, but only so far as a decent man may, without becoming loathsome to
himself.
It was rather like a
forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the
suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily
fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a
searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man's breast to
cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of
the earth -- even before life itself -- aspires to peace.
Jukes was benumbed much
more than he supposed. He held on -- very wet, very cold, stiff in every limb;
and in a momentary hallucination of swift visions (it is said that a drowning
man thus reviews all his life) he beheld all sorts of memories altogether
unconnected with his present situation. He remembered his father, for instance:
a worthy business man, who at an unfortunate crisis in his affairs went quietly
to bed and died forthwith in a state of resignation. Jukes did not recall these
circumstances, of course, but remaining otherwise unconcerned he seemed to see
distinctly the poor man's face; a certain game of nap played when quite a boy
in Table Bay on board a ship, since lost with all hands; the thick eyebrows of
his first skipper; and without any emotion, as he might years ago have walked
listlessly into her room and found her sitting there with a book, he remembered
his mother -- dead, too, now -- the resolute woman, left badly off, who had
been very firm in his bringing up.
It could not have
lasted more than a second, perhaps not so much. A heavy arm had fallen about
his shoulders; Captain MacWhirr's voice was speaking his name into his ear.
"Jukes!
Jukes!"
He detected the tone of
deep concern. The wind had thrown its weight on the ship, trying to pin her
down amongst the seas. They made a clean breach over her, as over a
deep-swimming log; and the gathered weight of crashes menaced monstrously from
afar. The breakers flung out of the night with a ghostly light on their crests
-- the light of sea-foam that in a ferocious, boiling-up pale flash showed upon
the slender body of the ship the toppling rush, the downfall, and the seething
mad scurry of each wave. Never for a moment could she shake herself clear of
the water; Jukes, rigid, perceived in her motion the ominous sign of haphazard
floundering. She was no longer struggling intelligently. It was the beginning
of the end; and the note of busy concern in Captain MacWhirr's voice sickened
him like an exhibition of blind and pernicious folly.
The spell of the storm
had fallen upon Jukes. He was penetrated by it, absorbed by it; he was rooted
in it with a rigour of dumb attention. Captain MacWhirr persisted in his cries,
but the wind got between them like a solid wedge. He hung round Jukes' neck as
heavy as a millstone, and suddenly the sides of their heads knocked together.
"Jukes! Mr. Jukes,
I say!"
He had to answer that
voice that would not be silenced. He answered in the customary manner: ".
. . Yes, sir."
And directly, his
heart, corrupted by the storm that breeds a craving for peace, rebelled against
the tyranny of training and command.
Captain MacWhirr had
his mate's head fixed firm in the crook of his elbow, and pressed it to his
yelling lips mysteriously. Sometimes Jukes would break in, admonishing hastily:
"Look out, sir!" or Captain MacWhirr would bawl an earnest
exhortation to "Hold hard, there!" and the whole black universe
seemed to reel together with the ship. They paused. She floated yet. And
Captain MacWhirr would resume his shouts. ". . . . Says . . . whole lot .
. . fetched away. . . . Ought to see . . . what's the matter."
Directly the full force
of the hurricane had struck the ship, every part of her deck became untenable;
and the sailors, dazed and dismayed, took shelter in the port alleyway under
the bridge. It had a door aft, which they shut; it was very black, cold, and
dismal. At each heavy fling of the ship they would groan all together in the
dark, and tons of water could be heard scuttling about as if trying to get at
them from above. The boatswain had been keeping up a gruff talk, but a more
unreasonable lot of men, he said afterwards, he had never been with. They were
snug enough there, out of harm's way, and not wanted to do anything, either;
and yet they did nothing but grumble and complain peevishly like so many sick
kids. Finally, one of them said that if there had been at least some light to
see each other's noses by, it wouldn't be so bad. It was making him crazy, he
declared, to lie there in the dark waiting for the blamed hooker to sink.
"Why don't you
step outside, then, and be done with it at once?" the boatswain turned on
him.
This called up a shout
of execration. The boatswain found himself overwhelmed with reproaches of all
sorts. They seemed to take it ill that a lamp was not instantly created for
them out of nothing. They would whine after a light to get drowned by -- anyhow!
And though the unreason of their revilings was patent -- since no one could
hope to reach the lamp-room, which was forward -- he became greatly distressed.
He did not think it was decent of them to be nagging at him like this. He told
them so, and was met by general contumely. He sought refuge, therefore, in an
embittered silence. At the same time their grumbling and sighing and muttering
worried him greatly, but by-and-by it occurred to him that there were six globe
lamps hung in the 'tween-deck, and that there could be no harm in depriving the
coolies of one of them.
The Nan-Shan had an
athwartship coal-bunker, which, being at times used as cargo space,
communicated by an iron door with the fore 'tween-deck. It was empty then, and
its manhole was the foremost one in the alleyway. The boatswain could get in,
therefore, without coming out on deck at all; but to his great surprise he
found he could induce no one to help him in taking off the manhole cover. He
groped for it all the same, but one of the crew lying in his way refused to
budge.
"Why, I only want
to get you that blamed light you are crying for," he expostulated, almost
pitifully.
Somebody told him to go
and put his head in a bag. He regretted he could not recognize the voice, and
that it was too dark to see, otherwise, as he said, he would have put a head on
that son of a sea-cook, anyway, sink or swim. Nevertheless, he had made up his
mind to show them he could get a light, if he were to die for it.
Through the violence of
the ship's rolling, every movement was dangerous. To be lying down seemed
labour enough. He nearly broke his neck dropping into the bunker. He fell on
his back, and was sent shooting helplessly from side to side in the dangerous
company of a heavy iron bar -- a coal-trimmer's slice probably -- left down
there by somebody. This thing made him as nervous as though it had been a wild
beast. He could not see it, the inside of the bunker coated with coal-dust
being perfectly and impenetrably black; but he heard it sliding and clattering,
and striking here and there, always in the neighbourhood of his head. It seemed
to make an extraordinary noise, too -- to give heavy thumps as though it had
been as big as a bridge girder. This was remarkable enough for him to notice
while he was flung from port to starboard and back again, and clawing
desperately the smooth sides of the bunker in the endeavour to stop himself.
The door into the 'tween-deck not fitting quite true, he saw a thread of dim
light at the bottom.
Being a sailor, and a
still active man, he did not want much of a chance to regain his feet; and as
luck would have it, in scrambling up he put his hand on the iron slice, picking
it up as he rose. Otherwise he would have been afraid of the thing breaking his
legs, or at least knocking him down again. At first he stood still. He felt
unsafe in this darkness that seemed to make the ship's motion unfamiliar,
unforeseen, and difficult to counteract. He felt so much shaken for a moment
that he dared not move for fear of "taking charge again." He had no
mind to get battered to pieces in that bunker.
He had struck his head
twice; he was dazed a little. He seemed to hear yet so plainly the clatter and
bangs of the iron slice flying about his ears that he tightened his grip to
prove to himself he had it there safely in his hand. He was vaguely amazed at
the plainness with which down there he could hear the gale raging. Its howls
and shrieks seemed to take on, in the emptiness of the bunker, something of the
human character, of human rage and pain -- being not vast but infinitely
poignant. And there were, with every roll, thumps, too -- profound, ponderous
thumps, as if a bulky object of five-ton weight or so had got play in the hold.
But there was no such thing in the cargo. Something on deck? Impossible. Or
alongside? Couldn't be.
He thought all this
quickly, clearly, competently, like a seaman, and in the end remained puzzled.
This noise, though, came deadened from outside, together with the washing and
pouring of water on deck above his head. Was it the wind? Must be. It made down
there a row like the shouting of a big lot of crazed men. And he discovered in
himself a desire for a light, too -- if only to get drowned by -- and a nervous
anxiety to get out of that bunker as quickly as possible.
He pulled back the
bolt: the heavy iron plate turned on its hinges; and it was as though he had
opened the door to the sounds of the tempest. A gust of hoarse yelling met him:
the air was still; and the rushing of water overhead was covered by a tumult of
strangled, throaty shrieks that produced an effect of desperate confusion. He
straddled his legs the whole width of the doorway and stretched his neck. And
at first he perceived only what he had come to seek: six small yellow flames
swinging violently on the great body of the dusk.
It was stayed like the
gallery of a mine, with a row of stanchions in the middle, and cross-beams
overhead, penetrating into the gloom ahead -- indefinitely. And to port there
loomed, like the caving in of one of the sides, a bulky mass with a slanting
outline. The whole place, with the shadows and the shapes, moved all the time.
The boatswain glared: the ship lurched to starboard, and a great howl came from
that mass that had the slant of fallen earth.
Pieces of wood whizzed
past. Planks, he thought, inexpressibly startled, and flinging back his head.
At his feet a man went sliding over, open-eyed, on his back, straining with
uplifted arms for nothing: and another came bounding like a detached stone with
his head between his legs and his hands clenched. His pigtail whipped in the
air; he made a grab at the boatswain's legs, and from his opened hand a bright
white disc rolled against the boatswain's foot. He recognized a silver dollar,
and yelled at it with astonishment. With a precipitated sound of trampling and
shuffling of bare feet, and with guttural cries, the mound of writhing bodies
piled up to port detached itself from the ship's side and sliding, inert and
struggling, shifted to starboard, with a dull, brutal thump. The cries ceased.
The boatswain heard a long moan through the roar and whistling of the wind; he
saw an inextricable confusion of heads and shoulders, naked soles kicking
upwards, fists raised, tumbling backs, legs, pigtails, faces.
"Good Lord!"
he cried, horrified, and banged-to the iron door upon this vision.
This was what he had
come on the bridge to tell. He could not keep it to himself; and on board ship
there is only one man to whom it is worth while to unburden yourself. On his
passage back the hands in the alleyway swore at him for a fool. Why didn't he
bring that lamp? What the devil did the coolies matter to anybody? And when he
came out, the extremity of the ship made what went on inside of her appear of
little moment.
At first he thought he
had left the alleyway in the very moment of her sinking. The bridge ladders had
been washed away, but an enormous sea filling the after-deck floated him up.
After that he had to lie on his stomach for some time, holding to a ring-bolt,
getting his breath now and then, and swallowing salt water. He struggled
farther on his hands and knees, too frightened and distracted to turn back. In
this way he reached the after-part of the wheelhouse. In that comparatively
sheltered spot he found the second mate. The boatswain was pleasantly surprised
-- his impression being that everybody on deck must have been washed away a
long time ago. He asked eagerly where the Captain was.
The second mate was
lying low, like a malignant little animal under a hedge.
"Captain? Gone
overboard, after getting us into this mess." The mate, too, for all he
knew or cared. Another fool. Didn't matter. Everybody was going by-and-by.
The boatswain crawled
out again into the strength of the wind; not because he much expected to find anybody,
he said, but just to get away from "that man." He crawled out as
outcasts go to face an inclement world. Hence his great joy at finding Jukes
and the Captain. But what was going on in the 'tween-deck was to him a minor
matter by that time. Besides, it was difficult to make yourself heard. But he
managed to convey the idea that the Chinaman had broken adrift together with
their boxes, and that he had come up on purpose to report this. As to the
hands, they were all right. Then, appeased, he subsided on the deck in a
sitting posture, hugging with his arms and legs the stand of the engine-room
telegraph -- an iron casting as thick as a post. When that went, why, he
expected he would go, too. He gave no more thought to the coolies.
Captain MacWhirr had
made Jukes understand that he wanted him to go down below -- to see.
"What am I to do
then, sir?" And the trembling of his whole wet body caused Jukes' voice to
sound like bleating.
"See first . . .
Boss'n . . . says . . . adrift."
"That boss'n is a
confounded fool," howled Jukes, shakily.
The absurdity of the
demand made upon him revolted Jukes. He was as unwilling to go as if the moment
he had left the deck the ship were sure to sink.
"I must know . . .
can't leave. . . ."
"They'll settle,
sir."
"Fight . . .
boss'n says they fight. . . . Why? Can't have . . . fighting . . . board ship.
. . . Much rather keep you here . . . case . . . . I should . . . washed
overboard myself. . . . Stop it . . . some way. You see and tell me . . .
through engine-room tube. Don't want you . . . come up here . . . too often.
Dangerous . . . moving about . . . deck."
Jukes, held with his
head in chancery, had to listen to what seemed horrible suggestions.
"Don't want . . .
you get lost . . . so long . . . ship isn't. . . . . Rout . . . Good man . . .
Ship . . . may . . . through this . . . all right yet."
All at once Jukes
understood he would have to go.
"Do you think she
may?" he screamed.
But the wind devoured
the reply, out of which Jukes heard only the one word, pronounced with great
energy ". . . . Always. . . ."
Captain MacWhirr
released Jukes, and bending over the boatswain, yelled, "Get back with the
mate." Jukes only knew that the arm was gone off his shoulders. He was
dismissed with his orders -- to do what? He was exasperated into letting go his
hold carelessly, and on the instant was blown away. It seemed to him that
nothing could stop him from being blown right over the stern. He flung himself
down hastily, and the boatswain, who was following, fell on him.
"Don't you get up
yet, sir," cried the boatswain. "No hurry!"
A sea swept over. Jukes
understood the boatswain to splutter that the bridge ladders were gone.
"I'll lower you down, sir, by your hands," he screamed. He shouted
also something about the smoke-stack being as likely to go overboard as not.
Jukes thought it very possible, and imagined the fires out, the ship helpless.
. . . The boatswain by his side kept on yelling. "What? What is it?"
Jukes cried distressfully; and the other repeated, "What would my old
woman say if she saw me now?"
In the alleyway, where
a lot of water had got in and splashed in the dark, the men were still as
death, till Jukes stumbled against one of them and cursed him savagely for
being in the way. Two or three voices then asked, eager and weak, "Any
chance for us, sir?"
"What's the matter
with you fools?" he said brutally. He felt as though he could throw
himself down amongst them and never move any more. But they seemed cheered; and
in the midst of obsequious warnings, "Look out! Mind that manhole lid,
sir," they lowered him into the bunker. The boatswain tumbled down after
him, and as soon as he had picked himself up he remarked, "She would say,
'Serve you right, you old fool, for going to sea.'"
The boatswain had some
means, and made a point of alluding to them frequently. His wife -- a fat woman
-- and two grown-up daughters kept a greengrocer's shop in the East-end of
London.
In the dark, Jukes,
unsteady on his legs, listened to a faint thunderous patter. A deadened
screaming went on steadily at his elbow, as it were; and from above the louder
tumult of the storm descended upon these near sounds. His head swam. To him,
too, in that bunker, the motion of the ship seemed novel and menacing, sapping
his resolution as though he had never been afloat before.
He had half a mind to
scramble out again; but the remembrance of Captain MacWhirr's voice made this
impossible. His orders were to go and see. What was the good of it, he wanted
to know. Enraged, he told himself he would see -- of course. But the boatswain,
staggering clumsily, warned him to be careful how he opened that door; there
was a blamed fight going on. And Jukes, as if in great bodily pain, desired
irritably to know what the devil they were fighting for.
"Dollars! Dollars,
sir. All their rotten chests got burst open. Blamed money skipping all over the
place, and they are tumbling after it head over heels -- tearing and biting like
anything. A regular little hell in there."
Jukes convulsively
opened the door. The short boatswain peered under his arm.
One of the lamps had
gone out, broken perhaps. Rancorous, guttural cries burst out loudly on their
ears, and a strange panting sound, the working of all these straining breasts.
A hard blow hit the side of the ship: water fell above with a stunning shock,
and in the forefront of the gloom, where the air was reddish and thick, Jukes
saw a head bang the deck violently, two thick calves waving on high, muscular
arms twined round a naked body, a yellow-face, open-mouthed and with a set wild
stare, look up and slide away. An empty chest clattered turning over; a man
fell head first with a jump, as if lifted by a kick; and farther off, indistinct,
others streamed like a mass of rolling stones down a bank, thumping the deck
with their feet and flourishing their arms wildly. The hatchway ladder was
loaded with coolies swarming on it like bees on a branch. They hung on the
steps in a crawling, stirring cluster, beating madly with their fists the
underside of the battened hatch, and the headlong rush of the water above was
heard in the intervals of their yelling. The ship heeled over more, and they
began to drop off: first one, then two, then all the rest went away together,
falling straight off with a great cry.
Jukes was confounded.
The boatswain, with gruff anxiety, begged him, "Don't you go in there,
sir."
The whole place seemed
to twist upon itself, jumping incessantly the while; and when the ship rose to
a sea Jukes fancied that all these men would be shot upon him in a body. He
backed out, swung the door to, and with trembling hands pushed at the bolt. . .
.
As soon as his mate had
gone Captain MacWhirr, left alone on the bridge, sidled and staggered as far as
the wheelhouse. Its door being hinged forward, he had to fight the gale for
admittance, and when at last he managed to enter, it was with an instantaneous
clatter and a bang, as though he had been fired through the wood. He stood
within, holding on to the handle.
The steering-gear
leaked steam, and in the confined space the glass of the binnacle made a shiny
oval of light in a thin white fog. The wind howled, hummed, whistled, with
sudden booming gusts that rattled the doors and shutters in the vicious patter
of sprays. Two coils of lead-line and a small canvas bag hung on a long
lanyard, swung wide off, and came back clinging to the bulkheads. The gratings
underfoot were nearly afloat; with every sweeping blow of a sea, water squirted
violently through the cracks all round the door, and the man at the helm had
flung down his cap, his coat, and stood propped against the gear-casing in a
striped cotton shirt open on his breast. The little brass wheel in his hands
had the appearance of a bright and fragile toy.
The cords of his neck
stood hard and lean, a dark patch lay in the hollow of his throat, and his face
was still and sunken as in death.
Captain MacWhirr wiped
his eyes. The sea that had nearly taken him overboard had, to his great
annoyance, washed his sou'-wester hat off his bald head. The fluffy, fair hair,
soaked and darkened, resembled a mean skein of cotton threads festooned round
his bare skull. His face, glistening with sea-water, had been made crimson with
the wind, with the sting of sprays. He looked as though he had come off
sweating from before a furnace.
"You here?"
he muttered, heavily.
The second mate had
found his way into the wheelhouse some time before. He had fixed himself in a
corner with his knees up, a fist pressed against each temple; and this attitude
suggested rage, sorrow, resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated
unforgiveness. He said mournfully and defiantly, "Well, it's my watch
below now: ain't it?"
The steam gear
clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman's eyeballs seemed to
project out of a hungry face as if the compass card behind the binnacle glass
had been meat. God knows how long he had been left there to steer, as if
forgotten by all his shipmates. The bells had not been struck; there had been
no reliefs; the ship's routine had gone down wind; but he was trying to keep
her head north-north-east. The rudder might have been gone for all he knew, the
fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse.
He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the
compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed
to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was horribly afraid,
also, of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it.
When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched.
Captain MacWhirr looked
up at the wheelhouse clock. Screwed to the bulk-head, it had a white face on which
the black hands appeared to stand quite still. It was half-past one in the
morning.
"Another
day," he muttered to himself.
The second mate heard
him, and lifting his head as one grieving amongst ruins, "You won't see it
break," he exclaimed. His wrists and his knees could be seen to shake
violently. "No, by God! You won't. . . ."
He took his face again
between his fists.
The body of the
helmsman had moved slightly, but his head didn't budge on his neck, -- like a
stone head fixed to look one way from a column. During a roll that all but took
his booted legs from under him, and in the very stagger to save himself,
Captain MacWhirr said austerely, "Don't you pay any attention to what that
man says." And then, with an indefinable change of tone, very grave, he
added, "He isn't on duty."
The sailor said
nothing.
The hurricane boomed,
shaking the little place, which seemed air-tight; and the light of the binnacle
flickered all the time.
"You haven't been
relieved," Captain MacWhirr went on, looking down. "I want you to
stick to the helm, though, as long as you can. You've got the hang of her.
Another man coming here might make a mess of it. Wouldn't do. No child's play.
And the hands are probably busy with a job down below. . . . Think you
can?"
The steering-gear
leaped into an abrupt short clatter, stopped smouldering like an ember; and the
still man, with a motionless gaze, burst out, as if all the passion in him had
gone into his lips: "By Heavens, sir! I can steer for ever if nobody talks
to me."
"Oh! aye! All
right. . . ." The Captain lifted his eyes for the first time to the man,
". . . Hackett."
And he seemed to
dismiss this matter from his mind. He stooped to the engine-room speaking-tube,
blew in, and bent his head. Mr. Rout below answered, and at once Captain
MacWhirr put his lips to the mouthpiece.
With the uproar of the
gale around him he applied alternately his lips and his ear, and the engineer's
voice mounted to him, harsh and as if out of the heat of an engagement. One of
the stokers was disabled, the others had given in, the second engineer and the
donkey-man were firing-up. The third engineer was standing by the steam-valve.
The engines were being tended by hand. How was it above?
"Bad enough. It
mostly rests with you," said Captain MacWhirr. Was the mate down there
yet? No? Well, he would be presently. Would Mr. Rout let him talk through the
speaking-tube? -- through the deck speaking-tube, because he -- the Captain --
was going out again on the bridge directly. There was some trouble amongst the
Chinamen. They were fighting, it seemed. Couldn't allow fighting anyhow. . . .
Mr. Rout had gone away,
and Captain MacWhirr could feel against his ear the pulsation of the engines,
like the beat of the ship's heart. Mr. Rout's voice down there shouted
something distantly. The ship pitched headlong, the pulsation leaped with a
hissing tumult, and stopped dead. Captain MacWhirr's face was impassive, and
his eyes were fixed aimlessly on the crouching shape of the second mate. Again
Mr. Rout's voice cried out in the depths, and the pulsating beats recommenced,
with slow strokes -- growing swifter.
Mr. Rout had returned
to the tube. "It don't matter much what they do," he said, hastily;
and then, with irritation, "She takes these dives as if she never meant to
come up again."
"Awful sea,"
said the Captain's voice from above.
"Don't let me
drive her under," barked Solomon Rout up the pipe.
"Dark and rain.
Can't see what's coming," uttered the voice. "Must -- keep -- her --
moving -- enough to steer -- and chance it," it went on to state
distinctly.
"I am doing as
much as I dare."
"We are -- getting
-- smashed up -- a good deal up here," proceeded the voice mildly.
"Doing -- fairly well -- though. Of course, if the wheelhouse should go. .
. ."
Mr. Rout, bending an
attentive ear, muttered peevishly something under his breath.
But the deliberate
voice up there became animated to ask: "Jukes turned up yet?" Then,
after a short wait, "I wish he would bear a hand. I want him to be done
and come up here in case of anything. To look after the ship. I am all alone.
The second mate's lost. . . ."
"What?"
shouted Mr. Rout into the engine-room, taking his head away. Then up the tube he
cried, "Gone overboard?" and clapped his ear to.
"Lost his
nerve," the voice from above continued in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Damned awkward circumstance."
Mr. Rout, listening
with bowed neck, opened his eyes wide at this. However, he heard something like
the sounds of a scuffle and broken exclamations coming down to him. He strained
his hearing; and all the time Beale, the third engineer, with his arms
uplifted, held between the palms of his hands the rim of a little black wheel
projecting at the side of a big copper pipe. He seemed to be poising it above
his head, as though it were a correct attitude in some sort of game.
To steady himself, he
pressed his shoulder against the white bulkhead, one knee bent, and a sweat-rag
tucked in his belt hanging on his hip. His smooth cheek was begrimed and
flushed, and the coal dust on his eyelids, like the black pencilling of a
make-up, enhanced the liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to his youthful
face something of a feminine, exotic and fascinating aspect. When the ship
pitched he would with hasty movements of his hands screw hard at the little
wheel.
"Gone crazy,"
began the Captain's voice suddenly in the tube. "Rushed at me. . . . Just
now. Had to knock him down. . . . This minute. You heard, Mr. Rout?"
"The devil!"
muttered Mr. Rout. "Look out, Beale!"
His shout rang out like
the blast of a warning trumpet, between the iron walls of the engine-room.
Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a
roof; and the whole lofty space resembled the interior of a monument, divided
by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering at different levels, and a
mass of gloom lingering in the middle, within the columnar stir of machinery
under the motionless swelling of the cylinders. A loud and wild resonance, made
up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air.
There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam. The
blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from
side to side.
Gleams, like pale long
flames, trembled upon the polish of metal; from the flooring below the enormous
crank-heads emerged in their turns with a flash of brass and steel -- going
over; while the connecting-rods, big-jointed, like skeleton limbs, seemed to
thrust them down and pull them up again with an irresistible precision. And
deep in the half-light other rods dodged deliberately to and fro, crossheads
nodded, discs of metal rubbed smoothly against each other, slow and gentle, in
a commingling of shadows and gleams.
Sometimes all those
powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had
been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of
languor; and Mr. Rout's eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face. He was
fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers. A short shiny jacket barely
covered his loins, and his white wrists protruded far out of the tight sleeves,
as though the emergency had added to his stature, had lengthened his limbs,
augmented his pallor, hollowed his eyes.
He moved, climbing high
up, disappearing low down, with a restless, purposeful industry, and when he
stood still, holding the guard-rail in front of the starting-gear, he would
keep glancing to the right at the steam-gauge, at the water-gauge, fixed upon
the white wall in the light of a swaying lamp. The mouths of two speaking-tubes
gaped stupidly at his elbow, and the dial of the engine-room telegraph
resembled a clock of large diameter, bearing on its face curt words instead of
figures. The grouped letters stood out heavily black, around the pivot-head of
the indicator, emphatically symbolic of loud exclamations: AHEAD, ASTERN, SLOW,
Half, STAND BY; and the fat black hand pointed downwards to the word FULL,
which, thus singled out, captured the eye as a sharp cry secures attention.
The wood-encased bulk
of the low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from above, emitted a faint
wheeze at every thrust, and except for that low hiss the engines worked their
steel limbs headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness. And all
this, the white walls, the moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout's
feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams,
uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves
against the ship's side. The whole loftiness of the place, booming hollow to
the great voice of the wind, swayed at the top like a tree, would go over
bodily, as if borne down this way and that by the tremendous blasts.
"You've got to
hurry up," shouted Mr. Rout, as soon as he saw Jukes appear in the
stokehold doorway.
Jukes' glance was
wandering and tipsy; his red face was puffy, as though he had overslept
himself. He had had an arduous road, and had travelled over it with immense
vivacity, the agitation of his mind corresponding to the exertions of his body.
He had rushed up out of the bunker, stumbling in the dark alleyway amongst a
lot of bewildered men who, trod upon, asked "What's up, sir?" in awed
mutters all round him; -- down the stokehold ladder, missing many iron rungs in
his hurry, down into a place deep as a well, black as Tophet, tipping over back
and forth like a see-saw. The water in the bilges thundered at each roll, and
lumps of coal skipped to and fro, from end to end, rattling like an avalanche
of pebbles on a slope of iron.
Somebody in there
moaned with pain, and somebody else could be seen crouching over what seemed
the prone body of a dead man; a lusty voice blasphemed; and the glow under each
fire-door was like a pool of flaming blood radiating quietly in a velvety
blackness.
A gust of wind struck
upon the nape of Jukes' neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet
ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two
wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two
shovels.
"Hallo! Plenty of
draught now," yelled the second engineer at once, as though he had been
all the time looking out for Jukes. The donkeyman, a dapper little chap with a
dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute
transport. They were keeping a full head of steam, and a profound rumbling, as
of an empty furniture van trotting over a bridge, made a sustained bass to all
the other noises of the place.
"Blowing off all
the time," went on yelling the second. With a sound as of a hundred
scoured saucepans, the orifice of a ventilator spat upon his shoulder a sudden
gush of salt water, and he volleyed a stream of curses upon all things on earth
including his own soul, ripping and raving, and all the time attending to his
business. With a sharp clash of metal the ardent pale glare of the fire opened
upon his bullet head, showing his spluttering lips, his insolent face, and with
another clang closed like the white-hot wink of an iron eye.
"Where's the
blooming ship? Can you tell me? blast my eyes! Under water -- or what? It's
coming down here in tons. Are the condemned cowls gone to Hades? Hey? Don't you
know anything -- you jolly sailor-man you . . . ?"
Jukes, after a
bewildered moment, had been helped by a roll to dart through; and as soon as
his eyes took in the comparative vastness, peace and brilliance of the
engine-room, the ship, setting her stern heavily in the water, sent him
charging head down upon Mr. Rout.
The chief's arm, long
like a tentacle, and straightening as if worked by a spring, went out to meet
him, and deflected his rush into a spin towards the speaking- tubes. At the
same time Mr. Rout repeated earnestly:
"You've got to
hurry up, whatever it is."
Jukes yelled "Are
you there, sir?" and listened. Nothing. Suddenly the roar of the wind fell
straight into his ear, but presently a small voice shoved aside the shouting
hurricane quietly.
"You, Jukes? --
Well?"
Jukes was ready to
talk: it was only time that seemed to be wanting. It was easy enough to account
for everything. He could perfectly imagine the coolies battened down in the
reeking 'tween-deck, lying sick and scared between the rows of chests. Then one
of these chests -- or perhaps several at once -- breaking loose in a roll,
knocking out others, sides splitting, lids flying open, and all these clumsy
Chinamen rising up in a body to save their property. Afterwards every fling of
the ship would hurl that tramping, yelling mob here and there, from side to
side, in a whirl of smashed wood, torn clothing, rolling dollars. A struggle
once started, they would be unable to stop themselves. Nothing could stop them
now except main force. It was a disaster. He had seen it, and that was all he
could say. Some of them must be dead, he believed. The rest would go on
fighting. . . .
He sent up his words,
tripping over each other, crowding the narrow tube. They mounted as if into a
silence of an enlightened comprehension dwelling alone up there with a storm.
And Jukes wanted to be dismissed from the face of that odious trouble intruding
on the great need of the ship.
HE WAITED. Before his
eyes the engines turned with slow labour, that in the moment of going off into
a mad fling would stop dead at Mr. Rout's shout, "Look out, Beale!"
They paused in an intelligent immobility, stilled in mid-stroke, a heavy crank
arrested on the cant, as if conscious of danger and the passage of time. Then,
with a "Now, then!" from the chief, and the sound of a breath
expelled through clenched teeth, they would accomplish the interrupted
revolution and begin another.
There was the prudent
sagacity of wisdom and the deliberation of enormous strength in their
movements. This was their work -- this patient coaxing of a distracted ship
over the fury of the waves and into the very eye of the wind. At times Mr.
Rout's chin would sink on his breast, and he watched them with knitted eyebrows
as if lost in thought.
The voice that kept the
hurricane out of Jukes' ear began: "Take the hands with you . . . ,"
and left off unexpectedly.
"What could I do
with them, sir?"
A harsh, abrupt,
imperious clang exploded suddenly. The three pairs of eyes flew up to the
telegraph dial to see the hand jump from FULL to STOP, as if snatched by a
devil. And then these three men in the engine-room had the intimate sensation
of a check upon the ship, of a strange shrinking, as if she had gathered
herself for a desperate leap.
"Stop her!"
bellowed Mr. Rout.
Nobody -- not even
Captain MacWhirr, who alone on deck had caught sight of a white line of foam
coming on at such a height that he couldn't believe his eyes -- nobody was to
know the steepness of that sea and the awful depth of the hollow the hurricane
had scooped out behind the running wall of water.
It raced to meet the
ship, and, with a pause, as of girding the loins, the Nan-Shan lifted her bows
and leaped. The flames in all the lamps sank, darkening the engine-room. One
went out. With a tearing crash and a swirling, raving tumult, tons of water
fell upon the deck, as though the ship had darted under the foot of a cataract.
Down there they looked
at each other, stunned.
"Swept from end to
end, by God!" bawled Jukes.
She dipped into the
hollow straight down, as if going over the edge of the world. The engine-room
toppled forward menacingly, like the inside of a tower nodding in an
earthquake. An awful racket, of iron things falling, came from the stokehold.
She hung on this appalling slant long enough for Beale to drop on his hands and
knees and begin to crawl as if he meant to fly on all fours out of the
engine-room, and for Mr. Rout to turn his head slowly, rigid, cavernous, with
the lower jaw dropping. Jukes had shut his eyes, and his face in a moment
became hopelessly blank and gentle, like the face of a blind man.
At last she rose
slowly, staggering, as if she had to lift a mountain with her bows.
Mr. Rout shut his
mouth; Jukes blinked; and little Beale stood up hastily.
"Another one like
this, and that's the last of her," cried the chief.
He and Jukes looked at
each other, and the same thought came into their heads. The Captain! Every
thing must have been swept away. Steering-gear gone -- ship like a log. All
over directly.
"Rush!"
ejaculated Mr. Rout thickly, glaring with enlarged, doubtful eyes at Jukes, who
answered him by an irresolute glance.
The clang of the
telegraph gong soothed them instantly. The black hand dropped in a flash from
STOP to FULL.
"Now then,
Beale!" cried Mr. Rout.
The steam hissed low.
The piston-rods slid in and out. Jukes put his ear to the tube. The voice was
ready for him. It said: "Pick up all the money. Bear a hand now. I'll want
you up here." And that was all.
"Sir?" called
up Jukes. There was no answer.
He staggered away like
a defeated man from the field of battle. He had got, in some way or other, a
cut above his left eyebrow -- a cut to the bone. He was not aware of it in the
least: quantities of the China Sea, large enough to break his neck for him, had
gone over his head, had cleaned, washed, and salted that wound. It did not
bleed, but only gaped red; and this gash over the eye, his dishevelled hair,
the disorder of his clothes, gave him the aspect of a man worsted in a fight
with fists.
"Got to pick up
the dollars." He appealed to Mr. Rout, smiling pitifully at random.
"What's
that?" asked Mr. Rout, wildly. "Pick up . . . ? I don't care. . .
." Then, quivering in every muscle, but with an exaggeration of paternal
tone, "Go away now, for God's sake. You deck people'll drive me silly.
There's that second mate been going for the old man. Don't you know? You
fellows are going wrong for want of something to do. . . ."
At these words Jukes
discovered in himself the beginnings of anger. Want of something to do --
indeed. . . . Full of hot scorn against the chief, he turned to go the way he
had come. In the stokehold the plump donkeyman toiled with his shovel mutely,
as if his tongue had been cut out; but the second was carrying on like a noisy,
undaunted maniac, who had preserved his skill in the art of stoking under a
marine boiler.
"Hallo, you
wandering officer! Hey! Can't you get some of your slush-slingers to wind up a
few of them ashes? I am getting choked with them here. Curse it! Hallo! Hey!
Remember the articles: Sailors and firemen to assist each other. Hey! D'ye
hear?"
Jukes was climbing out
frantically, and the other, lifting up his face after him, howled, "Can't
you speak? What are you poking about here for? What's your game, anyhow?"
A frenzy possessed
Jukes. By the time he was back amongst the men in the darkness of the alleyway,
he felt ready to wring all their necks at the slightest sign of hanging back.
The very thought of it exasperated him. He couldn't hang back. They shouldn't.
The impetuosity with
which he came amongst them carried them along. They had already been excited
and startled at all his comings and goings -- by the fierceness and rapidity of
his movements; and more felt than seen in his rushes, he appeared formidable --
busied with matters of life and death that brooked no delay. At his first word
he heard them drop into the bunker one after another obediently, with heavy
thumps.
They were not clear as
to what would have to be done. "What is it? What is it?" they were
asking each other. The boatswain tried to explain; the sounds of a great
scuffle surprised them: and the mighty shocks, reverberating awfully in the
black bunker, kept them in mind of their danger. When the boatswain threw open
the door it seemed that an eddy of the hurricane, stealing through the iron sides
of the ship, had set all these bodies whirling like dust: there came to them a
confused uproar, a tempestuous tumult, a fierce mutter, gusts of screams dying
away, and the tramping of feet mingling with the blows of the sea.
For a moment they
glared amazed, blocking the doorway. Jukes pushed through them brutally. He
said nothing, and simply darted in. Another lot of coolies on the ladder,
struggling suicidally to break through the battened hatch to a swamped deck,
fell off as before, and he disappeared under them like a man overtaken by a
landslide.
The boatswain yelled
excitedly: "Come along. Get the mate out. He'll be trampled to death. Come
on."
They charged in,
stamping on breasts, on fingers, on faces, catching their feet in heaps of
clothing, kicking broken wood; but before they could get hold of him Jukes
emerged waist deep in a multitude of clawing hands. In the instant he had been
lost to view, all the buttons of his jacket had gone, its back had got split up
to the collar, his waistcoat had been torn open. The central struggling mass of
Chinamen went over to the roll, dark, indistinct, helpless, with a wild gleam
of many eyes in the dim light of the lamps.
"Leave me alone --
damn you. I am all right," screeched Jukes. "Drive them forward.
Watch your chance when she pitches. Forward with 'em. Drive them against the
bulkhead. Jam 'em up."
The rush of the sailors
into the seething 'tween-deck was like a splash of cold water into a boiling
cauldron. The commotion sank for a moment.
The bulk of Chinamen
were locked in such a compact scrimmage that, linking their arms and aided by
an appalling dive of the ship, the seamen sent it forward in one great shove,
like a solid block. Behind their backs small clusters and loose bodies tumbled
from side to side.
The boatswain performed
prodigious feats of strength. With his long arms open, and each great paw
clutching at a stanchion, he stopped the rush of seven entwined Chinamen
rolling like a boulder. His joints cracked; he said, "Ha!" and they
flew apart. But the carpenter showed the greater intelligence. Without saying a
word to anybody he went back into the alleyway, to fetch several coils of cargo
gear he had seen there -- chain and rope. With these life-lines were rigged.
There was really no resistance.
The struggle, however it began, had turned into a scramble of blind panic. If
the coolies had started up after their scattered dollars they were by that time
fighting only for their footing. They took each other by the throat merely to
save themselves from being hurled about. Whoever got a hold anywhere would kick
at the others who caught at his legs and hung on, till a roll sent them flying
together across the deck.
The coming of the white
devils was a terror. Had they come to kill? The individuals torn out of the
ruck became very limp in the seamen's hands: some, dragged aside by the heels,
were passive, like dead bodies, with open, fixed eyes. Here and there a coolie
would fall on his knees as if begging for mercy; several, whom the excess of
fear made unruly, were hit with hard fists between the eyes, and cowered; while
those who were hurt submitted to rough handling, blinking rapidly without a
plaint. Faces streamed with blood; there were raw places on the shaven heads,
scratches, bruises, torn wounds, gashes. The broken porcelain out of the chests
was mostly responsible for the latter. Here and there a Chinaman, wild-eyed,
with his tail unplaited, nursed a bleeding sole.
They had been ranged
closely, after having been shaken into submission, cuffed a little to allay
excitement, addressed in gruff words of encouragement that sounded like
promises of evil. They sat on the deck in ghastly, drooping rows, and at the
end the carpenter, with two hands to help him, moved busily from place to place,
setting taut and hitching the life-lines. The boatswain, with one leg and one
arm embracing a stanchion, struggled with a lamp pressed to his breast, trying
to get a light, and growling all the time like an industrious gorilla. The
figures of seamen stooped repeatedly, with the movements of gleaners, and
everything was being flung into the bunker: clothing, smashed wood, broken
china, and the dollars, too, gathered up in men's jackets. Now and then a
sailor would stagger towards the doorway with his arms full of rubbish; and
dolorous, slanting eyes followed his movements.
With every roll of the
ship the long rows of sitting Celestials would sway forward brokenly, and her
headlong dives knocked together the line of shaven polls from end to end. When
the wash of water rolling on the deck died away for a moment, it seemed to
Jukes, yet quivering from his exertions, that in his mad struggle down there he
had overcome the wind somehow: that a silence had fallen upon the ship, a
silence in which the sea struck thunderously at her sides.
Everything had been
cleared out of the 'tween-deck -- all the wreckage, as the men said. They stood
erect and tottering above the level of heads and drooping shoulders. Here and
there a coolie sobbed for his breath. Where the high light fell, Jukes could
see the salient ribs of one, the yellow, wistful face of another; bowed necks;
or would meet a dull stare directed at his face. He was amazed that there had
been no corpses; but the lot of them seemed at their last gasp, and they appeared
to him more pitiful than if they had been all dead.
Suddenly one of the
coolies began to speak. The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he
threw his head up like a baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of
knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his
arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds,
that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a
strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent.
Two more started
mouthing what seemed to Jukes fierce denunciations; the others stirred with
grunts and growls. Jukes ordered the hands out of the 'tween-decks hurriedly.
He left last himself, backing through the door, while the grunts rose to a loud
murmur and hands were extended after him as after a malefactor. The boatswain
shot the bolt, and remarked uneasily, "Seems as if the wind had dropped,
sir."
The seamen were glad to
get back into the alleyway. Secretly each of them thought that at the last moment
he could rush out on deck -- and that was a comfort. There is something
horribly repugnant in the idea of being drowned under a deck. Now they had done
with the Chinamen, they again became conscious of the ship's position.
Jukes on coming out of
the alleyway found himself up to the neck in the noisy water. He gained the
bridge, and discovered he could detect obscure shapes as if his sight had
become preternaturally acute. He saw faint outlines. They recalled not the
familiar aspect of the Nan-Shan, but something remembered -- an old dismantled
steamer he had seen years ago rotting on a mudbank. She recalled that wreck.
There was no wind, not
a breath, except the faint currents created by the lurches of the ship. The
smoke tossed out of the funnel was settling down upon her deck. He breathed it
as he passed forward. He felt the deliberate throb of the engines, and heard
small sounds that seemed to have survived the great uproar: the knocking of
broken fittings, the rapid tumbling of some piece of wreckage on the bridge. He
perceived dimly the squat shape of his captain holding on to a twisted
bridge-rail, motionless and swaying as if rooted to the planks. The unexpected
stillness of the air oppressed Jukes.
"We have done it,
sir," he gasped.
"Thought you
would," said Captain MacWhirr.
"Did you?"
murmured Jukes to himself.
"Wind fell all at
once," went on the Captain.
Jukes burst out:
"If you think it was an easy job --"
But his captain,
clinging to the rail, paid no attention. "According to the books the worst
is not over yet."
"If most of them
hadn't been half dead with seasickness and fright, not one of us would have
come out of that 'tween-deck alive," said Jukes.
"Had to do what's
fair by them," mumbled MacWhirr, stolidly. "You don't find everything
in books."
"Why, I believe
they would have risen on us if I hadn't ordered the hands out of that pretty
quick," continued Jukes with warmth.
After the whisper of
their shouts, their ordinary tones, so distinct, rang out very loud to their ears
in the amazing stillness of the air. It seemed to them they were talking in a
dark and echoing vault.
Through a jagged
aperture in the dome of clouds the light of a few stars fell upon the black
sea, rising and falling confusedly. Sometimes the head of a watery cone would
topple on board and mingle with the rolling flurry of foam on the swamped deck;
and the Nan-Shan wallowed heavily at the bottom of a circular cistern of
clouds. This ring of dense vapours, gyrating madly round the calm of the
centre, encompassed the ship like a motionless and unbroken wall of an aspect
inconceivably sinister. Within, the sea, as if agitated by an internal
commotion, leaped in peaked mounds that jostled each other, slapping heavily
against her sides; and a low moaning sound, the infinite plaint of the storm's
fury, came from beyond the limits of the menacing calm. Captain MacWhirr
remained silent, and Jukes' ready ear caught suddenly the faint, longdrawn roar
of some immense wave rushing unseen under that thick blackness, which made the
appalling boundary of his vision.
"Of course,"
he started resentfully, "they thought we had caught at the chance to
plunder them. Of course! You said -- pick up the money. Easier said than done.
They couldn't tell what was in our heads. We came in, smash -- right into the
middle of them. Had to do it by a rush."
"As long as it's
done . . . ," mumbled the Captain, without attempting to look at Jukes.
"Had to do what's fair."
"We shall find yet
there's the devil to pay when this is over," said Jukes, feeling very
sore. "Let them only recover a bit, and you'll see. They will fly at our
throats, sir. Don't forget, sir, she isn't a British ship now. These brutes
know it well, too. The damned Siamese flag."
"We are on board,
all the same," remarked Captain MacWhirr.
"The trouble's not
over yet," insisted Jukes, prophetically, reeling and catching on.
"She's a wreck," he added, faintly.
"The trouble's not
over yet," assented Captain MacWhirr, half aloud. . . . "Look out for
her a minute."
"Are you going off
the deck, sir?" asked Jukes, hurriedly, as if the storm were sure to
pounce upon him as soon as he had been left alone with the ship.
He watched her,
battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black
waters lit by the gleams of distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into
the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of
steam -- and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant
trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the
contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jukes' head a few
stars shone into a pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc
frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars, too, seemed
to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their
splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.
Captain MacWhirr had
gone into the chart-room. There was no light there; but he could feel the
disorder of that place where he used to live tidily. His armchair was upset.
The books had tumbled out on the floor: he scrunched a piece of glass under his
boot. He groped for the matches, and found a box on a shelf with a deep ledge.
He struck one, and puckering the corners of his eyes, held out the little flame
towards the barometer whose glittering top of glass and metals nodded at him
continuously.
It stood very low --
incredibly low, so low that Captain MacWhirr grunted. The match went out, and
hurriedly he extracted another, with thick, stiff fingers.
Again a little flame
flared up before the nodding glass and metal of the top. His eyes looked at it,
narrowed with attention, as if expecting an imperceptible sign. With his grave
face he resembled a booted and misshapen pagan burning incense before the
oracle of a Joss. There was no mistake. It was the lowest reading he had ever
seen in his life.
Captain MacWhirr
emitted a low whistle. He forgot himself till the flame diminished to a blue
spark, burnt his fingers and vanished. Perhaps something had gone wrong with
the thing!
There was an aneroid
glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and
discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the
bulkhead, meaningly, not to be gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made
unerring by the indifference of matter. There was no room for doubt now.
Captain MacWhirr pshawed at it, and threw the match down.
The worst was to come,
then -- and if the books were right this worst would be very bad. The
experience of the last six hours had enlarged his conception of what heavy
weather could be like. "It'll be terrific," he pronounced, mentally.
He had not consciously looked at anything by the light of the matches except at
the barometer; and yet somehow he had seen that his water-bottle and the two
tumblers had been flung out of their stand. It seemed to give him a more
intimate knowledge of the tossing the ship had gone through. "I wouldn't
have believed it," he thought. And his table had been cleared, too; his
rulers, his pencils, the inkstand -- all the things that had their safe
appointed places -- they were gone, as if a mischievous hand had plucked them
out one by one and flung them on the wet floor. The hurricane had broken in
upon the orderly arrangements of his privacy. This had never happened before,
and the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure. And the worst
was to come yet! He was glad the trouble in the 'tween-deck had been discovered
in time. If the ship had to go after all, then, at least, she wouldn't be going
to the bottom with a lot of people in her fighting teeth and claw. That would
have been odious. And in that feeling there was a humane intention and a vague
sense of the fitness of things.
These instantaneous
thoughts were yet in their essence heavy and slow, partaking of the nature of
the man. He extended his hand to put back the matchbox in its corner of the
shelf. There were always matches there -- by his order. The steward had his
instructions impressed upon him long before. "A box . . . just there, see?
Not so very full . . . where I can put my hand on it, steward. Might want a
light in a hurry. Can't tell on board ship what you might want in a hurry.
Mind, now."
And of course on his side
he would be careful to put it back in its place scrupulously. He did so now,
but before he removed his hand it occurred to him that perhaps he would never
have occasion to use that box any more. The vividness of the thought checked
him and for an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers closed again on
the small object as though it had been the symbol of all these little habits
that chain us to the weary round of life. He released it at last, and letting
himself fall on the settee, listened for the first sounds of returning wind.
Not yet. He heard only
the wash of water, the heavy splashes, the dull shocks of the confused seas
boarding his ship from all sides. She would never have a chance to clear her
decks.
But the quietude of the
air was startlingly tense and unsafe, like a slender hair holding a sword
suspended over his head. By this awful pause the storm penetrated the defences
of the man and unsealed his lips. He spoke out in the solitude and the pitch
darkness of the cabin, as if addressing another being awakened within his
breast.
"I shouldn't like
to lose her," he said half aloud. He sat unseen, apart from the sea, from
his ship, isolated, as if withdrawn from the very current of his own existence,
where such freaks as talking to himself surely had no place. His palms reposed
on his knees, he bowed his short neck and puffed heavily, surrendering to a
strange sensation of weariness he was not enlightened enough to recognize for
the fatigue of mental stress.
From where he sat he
could reach the door of a washstand locker. There should have been a towel
there. There was. Good. . . . He took it out, wiped his face, and afterwards
went on rubbing his wet head. He towelled himself with energy in the dark, and
then remained motionless with the towel on his knees. A moment passed, of a
stillness so profound that no one could have guessed there was a man sitting in
that cabin. Then a murmur arose.
"She may come out
of it yet."
When Captain MacWhirr
came out on deck, which he did brusquely, as though he had suddenly become
conscious of having stayed away too long, the calm had lasted already more than
fifteen minutes -- long enough to make itself intolerable even to his
imagination. Jukes, motionless on the forepart of the bridge, began to speak at
once. His voice, blank and forced as though he were talking through hard-set
teeth, seemed to flow away on all sides into the darkness, deepening again upon
the sea.
"I had the wheel
relieved. Hackett began to sing out that he was done. He's lying in there
alongside the steering-gear with a face like death. At first I couldn't get
anybody to crawl out and relieve the poor devil. That boss'n's worse than no
good, I always said. Thought I would have had to go myself and haul out one of
them by the neck."
"Ah, well,"
muttered the Captain. He stood watchful by Jukes' side.
"The second mate's
in there, too, holding his head. Is he hurt, sir?"
"No --
crazy," said Captain MacWhirr, curtly.
"Looks as if he
had a tumble, though."
"I had to give him
a push," explained the Captain.
Jukes gave an impatient
sigh.
"It will come very
sudden," said Captain MacWhirr, "and from over there, I fancy. God
only knows though. These books are only good to muddle your head and make you
jumpy. It will be bad, and there's an end. If we only can steam her round in
time to meet it. . . ."
A minute passed. Some
of the stars winked rapidly and vanished.
"You left them
pretty safe?" began the Captain abruptly, as though the silence were
unbearable.
"Are you thinking of
the coolies, sir? I rigged life-lines all ways across that 'tween-deck."
"Did you? Good
idea, Mr. Jukes."
"I didn't . . .
think you cared to . . . know," said Jukes -- the lurching of the ship cut
his speech as though somebody had been jerking him around while he talked --
"how I got on with . . . that infernal job. We did it. And it may not
matter in the end."
"Had to do what's
fair, for all -- they are only Chinamen. Give them the same chance with
ourselves -- hang it all. She isn't lost yet. Bad enough to be shut up below in
a gale --"
"That's what I
thought when you gave me the job, sir," interjected Jukes, moodily.
"-- without being
battered to pieces," pursued Captain MacWhirr with rising vehemence.
"Couldn't let that go on in my ship, if I knew she hadn't five minutes to
live. Couldn't bear it, Mr. Jukes."
A hollow echoing noise,
like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went
away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist
of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over
the ship -- and went out.
"Now for it!"
muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Mr. Jukes."
"Here, sir."
The two men were
growing indistinct to each other.
"We must trust her
to go through it and come out on the other side. That's plain and straight.
There's no room for Captain Wilson's storm-strategy here."
"No, sir."
"She will be
smothered and swept again for hours," mumbled the Captain. "There's
not much left by this time above deck for the sea to take away -- unless you or
me."
"Both, sir,"
whispered Jukes, breathlessly.
"You are always
meeting trouble half way, Jukes," Captain MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly.
"Though it's a fact that the second mate is no good. D'ye hear, Mr. Jukes?
You would be left alone if. . . ."
Captain MacWhirr
interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all sides, remained silent.
"Don't you be put
out by anything," the Captain continued, mumbling rather fast. "Keep
her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the
wind. Facing it -- always facing it -- that's the way to get through. You are a
young sailor. Face it. That's enough for any man. Keep a cool head."
"Yes, sir,"
said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.
In the next few seconds
the Captain spoke to the engine-room and got an answer.
For some reason Jukes
experienced an access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a
warm breath, and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of
the darkness stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden
belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point.
The ship laboured
without intermission amongst the black hills of water, paying with this hard
tumbling the price of her life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking a white
plummet of steam into the night, and Jukes' thought skimmed like a bird through
the engine-room, where Mr. Rout -- good man -- was ready. When the rumbling
ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every sound, a dead pause in
which Captain MacWhirr's voice rang out startlingly.
"What's that? A
puff of wind?" -- it spoke much louder than Jukes had ever heard it before
-- "On the bow. That's right. She may come out of it yet."
The mutter of the winds
drew near apace. In the forefront could be distinguished a drowsy waking plaint
passing on, and far off the growth of a multiple clamour, marching and
expanding. There was the throb as of many drums in it, a vicious rushing note,
and like the chant of a tramping multitude.
Jukes could no longer
see his captain distinctly. The darkness was absolutely piling itself upon the
ship. At most he made out movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head
thrown up.
Captain MacWhirr was
trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The
hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees,
to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had
found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to
wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship,
Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were:
"I wouldn't like to lose her."
He was spared that
annoyance.
ON A bright sunshiny
day, with the breeze chasing her smoke far ahead, the Nan-Shan came into
Fu-chau. Her arrival was at once noticed on shore, and the seamen in harbour
said: "Look! Look at that steamer. What's that? Siamese -- isn't she? Just
look at her!"
She seemed, indeed, to
have been used as a running target for the secondary batteries of a cruiser. A
hail of minor shells could not have given her upper works a more broken, torn,
and devastated aspect: and she had about her the worn, weary air of ships
coming from the far ends of the world -- and indeed with truth, for in her
short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the
Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of
the earth. She was incrusted and gray with salt to the trucks of her masts and
to the top of her funnel; as though (as some facetious seaman said) "the
crowd on board had fished her out somewhere from the bottom of the sea and
brought her in here for salvage." And further, excited by the felicity of
his own wit, he offered to give five pounds for her -- "as she
stands."
Before she had been
quite an hour at rest, a meagre little man, with a red-tipped nose and a face
cast in an angry mould, landed from a sampan on the quay of the Foreign
Concession, and incontinently turned to shake his fist at her.
A tall individual, with
legs much too thin for a rotund stomach, and with watery eyes, strolled up and
remarked, "Just left her -- eh? Quick work."
He wore a soiled suit
of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache
drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim
and the crown of his hat.
"Hallo! what are
you doing here?" asked the ex-second-mate of the Nan-Shan, shaking hands
hurriedly.
"Standing by for a
job -- chance worth taking -- got a quiet hint," explained the man with
the broken hat, in jerky, apathetic wheezes.
The second shook his
fist again at the Nan-Shan. "There's a fellow there that ain't fit to have
the command of a scow," he declared, quivering with passion, while the
other looked about listlessly.
"Is there?"
But he caught sight on
the quay of a heavy seaman's chest, painted brown under a fringed sailcloth
cover, and lashed with new manila line. He eyed it with awakened interest.
"I would talk and
raise trouble if it wasn't for that damned Siamese flag. Nobody to go to -- or
I would make it hot for him. The fraud! Told his chief engineer -- that's
another fraud for you -- I had lost my nerve. The greatest lot of ignorant
fools that ever sailed the seas. No! You can't think . . ."
"Got your money
all right?" inquired his seedy acquaintance suddenly.
"Yes. Paid me off
on board," raged the second mate. "'Get your breakfast on shore,'
says he."
"Mean skunk!"
commented the tall man, vaguely, and passed his tongue on his lips. "What
about having a drink of some sort?"
"He struck
me," hissed the second mate.
"No! Struck! You
don't say?" The man in blue began to bustle about sympathetically.
"Can't possibly talk here. I want to know all about it. Struck -- eh?
Let's get a fellow to carry your chest. I know a quiet place where they have
some bottled beer. . . ."
Mr. Jukes, who had been
scanning the shore through a pair of glasses, informed the chief engineer
afterwards that "our late second mate hasn't been long in finding a
friend. A chap looking uncommonly like a bummer. I saw them walk away together
from the quay."
The hammering and
banging of the needful repairs did not disturb Captain MacWhirr. The steward
found in the letter he wrote, in a tidy chart-room, passages of such absorbing
interest that twice he was nearly caught in the act. But Mrs. MacWhirr, in the
drawing-room of the forty-pound house, stifled a yawn -- perhaps out of
self-respect -- for she was alone.
She reclined in a
plush-bottomed and gilt hammock-chair near a tiled fireplace, with Japanese
fans on the mantel and a glow of coals in the grate. Lifting her hands, she
glanced wearily here and there into the many pages. It was not her fault they
were so prosy, so completely uninteresting -- from "My darling wife"
at the beginning, to "Your loving husband" at the end. She couldn't
be really expected to understand all these ship affairs. She was glad, of
course, to hear from him, but she had never asked herself why, precisely.
". . . They are
called typhoons . . . The mate did not seem to like it . . . Not in books . . .
Couldn't think of letting it go on. . . ."
The paper rustled
sharply. ". . . . A calm that lasted more than twenty minutes," she
read perfunctorily; and the next words her thoughtless eyes caught, on the top
of another page, were: "see you and the children again. . . ." She
had a movement of impatience. He was always thinking of coming home. He had
never had such a good salary before. What was the matter now?
It did not occur to her
to turn back overleaf to look. She would have found it recorded there that
between 4 and 6 A. M. on December 25th, Captain MacWhirr did actually think
that his ship could not possibly live another hour in such a sea, and that he
would never see his wife and children again. Nobody was to know this (his
letters got mislaid so quickly) -- nobody whatever but the steward, who had
been greatly impressed by that disclosure. So much so, that he tried to give
the cook some idea of the "narrow squeak we all had" by saying
solemnly, "The old man himself had a dam' poor opinion of our
chance."
"How do you
know?" asked, contemptuously, the cook, an old soldier. "He hasn't
told you, maybe?"
"Well, he did give
me a hint to that effect," the steward brazened it out.
"Get along with you!
He will be coming to tell me next," jeered the old cook, over his
shoulder.
Mrs. MacWhirr glanced
farther, on the alert. ". . . Do what's fair. . . . Miserable objects . .
. . Only three, with a broken leg each, and one . . . Thought had better keep
the matter quiet . . . hope to have done the fair thing. . . ."
She let fall her hands.
No: there was nothing more about coming home. Must have been merely expressing
a pious wish. Mrs. MacWhirr's mind was set at ease, and a black marble clock,
priced by the local jeweller at £3 18s. 6d., had a discreet stealthy tick.
The door flew open, and
a girl in the long-legged, short-frocked period of existence, flung into the
room. A lot of colourless, rather lanky hair was scattered over her shoulders.
Seeing her mother, she stood still, and directed her pale prying eyes upon the
letter.
"From
father," murmured Mrs. MacWhirr. "What have you done with your
ribbon?"
The girl put her hands
up to her head and pouted.
"He's well,"
continued Mrs. MacWhirr languidly. "At least I think so. He never
says." She had a little laugh. The girl's face expressed a wandering
indifference, and Mrs. MacWhirr surveyed her with fond pride.
"Go and get your
hat," she said after a while. "I am going out to do some shopping.
There is a sale at Linom's."
"Oh, how
jolly!" uttered the child, impressively, in unexpectedly grave vibrating
tones, and bounded out of the room.
It was a fine
afternoon, with a gray sky and dry sidewalks. Outside the draper's Mrs.
MacWhirr smiled upon a woman in a black mantle of generous proportions armoured
in jet and crowned with flowers blooming falsely above a bilious matronly
countenance. They broke into a swift little babble of greetings and
exclamations both together, very hurried, as if the street were ready to yawn
open and swallow all that pleasure before it could be expressed.
Behind them the high
glass doors were kept on the swing. People couldn't pass, men stood aside
waiting patiently, and Lydia was absorbed in poking the end of her parasol between
the stone flags. Mrs. MacWhirr talked rapidly.
"Thank you very
much. He's not coming home yet. Of course it's very sad to have him away, but
it's such a comfort to know he keeps so well." Mrs. MacWhirr drew breath.
"The climate there agrees with him," she added, beamingly, as if poor
MacWhirr had been away touring in China for the sake of his health.
Neither was the chief
engineer coming home yet. Mr. Rout knew too well the value of a good billet.
"Solomon says
wonders will never cease," cried Mrs. Rout joyously at the old lady in her
armchair by the fire. Mr. Rout's mother moved slightly, her withered hands
lying in black half-mittens on her lap.
The eyes of the
engineer's wife fairly danced on the paper. "That captain of the ship he
is in -- a rather simple man, you remember, mother? -- has done something
rather clever, Solomon says."
"Yes, my
dear," said the old woman meekly, sitting with bowed silvery head, and
that air of inward stillness characteristic of very old people who seem lost in
watching the last flickers of life. "I think I remember."
Solomon Rout, Old Sol,
Father Sol, the Chief, "Rout, good man" -- Mr. Rout, the
condescending and paternal friend of youth, had been the baby of her many
children -- all dead by this time. And she remembered him best as a boy of ten
-- long before he went away to serve his apprenticeship in some great
engineering works in the North. She had seen so little of him since, she had
gone through so many years, that she had now to retrace her steps very far back
to recognize him plainly in the mist of time. Sometimes it seemed that her
daughter-in-law was talking of some strange man.
Mrs. Rout junior was
disappointed. "H'm. H'm." She turned the page. "How provoking!
He doesn't say what it is. Says I couldn't understand how much there was in it.
Fancy! What could it be so very clever? What a wretched man not to tell
us!"
She read on without
further remark soberly, and at last sat looking into the fire. The chief wrote
just a word or two of the typhoon; but something had moved him to express an
increased longing for the companionship of the jolly woman. "If it hadn't
been that mother must be looked after, I would send you your passage-money
to-day. You could set up a small house out here. I would have a chance to see
you sometimes then. We are not growing younger. . . ."
"He's well,
mother," sighed Mrs. Rout, rousing herself.
"He always was a
strong healthy boy," said the old woman, placidly.
But Mr. Jukes' account
was really animated and very full. His friend in the Western Ocean trade
imparted it freely to the other officers of his liner. "A chap I know
writes to me about an extraordinary affair that happened on board his ship in
that typhoon -- you know -- that we read of in the papers two months ago. It's
the funniest thing! Just see for yourself what he says. I'll show you his
letter."
There were phrases in
it calculated to give the impression of light-hearted, indomitable resolution.
Jukes had written them in good faith, for he felt thus when he wrote. He
described with lurid effect the scenes in the 'tween-deck. ". . . It
struck me in a flash that those confounded Chinamen couldn't tell we weren't a
desperate kind of robbers. 'Tisn't good to part the Chinaman from his money if
he is the stronger party. We need have been desperate indeed to go thieving in
such weather, but what could these beggars know of us? So, without thinking of
it twice, I got the hands away in a jiffy. Our work was done -- that the old
man had set his heart on. We cleared out without staying to inquire how they
felt. I am convinced that if they had not been so unmercifully shaken, and
afraid -- each individual one of them -- to stand up, we would have been torn
to pieces. Oh! It was pretty complete, I can tell you; and you may run to and
fro across the Pond to the end of time before you find yourself with such a job
on your hands."
After this he alluded
professionally to the damage done to the ship, and went on thus:
"It was when the
weather quieted down that the situation became confoundedly delicate. It wasn't
made any better by us having been lately transferred to the Siamese flag;
though the skipper can't see that it makes any difference -- 'as long as we are
on board' -- he says. There are feelings that this man simply hasn't got -- and
there's an end of it. You might just as well try to make a bedpost understand.
But apart from this it is an infernally lonely state for a ship to be going
about the China seas with no proper consuls, not even a gunboat of her own
anywhere, nor a body to go to in case of some trouble.
"My notion was to
keep these Johnnies under hatches for another fifteen hours or so; as we
weren't much farther than that from Fu-chau. We would find there, most likely,
some sort of a man-of-war, and once under her guns we were safe enough; for
surely any skipper of a man-of-war -- English, French or Dutch -- would see
white men through as far as row on board goes. We could get rid of them and
their money afterwards by delivering them to their Mandarin or Taotai, or
whatever they call these chaps in goggles you see being carried about in
sedan-chairs through their stinking streets.
"The old man
wouldn't see it somehow. He wanted to keep the matter quiet. He got that notion
into his head, and a steam windlass couldn't drag it out of him. He wanted as
little fuss made as possible, for the sake of the ship's name and for the sake
of the owners -- 'for the sake of all concerned,' says he, looking at me very
hard. It made me angry hot. Of course you couldn't keep a thing like that
quiet; but the chests had been secured in the usual manner and were safe enough
for any earthly gale, while this had been an altogether fiendish business I
couldn't give you even an idea of.
"Meantime, I could
hardly keep on my feet. None of us had a spell of any sort for nearly thirty
hours, and there the old man sat rubbing his chin, rubbing the top of his head,
and so bothered he didn't even think of pulling his long boots off.
"'I hope, sir,'
says I, 'you won't be letting them out on deck before we make ready for them in
some shape or other.' Not, mind you, that I felt very sanguine about
controlling these beggars if they meant to take charge. A trouble with a cargo
of Chinamen is no child's play. I was dam' tired, too. 'I wish,' said I, 'you
would let us throw the whole lot of these dollars down to them and leave them
to fight it out amongst themselves, while we get a rest.'
"'Now you talk
wild, Jukes,' says he, looking up in his slow way that makes you ache all over,
somehow. 'We must plan out something that would be fair to all parties.'
"I had no end of
work on hand, as you may imagine, so I set the hands going, and then I thought
I would turn in a bit. I hadn't been asleep in my bunk ten minutes when in
rushes the steward and begins to pull at my leg.
"'For God's sake,
Mr. Jukes, come out! Come on deck quick, sir. Oh, do come out!'
"The fellow scared
all the sense out of me. I didn't know what had happened: another hurricane --
or what. Could hear no wind.
"'The Captain's
letting them out. Oh, he is letting them out! Jump on deck, sir, and save us.
The chief engineer has just run below for his revolver.'
"That's what I
understood the fool to say. However, Father Rout swears he went in there only
to get a clean pocket-handkerchief. Anyhow, I made one jump into my trousers
and flew on deck aft. There was certainly a good deal of noise going on forward
of the bridge. Four of the hands with the boss'n were at work abaft. I passed
up to them some of the rifles all the ships on the China coast carry in the
cabin, and led them on the bridge. On the way I ran against Old Sol, looking
startled and sucking at an unlighted cigar.
"'Come along,' I
shouted to him.
"We charged, the
seven of us, up to the chart-room. All was over. There stood the old man with
his sea-boots still drawn up to the hips and in shirt-sleeves -- got warm
thinking it out, I suppose. Bun Hin's dandy clerk at his elbow, as dirty as a
sweep, was still green in the face. I could see directly I was in for
something.
"'What the devil
are these monkey tricks, Mr. Jukes?' asks the old man, as angry as ever he
could be. I tell you frankly it made me lose my tongue. 'For God's sake, Mr.
Jukes,' says he, 'do take away these rifles from the men. Somebody's sure to
get hurt before long if you don't. Damme, if this ship isn't worse than Bedlam!
Look sharp now. I want you up here to help me and Bun Hin's Chinaman to count
that money. You wouldn't mind lending a hand, too, Mr. Rout, now you are here.
The more of us the better.'
"He had settled it
all in his mind while I was having a snooze. Had we been an English ship, or
only going to land our cargo of coolies in an English port, like Hong-Kong, for
instance, there would have been no end of inquiries and bother, claims for
damages and so on. But these Chinamen know their officials better than we do.
"The hatches had
been taken off already, and they were all on deck after a night and a day down
below. It made you feel queer to see so many gaunt, wild faces together. The
beggars stared about at the sky, at the sea, at the ship, as though they had expected
the whole thing to have been blown to pieces. And no wonder! They had had a
doing that would have shaken the soul out of a white man. But then they say a
Chinaman has no soul. He has, though, something about him that is deuced tough.
There was a fellow (amongst others of the badly hurt) who had had his eye all
but knocked out. It stood out of his head the size of half a hen's egg. This
would have laid out a white man on his back for a month: and yet there was that
chap elbowing here and there in the crowd and talking to the others as if
nothing had been the matter. They made a great hubbub amongst themselves, and
whenever the old man showed his bald head on the foreside of the bridge, they
would all leave off jawing and look at him from below.
"It seems that
after he had done his thinking he made that Bun Hin's fellow go down and
explain to them the only way they could get their money back. He told me
afterwards that, all the coolies having worked in the same place and for the
same length of time, he reckoned he would be doing the fair thing by them as
near as possible if he shared all the cash we had picked up equally among the
lot. You couldn't tell one man's dollars from another's, he said, and if you
asked each man how much money he brought on board he was afraid they would lie,
and he would find himself a long way short. I think he was right there. As to
giving up the money to any Chinese official he could scare up in Fu-chau, he
said he might just as well put the lot in his own pocket at once for all the
good it would be to them. I suppose they thought so, too.
"We finished the
distribution before dark. It was rather a sight: the sea running high, the ship
a wreck to look at, these Chinamen staggering up on the bridge one by one for
their share, and the old man still booted, and in his shirt-sleeves, busy
paying out at the chart-room door, perspiring like anything, and now and then
coming down sharp on myself or Father Rout about one thing or another not quite
to his mind. He took the share of those who were disabled himself to them on
the No. 2 hatch. There were three dollars left over, and these went to the
three most damaged coolies, one to each. We turned-to afterwards, and shovelled
out on deck heaps of wet rags, all sorts of fragments of things without shape,
and that you couldn't give a name to, and let them settle the ownership
themselves.
"This certainly is
coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all
concerned. What's your opinion, you pampered mail-boat swell? The old chief
says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done. The skipper
remarked to me the other day, 'There are things you find nothing about in
books.' I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man."