A PLAN TO SAVE JAKOUB
As I have said, I used to keep a careful diary as long as my life
contained nothing eventful to record.
As soon as things began to happen to me I naturally ceased to record
them. I was too busy experiencing them.
The diary habit, I think, presupposes a certain placidity, both of mind
and circumstance.
The days that followed each other now on board the _Astarte_ were
placid enough, but the habit was broken, and I have only a rather
confused memory of the long journey.
The wind held from the north and nor’-west, steady and moderate, with
bright skies, and the _Astarte_, with the big square sails set, marched
steadily over the waters.
One night, as Edmund and I were on the deck before turning in, a great
light flashed on our port bow. There was a slight haze, and we could
see the great white beam move round across sea and sky like the hand of
a vast clock until it struck the _Astarte_, and seemed to pause for an
instant searching and almost blinding us ere it moved away again on its
night-long quest.
“That’s Ushant,” said Edmund. “We’ll soon be in the Bay now.”
For days and nights we were borne along on great following seas that
seemed to fling us from one to another. Running before it we felt
nothing of the wind that hummed continually in the shrouds, and it was
as though we were swept down the current of a mighty river.
Each day Edmund marked our position on the chart, and declared happily
that we had beaten all records for a vessel of our size.
Home and all my little anxieties about it vanished from my mind. Even
the existence of Jakoub ceased to trouble me.
I lived absorbed in the splendour of our motion and in the rising and
setting of the sun.
Then the sea became smoother, though the good wind held, as the land
came out to meet us.
For whole days, it seems, I watched the dry, greenish-brown foothills
of the Portuguese coast, with white farms and villages embedded in the
valleys, and the fantastic outline of the higher land behind them.
We passed fleets of sardine-fishers in boats that seemed to be absurdly
small to be so far from land, and for a whole day we were among a
school of dolphins that raced and played around us.
Until I had seen those creatures I always thought a flock of swifts,
screaming round the roofs in the evening, were the highest expression
in nature of speed and delirious joy in life. But now I long to be a
dolphin when I die. As they tore past us in groups and couples on the
surface of the water, now leaping clear, now diving deep in a common
impulse, one expected to hear great shouts of laughter from them in
their play. Yet I was told there are men who shoot them and leave a
useless, bloody carcass wallowing in their vessel’s wake.
One evening it fell almost calm, with a deep-red sunset touching the
sea to flashes of rose among its blue, and lighting the coast with a
purple and orange glow.
One of the Arabs in the fo’c’sle was singing, or rather chanting, in a
high-pitched tenor, and at the end of each sentence his hearers chimed
in with a deep chorus of “Kham leila, kha-am yome?” (“How many nights,
how many days?”)
There was a strange mysterious melody in the monotonous chant which was
afterwards to become so familiar. It fixed the whole strange sunset
landscape like a dream picture in my mind.
Jakoub came out cursing them. The weird Oriental music ceased, and
hatred of Jakoub sprouted anew in my heart.
During all this time we were a cheery, cordial party in the cabin.
Edmund seemed to be continually in high spirits as we got farther south
and the _Astarte_ continued her record-breaking, and every day I found
Captain Welfare more likeable as I got to know him better. He had quite
stopped apologising to me for things, and had become used to treating
me as a man of like passions with himself. He was very interested in
the bishop, not having, as he said, met one before.
One day he asked me in strict confidence if I thought his Lordship was
really a God-fearing man. I naturally found this a delicate question,
and one very difficult to answer.
“I should be very sorry to misrepresent him,” I replied cautiously,
“but I should take him to be a man who feels he has no need to fear
God. After all, why should he?”
Captain Welfare looked at me with as much horror as though I had said
something blasphemous.
“No need to fear God!” he replied. “Well, I don’t know!”
I saw that if fear, craven fear of a petulant and unreasonable Deity
were deleted from his religion, there would be nothing left.
For Welfare was a very simple, literal-minded man. He was one of those
who meant “fearing God” when he said it. The words did not convey to
him their usual meaning of being bored on Sunday; a commoner and, after
all, a much less harmful form of superstition.
I was glad he was shocked, because Ju-ju worship makes me angry, and,
unlike the bishop, I am not much interested in the theological ideas of
primitive people. I never could see that these ideas had any influence
on their conduct. So I was relieved to feel that Captain Welfare would
probably not want me to talk about religion any more.
In the intervals between eating and sleeping--the main concerns of a
passenger on board ship--I made very material progress in Arabic as
expounded by Hassan, and, spending thus a good deal of time in the
saloon, I noticed that Captain Welfare was very busy in his cabin. He
seemed to spend hours a day writing in a number of large strongly-bound
commercial books of the type I was accustomed to think of as “ledgers.”
One day he came to me with an air of great satisfaction on his large
countenance, as though he were going to give me an unexpected treat.
“I’ve been thinking, sir,” he said, “that now as you’re a partner you
ought to have a thorough overhaul of the books. So I’ve got ’em all up
to date and summarised, and ready for your inspection, whenever you
feel inclined to take an hour or two at them.”
“I’m afraid it would not be the slightest use,” I said, determined to
take a firm stand at the beginning. A great disappointment clouded his
expression, and I thought of the hours I had seen him spending over his
lamentable occupation.
“You see,” I continued, as kindly as I could, “I should not understand
them. To me your volumes are simply what Charles Lamb called ‘books
that are no books.’ I have sometimes tried to read the balance-sheets
published by charities to which I am a subscriber, and I always find
that everything that would normally be regarded as an asset is placed
on the debit side of the account; while debts and other liabilities are
on the credit side, as if they were something to be proud of. I have
tried, but I cannot understand this. There is either some perversity
in the business mind, or some blind spot in mine, which prevents our
ever coming together, as it were. I have definitely abandoned all
idea of trying to grasp what seems to me to be rather absurdly called
‘book-keeping.’”
Captain Welfare tried several times to interrupt this long speech; but
I was determined to make my position perfectly clear at the start and
would not let him.
He looked very disappointed.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t mind admitting that sometimes
those fancy ways of accounting lays me over myself. But I’ve got my own
method--perfectly clear and--and straightfor’ard. You’ll soon pick it
up. Just let me show you the ‘profit and loss’ account.”
He looked so pathetic, so like a child when one has not time to take
an interest in his toy, that I yielded with a sigh and went into his
cabin.
He had a great array of large folios. I admired the binding and the
smooth thick paper. I praised the neatness of his handwriting and
figures, and particularly admired the diagonal lines which he had
ruled in red ink across half-blank pages. These guided the eye down to
the words “Total” or “Brought forward,” followed by certain pounds,
shillings, and pence.
I told him that I had never been able to rule a line with a pen without
the ink forming little pools along the ruler, which made blots when you
removed it.
I asked him to show me how to do it properly.
But it was no mere manual dexterity of which Captain Welfare was proud.
I had to tell him regretfully that his figures conveyed almost nothing
to me, although I admitted that they appeared to be based on something
more like a rational system than the usual products of professional
accountancy.
“Besides,” I said, as a cheering thought struck me, “if I want to I can
get an accountant to go through all these books and report on them. I
might be able to understand his report.”
“I don’t know,” said Welfare doubtfully, “but what I could explain
these books better to you than what I could to one of them professional
gentlemen. You see, they want things shown by their own method, which
ain’t applicable to our business, as you say yourself. And they want
vouchers which you can’t get in our business.”
“Vouchers? Oh no, of course not!”
Whatever vouchers might be, I felt I should greatly dislike them.
“I’m glad you feel yourself we hadn’t ought to produce vouchers. How
can you get a receipt from a native what can’t write his own language,
let alone any proper one?”
“No, that’s obvious,” I agreed.
“Well, I just wanted you as a partner to feel you had access to
everything, and to know you were perfectly satisfied. Now this,” he
added, turning up a page in a smaller book, “this is an idea of my own.
Just to show you we are running everything on sound business lines.
This is the Depreciation Account on the _Astarte_.”
“Oh!” I said, trying hard to make the monosyllable sound intelligent
and interested.
“Yes; every year we write so much off her value. In a few years’ time
she’ll be depreciated away to nothing.”
“Oh! I hope not,” I said in alarm at the idea of a few gaunt ribs
representing all that was left of the good ship.
“Hope not?” asked Welfare. “But don’t you see that every penny we make
out of her then will be pure bunce?”
“Is that what they call ‘scrap price’?” I asked.
I saw at once that I had said the wrong thing.
“Scrap price? Why, we’re not going to sell her!”
“Oh no. Of course not. Yes, of course, it’s a splendid idea. I don’t
quite see where the extra money comes from. Wouldn’t it pay better to
keep her in repair?”
“Well, I don’t know! Of course, we keep her in repair.”
“That’s all right then. I didn’t quite follow.”
“The point is, she stands at nothing in the books.”
“I see; and sticks at nothing on the sea, eh?”
I laughed at my own pleasantry, and was surprised to see a look of
quick suspicion and annoyance on Captain Welfare’s usually genial face.
“Nothing in the way of weather, I mean.”
Captain Welfare closed his books in silence and put them back on their
shelf.
“Well, so long as you’re satisfied,” he said.
“Oh, I’m perfectly satisfied.”
“And the books is there for your inspection whenever you’ve a mind.”
“Thank you. But I’m afraid you’ll have to look upon me practically as a
sleeping partner.”
“Perhaps it will be as well.”
I had lost count of the lapse of time under the strange nepenthe-like
influence that a sailing-ship at sea possesses. If I thought at all of
Bates and Mrs. Rattray, of Snape or the bishop, of parish, or pigeons,
or the Byzantine Empire, it was as of dead friends remembered, and dim
interests of the past.
The thought of anxiety on the part of people at home no longer worried
me. I had no worries. I had hardly even anticipation. The _Astarte_ had
become my planet, bearing all I knew of humanity. The ocean had become
space, through which my planet ever moved, and measurements of time had
ceased to matter, as though we were already in Eternity. I was content
to lean for hours on the bulwark looking down at the stream of bubbles
for ever forming on the ship’s side, begotten of the sea by the ship’s
motion, falling behind us, spinning for a moment on the surface, and
expiring in their myriads, countless and insignificant as human lives.
Then one day the horizon was decorated by the delicate white edges of
the still snow-covered Sierras of Spain. I do not know for how many
days I watched their delicate aerial loveliness. We came nearer the
land, and someone pointed out Trafalgar Bay. But even that one magic
word was powerless to move me from the trance that had got possession
of my soul.
We passed through the Straits at night, and I awoke in the
Mediterranean.
We kept near the southern shore, passing under the savage precipices
and gullies of Ceuta. The Rock of Gibraltar I saw only in the distance,
standing pointed like a helmet. The wind, still northerly, was now on
our beam, and there was less of it, so that our progress, though still
steady, was slower than it had been.
For days and days it seemed we hugged the African coast, sometimes so
close that we could see the stones and sand on the shingly beach below
barren rocky foothills. For the most part the land seemed utterly
uninhabited, but occasionally we passed a greener tract, where there
were sparse crops and stunted bushes, occasionally a flat-roofed hovel
among them, and through Captain Welfare’s telescope I could make out
goats and children moving.
It was strange to me to think of the lives of human beings there.
On other days the land would recede quite out of sight as we passed
deep bays, and again we passed islets of rock, precipitous and
fantastic in form and colour.
So desolate were these places, it seemed as if ours must be the first
eyes to see them, impossible to realise that for ages men had known
them, charted, mapped and measured them.
The only human incident I can recall in all this time is that Edmund
and Welfare quarrelled one night over their game of piquet, and did not
speak to each other until after dinner the following evening, when they
resumed their play, and each politely insisted that the other had been
right. That is one of the beauties of piquet. It can only be rightly
conducted in an atmosphere of eighteenth-century courtliness. It is a
game for ladies and gentlemen, and soon, alas! will be played no more.
I was surprised to find that Welfare played it, and could as soon have
pictured him walking a minuet.
I was still dreamily content, and had ceased to have even any curiosity
as to our destination; but as we drew nearer to the coast of Egypt
I noticed a new preoccupation in Edmund and Welfare. They made long
and intimate studies of the chart, and several times I saw them in
conversation with Jakoub.
I began to awake with pain to the renewed sense of the responsibilities
and anxieties of life. I had forgotten Jakoub, and to remember his
existence again brought back to me all the doubt and fear of the future
which is the real tragedy of mankind.
I had seen the splendour of the Mediterranean sky, the pageantry of
dawn and sunset, of moonrise and the evening star, as they might have
appeared to the first man; but now all was tarnished again by human
associations. I had to put on life again as one might don a hair-shirt.
And I shrank from it.
Edmund began to hold aloof again, and some instinct warned me that
Welfare was seeking in his clumsy mind for the easiest way of making
some difficult proposition.
I began almost unconsciously to arm myself against him. So I was on the
alert when he said to me one afternoon with an elaborate attempt to
speak unconcernedly, “You’d like to see something of the desert while
you’re out here, I suppose?”
“I should have liked to see Egypt, of course,” I replied, pre-warned,
“but I can’t now. I shall simply have to send a cable and get the first
boat for Marseilles.”
“To be sure. I know you must be getting home. I shall be very sorry
when you leave us, sir.”
“Thank you. I shall be quite as sorry to go. It’s been a delightful
trip. I feel as if I had been dreaming. But I’ve woken up to reality
now, and I must make up my mind to a certain amount of awkwardness
after being so long away and sending no word. I must get home and put
things straight.”
“That is so. I quite understand. I was thinking you would actually save
time, and see a bit of the country into the bargain, if you landed near
the western frontier and went on overland to Alexandria.”
“Is that possible?”
“Quite easy. It would be hot in the desert, of course.”
“I don’t think I should mind the heat.”
“It would be about a day and a half’s camel ride from the place I’m
thinking of to the railway, and then only a few hours to Alexandria. It
would take us longer by sea, even if the wind holds, and it’s falling
lighter. We’ll soon only have the morning and evening breeze to count
on.”
I found the idea of a camel ride across the desert rather attractive.
It would be an adventure, another instalment of the utterly
unexpected, a fitting end to this extraordinary voyage.
“You wouldn’t, of course, be seeing the Pyramids, or the temples
that everybody goes to see, but of course you can visit them any
time,” Captain Welfare continued, as though impartially weighing the
advantages of his own suggestion, “and I don’t fancy many tourists get
to see the western desert.”
“I should like it,” I said. “It would be intensely interesting. But
how on earth am I to get a camel and a guide? I don’t suppose one can
whistle for them like a taxi?”
“No; it’s a pretty lonesome part. But Jakoub will manage all that.”
“Jakoub?” I asked with instant suspicion.
“Yes; Jakoub has got to go that way.”
“Then he can go alone,” I said with sudden emphasis. “I will not go
with him.”
“No? I’m afraid that settles it then. It’s a pity too, for I think you
would have found it interesting.”
Captain Welfare walked away as though the subject were closed. If for
any reason he wanted me to go with Jakoub, this was the cleverest thing
I had known him do; for he left me longing to discuss the matter.
Indeed, I came to the conclusion that he could not want me to go, for
it was difficult to credit him with so much subtlety.
I resumed the question myself at dinner, anxious to know if Edmund
had been consulted before the proposal was made to me. Edmund made no
attempt to conceal the fact that it was their joint idea.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that Welfare has made it quite clear to you
why we want you to go.”
“I understood that it was to be a sort of pleasure trip for me in
charge of this malefactor of yours.”
“As a matter of fact, I think you would find the journey interesting,
though fatiguing. But that is not the point.”
“My point is that I have no wish to be murdered in a howling wilderness
by a man of whom I utterly disapprove.”
“Jakoub may be a murderer for all I know,” Edmund admitted. “I am sure
he would become one if it suited his convenience. But you must know
that neither Welfare nor I would suggest your going if there was the
slightest chance of his murdering you!”
Of course, I did know this perfectly well; but with the babyish
perversity that sometimes afflicts quite sensible people, I felt
compelled to go on being offended. I was making myself ridiculous,
and I knew it, and nothing feeds anger in one’s heart like that. But
having once adopted a pose, even a pose one dislikes or is tired of, it
requires immense strength of mind to abandon it.
I have known the happiness of families wrecked by this fatuous adhesion
to a worn-out, discredited and detested pose.
“I don’t see,” I said, “what is to prevent his murdering me if he wants
to. I’m sure he dislikes me as much as I do him.”
“Very likely. But under the circumstances you will be necessary to his
own safety. Jakoub has sense enough to control his dislikes.”
“And in what way am I to protect him?”
“You’ll be part of his disguise. He’ll go as your dragoman. It’s the
only way to get him safely into Alexandria, and we must have him there
for a few days to negotiate this sale.”
“Why can’t you go yourself, or Captain Welfare?”
“I’m wanted to navigate the ship. Welfare couldn’t manage the business,
because he can’t talk the lingo. And Jakoub must be got off the ship
before they come and look for him.”
“And why should I help the brute to escape? I don’t want him to escape!”
“Mr. Davoren,” said Welfare very solemnly, “Jakoub is a wrong ’un, I
admit. A dead wrong ’un. I’ve never disguised my opinion about that. I
don’t know what the charges against him may be--not all of them. But I
know this, however bad you may think him, if you saw the convict prison
at Tourah you wouldn’t want to help get him there. If you saw the
poor devils there working in chains in the quarries under the desert
sun, you’d know that no man is bad enough for it. I tell you, sir, if
a convict’s friends have any money when he’s sent there, they try to
bribe a sentry to shoot him. It’s all they can do. Men have prayed
their judges to hang them, sooner than be sent there.”
This appeal of Captain Welfare’s impressed me, but I only said, “All
the same, I don’t see why I should help him to escape the law. It’s
a very unpleasant, a very risky, a very wrong thing for a man in my
position to do.”
“But,” said Edmund, “you don’t know anything against him really except
what we’ve told you--our suspicions.”
“You forget that you mentioned warrants for his arrest.”
“Aye. We did mention that,” said Welfare; “it’s a pity, but we had to.”
“Captain Welfare, am I to understand that you decide beforehand how
much of the truth I am to be told?”
“Oh, dear no, sir. You’ve been told practically everything. I only
meant that if we had kept it quiet about the warrants you’d maybe have
been easier in your mind.”
“There’s no need for us to start disliking each other,” Edmund remarked
judicially; “the situation is simply this. Jakoub must go. If you don’t
like to go with him he must go alone. In that case he risks his own
liberty and our profit. If you choose, you can save both. I quite admit
it’s asking a good deal of you. But what you do not know is Egypt and
the ways of the Egyptian police and their courts. Jakoub probably does
not deserve justice, but he certainly won’t get it from them. He would
probably get off scot free simply because he really is a rogue. In the
meantime, I don’t see why he should not be serving us.”
“It seems to me that I am now being asked to go practically on behalf
of the firm. That is a very different thing from having a sort of
pleasure trip arranged for my benefit.”
I spoke thus in loyalty to my pose, of which I was getting sicker every
moment. I had made up my mind to go, since I had learned that Jakoub
had good reasons for letting me continue to live, and that handing him
over to Egyptian justice was apparently patronising a kind of lottery,
in which he might draw a ticket entitling him to be tortured to death,
or a different-coloured one letting him go free. I wanted to see him
decently but quite certainly hanged.
“I’m afraid I’m to blame,” said Captain Welfare. “I hadn’t ought to
have put it to you as I did. I was going on to explain how you might
give us all a leg-up, all of us as a firm I mean, but if you remember,
sir, you rayther cut me short about Jakoub.”
This was a very unnecessary remark of Captain Welfare’s. It merely
emphasised the personal side of my present attitude, which I was now
anxious to abandon. Edmund’s delicate tact evidently recognised this.
“I am certainly asking you to go on behalf of the firm,” he said. “We
must have someone we can trust in charge of Jakoub, whom we cannot
trust. And at present there simply isn’t anyone else but you.”
This, of course, settled it, and I had very soon graciously promised to
go.
On looking back it seems to me that in every one of these transactions
I allowed myself to become as it were committed, without knowing the
details, or anything of the possible objections. When these became
obvious it was too late for me to withdraw.
I was, in fact, dragged at the heels of Edmund’s fate. That is the only
excuse I can offer to those who, knowing the sequel, will judge that I
require one.
For myself I require no excuse, for I was not conscious of wrong-doing.
But then, I have already tried to explain to the reader something of
those terms of pleasant familiarity on which I and my conscience dwelt
together. I am sure it should be a function of any true religion to
promote this cheery co-partnership, and that if it were only commoner
there would be far more agreeable people in the world. I always take at
their word those who go about calling themselves “miserable sinners,”
and I notice this always seems to disconcert them.
We had been for some time out of sight of land, as the coast of
Tripoli had fallen away from us into the great Bay of Sidra, but now,
on the morning after our discussion, I saw for the first time the edge
of the great Libyan Desert.
We still carried a breeze with us, but inland of us the sea lay
becalmed, so smooth it seemed to be some viscous sea like that imagined
by the Ancient Mariner, while the miraged atmosphere above it was
fluid. The remotest part of this shimmering fluid was threaded by a
thin line of broken points of yellow light, like fragments of the moon.
That was the distant coast, the margin of the great desert.