Evidently they knew all about it already, and they treated me to a
show of consternation. The manager, a soft-footed, immensely obese man,
breathing short, got up to meet me, while all round the room the young
clerks, bending over the papers on their desks, cast upward glances in
my direction. The fat man, without waiting for my complaint, wheezing
heavily and in a tone as if he himself were incredulous, conveyed to
me the news that Falk--Captain Falk--had declined--had absolutely
declined--to tow my ship--to have anything to do with my ship--this day
or any other day. Never!
I did my best to preserve a cool appearance, but, all the same, I must
have shown how much taken aback I was. We were talking in the middle
of the room. Suddenly behind my back some ass blew his nose with great
force, and at the same time another quill-driver jumped up and went out
on the landing hastily. It occurred to me I was cutting a foolish figure
there. I demanded angrily to see the principal in his private room.
The skin of Mr. Siegers’ head showed dead white between the iron grey
streaks of hair lying plastered cross-wise from ear to ear over the top
of his skull in the manner of a bandage. His narrow sunken face was of
an uniform and permanent terra-cotta colour, like a piece of pottery.
He was sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten. But from
that debile body there issued a bullying voice, tremendously loud, harsh
and resonant, as if produced by some powerful mechanical contrivance
in the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know what he did with it in
the private life of his home, but in the larger sphere of business it
presented the advantage of overcoming arguments without the slightest
mental effort, by the mere volume of sound. We had had several
passages of arms. It took me all I knew to guard the interests of my
owners--whom, nota bene, I had never seen--while Siegers (who had
made their acquaintance some years before, during a business tour in
Australia) pretended to the knowledge of their innermost minds, and, in
the character of “our very good friends,” threw them perpetually at my
head.
He looked at me with a jaundiced eye (there was no love lost between
us), and declared at once that it was strange, very strange. His
pronunciation of English was so extravagant that I can’t even attempt to
reproduce it. For instance, he said “Fferie strantch.” Combined with
the bellowing intonation it made the language of one’s childhood sound
weirdly startling, and even if considered purely as a kind of unmeaning
noise it filled you with astonishment at first. “They had,” he
continued, “been acquainted with Captain Falk for very many years, and
never had any reason....”
“That’s why I come to you, of course,” I interrupted. “I’ve the right
to know the meaning of this infernal nonsense.” In the half light of the
room, which was greenish, because of the tree-tops screening the
window, I saw him writhe his meagre shoulders. It came into my head, as
disconnected ideas will come at all sorts of times into one’s head, that
this, most likely, was the very room where, if the tale were true, Falk
had been lectured by Mr. Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers’ (the son’s)
overwhelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had been trying to
articulate his words through a trombone, was expressing his great regret
at a conduct characterised by a very marked want of discretion... As I
lived I was being lectured too! His deafening gibberish was difficult to
follow, but it was _my_ conduct--mine!--that... Damn! I wasn’t going to
stand this.
“What on earth are you driving at?” I asked in a passion. I put my hat
on my head (he never offered a seat to anybody), and as he seemed for
the moment struck dumb by my irreverence, I turned my back on him and
marched out. His vocal arrangements blared after me a few threats of
coming down on the ship for the demurrage of the lighters, and all the
other expenses consequent upon the delays arising from my frivolity.
Once outside in the sunshine my head swam. It was no longer a question
of mere delay. I perceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating
absurdities that were leading me to something very like a disaster. “Let
us be calm,” I muttered to myself, and ran into the shade of a
leprous wall. From that short side-street I could see the broad main
thoroughfare ruinous and gay, running away, away between stretches of
decaying masonry, bamboo fences, ranges of arcades of brick and plaster,
hovels of lath and mud, lofty temple gates of carved timber, huts of
rotten mats--an immensely wide thoroughfare, loosely packed as far as
the eye could reach with a barefooted and brown multitude paddling ankle
deep in the dust. For a moment I felt myself about to go out of my mind
with worry and desperation.
Some allowance must be made for the feelings of a young man new to
responsibility. I thought of my crew. Half of them were ill, and I
really began to think that some of them would end by dying on board if
I couldn’t get them out to sea soon. Obviously I should have to take my
ship down the river, either working under canvas or dredging with the
anchor down; operations which, in common with many modern sailors,
I only knew theoretically. And I almost shrank from undertaking them
shorthanded and without local knowledge of the river bed, which is so
necessary for the confident handling of the ship. There were no pilots,
no beacons, no buoys of any sort; but there was a very devil of a
current for anybody to see, no end of shoal places, and at least two
obviously awkward turns of the channel between me and the sea. But how
dangerous these turns were I would not tell. I didn’t even know what
my ship was capable of! I had never handled her in my life. A
misunderstanding between a man and his ship in a difficult river with no
room to make it up, is bound to end in trouble for the man. On the other
hand, it must be owned I had not much reason to count upon a general run
of good luck. And suppose I had the misfortune to pile her up high and
dry on some beastly shoal? That would have been the final undoing of
that voyage. It was plain that if Falk refused to tow me out he would
also refuse to pull me off. This meant--what? A day lost at the
very best; but more likely a whole fortnight of frizzling on some
pestilential mud-flat, of desperate work, of discharging cargo; more than
likely it meant borrowing money at an exorbitant rate of interest--from
the Siegers’ gang too at that. They were a power in the port. And that
elderly seaman of mine, Gambril, had looked pretty ghastly when I
went forward to dose him with quinine that morning. _He_ would certainly
die--not to speak of two or three others that seemed nearly as bad,
and of the rest of them just ready to catch any tropical disease going.
Horror, ruin and everlasting remorse. And no help. None. I had fallen
amongst a lot of unfriendly lunatics!
At any rate, if I must take my ship down myself it was my duty to
procure if possible some local knowledge. But that was not easy. The
only person I could think of for that service was a certain Johnson,
formerly captain of a country ship, but now spliced to a country wife
and gone utterly to the bad. I had only heard of him in the vaguest way,
as living concealed in the thick of two hundred thousand natives, and
only emerging into the light of day for the purpose of hunting up some
brandy. I had a notion that if I could lay my hands on him I would sober
him on board my ship and use him for a pilot. Better than nothing. Once
a sailor always a sailor--and he had known the river for years. But in
our Consulate (where I arrived dripping after a sharp walk) they could
tell me nothing. The excellent young men on the staff, though willing to
help me, belonged to a sphere of the white colony for which that sort of
Johnson does not exist. Their suggestion was that I should hunt the
man up myself with the help of the Consulate’s constable--an
ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars.
This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted in sitting behind a
little table in an outer room of Consular offices, when ordered to
assist me in my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy and a
marvellous amount of local knowledge of a sort. But he did not conceal
an immense and sceptical contempt for the whole business. We explored
together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling
dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry--a tiny
box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony--could by
no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful
intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and
with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate.
We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind
alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major
remarked to me perfunctorily, had “killed another man last year.”
Thereupon he addressed him as “Antonio” and “Old Buck,” though that
bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell
wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never
unbending, the sergeant chucked--absolutely chucked--under the chin
a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had
volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he
kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women,
who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay
hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like
packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars. We got
in, we drove on, we got out again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of
looking behind a heap of rubble. The sun declined; my companion was curt
and sardonic in his answers, but it appears we were just missing Johnson
all along. At last our conveyance stopped once more with a jerk, and the
driver jumping down opened the door.
A black mudhole blocked the lane. A mound of garbage crowned with the
dead body of a dog arrested us not. An empty Australian beef tin bounded
cheerily before the toe of my boot. Suddenly we clambered through a gap
in a prickly fence....
It was a very clean native compound: and the big native woman, with bare
brown legs as thick as bedposts, pursuing on all fours a silver dollar
that came rolling out from somewhere, was Mrs. Johnson herself. “Your
man’s at home,” said the ex-sergeant, and stepped aside in complete
and marked indifference to anything that might follow. Johnson--at
home--stood with his back to a native house built on posts and with its
walls made of mats. In his left hand he held a banana. Out of the right
he dealt another dollar into space. The woman captured this one on the
wing, and there and then plumped down on the ground to look at us with
greater comfort.
My man was sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven, muddy on elbows and
back; where the seams of his serge coat yawned you could see his white
nakedness. The vestiges of a paper collar encircled his neck. He looked
at us with a grave, swaying surprise. “Where do you come from?” he
asked. My heart sank. How could I have been stupid enough to waste
energy and time for this?
But having already gone so far I approached a little nearer and declared
the purpose of my visit. He would have to come at once with me, sleep on
board my ship, and to-morrow, with the first of the ebb, he would give
me his assistance in getting my ship down to the sea, without steam. A
six-hundred-ton barque, drawing nine feet aft. I proposed to give
him eighteen dollars for his local knowledge; and all the time I was
speaking he kept on considering attentively the various aspects of the
banana, holding first one side up to his eye, then the other.
“You’ve forgotten to apologise,” he said at last with extreme precision.
“Not being a gentleman yourself, you don’t know apparently when you
intrude upon a gentleman. I am one. I wish you to understand that when I
am in funds I don’t work, and now...”
I would have pronounced him perfectly sober hadn’t he paused in great
concern to try and brush a hole off the knee of his trousers.
“I have money--and friends. Every gentleman has. Perhaps you would like
to know my friend? His name is Falk. You could borrow some money. Try to
remember. F-A-L-K, Falk.” Abruptly his tone changed. “A noble heart,” he
said muzzily.
“Has Falk been giving you some money?” I asked, appalled by the detailed
finish of the dark plot.
“Lent me, my good man, not given me. Lent,” he corrected suavely.
“Met me taking the air last evening, and being as usual anxious to
oblige--Hadn’t you better go to the devil out of my compound?”
And upon this, without other warning, he let fly with the banana which
missed my head, and took the constable just under the left eye. He
rushed at the miserable Johnson, stammering with fury. They fell....
But why dwell on the wretchedness, the breathlessness, the degradation,
the senselessness, the weariness, the ridicule and humiliation
and--and--the perspiration, of these moments? I dragged the ex-hussar
off. He was like a wild beast. It seems he had been greatly annoyed
at losing his free afternoon on my account. The garden of his bungalow
required his personal attention, and at the slight blow of the banana
the brute in him had broken loose. We left Johnson on his back, still
black in the face, but beginning to kick feebly. Meantime, the big woman
had remained sitting on the ground, apparently paralysed with extreme
terror.
For half an hour we jolted inside our rolling box, side by side, in
profound silence. The ex-sergeant was busy staunching the blood of a
long scratch on his cheek. “I hope you’re satisfied,” he said suddenly.
“That’s what comes of all that tomfool business. If you hadn’t
quarrelled with that tugboat skipper over some girl or other, all this
wouldn’t have happened.”
“You heard _that_ story?” I said.
“Of course I heard. And I shouldn’t wonder if the Consul-General himself
doesn’t come to hear of it. How am I to go before him to-morrow with
that thing on my cheek--I want to know. Its _you_ who ought to have got
this!”
After that, till the gharry stopped and he jumped out without
leave-taking, he swore to himself steadily, horribly; muttering great,
purposeful, trooper oaths, to which the worst a sailor can do is like
the prattle of a child. For my part I had just the strength to crawl
into Schomberg’s coffee-room, where I wrote at a little table a note to
the mate instructing him to get everything ready for dropping down the
river next day. I couldn’t face my ship. Well! she had a clever sort of
skipper and no mistake--poor thing! What a horrid mess! I took my head
between my hands. At times the obviousness of my innocence would reduce
me to despair. What had I done? If I had done something to bring about
the situation I should at least have learned not to do it again. But I
felt guiltless to the point of imbecility. The room was empty yet;
only Schomberg prowled round me goggle-eyed and with a sort of awed
respectful curiosity. No doubt he had set the story going himself; but
he was a good-hearted chap, and I am really persuaded he participated in
all my troubles. He did what he could for me. He ranged aside the heavy
match-stand, set a chair straight, pushed a spittoon slightly with
his foot--as you show small attentions to a friend under a great
sorrow--sighed, and at last, unable to hold his tongue:
“Well! I warned you, captain. That’s what comes of running your head
against Mr. Falk. Man’ll stick at nothing.”
I sat without stirring, and after surveying me with a sort of
commiseration in his eyes he burst out in a hoarse whisper: “But for
a fine lump of a girl, she’s a fine lump of a girl.” He made a loud
smacking noise with his thick lips. “The finest lump of a girl that I
ever...” he was going on with great unction, but for some reason or
other broke off. I fancied myself throwing something at his head. “I
don’t blame you, captain. Hang me if I do,” he said with a patronising
air.
“Thank you,” I said resignedly. It was no use fighting against this
false fate. I don’t know even if I was sure myself where the truth of
the matter began. The conviction that it would end disastrously had been
driven into me by all the successive shocks my sense of security had
received. I began to ascribe an extraordinary potency to agents in
themselves powerless. It was as if Schomberg’s baseless gossip had the
power to bring about the thing itself or the abstract enmity of Falk
could put my ship ashore.
I have already explained how fatal this last would have been. For my
further action, my youth, my inexperience, my very real concern for the
health of my crew must be my excuse. The action itself, when it came,
was purely impulsive. It was set in movement quite undiplomatically and
simply by Falk’s appearance in the doorway.
The room was full by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked
at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation
produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The
tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the
silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to
Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort
of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad
for business, he affirmed; but, in truth, this specimen of portly,
middle-aged manhood was of a timid disposition. I don’t know what,
considering my presence in the place, they all hoped would come of it. A
sort of stag fight, perhaps. Or they may have supposed Falk had come in
only to annihilate me completely. As a matter of fact, Falk had come in
because Hermann had asked him to inquire after the precious white cotton
parasol which, in the worry and excitement of the previous day, he had
forgotten at the table where we had held our little discussion.
It was this that gave me my opportunity. I don’t think I would have gone
to seek Falk out. No. I don’t think so. There are limits. But there was
an opportunity and I seized it--I have already tried to explain why. Now
I will merely state that, in my opinion, to get his sickly crew into
the sea air and secure a quick despatch for his ship a skipper would be
justified in going to any length, short of absolute crime. He should
put his pride in his pocket; he may accept confidences; explain his
innocence as if it were a sin; he may take advantage of misconceptions,
of desires and of weaknesses; he ought to conceal his horror and other
emotions, and, if the fate of a human being, and that human being
a magnificent young girl, is strangely involved--why, he should
contemplate that fate (whatever it might seem to be) without turning a
hair. And all these things I have done; the explaining, the listening,
the pretending--even to the discretion--and nobody, not even Hermann’s
niece, I believe, need throw stones at me now. Schomberg at all events
needn’t, since from first to last, I am happy to say, there was not the
slightest “fracas.”
Overcoming a nervous contraction of the windpipe, I had managed to
exclaim “Captain Falk!” His start of surprise was perfectly genuine, but
afterwards he neither smiled nor scowled. He simply waited. Then, when
I had said, “I must have a talk with you,” and had pointed to a chair
at my table, he moved up to me, though he didn’t sit down. Schomberg,
however, with a long tumbler in his hand, was making towards us
prudently, and I discovered then the only sign of weakness in Falk. He
had for Schomberg a repulsion resembling that sort of physical fear
some people experience at the sight of a toad. Perhaps to a man so
essentially and silently concentrated upon himself (though he could talk
well enough, as I was to find out presently) the other’s irrepressible
loquacity, embracing every human being within range of the tongue, might
have appeared unnatural, disgusting, and monstrous. He suddenly gave
signs of restiveness--positively like a horse about to rear, and,
muttering hurriedly as if in great pain, “No. I can’t stand that
fellow,” seemed ready to bolt. This weakness of his gave me the
advantage at the very start. “Verandah,” I suggested, as if rendering
him a service, and walked him out by the arm. We stumbled over a few
chairs; we had the feeling of open space before us, and felt the fresh
breath of the river--fresh, but tainted. The Chinese theatres across the
water made, in the sparsely twinkling masses of gloom an Eastern town
presents at night, blazing centres of light, and of a distant and
howling uproar. I felt him become suddenly tractable again like an
animal, like a good-tempered horse when the object that scares him is
removed. Yes. I felt in the darkness there how tractable he was, without
my conviction of his inflexibility--tenacity, rather, perhaps--being in
the least weakened. His very arm abandoning itself to my grasp was as
hard as marble--like a limb of iron. But I heard a tumultuous scuffling
of boot-soles within. The unspeakable idiots inside were crowding to the
windows, climbing over each other’s backs behind the blinds, billiard
cues and all. Somebody broke a window pane, and with the sound of
falling glass, so suggestive of riot and devastation, Schomberg reeled
out after us in a state of funk which had prevented his parting with his
brandy and soda. He must have trembled like an aspen leaf. The piece of
ice in the long tumbler he held in his hand tinkled with an effect
of chattering teeth. “I beg you, gentlemen,” he expostulated thickly.
“Come! Really, now, I must insist...”
How proud I am of my presence of mind! “Hallo,” I said instantly in a
loud and naive tone, “somebody’s breaking your windows, Schomberg. Would
you please tell one of your boys to bring out here a pack of cards and a
couple of lights? And two long drinks. Will you?”
To receive an order soothed him at once. It was business. “Certainly,”
he said in an immensely relieved tone. The night was rainy, with
wandering gusts of wind, and while we waited for the candles Falk said,
as if to justify his panic, “I don’t interfere in anybody’s business.
I don’t give any occasion for talk. I am a respectable man. But this
fellow is always making out something wrong, and can never rest till he
gets somebody to believe him.”
This was the first of my knowledge of Falk. This desire of
respectability, of being like everybody else, was the only recognition
he vouchsafed to the organisation of mankind. For the rest he might have
been the member of a herd, not of a society. Self-preservation was his
only concern. Not selfishness, but mere self-preservation. Selfishness
presupposes consciousness, choice, the presence of other men; but his
instinct acted as though he were the last of mankind nursing that law
like the only spark of a sacred fire. I don’t mean to say that living
naked in a cavern would have satisfied him. Obviously he was
the creature of the conditions to which he was born. No doubt
self-preservation meant also the preservation of these conditions. But
essentially it meant something much more simple, natural, and powerful.
How shall I express it? It meant the preservation of the five senses
of his body--let us say--taking it in its narrowest as well as in its
widest meaning. I think you will admit before long the justice of this
judgment. However, as we stood there together in the dark verandah I had
judged nothing as yet--and I had no desire to judge--which is an idle
practice anyhow. The light was long in coming.
“Of course,” I said in a tone of mutual understanding, “it isn’t exactly
a game of cards I want with you.”
I saw him draw his hands down his face--the vague stir of the passionate
and meaningless gesture; but he waited in silent patience. It was
only when the lights had been brought out that he opened his lips. I
understood his mumble to mean that “he didn’t know any game.”
“Like this Schomberg and all the other fools will have to keep off,”
I said tearing open the pack. “Have you heard that we are universally
supposed to be quarrelling about a girl? You know who--of course. I am
really ashamed to ask, but is it possible that you do me the honour to
think me dangerous?”