He--he's not quite himself." Already the index of his temperament was
beginning to swing from fair to foul again and his handsome face to blur
with doubt. The thing that had looked so easy at the first feverish
flush of relief was taking another proportion. "No, that's the devil of
it," he said, gnawing the corner of his mustache. "Not by any means
himself. He didn't even seem to know me."
"He might anyhow ha' wrote to tell us what happened to him that night."
The mate's dark lashes lifted a little in a superior way they had as he
stuffed the book out of sight.
"He might have, only Wickwire couldn't read--you remember, sir. He'd
hardly be apt to write either."
But Raff held to the point.
"Are you sure it was him? What'd he have to say?"
"He wouldn't come along--wouldn't listen to me. He--he said, if you want
to know--he told me to go troubling the wicked if I liked, but to leave
the weary at rest, and swore a little by this and that and so turned to
another pipe."
The captain smote his thigh a clap like a pistol shot, and indeed it
needed no more to convince any one, the quaint phrase brought quick
before us the figure of that sour, dour Scotch engineer whose loss had
cast such a gloom upon our little company, had left such a lading of
mystery aboard the _Moung Poh_.
"Six--seven weeks since. And he ain't dead after all--!"
"Seven weeks and three days."...
There was that in Sutton's tone which served to check the captain's
jubilant bellow. He knew, we both knew, what would be coming next.
"Twentieth June was the date, sir--before our last trip to Moulmein. We
were lying here in this very berth, No. 6 Principe Ghat, on just such
another night as this, at the beginning of the rains. We'd been coaling
too; some empty barges lay alongside. As it might be now, without the
gap of time--"
Sutton spoke downward-looking, twisting his cap in his hands, and he
told the thing like one doing penance and square enough, as he had from
the first alarm. A clean-cut, upstanding youngster, a satisfactory
figure of a youngster, the sort every man likes to frame to himself for
an image of his own youth. And yet--and yet, hearkening, I caught the
same unsteady note that had made me curious of him often and often
before. Something in him rang false. Not so much like a bell that has
cracked, if you understand me, but rather like metal whereof the alloy
was never rightly fined.
"I was off watch that evening," he went on. "Chris Wickwire wanted to go
ashore--for the first time in a year maybe. You know you generally
couldn't lift him out of the ship with a winch, and so I waited till he
should come up and step by the gangway to fix a bit of a joke on him. It
was wrong of me, and very silly, you know, and dearly I've paid for it.
But I only meant a jape, sir--to hear him rip and fuss and perhaps jolt
a proper oath out of him and make him break that everlasting clay cutty
he always wore in his face.... I fixed to loose the hand rope on the
outboard side--
"I did loose it, _you_ know I did; and then I leaned there on the rail
to laugh. He went down the steps in the dark. I figgered he'd be slid
quite neat into the shore boat waiting below, d'y'see? I heard him
stumble and call for me before I thought what I'd done. I heard him, and
I didn't go to help, but I never thought how it would be, sir, not till
too late. You believe that--!"
The cry wrenched from him as he searched our faces. It was very
necessary to him that we should believe; he had all a boy's eagerness to
keep the illusion--some illusion. And this was natural too, though even
the kid prank as he told it came to the same stark and gratuitous
horror. For Chris Wickwire had dropped out of life from that gangway!
Captain Raff chewed his cheroot for a space in silence. You would hardly
expect him to have the subtlety of a donkey engine, so to speak, but he
might surprise you at times, and he had learned to be very patient with
the mate. Perhaps in his own time he had passed some crisis when the
stuff in him was molding and setting, though it must have been quite a
different occasion with so rugged a soul.
"Well," he said carefully, "we know all that, and I never heard nobody
jaw you as hard about it as what you done yourself. But it's all right
now, ain't it? You've found him. Didn't you just say you found him
again?" And then he added what turned out to be a singular comment: "If
the chief was smokin' his ol' pipe as usual, I judge nothin' much could
ha' happened to him. He must be pretty much his own self after all."
So Sutton was driven back on the mere fact, which must always have been
tough for him. He had blinked it thus far, as I suppose was his weakness
to blink and to spin all manner of sanguine threads about the naked nubs
of things. But if he meant to tell, he had here to tell outright, though
I saw him wince....
"I found him in an awful hole down there," he faltered, "a kind of a
chandoo shop. And the stuff he's smoking now is--opium!"
* * * * *
I cannot say that either Raff or myself had arrived at any clearness
when we headed away into the maze of Colootullah that night. It was all
a bad dream, and it began badly, in a dog kennel of a ticca gharri that
racked us in tune to our own jarring thoughts.
We huddled together on the one bench, we two, though, dear knows, the
captain would have been a fare by himself. Sutton sat opposite quite
stiffly with his knees drawn aside, and the journey long said never a
word. And this was the next aspect we had of him, you will note: a
strained and silent presence and a pallid face glimpsed now and then by
the brief flicker of some street lamp. For he had seen what we had
not--Chris Wickwire alive, but Chris Wickwire transmogrified out of all
belief, the inmate of a hideous den in the city's vilest slum--and
somehow it set him sharp apart from us....
You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of
all hands toward the chief engineer of the _Moung Poh_. Every ship has
her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say,
and in the curious way of such traditions this had come to center on
Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the
prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high
seas.
I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned,
long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he
was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic
relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His
vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity,
and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general
damnation in which he moved--these were points of pride and almost of
affection.
"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third
engineer--we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the
ports--"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw, an' blistered son
of perdition,' he says, 'I'll learn you to 'ide liquor in your bunk.
Wine is a knocker,' he says, and stretches me. And with that goes back
to his cabin to _prye_ for me! I 'eard 'im groanin' as I come by the
dead-light. Oh, he's a 'oly wonder and no mistyke--once he goes to set a
bloke right there's nothin' he won't do for 'im!"
Nobody knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history
began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in
his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose
rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to
raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady passengers into
fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler
shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official
brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was
somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and the man
that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish
parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire
undertook to do both.
* * * * *
You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like
Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to
him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange
seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth
a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on
his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appetite for life and
confident humor--here was a brand to be snatched from the burning: here
was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!
And Sutton--at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game
for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a
jape he was all too apt at.
"Where ha' ye been the day--ashore again? Buyin' gauds an' silk
pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal
speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its
waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o'
damnable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're
light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like
the lilies o' the field!"
This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton--at the start, as I say. He
must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being damned
with such assurance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so
developed the jest.
* * * * *
With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much
between himself and the censor, but I chanced to overhear an odd
passage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other
wrong on some argued matter.
"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."
"What--no Book!"
"I need nane. What for?"
"Why, for me, of course. It's a remedy for all ills, they say.... I'm
surprised at your not trying it on."
They made a picture there by the rail in a strong glint of sunlight--the
chief, squatted on a bollard like a grim and battered Moses giving the
law; Sutton, dapper in fresh ducks, his hands in his pockets, swaying
easily to the ship's motion.
Wickwire seemed to reflect. "Aye, it's a grand book, nae doot, but wad
ye listen? I been watchin' ye, laddie--I ken ye better than maybe ye
think."
"Much obliged, I'm sure," said Sutton pertly.
"Aye, there it is, ye see. Ye never tak' the straight way wi' life. But
what I dinna just ken is this: are ye a'thegither past the reach o' good
words for remedy? Puttin' aside the false glitter, could ever ye cast
the beam from yer eye an' listen how hell gapes for ye?"
"I might," said Sutton. "You haven't a notion how I enjoy hearing about
it. You might read to me."
I was startled then to see the depth of yearning in Wickwire's regard,
to see his hands knotting and twisting one in the other. However it
might be with the mate, it was no play with him; he was wrung with pity
as toward an erring son, or toward some younger memory of himself,
perhaps--for Sutton had this appeal.
"Suppose I should tell ye now I canna read the heid o' one printed word
frae the hurdies o' it?"
The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.
"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case--I could
read to you," he cried--"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a
bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth--oodles of truth! I'll show
you old boy--"
And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where
the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he
came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the
cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point
for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of
the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet
hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to
protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over
into merriment....
"Where's the chief?"
"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."
"Saved anybody yet?"
"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce.
He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"
But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the
other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.
For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we
were coaling at Calcutta--seven weeks before, you remember--they broke
suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all
that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while
Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a
long-drawn lip over his pipe.
"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper.
"Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool
in his heart! He's young--he's ower young. What he needs is to come to
gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod
an' a staff to comfort him--an' by this an' that," he breathed through
the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we
lost Wickwire....
* * * * *
Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we
hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that
this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.
By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the
accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have
landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside--there had been one
missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah
Bridge--and so reached shore.
"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a
silence. "Is that how you make it?"
"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven
I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling
block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.
"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb,"
said Raff simply-- "or anything like it."
Sutton said nothing.
Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew
the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower
ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air
heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet,
in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted
corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of
lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For
we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.
* * * * *
Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its
hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of
Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and
pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso
Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless,
moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with
infinite suggestions of dim horrors--
To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted
swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and
reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded
cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We
jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a
dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive
with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked
bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on
the floor above the street.
There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and
gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a
gallery, but it had no windows--only a row of shallow cells, so to say,
divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and
small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned
from a niche. He was fat and crass and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for
such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!
Perhaps because we were listening!...
"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's
that pipe?" A voice to send the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary
and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere
on earth, or under. "_Not_ the silver one, ye blistered limb--"
Nobody came; nothing stirred among the curtains. Sutton had closed the
door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and
the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty.
And the plaint began again, monotonous, muffled:
"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...
Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture
he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the
gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay
propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside
him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as
perhaps the imps tend the damned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he
held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he
raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by.
"Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.
He looked up at us then, and it was Chris Wickwire, his very self. He
looked and looked and made no sign.
I think I might have been less shocked to see some change, some altered
trait to veil the normal image of him. But there was none. He was the
same, the same weather-beaten old tinker with the lean, long face and
hard-set jaw and the dour eye that could quell a mutinous stokehole at a
glance. In the midst of this evil and fantastic luxury he still wore the
same old shiny alpaca too, his regular shore-going and Sunday garb, and
a ragged bit of ribbon at his throat. Somehow that cut me all up.
"Wickwire!" began Raff again. "Come away out of that. What are y' doin'
here?"
No answer; the smoker's concern was for his pipe.
"Chief, d'you hear me? You're needed on board." The captain shook him
gently, and then not so gently.
"Drop it. We've come to bring you away. For any sakes quit that
devilment, now, will y'!"...
The figure on the couch made a languid effort.
"I'll grant ye--I'll grant ye the siller's weel enough for a change.
Aye, it makes a change." He wagged his head at us confidentially. "But
the bamboo's the best. It smokes sweet--varra sweet it smokes. An' that
unhandy thief of a boy--" He paused to draw lazily at the mouthpiece and
loosed a slow gout of vapor. "He's always mislayin' it somewhere--"
Raff cried a round oath and snatched the pipe from him; flung it down.
But the chief only sank back among the pillows and closed his eyes, even
smiling a little to himself, as one accustomed to the vagaries of
phantom guests....
For the last few moments he had forgotten our appointed guide and
leader. He had been standing by, a stricken witness, but with a common
impulse the captain and I turned on him, and he started from
contemplation of his handiwork as if he had pulled a secret wire.
"You brought us here," roared Raff, accusing.
"I--I didn't think he was as bad as this."
"Bad! He's crazy as a coot. What were you going to do about it?"
The flurry of our passage had begun to draw in behind us in a back-lash
wave. The house seemed to hum under our feet. A door opened on a gust of
muttering voices. Down by the entrance to the gallery a knot of vague
shadows had gathered. It occurred to me, and time enough you might
suppose, that we were very far from possible aid in a region where
visitors are a poor risk. And suddenly, out of space for all I knew,
appeared a little noiseless silken apparition of a Chinese who regarded
us from twin lenses with a phosphorescent gleam.
It was of a piece with the whole mysterious side of the affair that he
should address Sutton a screed in the vernacular and that the mate
should answer. I was long past wonder--anything might happen now--and I
only noted that our companion could be wheedling and plausible in more
than one language. But Raff seemed curiously put out and broke upon
their chatter.
"Friend of yours?" he rumbled.
Sutton span around nervously.
"He--he says we've got to go away quick. He says we've no business
here."
"Tell him sure thing, soon as we get our friend."
"But he says--he says Chris is his lodger, in a private house, and
mustn't be disturbed."
"Oh, he does, hey? Well, we'll give him a chance to explain to the
police in another minute!"
"That's no good either."
"Does he figger we can't get no police?"
"'Tisn't that, sir. The police couldn't help."
"Why not?"
"Why, it seems he's breaking no law. There's no bar to private smoking.
I've been trying to get around him somehow, but there doesn't seem to be
anything we can do. He says the white man has a right to stay here, and
he has a right to keep him."...
"Keep him! Well, by God!"
"I suppose Chris must have a little money banked somewhere," continued
the mate miserably. "Li Chwan'll never let go of him while it lasts."
"And you mean we got to leave him after all--leave the ol' chief to rot
where he lays?"
"Unless he wants to--to come away of his own motion," stammered Sutton.
"I thought he'd come quite easy when he saw the three of us. But he
won't. He doesn't want to--and that's the dreadful fact. And--and--only
look at him now!"
* * * * *
His fascinated gaze had coasted back to the face on the cushions. It
might have been cut from tan marble, impassive and stern, and we saw
what he meant--though perhaps not as vividly as he saw--the wretched
incongruous tragedy of such a face in such a setting.
"So this is the end of your grand scheme!" said Captain Raff bitterly.
Well, you see, it came rather rough on a superior young optimist. For
the very first time in his life, I suppose, Sutton found himself called
to account without a chance either to smile or to sulk, to palter or to
play at clever tricks. Whatever his share in the unhappy business had
been--and we had never fully fathomed it, you remember--he was facing
the result of that folly without the possibility of disguise or excuse
or easy escape. Here was actual, physical hell to equal Wickwire's own
preaching--the murky depth of it. And here was Wickwire himself,
condemned to the dreariest fate ever devised by unamusing devils. And
who to blame?...
What he suffered we had a guess even then. Being the sort of chap he
was, he fought a very pretty little fight with himself in that
moment--which we might have guessed as well. His face was gridironed,
studded with sweat, and his hands clenched and opened. He turned here
and there, seeking the careless word or the flippant gesture, some
relief to an intolerable sense of guilt. But writhe as he liked, his
darting glances always painfully returned to the still victim on the
charpoy.
The Chinese touched his arm....
"No," he quavered. "No--no, by gum, _no_! It's not the end. Keep off of
me!" Like a man who clears himself of a vileness, he slung Li Chwan
across the room. "And you--" he cried to us "--hoist the chief up out of
that, and lively. There's a way yet if we take the straight of it. Grab
him!"
We responded--just as we had hesitated before--to some subtle quality
behind the words, and while we were gathering the limp body Sutton
himself was laying wide hold on the draperies across the wall. They
ripped and swayed, swirled down about him so that he stood waist deep
wrestling with figurative monsters until the whole blue screen tore away
and revealed the glass partition which closed the end of the gallery.
Solid at the base, it was latticed above with small panes, and, taking
the straight way with a vengeance, he flung himself literally and bodily
against it. The jingling crash brought a howl from the stairhead, but he
broke a gap with his bleeding fists, wrenched out the crosspieces.... A
spatter of warm rain blew in upon us.
"There's only the street below!" I gasped.
"Out!" was Sutton's crisp order. "Out--and through--and over with you!"
We had no choice; his furious energy drove us. Wickwire hung a dead
weight in our arms, but we propped him on the jagged sill and scrambled
after, any fashion. Clinging there, we had one last glimpse into the
gallery behind us, set like a stage for our benefit.