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.
V
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
engineroom 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! Everything 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 'tweendecks 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,
long-drawn 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 lifelines 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.