ELUSIVE GUM
It was in the small hours when Austin wakened, and, listening a moment,
stretched his aching limbs with a little sigh of content. The odds and
ends on the table beside him were rattling merrily, and a deep pulsatory
humming rang stridently through the silence of the swamps. The pump was
running well, for he could hear the steady splash of water falling into
the creek, and once more a little thrill of exultation ran through him.
He was not in most respects a fanciful man, for in him the artistic
temperament was held in due subjection by a knowledge of the world and
shrewd practical sense. Still, there were times when he vaguely
recognised that there might, after all, be a reality behind the fancies
he now and then indulged in with a smile, and that night it seemed to
him that the big centrifugal pump was chanting a song of triumph.
He had tasted toil, and what toil really is only those know who have
borne it in the steamy heat of the tropics, which saps the white man's
vigour; while he had discovered what, artist as he was, he had not
learned before: that, by way of compensation, man may attain a certain
elusive spirituality by the stern subjugation of his body, even when it
is accomplished by brutal manual labour. As the _Estremedura_'s
sobrecargo he had watched the struggle for existence between man and man
with good-humoured toleration of its petty wiles and trickeries, but now
it was the cleaner and more primitive struggle between man and matter
he was called upon to take his part in with the faith in the destiny of
his species which is capable of moving mountains, and not infrequently
does so with hydraulic hose and blasting charges, as well as a few odd
thousand tons of iron and water in a stranded steamer. Lying still a
while, he heard the great pump hurling out its announcement of man's
domination to swamp and forest, and then went peacefully to sleep.
He was astir with the dawn next morning, but when they went down the
ladder into the hold he knew that the change in him had reached a
further stage. Whether the water had sunk or not, he was going to see
that fight out, and go back triumphant, or leave his bones in Africa. It
was not alone to vindicate himself in Jacinta's eyes, for that, though
it counted, too, seemed of less moment now; he was there to justify his
existence, to prove himself a man, which many who have won honours in
this world have, after all, never really done. As a sign of it, he was
wholly practical when, hanging down from the ladder, he laid the fingers
of one hand upon the scratch Jefferson had made on the iron. Then he
held up the hand.
"Wet to the knuckles only," he said. "Last night the water was on the
thumb."
They went up, and Jefferson looked at him keenly when they stood on
deck; in fact, as he had done when Austin first clambered, half naked,
out of the hatch.
"Yes," he said quietly, "she is heaving it out, and you have done more
than start in. You mean staying with it now?"
Austin laughed. "I'm not sure how you know it, but I really think I do."
"No?" said Jefferson, with a twinkle in his eyes. "When it's in your
voice, and stamped upon the rest of you. Well, I think we're going to
float her, though it's perhaps not quite a sure thing yet. We seem to
have bluffed off Funnel-paint, but the trouble is, you can't bluff the
fever. In the meanwhile, we'll see if she's draining any out of the
engine room."
They went in, and stood on the top platform, looking down on the water,
which, so far as they could discern, stood at much the same level as it
had done. Jefferson gazed at it with an air of reflection.
"If the bulkhead's strained and started so the water could get in, I
don't quite see why it shouldn't run out into the hold again, but
there's evidently no suction that way," he said. "You see how that
tool-case lid is floating. There's another point that strikes me. Those
started plates don't seem to be letting very much water in."
"As you have already pointed out, there is a good deal it's a little
difficult to understand about the whole thing."
"Well," said Jefferson gravely, "it doesn't matter in the meanwhile, and
we'll probably find out by and by. The first thing we have to do is to
lay hands on that gum, and until the water's lower we can't start in.
The boys can lay off to-day. Well, what are you wanting, Bill?"
"Two of the Canariers down!" said the fireman, who appeared in the
doorway. "They was looking groggy yesterday, an' one o' them's talking
silly now. I think it's fever."
Austin looked at Jefferson, whose face grew a trifle grim. "Ah," he
said, "it's beginning. Well, I had expected we'd have that to grapple
with before very long. We'll go along and look at them."
They went, and found one of the men raving in the forecastle, while
Austin, who did what he could for him and his comrade, which was very
little, afterwards spent a day of blissful idleness stretched at full
length on the settee in the skipper's room, with a damp-stained
treatise on navigation. He had never imagined that he could peruse a
work of that kind with interest, but it served its purpose, for he felt
he must have something to fix his attention on. In the meanwhile the big
pump hummed on, as it did for another day and night, until on the third
morning Jefferson stopped it and turned steam on the winch again.
"You have got to keep your eyes open as well as hustle, boys," he said,
as he stood with his hand on the lever. "There'll be forty dollars,
Spanish, for whoever finds the first bag of gum."
Austin made this clear to them, and they went down the ladder, but two
men who had gone with them before were not there that day. The water had
sunk, and tiers of rotting bags lay, half afloat, in it, giving out a
sickening smell of fermentation. They were filled with little black
nuts, the oleaginous kernels of the palm fruit from which the layer of
oil had been scraped off, and these were evidently worth little in their
damaged condition. Austin, however, had very little time to notice them
in, for the winch above him rattled, and the day of feverish toil began.
The bags burst when they dragged them into piles and laid them upon the
sling, while when the winch swung them up, a rain of kernels and slimy
water came pattering and splashing down. Putrefying kernels floated up
into every hole they made, and now and then a man sank waist deep among
the crumbling bags. Still, there was no stoppage or slackening of
effort. Forty dollars is a large sum to a seaman of the Canaries, who
can bring up a family on one peseta, which is rather less than
ninepence, a day, while the bonus contingent on getting the _Cumbria_
off would set up most of them for life. They remembered it that day as
they floundered and waded about the stifling hold, for the work of the
big pump had renewed their ardour.
Still, the task before them was one most men would have shrunk from. The
heat below decks was suffocating, the smell of the steaming, fermenting
mass of slime and oil and kernels nauseating. The water it swam in was
putrescent, and the weight to be hauled out of it and sent up into the
sunlight apparently enough to keep them busy for months ahead, though
they had, as everybody knew, very little time to move it in. It was to
be a grim struggle between man and inert material, for unless the
_Cumbria_ was hove off when the rains came, it seemed very probable that
she would stay there until she fell to pieces.
They set about it in silence, which, in the case of Spaniards, was a
significant thing; but nobody had any breath to spare, and Austin gasped
distressfully as he toiled, almost naked, in their midst. His hair was
filled with grease, clots of oil smeared his shoulders, and the bags
that burst as he lifted them abraded his dripping skin. Still, they went
up, opening as they swung out of the dusky hold, and the winch rattled
on, while there could be no rest for any man while sling succeeded
sling.
He was half blinded by perspiration, the wounds on his raw hands had
opened again, and there were now red patches on his uncovered breast and
arms. His muscles had, however, grown accustomed to the strain since the
first arduous day, and he did a man's part, as their comrade, with the
rest. There were no distinctions down in the stifling hold. It was a
community of effort for the one result, and again Austin wondered at the
forethought of the fever-wasted man above who drove the hammering winch.
Jefferson was, beyond all question, boss; but with singular clearness of
vision, or, perhaps, that higher, half-conscious faculty of doing the
right thing, that characterises the leader of men, he had recognised
that what he called bluff was of no service here, and had gone straight
to the strength there is in simple human nature. There was, those
untaught sailormen knew, no labour he was not ready to bear his part in,
and no command was flung at them for a show of authority. Jefferson
spent his strength and dollars freely, and while he asked no more than a
hundred cents' worth for the latter, he got it with interest, a
hundredfold.
It grew hotter and hotter, and there were curiously mingled ejaculations
of Latin prayer and imprecations that had somehow lost their sting. The
man with calumniated ancestry took it as a jest, and amidst the roar of
running chain and fierce rattle of the winch the work went on. The rains
were coming, there was very much to be done, and human courage braced
itself to the task. Hard hands were torn and bleeding, veins showed
gorged on dusky foreheads, muscles rose and bunched themselves under the
olive skin, and Englishman and Iberian gave freely all that was in them,
the sweat of the hard-driven body and tension of controlling will. They
were alone in the land of the shadow, with a deadly climate against
them, but the conflict they were engaged in has been waged before by
Spaniards and Englishmen in half the wilder lands.
Then the winch stopped suddenly, and Jefferson came backwards down the
ladder. He alighted knee deep in water among the rotten bags, and all
his observations were not recordable. He had put off conventionality,
and was once more the reckless sailor and the optimistic American, so he
spoke of the lower regions, and called the men who had stowed the
_Cumbria_'s cargo condemned loafers in barbarous Castilian and good
American, while the olive-faced Canarios gasped and grinned at him.
"The man who packed those bags there should be hung," he said. "We can't
break the bulk out until we've shifted most of them. Then I'll send you
down the sling-tub, and we'll heave the stuff to ----! It's sixty
dollars now for the man who finds the gum."
"No sign of it yet," said Austin. "They'd never have stowed it among the
bulk kernels. They're worth something. Hadn't you better make sure of
them?"
Jefferson laughed grimly. "They're worth--how do I know? Call it AL12 a
ton when they're not rotten. It's the gum we came for, and I'm going to
find it if I tear the ballast tanks and limbeys out of her. Clear that
bag bulkhead, and then stand by for the sling-tub. We'll heave every
blue-flamed kernel over."
The tub came down by and by, in fact, two of them, and those who had no
shovels bailed up the slimy kernels with their hats and hands; but each
time the chain swung through the hatch the tub below was full. It was
two o'clock when they desisted, and some of them were waist deep in
water then, while soon after they came up the big hose splashed in
again. There were steampipe collars to unbolt and pack, and bolt again,
before that was done; while when Austin came upon Jefferson, he held up
one hand from which the scalded skin was peeling.
"I can run the ---- winch if I drive her with my mouth and foot," he
said. "Get the comida into you, and then back into the hold again. We're
going to make her hum."
Austin glanced suggestively towards the men, who stood with backs still
bent with weariness, about the entrance to the forecastle.
"I suppose so," he said. "Still, the question is, can they stand it
long?"
Jefferson laughed harshly. "They'll have to. We have the blazing sun
against us, and the evening fever-mist; in fact, 'most everything that
man has to grapple with, and the worst of all is time. Still, they can't
break us. We have got to beat them--the river, the climate, and all the
man-killing meanness nature has in Western Africa."
He stopped a moment, and, standing very straight, a haggard, grim-faced
scarecrow, flung up his scalded hands towards the brassy heavens in a
wide, appealing gesture. "When you come to the bottom of things, that's
what we were made for. There's something in us that is stronger than
them all."
Austin said nothing, though once more a little thrill ran through him as
he slipped away quietly in search of his comida. What they were doing
had, he felt, been sung in Epics long ago, and Jefferson had, it seemed,
blundered upon the under-running theme. It was the recognition of the
primal ban again, the ban that had a blessing for man to triumph in, and
by it win dominion over the material world and all there is therein. He
and his comrade were men whose creed was crudely simple, though it was
also, on points they did not often mention, severe; but they bore the
bonds of service, which are never worn without compensation, willingly,
and the tense effort of will and limb had clarified and strengthened the
vague faith in them until they were ready to attempt the impossible.
Still, Austin had little time for his comida. The men in the forecastle
were very sick indeed, and he packed them in foul blankets, and dosed
them with green-lime water, boiling hot to start the perspiration, which
was, he recognised, likely to accomplish more than his prescriptions.
There were limes in Funnel-paint's village, and they had not scrupled to
requisition them. One of the men lay still, moaning faintly through
blackened lips, and the other, raving, called incoherently on saints and
angels. It seemed to Austin, standing in that reeking den, that there
was small chance for his patients unless they heard him. Two of those
whose names he caught had once, he remembered, been, at least,
fresh-water sailormen, and half unconsciously he also appealed to them.
One creed appeared much the same as another in that dark land, and
something in him cried out instinctively to the great serene influences
beyond the shadow. When he had finished his work of mercy the Spaniards
were stripping the covers off the after hatch, and he had scarcely a
minute for a mouthful before he joined them to heave the kernels up by
hand. They went up, basket after basket, and splashed into the creek,
but there was no sign of a gum bag or package anywhere among them. Bill,
who hove them out through the open gangway, once turned to grin at
Austin, who stood next the hatch.
"I've never been a millionaire, an' it's ---- unlikely that I'll ever be
one, either; but I know what it must feel like now," he said. "Here are
you an' me slingin' away stuff that's worth twelve pounds a ton, an' one
o' them goes a long way with a man like me."
Austin said nothing. He had no breath to spare, but he thrust a brimming
basket upon the fireman, and that did just as well. They toiled
throughout that afternoon, under a broiling sun, but when the black
darkness came again they had still found no gum. Then, as they ate
together, Austin looked at Jefferson.
"You are sure the gum was really put into her?" he said.
"It was," said Jefferson, with a little grim smile. "Whether it's there
now, or not, is another thing. We'll know when she's empty, and if we
haven't found it then, we'll consider. Not a pound reached Grand Canary,
and it's quite certain that the fellows who went--somewhere else--took
none of it with them."