There came a silence.
“He’s a Card,” said Pollack. “Let’s give him his commission. I don’t
mind.”
“Eh?” I cried.
“I said he was a Card, that’s all,” said Pollack. “I’m coming.”
He appeared in my doorway a faint white figure joined our vehement
whisperings.
We had to buy the captain off; we had to promise him ten per cent. of
our problematical profits. We were to give him ten per cent. on what we
sold the cargo for over and above his legitimate pay, and I found in my
out-bargained and disordered state small consolation in the thought
that I, as the Gordon-Nasmyth expedition, was to sell the stuff to
myself as Business Organisations. And he further exasperated me by
insisting on having our bargain in writing. “In the form of a letter,”
he insisted.
“All right,” I acquiesced, “in the form of a letter. Here goes! Get a
light!”
“And the apology,” he said, folding up the letter.
“All right,” I said; “Apology.”
My hand shook with anger as I wrote, and afterwards I could not sleep
for hate of him. At last I got up. I suffered, I found, from an unusual
clumsiness. I struck my toe against my cabin door, and cut myself as I
shaved. I found myself at last pacing the deck under the dawn in a mood
of extreme exasperation. The sun rose abruptly and splashed light
blindingly into my eyes and I swore at the sun. I found myself
imagining fresh obstacles with the men and talking aloud in
anticipatory rehearsal of the consequent row.
The malaria of the quap was already in my blood.
V
Sooner or later the ridiculous embargo that now lies upon all the coast
eastward of Mordet Island will be lifted and the reality of the
deposits of quap ascertained. I am sure that we were merely taking the
outcrop of a stratum of nodulated deposits that dip steeply seaward.
Those heaps were merely the crumbled out contents of two irregular
cavities in the rock; they are as natural as any talus or heap of that
kind, and the mud along the edge of the water for miles is mixed with
quap, and is radio-active and lifeless and faintly phosphorescent at
night. But the reader will find the full particulars of my impression
of all this in the _Geological Magazine_ for October, 1905, and to that
I must refer him. There, too, he will find my unconfirmed theories of
its nature. If I am right it is something far more significant from the
scientific point of view than those incidental constituents of various
rare metals, pitchblende, rutile, and the like, upon which the
revolutionary discoveries of the last decade are based. Those are just
little molecular centres of disintegration, of that mysterious decay
and rotting of those elements, elements once regarded as the most
stable things in nature. But there is something—the only word that
comes near it is _cancerous_—and that is not very near, about the whole
of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by
destroying; an elemental stirring and disarrangement, incalculably
maleficent and strange.
This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radio-activity is
a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It
spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and
those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of
coherent existence. It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old
culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and
assured reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent
centres that have come into being in our globe—these quap heaps are
surely by far the largest that have yet been found in the world; the
rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystals—I am haunted by a
grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and
dispersal of all our world. So that while man still struggles and
dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. I
mention this here as a queer persistent fancy. Suppose, indeed, that is
to be the end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering
accumulation of achievements, but just—atomic decay! I add that to the
ideas of the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning
out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new and far more possible
end—as Science can see ends—to this strange by-play of matter that we
call human life. I do not believe this can be the end; no human soul
can believe in such an end and go on living, but to it science points
as a possible thing, science and reason alike. If single human
beings—if one single ricketty infant—can be born as it were by accident
and die futile, why not the whole race? These are questions I have
never answered, that now I never attempt to answer, but the thought of
quap and its mysteries brings them back to me.
I can witness that the beach and mud for two miles or more either way
was a lifeless beach—lifeless as I could have imagined no tropical mud
could ever be, and all the dead branches and leaves and rotting dead
fish and so forth that drifted ashore became presently shrivelled and
white. Sometimes crocodiles would come up out of the water and bask,
and now and then water birds would explore the mud and rocky ribs that
rose out of it, in a mood of transitory speculation. That was its
utmost admiration. And the air felt at once hot and austere, dry and
blistering, and altogether different the warm moist embrace that had
met us at our first African landfall and to which we had grown
accustomed.
I believe that the primary influence of the quap upon us was to
increase the conductivity of our nerves, but that is a mere
unjustifiable speculation on my part. At any rate it gave a sort of
east wind effect to life. We all became irritable, clumsy, languid and
disposed to be impatient with our languor. We moored the brig to the
rocks with difficulty, and got aground on mud and decided to stick
there and tow off when we had done—the bottom was as greasy as butter.
Our efforts to fix up planks and sleepers in order to wheel the quap
aboard were as ill-conceived as that sort of work can be—and that sort
of work can at times be very ill-conceived. The captain had a
superstitious fear of his hold: he became wildly gesticulatory and
expository and incompetent at the bare thought of it. His shouts still
echo in my memory, becoming as each crisis approached less and less
like any known tongue.
But I cannot now write the history of those days of blundering and
toil: of how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to the beach,
thirty feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a
rib, of how I and Pollack set the limb and nursed him through the fever
that followed, of how one man after another succumbed to a feverish
malaria, and how I—by virtue of my scientific reputation—was obliged to
play the part of doctor and dose them with quinine, and then finding
that worse than nothing, with rum and small doses of Easton’s Syrup, of
which there chanced to be a case of bottles aboard—Heaven and
Gordon-Nasmyth know why. For three long days we lay in misery and never
shipped a barrow-load. Then, when they resumed, the men’s hands broke
out into sores. There were no gloves available; and I tried to get
them, while they shovelled and wheeled, to cover their hands with
stockings or greased rags. They would not do this on account of the
heat and discomfort. This attempt of mine did, however, direct their
attention to the quap as the source of their illness and precipitated
what in the end finished our lading, an informal strike. “We’ve had
enough of this,” they said, and they meant it. They came aft to say as
much. They cowed the captain.
Through all these days the weather was variously vile, first a furnace
heat under a sky of a scowling intensity of blue, then a hot fog that
stuck in one’s throat like wool and turned the men on the planks into
colourless figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms, mad
elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat,
confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the
shipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or
ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the
barrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the
swinging high planks, and then at last, the dollop, dollop, as the
stuff shot into the hold. “Another barrow-load, thank God! Another
fifteen hundred, or it may be two thousand pounds, for the saving of
Ponderevo!...”
I found out many things about myself and humanity in those weeks of
effort behind Mordet Island. I understand now the heart of the sweater,
of the harsh employer, of the nigger-driver. I had brought these men
into a danger they didn’t understand, I was fiercely resolved to
overcome their opposition and bend and use them for my purpose, and I
hated the men. But I hated all humanity during the time that the quap
was near me.
And my mind was pervaded, too, by a sense of urgency and by the fear
that we should be discovered and our proceedings stopped. I wanted to
get out to sea again—to be beating up northward with our plunder. I was
afraid our masts showed to seaward and might betray us to some curious
passer on the high sea. And one evening near the end I saw a canoe with
three natives far off down the lake; I got field-glasses from the
captain and scrutinised them, and I could see them staring at us. One
man might have been a half-breed and was dressed in white. They watched
us for some time very quietly and then paddled off into some channel in
the forest shadows.
And for three nights running, so that it took a painful grip upon my
inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle’s face, only that it was
ghastly white like a clown’s, and the throat was cut from ear to ear—a
long ochreous cut. “Too late,” he said; “Too late!...”