"What would happen if we went ashore here? Why, we'd very likely be
eaten."
"Eaten! Oh, captain, you can't really mean that. In these days too!"
"But I do mean it. Yonder's a pretty bad coast. As for `in these
days,' we haven't yet captured quite all the earth, only the greater
part of it. There are still some rum places left."
"Oh!" And the inquiring lady passenger stared, round-eyed, to eastward,
where, however, no sign of any coast was visible, nor yet in any other
quarter.
The steamship _Baleka_ was shearing her way through the smooth satiny
folds of the tropical swell, and the light breeze which stirred the
surface combined with the air the ship was making to render life quite
tolerable beneath the grateful shade of the awnings. Otherwise it was
hot--unequivocably hot; and where the glisten of brasswork was exposed
to the overhead noonday sun the inadvertent contact of the bare hand
with the said brasswork was sufficient to make the owner jump. So
completely alone on this shoreless sea was the steamer that the plumes
of smoke from her great white funnels seemed as though they had no
business to taint this free, pure air with their black abominations--
seemed, in fact, an outrage on the blue and golden solitude. Yet the
said solitude was by no means devoid of life. Flying-fish skimming
above the liquid plain singly or in flights like silvery birds, or a
school of porpoises keeping pace with the ship for miles in graceful
leaps, as their sportive way is, constituted only hints as to the
teeming life of the waters in common with the earth and air; or here and
there a triangular fin moving dark and oily above the surface in
scarcely perceptible glide. The sight started the inquiring lady
passenger off afresh.
"Look, there's another shark; what a number we've seen within the last
day or two, captain. Is there any truth in that idea that a shark
following a ship means that there's going to be a death on board?"
"But this one isn't following the ship; he's going very nearly clean in
the contrary direction."
"Yes, I know. But do you think there's anything in the idea?"
"Why, I think that if somebody died every time a shark followed a ship
there'd soon be none of us left to go to sea at all. What the joker's
really smelling after is the stuff that's thrown overboard from the
cook's galley from time to time."
"Really? Well, there goes another weird legend of the sea--weird but
romantic."
"It'd be a good thing if a few more of them went overboard," laughed the
matter-of-fact captain. "They soon will, too--a good many have already.
In the old `windjammer,' days when you had nothing to do half the
voyage but sit and whistle for a breeze, these yarns got into Jack's
head and stuck there. Now with steam and quick voyages, and a rattling
spell of work in stowing cargo every few days or so, Jack hasn't got
time to bother about that sort of thing."
"Then sailors aren't superstitious any more?"
"No more than shore folk. I've seen landsmen both on board ship and
ashore who could give points in that line to the scarriest old Jack-tar
who ever munched salt horse, and knock him hollow at that."
"Then you've no superstitions of your own, captain--you, a sailor?"
"Not one; I don't believe any such nonsense."
A solitary passenger, passing at the time in his walk up and down,
overhearing, smiled and nodded approval.
The _Baleka_ was steering north by north-west, every eleven or eleven
and a half knots that her nose managed to shove through the water that
creamed back from her straight stem bringing her an hour nearer England.
She was not a mail steamer, or even a regular passenger boat, being one
of a private venture embarked in with the object of cheapening freight
between England and the South African ports. But besides a full cargo
she carried a limited complement of passengers and a quite unlimited
ditto of cockroaches; otherwise she was an exceedingly comfortable boat,
and combined good catering with a considerable reduction on current
rates of passage money by the ordinary lines, all of which was a
consideration with those to whom a few days more or less at sea mattered
nothing.
The smoking-room amidships was a snug apartment with roomy chairs and
well-cushioned lounges. In one corner three or four of the male
passengers were hard at work capturing the Transvaal--a form of
amusement widely prevailing at that time, although the war had not yet
been started; rather should we have omitted the transition
qualification, for they had already conquered and annexed the obnoxious
republic, and that with surprisingly little loss or difficulty. Then
the discussion waxed lively and warm, for the justifiability of the
proposed annexation had come up; meanwhile others had dropped in.
"I maintain it would be utterly unjustifiable," said one. "It's all
very well to urge that it would be for the good of civilisation and
numbers, and all that sort of thing, but we can't do evil that good may
come of it. That's a hard and fast rule."
"There's no such thing as a hard and fast rule, or oughtn't to be,"
retorted with some heat he who had borne the main part of the argument;
"but if there is, why, `the greatest good for the greatest number' is a
fairly safe one. What do you think sir?" turning to a man who was
seated in another corner reading, but who had paid no attention to the
discussion at all.
"Think? Oh, I don't know. I haven't been in that part long enough to
have formed an opinion," was the answer.
"But you don't agree with our friend there that there should be a hard
and fast rule for everything? Surely you are of opinion that every
question should be decided on its own merits?"
"Certainly," replied the other politely, though inwardly bored at being
dragged into a crude and threadbare discussion upon a subject in which
he felt no interest whatever. "That's a sound principle all the world
over, and a safe one."
"There you are," cried the first speaker triumphantly, turning upon his
antagonist. "What did I tell you? This gentleman agrees with me
entirely, as any sensible man would on such a point as that."
"We can't do evil that good may come of it," reiterated the said
antagonist. "That's a hard and fast rule."
"Hard and fast rule be blowed! You might as well apply that to the
Valpy case," naming a somewhat prominent lawsuit then going forward, and
relating to a disputed succession. "If the Valpy in possession weren't
justified in sticking to possession when he knew the real heir was a
congenital idiot, and a homicidal one at that--why, there's no such
thing as any law of common sense."
"What were the facts?" asked the man who had been appealed to from
outside. "I have not been much in the way of reading the papers of
late."
They told him--several of them at once, as the way of a smoking-room
gathering is. By judicious winnowing down he managed to elicit that a
vast deal of property had been in dispute, that the holder had been an
exemplary landlord, and, in short, a sort of Providence to all dependent
on him; whereas the man who had successfully established his own claim,
and thereby had ousted him, was one of those subjects for whom a few
minutes in a lethal chamber would have constituted the only appropriate
and adequate treatment. Indeed, the only matter of debate was as to
whether the former holder, knowing that he was not legally entitled to
remain in possession, was justified in retaining the same. Those here
present were of opinion that he was.
"I don't agree with you at all," said the uncompromising man. "We can't
do evil that good may come of it. That's the divine law, and--"
"Hallo! What's the excitement?" interrupted somebody, as several
persons hurried by the open door, some with binoculars in their hands.
"Oh, we've only sighted some ship, I suppose," said the leader on the
other side. "What I was going to say is--"
But ever so little to break the sea and sky monotony of a voyage will
avail to raise a modicum of excitement; wherefore, what the speaker "was
going to say" remained perforce unknown, for the group incontinently
melted away in order to see what little there was to be seen.
That little was little enough. A solitary speck away towards the
sky-line; to those who had binoculars, and soon to those who had not,
taking shape--that shape the hull of a ship. Little enough in all
conscience.
But--was it? The submerged hull of a ship and no more, save for two
stumps of mast of uneven length sticking out of her. The poop and
forecastle were above water, and in the wash of the increasing evening
swell part of the bulwarks heaved up as the hulk rolled lazily, her
rusty red sides, glistening and wet, showing a line of encrusting
barnacles. This was what met the eager gaze of the passengers of the
_Baleka_ in the lurid, smoky glare of the tropical sunset as the steamer
swept up to, and slowed down to pass, the sad relic; and there may have
been some among them who noticed that the long, straight path of her
foamy wake has undergone an abrupt deviation behind her--for the
derelict had been lying right in her course.
Right in her course! An hour later and it would have been dark--very
dark--and then!
There was quite a buzz of interest among the passengers; the man who had
been to sea a great deal advancing, of course, all sorts of wild and
impossible theories with regard to the wreck. But though glasses were
strained upon her no trace was visible as to her name or nationality.
"By George! I'm blest if it isn't the Red Derelict herself!" exclaimed
the fourth officer, lowering his binoculars. Instantly he became the
centre of an inquiring group, chiefly ladies.
"The Red Derelict? What's that, Mr Ransome?" came the eager query.
"Haven't you heard of her?" said the other, who was little more than a
merry-faced boy. "Why, she's a sort of Flying Dutchman. She's been
cruising around in these waters some time now, and they say it isn't
lucky to sight her."
"Luckier than not to sight her--and an hour later we shouldn't have
sighted her--in the dark."
The rejoinder was significant, and it came from the quiet passenger who
had been appealed to for his opinion during the smoke-room discussion.
The fourth officer looked not at all pleased at this encroachment on his
own privileges as oracle. But he was destined to look less pleased
still.
"Mr Ransome," interrupted the captain's voice from the bridge overhead,
"just send me the second quartermaster here. After that I want you here
yourself." And the captain's tone was crisp, and his face was grim--and
the merry-faced boy looked no longer merry, for he knew a wigging was in
store.
"Right, sir," he answered, starting off with alacrity.
"Powis, d'you hear that blighted young fool blithering away about Red
Derelicts and Flying Dutchmen?" said the captain in an undertone to the
chief officer. "As if passengers ain't a skeery enough crowd without
filling 'em up with all sorts of sick old sea lies into the bargain. He
ought to be sent back to school again and well swished. Well, log the
derelict."
The bugle rang out its second dinner summons to the strains of "The
Roast Beef of Old England," and there was something of a scurry among
the passengers, who had ignored the first in their eagerness to watch
the derelict. A few, however, remained, gazing after the ghastly
eloquence of the deserted hulk, now black and indistinct in the dusk,
for in the tropical seas darkness comes down with a rush.
"Wonder if there's anything in Ransome's yarn about that beauty," said
one man, shutting his binoculars. "Hang it! I'm not superstitious,
but, all the same, I wish we'd never sighted her."