JEFFERSON FEELS THE STRAIN
The afternoon was wearing through, but it was still almost insufferably
hot when Jefferson stood with his hand upon the valve of the _Cumbria_'s
forward winch. She lay with her bows wedged into the mangrove forest,
which crawled on high-arched roots over leagues of bubbling mire to the
edge of one of the foulest creeks in Western Africa. It flowed, thick
and yeasty, beneath the steamer's hove-up side, for she lay with a list
to starboard athwart the stream. There was a bend close by, and her
original crew had apparently either failed to swing her round it, which
is an accident that sometimes happens in that country, or driven her
ashore to save her sinking.
Her iron deck was unpleasantly hot, and the negroes who crossed it
between hatch and surfboat hopped. They, of course, wore no boots, and,
indeed, very little of anything at all beyond a strip of cotton round
their waists. There was not a breath of wind astir, and the saturated
atmosphere, which was heavy with the emanations of the swamps, seemed to
seal the perspiration in the burning skin. Jefferson felt the veins on
his forehead swollen to the bursting point when he stopped the winch and
looked about him while the Spaniards slipped a sling over a palm-oil
puncheon in the hold below.
He could see nothing but a strip of dazzling water, and the dingy,
white-stemmed mangroves which stretched away farther than the eye could
follow, and sighed as he glanced back at the _Cumbria_. She lay with
deck unpleasantly slanted and one bilge in the mire, a rusty, two-masted
steamer, with the blistered paint peeling off her, and the burnt awnings
hanging from their spars. He did not expect much water in that creek
until the wet season, and in the meanwhile it was necessary to heave the
coal and cargo out of her and send it down stream to a neighbouring
beach. It was very slow work with the handful of men he had, and those
few weeks had set their mark on Jefferson.
He had never been a fleshy man, and long days of feverish toil under a
burning sun and in the steamy heat of the flooded holds had worn him to
skin and bone. His duck garments hung with a significant slackness about
his gaunt frame, and they were rent in places, as well as blackened and
smeared with oil. His face was grim and hollow, but there was a fierce
steadfastness in his eyes, which seemed filled with curious brilliancy.
"Are you going to sleep down there? Can't you send up another cask?" he
said.
A voice came up from the dusky hatch, out of which there flowed a hot,
sour smell of palm oil and putrefying water. "The next tier's jammed up
under the orlop beams," it said. "We might get on a little if we could
break a puncheon out."
Jefferson laid his hands upon the combing of the hatch and swung himself
over. It was a drop of several yards, and he came down upon the slippery
round of a big puncheon, and reeling across the barrels, fell backwards
against an angle-iron. He was, however, up again in a moment, and stood
blinking about him with eyes dazzled by the change from the almost
intolerable brightness above. Blurred figures were standing more than
ankle deep in water on the slanted rows of puncheons, and Jefferson,
who could not see them very well, blinked again when an Englishman,
stripped to the waist, moved towards him. The latter was dripping with
yellow oil and perspiration.
"It's this one," he said, and kicked a puncheon viciously. "The
derrick-crabs have pulled the tops of the staves off her. They're soaked
an' soft with oil. The water underneath's jamming them up, an' you'll
see how the tier's keyed down by the orlop-beams."
Jefferson wrenched the iron bar he held away from him and turned to the
rest.
"There's a patch of the head clear. Two or three of you get a handspike
on to it," he said. "No, shove it lower down. Mas abajo. Now, heave all
together. Vamos. Toda fuerza!"
They were barefooted Canary Spaniards, of an astonishing ignorance, but
excellent sailormen, and they understood him. Lean, muscular bodies
strained and bent, the dew of effort dripped from them; and, as he
heaved with lips set, the hollows grew deeper in Jefferson's grim face.
No one spoke; there was only a deep, stertorous gasping, until the
puncheon moved a little, and Jefferson, stooping, drove his bar a trifle
lower. Then, while he strained every muscle and sinew in strenuous
effort, the great, slimy barrel rose again, tilted, and rolled out on
its fellows. For a moment it left a space of oily black water where it
had been, and then the puncheons closed in with a crash again. Jefferson
flung the bar down and straightened himself.
"Now," he said wearily, "you can get ahead."
He crawled up the ladder with a curious languidness, and while one of
the Englishmen apostrophised the puncheons the Spaniards went back to
their task. The Castilian is not supposed to be remarkable for
diligence, but there is, at least among the lower ranks of men in whom
the Iberian blood flows, a capacity for patient toil and uncomplaining
endurance which, while not always very apparent, nevertheless shows
itself unmistakably under pressure of circumstances. These were simple
men, who had never been encouraged to think for themselves, and were,
therefore, like other Spaniards of their degree, perhaps, incapable of
undertaking anything on their own initiative, but they could do a great
deal under the right leader, and they had him in Jefferson.
One of the Englishmen, however, was not quite satisfied. He had been in
the tropics before, and did not like the curious flush in Jefferson's
face or the way the swollen veins showed on his forehead, so he climbed
the ladder after him and leaned upon the winch-drum looking at him
meditatively. The man was very ragged as well as very dirty, and
altogether disreputable, so far as appearance went, while it is probable
that in several respects his character left a good deal to be desired.
"Here's your hat. It's wet, but that's no harm," he said. "You forgot
it. Hadn't you better put it on quick?"
Jefferson, who recognised the wisdom of this, did so.
"That's all right! Well, what--are--you stopping for?" he said.
The other man still regarded him contemplatively. "I know my place--but
things isn't quite the same aboard this 'ooker as they would be on a
big, two-funnel liner. You couldn't expect it. That's why I come up just
now to speak to you. You're not feelin' well to-day?"
"It's not worth worrying about. I guess nobody but a nigger ever does
feel well in this country."
The other man shook his head. "You go slow. I've seen it comin' on," he
said. "You oughtn't to 'a' had your hat off a minute. You see, if you
drop out, how's Bill an' me to get the bonus you promised us?"
Jefferson laughed, though he found, somewhat to his concern, that he
could not see the man very well.
"I'm going to hold up until I knock the bottom of this contract out," he
said, good-humouredly. "I can't do it if I stop and talk to you. Get a
move on. Light out of this!"
The man went back. He had done what he felt was his duty, though he had
not expected that it would be of very much use, and Jefferson started
the winch. It hammered and rattled, and the barrels came up, slimy and
dripping, with patches of whitewash still clinging to them. The glare of
it dazzled Jefferson until he could scarcely see them as they swung
beneath the derrick-boom, but he managed to drop them into the surfboat
alongside and pile the rest on deck, when she slid down the creek with a
row of negroes paddling on either side. The steamer had struck the
forest at the time of highest water, and it was necessary to take
everything out of her if she was to be floated during the coming rainy
season.
He toiled on for another hour, with a racking pain in his head, and the
Canarios toiled in the stifling hold below, until there was a jar and a
rattle, and a big puncheon that should have gone into the surfboat came
down with a crash amidst them, and, bursting, splashed them with yellow
oil. Then the man who had remonstrated with Jefferson went up the ladder
in haste. The winch had stopped, and Jefferson lay across it, amidst a
coil of slack wire, with a suffused face. The man, who stooped over him,
shouted, and the rest who came up helped to carry him to his room
beneath the bridge. The floor was slanted so that one could scarcely
stand on it, and as the berth took the same list, they laid him where
the side of it met the bulkhead. He lay there, speechless, with
half-closed eyes, and water and palm oil soaking from him.
"Now," said the man who had given Jefferson good advice, "you'll get
these Spaniards out of this, Bill. Then you'll go on breaking the
puncheons out. Wall-eye, here, can run the winch for you, but you can
come back in half an hour when I've found out what's wrong with the
skipper."
Bill seemed to recognise that his comrade had risen to the occasion.
"Well," he said, "I s'pose there's no use in me sayin' anything. All I
want to know is, how you're going to do it?"
"See that?" and the other man pointed to a chest beneath the settee.
"It's full of medicines, an' there's a book about them. Good ole Board
of Trade!"
"How d'you know those medicines arn't all gorn?" asked Bill.
"They arn't. I've been in. There's a bottle of sweet paregoricky stuff I
came round for a swigg of when Mr. Jefferson wasn't there now and then.
It warms you up kind of comfortin'."
Bill went away with the Spaniards, and, in place of improving the
occasion by looking for liquor, as he might, perhaps, have been expected
to do, went on with his task. The English sailorman does not always
express himself delicately, but he is, now, at least, very far from
being the dissolute, unintelligent ruffian he is sometimes supposed to
be. There is no doubt of this, for shipowners know their business, and
while there is no lack of Teutons and cheerful, sober Scandinavians, a
certain proportion of English seamen still go to sea in English ships.
The man who sat in Jefferson's room could, at least, understand the
treatise in the medicine chest, although it was one approved by the
Board of Trade, which august body has apparently no great fondness for
lucid explanations. He was, however, still pouring over it when his
comrade thrust his head into the doorway again, and it is possible that
Jefferson had not suffered greatly from the fact that he had not as yet
quite decided on any course of treatment.
"Well," said the newcomer, "I s'pose you know what he--has--got?"
"Come in, an' sit down there," said the other. "It's fever, for one
thing--I've seen it coming on--an' sunstroke for another. What I'm stuck
at is if I'm to treat them both together."
Bill looked reflective. "I think I'd take them one at a time. Get the
sunstroke out of him, an' then go for the fever. How d' you start on it,
Tom?"
"Undo his clothes. That's easy. The buttons is mostly off them, an' he
has hardly any on. Then you put cold water on his head."
"That's not easy, anyway! Where the blazes are you going to get cold
water from?"
It was somewhat of a paradox, for while there is plenty of water in
Western Africa, none of it is cold. Tom, however, was once more equal to
the occasion.
"We could get a big spanner from the engine room, an' put it on his
head," he said. "There's plenty of them. S'pose you go an' bring one.
Any way, we'll swill him with the coldest water we can get."
They laid a soaked singlet upon his head with a couple of iron spanners
under it, and then sat down to watch the effect. Somewhat to their
astonishment, it did not appear to do him any appreciable good. Darkness
closed down as they waited, and it seemed to grow hotter than ever,
while the thick white steam rose from the swamps. Tom stood up and
lighted the lamp.
"The fever's easier," he said. "I've had it. You give him the
mixture--it's down in the book--though I don't know what the meaning of
all these sign things is. That starts him perspiring, an' then it's
thick blankets. We used to give them green-lime water in the mailboats."
"Where's the green limes?" said Bill. "Any way, I'd give the sunstroke a
decent chance first. Perhaps he'll come out of it himself. I don't know
that it wouldn't be better if he did."
Jefferson came out of his limp unconsciousness into a raving delirium
that night, and they rolled him in two blankets, while Bill, being left
on watch, wisely threw away the draught his comrade had concocted.
Jefferson was also very little more sensible during the next few days,
and, though the work went on, before the week was over the two lonely
Englishmen found they had another difficulty to grapple with. The sun
was almost overhead, and the iron deck, insufferably hot, when the
surfboat negroes, who had just finished their meal, came forward
together, eight or nine big, naked men, with animal faces and splendid
muscles. Nobody knew where they came from, but when two or three of them
appeared in a canoe, Jefferson had managed to make them understand that
he was willing to pay them for their services, and they forthwith went
away, and came back with several comrades and a man of shorter stature
who had apparently worked on a steamboat or at a white man's factory.
They had worked tolerably well while Jefferson was about to watch them,
but they had now apparently decided on another mode of behaviour, for
the attitude of their leader was unmistakably truculent. The man called
Bill, sitting on the fore hatch, turned at the patter of naked feet, and
looked at him.
"Well," he said sharply, "what the ---- are you wanting?"
"Two bokus them green gin," said the negro. "Two lil' piece of cloff
every boy."
Tom laughed ironically. "There isn't any green gin bokus in the ship,
for one thing. You'll get your cloth-piece when the work is done. That's
all I've got to say to you. Get out of this!"
The negro made a little forceful gesture. "You no cappy."
"Well," said Bill, drily, "he figures he's a bloomin' admiral in the
meanwhile, and that's good enough for you. Go home again, and don't
worry me."
"Two cloff-piece," said the negro. "Two cloff-piece every boy. You no
lib for get them, we come down too much boy an' take them 'teamboat from
you."
The white men looked at one another, and it was evident that they were
uncertain how far the negro might be able to make good his threat. There
was, as it happened, very little to prevent him doing it, and stockaded
factories, as well as stranded steamboats, have been looted in Western
Africa. Still, they remembered that they had the prestige of their
colour to maintain.
"Oh, get out one time!" said Tom.
The negro turned upon him. "You no cappy. You low, white 'teamboat
bushman. Too much boy he lib for come down one night an' cut you big fat
t'roat."
Bill, who was big and brawny, rose with an air of sorrowful resignation.
"This ---- nonsense has got to be stopped," he said, and walked
tranquilly towards the negro. "You wouldn't listen to reason,
Black-funnel-paint."
Then, before the latter quite realised what had happened to him, a grimy
fist descended upon his jaw, and as he staggered backwards somebody
seized his shoulders and whirled him round. In another moment Bill
kicked with all his might, and the negro went out headlong through the
open gangway into the creek alongside. In the meanwhile the Spaniards
came tumbling from the hatch, and, though they were quiet men, they
carried long Canary knives. The sight of them was enough for the
negroes, and they followed their leader, plunging from the gangway or
over the rail. Their canoes still lay beneath the quarter, and though
Tom hurled a few big lumps of coal on them as they got under way, they
were flying up the creek in another minute, with paddles flashing.
Then Bill explained the affair to the Canarios as well as he could, and
afterward drew his comrade back into the shadow of the deck-house to
hold a council. Both of them felt somewhat lonely as they blinked at the
desolation of dingy mangroves which hemmed them in. There was, so far as
they knew, not a white man in that part of Africa, and the intentions of
the negroes were apparently by no means amicable.
"Funnel-paint may come back an' bring his friends," said Tom. "I don't
know what's to stop him if he wants to. There's not a gun in the ship
except Mr. Jefferson's pistol, an' those Canary fellows' knives, an' we
can't worry Mr. Jefferson about the thing when he's too sick to
understand. If I'd only begun on him for fever he might have been
better."
"I'm thankful," said Bill, "as he isn't dead. It wouldn't be very
astonishing, but that don't matter."
"You'd think it mattered a good deal if you was Mr. Jefferson. If I
wasn't that anxious about him I'd let you try your hand an' see how easy
it is worrying out that book. As it is, one of us is enough."
"I'm thinking," said Bill sourly, "as it's a ---- sight too much!"
Tom glared at him a moment, for one of the effects that climate has upon
a white man's nerves is to keep him in a state of prickly irritation;
but he was more anxious than he cared to confess, too anxious, indeed,
to force a quarrel.
"Well," he said, "I'll ask you what you mean another time. Just now,
we've got to do a little for Mr. Jefferson and a little for ourselves.
Eight pound a month, all found, and a fifty-pound bonus when he gets her
off, isn't to be picked up everywhere, and, of course, there's no
telling when you an' me may get the fever. Now, then, we want a boss who
isn't sick, an' more men, as well as a doctor."
"Of course. How're you goin' to get 'em?"
"Not here. They don't grow in the swamps. Somebody's got to go for them,
an' Las Palmas is the best place. You could find a West-coast mailboat
goin' home if you went down the creek in the launch. They've a man or
two sick in the engine room most trips, an' they'd be glad to take you
firin'. Now, before Mr. Jefferson got that sunstroke he showed me two
envelopes. If he was to peg out sudden I was to see the men in Las
Palmas got them, and they'd tell me what to do. Men do peg out at any
time in this country. Well, you look for a liner an' take those letters.
If it's a good boat she'll only be four or five days steaming up the
trades. Mr. Jefferson deserves a chance for his life."
"What's wrong with takin' him, too; or all of us goin', for that
matter?" asked his companion.
"Eight pounds a month, an' a bonus! Besides, Mr. Jefferson put all his
money into getting this ship off. If he comes round an' finds it thrown
away he's not going to be grateful to either of us."
Bill sat silent, evidently thinking hard for a minute or two. "Well," he
said, "there's sense in the thing, an' I'll try it. You'll be all right
with those Canariers. They're nice quiet men, an' if you make 'em say it
over lots of times you can generally understand 'em. Wall-eye can bring
the launch back. I'll get out of this when we've steam up."
It was two hours later when he and one of the Canarios who had worked on
board the coaling company's tug departed, and the rest, clustering along
the _Cumbria_'s rail, watched them wistfully as the little clanking
craft slid down the creek. They would very much have liked to have gone
in her, and might have done so had not Jefferson had the forethought to
promise them a small share of the profit when the work was done, and fed
them well. There are also men who inspire confidence in those they lead,
and sailormen capable of carrying out a bargain. Thus there were no open
expressions of regret or misgivings when the last of the launch's
smoke-trail melted above the mangroves, though Tom looked very grave as
he clawed the shoulder of an olive-faced Canario seaman who did not
understand him.
"If that man goes on the loose with what he gets for firin', an' forgets
all about those letters, it won't be nice for us," he said. "In the
meanwhile, we've just got to buck up and lighten the blame old
scrap-iron tank between us."
He called her a few other names while the Spaniard watched him, smiling,
and, having so relieved himself, went softly into the skipper's room,
where Jefferson lay, a worn-out shadow of a man, wrapped in very dirty
blankets, and babbling incoherently.