I
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.