For a while after his second’s answering hoot Massy hung over the
engine-room gloomily. Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred
pounds, had kept his command for three years, might have been suspected
of never having seen that coast before. He seemed unable to put down his
glasses, as though they had been glued under his contracted eyebrows.
This settled frown gave to his face an air of invincible and just
severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration
poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at
the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose
blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust.
From time to time, still holding up his glasses, he raised his other
hand to wipe his streaming face. The drops rolled down his cheeks, fell
like rain upon the white hairs of his beard, and brusquely, as if guided
by an uncontrollable and anxious impulse, his arm reached out to the
stand of the engine-room telegraph.
The gong clanged down below. The balanced vibration of the dead-slow
speed ceased together with every sound and tremor in the ship, as if the
great stillness that reigned upon the coast had stolen in through
her sides of iron and taken possession of her innermost recesses. The
illusion of perfect immobility seemed to fall upon her from the luminous
blue dome without a stain arching over a flat sea without a stir. The
faint breeze she had made for herself expired, as if all at once the air
had become too thick to budge; even the slight hiss of the water on her
stem died out. The narrow, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple,
seemed to approach the shoal water of the bar by stealth. The plunge of
the lead with the mournful, mechanical cry of the lascar came at longer
and longer intervals; and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their
breath. The Malay at the helm looked fixedly at the compass card, the
Captain and the Serang stared at the coast.
Massy had left the skylight, and, walking flat-footed, had returned
softly to the very spot on the bridge he had occupied before. A slow,
lingering grin exposed his set of big white teeth: they gleamed evenly
in the shade of the awning like the keyboard of a piano in a dusky room.
At last, pretending to talk to himself in excessive astonishment, he
said not very loud--
“Stop the engines now. What next, I wonder?”
He waited, stooping from the shoulders, his head bowed, his glance
oblique. Then raising his voice a shade--
“If I dared make an absurd remark I would say that you haven’t the
stomach to . . .”
But a yelling spirit of excitement, like some frantic soul wandering
unsuspected in the vast stillness of the coast, had seized upon the body
of the lascar at the lead. The languid monotony of his sing-song changed
to a swift, sharp clamor. The weight flew after a single whir, the line
whistled, splash followed splash in haste. The water had shoaled, and
the man, instead of the drowsy tale of fathoms, was calling out the
soundings in feet.
“Fifteen feet. Fifteen, fifteen! Fourteen, fourteen . . .”
Captain Whalley lowered the arm holding the glasses. It descended slowly
as if by its own weight; no other part of his towering body stirred; and
the swift cries with their eager warning note passed him by as though he
had been deaf.
Massy, very still, and turning an attentive ear, had fastened his eyes
upon the silvery, close-cropped back of the steady old head. The ship
herself seemed to be arrested but for the gradual decrease of depth
under her keel.
“Thirteen feet . . . Thirteen! Twelve!” cried the leadsman anxiously
below the bridge. And suddenly the barefooted Serang stepped away
noiselessly to steal a glance over the side.
Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat
rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and
with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy
of fourteen. There was a childlike impulsiveness in the curiosity with
which he watched the spread of the voluminous, yellowish convolutions
rolling up from below to the surface of the blue water like massive
clouds driving slowly upwards on the unfathomable sky. He was not
startled at the sight in the least. It was not doubt, but the certitude
that the keel of the Sofala must be stirring the mud now, which made him
peep over the side.
His peering eyes, set aslant in a face of the Chinese type, a little old
face, immovable, as if carved in old brown oak, had informed him long
before that the ship was not headed at the bar properly. Paid off from
the Fair Maid, together with the rest of the crew, after the completion
of the sale, he had hung, in his faded blue suit and floppy gray hat,
about the doors of the Harbor Office, till one day, seeing Captain
Whalley coming along to get a crew for the Sofala, he had put himself
quietly in the way, with his bare feet in the dust and an upward mute
glance. The eyes of his old commander had fallen on him favorably--it
must have been an auspicious day--and in less than half an hour the
white men in the “Ofiss” had written his name on a document as Serang of
the fire-ship Sofala. Since that time he had repeatedly looked at that
estuary, upon that coast, from this bridge and from this side of the
bar. The record of the visual world fell through his eyes upon his
unspeculating mind as on a sensitized plate through the lens of a
camera. His knowledge was absolute and precise; nevertheless, had he
been asked his opinion, and especially if questioned in the downright,
alarming manner of white men, he would have displayed the hesitation of
ignorance. He was certain of his facts--but such a certitude counted for
little against the doubt what answer would be pleasing. Fifty years ago,
in a jungle village, and before he was a day old, his father (who died
without ever seeing a white face) had had his nativity cast by a man of
skill and wisdom in astrology, because in the arrangement of the stars
may be read the last word of human destiny. His destiny had been to
thrive by the favor of various white men on the sea. He had swept the
decks of ships, had tended their helms, had minded their stores, had
risen at last to be a Serang; and his placid mind had remained as
incapable of penetrating the simplest motives of those he served as they
themselves were incapable of detecting through the crust of the earth
the secret nature of its heart, which may be fire or may be stone. But
he had no doubt whatever that the Sofala was out of the proper track for
crossing the bar at Batu Beru.
It was a slight error. The ship could not have been more than twice her
own length too far to the northward; and a white man at a loss for a
cause (since it was impossible to suspect Captain Whalley of blundering
ignorance, of want of skill, or of neglect) would have been inclined to
doubt the testimony of his senses. It was some such feeling that kept
Massy motionless, with his teeth laid bare by an anxious grin. Not so
the Serang. He was not troubled by any intellectual mistrust of his
senses. If his captain chose to stir the mud it was well. He had known
in his life white men indulge in outbreaks equally strange. He was only
genuinely interested to see what would come of it. At last, apparently
satisfied, he stepped back from the rail.
He had made no sound: Captain Whalley, however, seemed to have observed
the movements of his Serang. Holding his head rigidly, he asked with a
mere stir of his lips--
“Going ahead still, Serang?”
“Still going a little, Tuan,” answered the Malay. Then added casually,
“She is over.”
The lead confirmed his words; the depth of water increased at every
cast, and the soul of excitement departed suddenly from the lascar swung
in the canvas belt over the Sofala’s side. Captain Whalley ordered the
lead in, set the engines ahead without haste, and averting his eyes from
the coast directed the Serang to keep a course for the middle of the
entrance.
Massy brought the palm of his hand with a loud smack against his thigh.
“You grazed on the bar. Just look astern and see if you didn’t. Look at
the track she left. You can see it plainly. Upon my soul, I thought you
would! What made you do that? What on earth made you do that? I believe
you are trying to scare me.”
He talked slowly, as it were circumspectly, keeping his prominent black
eyes on his captain. There was also a slight plaintive note in his
rising choler, for, primarily, it was the clear sense of a wrong
suffered undeservedly that made him hate the man who, for a beggarly
five hundred pounds, claimed a sixth part of the profits under the three
years’ agreement. Whenever his resentment got the better of the awe
the person of Captain Whalley inspired he would positively whimper with
fury.
“You don’t know what to invent to plague my life out of me. I would not
have thought that a man of your sort would condescend . . .”
He paused, half hopefully, half timidly, whenever Captain Whalley made
the slightest movement in the deck-chair, as though expecting to be
conciliated by a soft speech or else rushed upon and hunted off the
bridge.
“I am puzzled,” he went on again, with the watchful unsmiling baring of
his big teeth. “I don’t know what to think. I do believe you are trying
to frighten me. You very nearly planted her on the bar for at least
twelve hours, besides getting the engines choked with mud. Ships can’t
afford to lose twelve hours on a trip nowadays--as you ought to know
very well, and do know very well to be sure, only . . .”
His slow volubility, the sideways cranings of his neck, the black
glances out of the very corners of his eyes, left Captain Whalley
unmoved. He looked at the deck with a severe frown. Massy waited for
some little time, then began to threaten plaintively.
“You think you’ve got me bound hand and foot in that agreement. You
think you can torment me in any way you please. Ah! But remember it has
another six weeks to run yet. There’s time for me to dismiss you before
the three years are out. You will do yet something that will give me the
chance to dismiss you, and make you wait a twelvemonth for your money
before you can take yourself off and pull out your five hundred, and
leave me without a penny to get the new boilers for her. You gloat over
that idea--don’t you? I do believe you sit here gloating. It’s as if I
had sold my soul for five hundred pounds to be everlastingly damned in
the end. . . .”