IX

On turning to descend Massy perceived the head of Sterne the mate

loitering, with his sly confident smile, his red mustaches and blinking

eyes, at the foot of the ladder.

Sterne had been a junior in one of the larger shipping concerns before

joining the Sofala. He had thrown up his berth, he said, “on general

principles.” The promotion in the employ was very slow, he complained,

and he thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit in the world.

It seemed as though nobody would ever die or leave the firm; they all

stuck fast in their berths till they got mildewed; he was tired of

waiting; and he feared that when a vacancy did occur the best servants

were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides, the captain he

had to serve under--Captain Provost--was an unaccountable sort of man,

and, he fancied, had taken a dislike to him for some reason or other.

For doing rather more than his bare duty as likely as not. When he

had done anything wrong he could take a talking to, like a man; but

he expected to be treated like a man too, and not to be addressed

invariably as though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost plump

and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and Captain Provost, in a

most scornful way, had told him that he was a perfect officer, and that

if he disliked the way he was being spoken to there was the gangway--he

could take himself off ashore at once. But everybody knew what sort of

man Captain Provost was. It was no use appealing to the office. Captain

Provost had too much influence in the employ. All the same, they had to

give him a good character. He made bold to say there was nothing in the

world against him, and, as he had happened to hear that the mate of the

Sofala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he

thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. . . .

He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-faced, thin-flanked,

throwing out his lean chest; and had recited his little tale with an

open and manly assurance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,

his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming mustache; his eyebrows

were straight, furry, of a chestnut color, and the directness of his

frank gaze seemed to tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley

had engaged him temporarily; then, the other man having been ordered

home by the doctors, he had remained for the next trip, and then the

next. He had now attained permanency, and the performance of his duties

was marked by an air of serious, single-minded application. Directly

he was spoken to, he began to smile attentively, with a great deference

expressed in his whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking

which went on all the time something quizzical, as though he had

possessed the secret of some universal joke cheating all creation and

impenetrable to other mortals.

Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step by step; when the

chief engineer had reached the deck he swung about, and they found

themselves face to face. Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar,

they confronted each other as if there had been something between

them--something else than the bright strip of sunlight that, falling

through the wide lacing of two awnings, cut crosswise the narrow

planking of the deck and separated their feet as it were a stream;

something profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unexpressed

understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort of fear.

At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking forward his

scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the rest of his face, murmured--

“You’ve seen? He grazed! You’ve seen?”

Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow, fleshy countenance,

replied in the same pitch--

“Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been stuck fast in the

mud.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course a shipowner may say

what he jolly well pleases on his own deck. That’s all right; but I beg

to . . .”

“Get out of my way!”

The other had a slight start, the impulse of suppressed indignation

perhaps, but held his ground. Massy’s downward glance wandered right and

left, as though the deck all round Sterne had been bestrewn with eggs

that must not be broken, and he had looked irritably for places where

he could set his feet in flight. In the end he too did not move, though

there was plenty of room to pass on.

“I heard you say up there,” went on the mate--“and a very just remark it

was too--that there’s always something wrong. . . .”

“Eavesdropping is what’s wrong with _you_, Mr. Sterne.”

“Now, if you would only listen to me for a moment, Mr. Massy, sir, I

could . . .”

“You are a sneak,” interrupted Massy in a great hurry, and even managed

to get so far as to repeat, “a common sneak,” before the mate had broken

in argumentatively--

“Now, sir, what is it you want? You want . . .”

“I want--I want,” stammered Massy, infuriated and astonished--“I want.

How do you know that I want anything? How dare you? . . . What do you

mean? . . . What are you after--you . . .”

“Promotion.” Sterne silenced him with a sort of candid bravado. The

engineer’s round soft cheeks quivered still, but he said quietly

enough--

“You are only worrying my head off,” and Sterne met him with a confident

little smile.

“A chap in business I know (well up in the world he is now) used to tell

me that this was the proper way. ‘Always push on to the front,’ he would

say. ‘Keep yourself well before your boss. Interfere whenever you get a

chance. Show him what you know. Worry him into seeing you.’ That was his

advice. Now I know no other boss than you here. You are the owner, and

no one else counts for _that_ much in my eyes. See, Mr. Massy? I want to

get on. I make no secret of it that I am one of the sort that means to

get on. These are the men to make use of, sir. You haven’t arrived at

the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out--I dare say.”

“Worry your boss in order to get on,” mumbled Massy, as if awestruck by

the irreverent originality of the idea. “I shouldn’t wonder if this was

just what the Blue Anchor people kicked you out of the employ for. Is

that what you call getting on? You shall get on in the same way here if

you aren’t careful--I can promise you.”

At this Sterne hung his head, thoughtful, perplexed, winking hard at

the deck. All his attempts to enter into confidential relations with

his owner had led of late to nothing better than these dark threats

of dismissal; and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into a

hesitating silence as though he were not sure that the proper time for

defying it had come. On this occasion he seemed to have lost his tongue

for a moment, and Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with

an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it by stepping

aside. He turned then swiftly, opening his mouth very wide as if to

shout something after the engineer, but seemed to think better of it.

Always--as he was ready to confess--on the lookout for an opening to

get on, it had become an instinct with him to watch the conduct of his

immediate superiors for something “that one could lay hold of.” It was

his belief that no skipper in the world would keep his command for a

day if only the owners could be “made to know.” This romantic and

naive theory had led him into trouble more than once, but he remained

incorrigible; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that

whenever he joined a ship the intention of ousting his commander out

of the berth and taking his place was always present at the back of his

head, as a matter of course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours

with the reveries of careful plans and compromising discoveries--the

dreams of his sleep with images of lucky turns and favorable accidents.

Skippers had been known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing

could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing what he’s made

of. They also would tumble overboard sometimes: he had heard of one or

two such cases. Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally,

he was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single one of them

would stand the test of careful watching by a man who “knew what’s what”

and who kept his eyes “skinned pretty well” all the time.

After he had gained a permanent footing on board the Sofala he allowed

his perennial hope to rise high. To begin with, it was a great advantage

to have an old man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the

nature of things was likely to give up the job before long from one

cause or another. Sterne was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that

he did not seem anyway near being past his work yet. Still, these

old men go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the

owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal and steadiness.

Sterne never for a moment doubted the obvious nature of his own merits

(he was really an excellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit

alone does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must have some push

in him, and must keep his wits at work too to help him forward. He made

up his mind to inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done

at all; not indeed estimating the command of the Sofala as a very great

catch, but for the reason that, out East especially, to make a start is

everything, and one command leads to another.

He began by promising himself to behave with great circumspection;

Massy’s somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside

one’s usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to

realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an

exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagination penetrated it

quickly; the feeling that there was in it an element which eluded his

grasp exasperated his impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an

end, then another, and he had begun his third before he saw an opening

by which he could step in with any sort of effect. It had all been very

queer and very obscure; something had been going on near him, as if

separated by a chasm from the common life and the working routine of

the ship, which was exactly like the life and the routine of any other

coasting steamer of that class.

Then one day he made his discovery.

It came to him after all these weeks of watchful observation and puzzled

surmises, suddenly, like the long-sought solution of a riddle that

suggests itself to the mind in a flash. Not with the same authority,

however. Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remaining

thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake it off with

self-contumely, as though it had been the product of an unhealthy bias

towards the Incredible, the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of--the Mad!

This--the illuminating moment--had occurred the trip before, on the

return passage. They had just left a place of call on the mainland

called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a

massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky

strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny

creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the

coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,

seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering

fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across the wide opening

the nearest of a group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy

yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the hummocky tops

of other islets peeped out motionless above the water of the channels

between, scoured tumultuously by the breeze.

The usual track of the Sofala both going and returning on every trip led

her for a few miles along this reefinfested region. She followed a broad

lane of water, dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the

earth’s crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks run in disorder

upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals. Some of these fragments of land

appeared, indeed, no bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat,

lay awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts of stone;

several, heavily timbered and round at the base, emerged in squat domes

of deep green foliage that shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch

of cloud shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally season. The

thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently over that cluster; it turned

then shadowy in its whole extent; it turned more dark, and as if more

still in the play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals

of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished--dissolving utterly at times

in the thick rain--to reappear clear-cut and black in the stormy light

against the gray sheet of the cloud--scattered on the slaty round table

of the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of years, unfretted

by the strife of the world, there it lay unchanged as on that day, four

hundred years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of a

high-pooped caravel.

It was one of these secluded spots that may be found on the busy sea,

as on land you come sometimes upon the clustered houses of a hamlet

untouched by men’s restlessness, untouched by their need, by their

thought, and as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted

generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of seafowl, urging

their way from all the points of the horizon to sleep on the outer rocks

of the group, unrolled the converging evolutions of their flight in

long somber streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating cloud of

their wings soared and stooped over the pinnacles of the rocks, over

the rocks slender like spires, squat like martello towers; over the

pyramidal heaps like fallen ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders

showing like a wall of stones battered to pieces and scorched by

lightning--with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach. The

noise of their continuous and violent screaming filled the air.

This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from Batu Beru; it

would meet her on quiet evenings, a pitiless and savage clamor enfeebled

by distance, the clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for

a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it especially on board;

it was the voice of their ship’s unerring landfall, ending the steady

stretch of a hundred miles. She had made good her course, she had run

her distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by one, the

points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . . and the cloud of birds

hovered--the restless cloud emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the

sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,

of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a flaw.

But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she

would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night.

All would be still, dumb, almost invisible--but for the blotting out of

the low constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses of the

islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst the dark spaces of the

heaven: and the ship’s three lights, resembling three stars--the red and

the green with the white above--her three lights, like three companion

stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving course for the

passage at the southern end of the group. Sometimes there were human

eyes open to watch them come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber

void; the eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a reef.

He thought drowsily: “Ha! The fire-ship that once in every moon goes in

and comes out of Pangu bay.” More he did not know of her. And just as he

had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating the calm water

a mile and a half away, the time would come for the Sofala to alter her

course, the lights would swing off him their triple beam--and disappear.

A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast tribe of

long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove for their living in this

lonely wilderness of islets, lying like an abandoned outwork of the land

at the gates of the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the

water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky

canoes, scooped out of the trunk of a tree: the forms of the bottom

undulated slightly to the dip of a paddle; and the men seemed to hang

in the air, they seemed to hang inclosed within the fibers of a dark,

sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, unsteady, pellucid, green

air above the shoals.

Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried up in the sunshine;

their lives ran out silently; the homes where they were born, went to

rest, and died--flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with a

few ragged mats--were hidden out of sight from the open sea. No glow

of their household fires ever kindled for a seaman a red spark upon the

blind night of the group: and the calms of the coast, the flaming long

calms of the equator, the unbreathing, concentrated calms like the deep

introspection of a passionate nature, brooded awfully for days and weeks

together over the unchangeable inheritance of their children; till at

last the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole, till

the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thickened, about the legs of

lean men with girded loins, wading thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the

shallows. And it would happen now and then that the Sofala, through some

delay in one of the ports of call, would heave in sight making for Pangu

bay as late as noonday.

Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her smoke would arise

mysteriously from an empty point on the clear line of sea and sky. The

taciturn fishermen within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards

the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny beaches, the

brown figures of men, women, and children grubbing in the sand in search

of turtles’ eggs, would rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over

the eyes, to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve

off--and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes

followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going

at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the

very bosom of the earth.

On such days the luminous sea would give no sign of the dangers lurking

on both sides of her path. Everything remained still, crushed by the

overwhelming power of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the

sunshine,--the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resembling spires,

the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of islets resembling beehives,

resembling mole-hills, the islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the

contours of ivy-clad towers,--would stand reflected together upside

down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony disposed on the

silvered plate-glass of a mirror.

The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the whole at once in

the spume of the windward breakers, as if in a sudden cloudlike burst

of steam; and the clear water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages.

The provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam the wide

base of the group; the submerged level of broken waste and refuse left

over from the building of the coast near by, projecting its dangerous

spurs, all awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked long

spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of froth and stones.

And even nothing more than a brisk breeze--as on that morning, the

voyage before, when the Sofala left Pangu bay early, and Mr. Sterne’s

discovery was to blossom out like a flower of incredible and evil aspect

from the tiny seed of instinctive suspicion,--even such a breeze had

enough strength to tear the placid mask from the face of the sea. To

Sterne, gazing with indifference, it had been like a revelation to

behold for the first time the dangers marked by the hissing livid

patches on the water as distinctly as on the engraved paper of a chart.

It came into his mind that this was the sort of day most favorable for a

stranger attempting the passage: a clear day, just windy enough for the

sea to break on every ledge, buoying, as it were, the channel plainly

to the sight; whereas during a calm you had nothing to depend on but the

compass and the practiced judgment of your eye. And yet the successive

captains of the Sofala had had to take her through at night more than

once. Nowadays you could not afford to throw away six or seven hours

of a steamer’s time. That you couldn’t. But then use is everything, and

with proper care . . . The channel was broad and safe enough; the main

point was to hit upon the entrance correctly in the dark--for if a man

got himself involved in that stretch of broken water over yonder he

would never get out with a whole ship--if he ever got out at all.

This was Sterne’s last train of thought independent of the great

discovery. He had just seen to the securing of the anchor, and had

remained forward idling away a moment or two. The captain was in charge

on the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away from his survey of

the sea and had leaned his shoulders against the fish davit.

These, properly speaking, were the very last moments of ease he was to

know on board the Sofala. All the instants that came after were to be

pregnant with purpose and intolerable with perplexity. No more idle,

random thoughts; the discovery would put them on the rack, till

sometimes he wished to goodness he had been fool enough not to make

it at all. And yet, if his chance to get on rested on the discovery of

“something wrong,” he could not have hoped for a greater stroke of luck.

X

The knowledge was too disturbing, really. There was “something wrong”

with a vengeance, and the moral certitude of it was at first simply

frightful to contemplate. Sterne had been looking aft in a mood so idle,

that for once he was thinking no harm of anyone. His captain on the

bridge presented himself naturally to his sight. How insignificant, how

casual was the thought that had started the train of discovery--like

an accidental spark that suffices to ignite the charge of a tremendous

mine!

Caught under by the breeze, the awnings of the foredeck bellied upwards

and collapsed slowly, and above their heavy flapping the gray stuff of

Captain Whalley’s roomy coat fluttered incessantly around his arms and

trunk. He faced the wind in full light, with his great silvery beard

blown forcibly against his chest; the eyebrows overhung heavily the

shadows whence his glance appeared to be staring ahead piercingly.

Sterne could just detect the twin gleam of the whites shifting under the

shaggy arches of the brow. At short range these eyes, for all the man’s

affable manner, seemed to look you through and through. Sterne never

could defend himself from that feeling when he had occasion to speak

with his captain. He did not like it. What a big heavy man he appeared

up there, with that little shrimp of a Serang in close attendance--as

was usual in this extraordinary steamer! Confounded absurd custom that.

He resented it. Surely the old fellow could have looked after his ship

without that loafing native at his elbow. Sterne wriggled his shoulders

with disgust. What was it? Indolence or what?

That old skipper must have been growing lazy for years. They all grew

lazy out East here (Sterne was very conscious of his own unimpaired

activity); they got slack all over. But he towered very erect on the

bridge; and quite low by his side, as you see a small child looking over

the edge of a table, the battered soft hat and the brown face of the

Serang peeped over the white canvas screen of the rail.

No doubt the Malay was standing back, nearer to the wheel; but the

great disparity of size in close association amused Sterne like the

observation of a bizarre fact in nature. They were as queer fish out of

the sea as any in it.

He saw Captain Whalley turn his head quickly to speak to his Serang;

the wind whipped the whole white mass of the beard sideways. He would

be directing the chap to look at the compass for him, or what not. Of

course. Too much trouble to step over and see for himself. Sterne’s

scorn for that bodily indolence which overtakes white men in the East

increased on reflection. Some of them would be utterly lost if they

hadn’t all these natives at their beck and call; they grew perfectly

shameless about it too. He was not of that sort, thank God! It wasn’t

in him to make himself dependent for his work on any shriveled-up little

Malay like that. As if one could ever trust a silly native for anything

in the world! But that fine old man thought differently, it seems. There

they were together, never far apart; a pair of them, recalling to the

mind an old whale attended by a little pilot-fish.

The fancifulness of the comparison made him smile. A whale with an

inseparable pilot-fish! That’s what the old man looked like; for it

could not be said he looked like a shark, though Mr. Massy had called

him that very name. But Mr. Massy did not mind what he said in his

savage fits. Sterne smiled to himself--and gradually the ideas evoked

by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas

of aid, of guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his mind:

the word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of

welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land

in the dark: groping blindly in fogs: feeling their way in the thick

weather of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown up

from the sea, contract the range of sight on all sides to a shrunken

horizon that seems within reach of the hand.

A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local knowledge, like

a sharper vision, completes the shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed;

penetrates the veils of mist spread over the land by the storms of the

sea; defines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under the pall

of fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a starless night as in a

shallow grave. He recognizes because he already knows. It is not to

his far-reaching eye but to his more extensive knowledge that the pilot

looks for certitude; for this certitude of the ship’s position on

which may depend a man’s good fame and the peace of his conscience, the

justification of the trust deposited in his hands, with his own life

too, which is seldom wholly his to throw away, and the humble lives of

others rooted in distant affections, perhaps, and made as weighty as

the lives of kings by the burden of the awaiting mystery. The pilot’s

knowledge brings relief and certitude to the commander of a ship; the

Serang, however, in his fanciful suggestion of a pilot-fish attending a

whale, could not in any way be credited with a superior knowledge. Why

should he have it? These two men had come on that run together--the

white and the brown--on the same day: and of course a white man would

learn more in a week than the best native would in a month. He was

made to stick to the skipper as though he were of some use--as the

pilot-fish, they say, is to the whale. But how--it was very marked--how?

A pilot-fish--a pilot--a . . . But if not superior knowledge then . . .

Sterne’s discovery was made. It was repugnant to his imagination,

shocking to his ideas of honesty, shocking to his conception of mankind.

This enormity affected one’s outlook on what was possible in this world:

it was as if for instance the sun had turned blue, throwing a new and

sinister light on men and nature. Really in the first moment he had felt

sickish, as though he had got a blow below the belt: for a second the

very color of the sea seemed changed--appeared queer to his wandering

eye; and he had a passing, unsteady sensation in all his limbs as though

the earth had started turning the other way.

A very natural incredulity succeeding this sense of upheaval brought a

measure of relief. He had gasped; it was over. But afterwards during all

that day sudden paroxysms of wonder would come over him in the midst

of his occupations. He would stop and shake his head. The revolt of

his incredulity had passed away almost as quick as the first emotion

of discovery, and for the next twenty-four hours he had no sleep. That

would never do. At meal-times (he took the foot of the table set up

for the white men on the bridge) he could not help losing himself in

a fascinated contemplation of Captain Whalley opposite. He watched the

deliberate upward movements of the arm; the old man put his food to his

lips as though he never expected to find any taste in his daily bread,

as though he did not know anything about it. He fed himself like a

somnambulist. “It’s an awful sight,” thought Sterne; and he watched the

long period of mournful, silent immobility, with a big brown hand

lying loosely closed by the side of the plate, till he noticed the two

engineers to the right and left looking at him in astonishment. He would

close his mouth in a hurry then, and lowering his eyes, wink rapidly at

his plate. It was awful to see the old chap sitting there; it was even

awful to think that with three words he could blow him up sky-high.

All he had to do was to raise his voice and pronounce a single short

sentence, and yet that simple act seemed as impossible to attempt as

moving the sun out of its place in the sky. The old chap could eat in

his terrific mechanical way; but Sterne, from mental excitement, could

not--not that evening, at any rate.

He had had ample time since to get accustomed to the strain of the

meal-hours. He would never have believed it. But then use is everything;

only the very potency of his success prevented anything resembling

elation. He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a loaded

gun to help him on his way through the world, chances to come upon a

torpedo--upon a live torpedo with a shattering charge in its head and

a pressure of many atmospheres in its tail. It is the sort of weapon to

make its possessor careworn and nervous. He had no mind to be blown up

himself; and he could not get rid of the notion that the explosion was

bound to damage him too in some way.

This vague apprehension had restrained him at first. He was able now to

eat and sleep with that fearful weapon by his side, with the conviction

of its power always in mind. It had not been arrived at by any

reflective process; but once the idea had entered his head, the

conviction had followed overwhelmingly in a multitude of observed little

facts to which before he had given only a languid attention. The abrupt

and faltering intonations of the deep voice; the taciturnity put on

like an armor; the deliberate, as if guarded, movements; the long

immobilities, as if the man he watched had been afraid to disturb the

very air: every familiar gesture, every word uttered in his hearing,

every sigh overheard, had acquired a special significance, a

confirmatory import.

Every day that passed over the Sofala appeared to Sterne simply crammed

full with proofs--with incontrovertible proofs. At night, when off duty,

he would steal out of his cabin in pyjamas (for more proofs) and stand

a full hour, perhaps, on his bare feet below the bridge, as absolutely

motionless as the awning stanchion in its deck socket near by. On the

stretches of easy navigation it is not usual for a coasting captain to

remain on deck all the time of his watch. The Serang keeps it for him as

a matter of custom; in open water, on a straight course, he is usually

trusted to look after the ship by himself. But this old man seemed

incapable of remaining quietly down below. No doubt he could not sleep.

And no wonder. This was also a proof. Suddenly in the silence of the

ship panting upon the still, dark sea, Sterne would hear a low voice

above him exclaiming nervously--

“Serang!”

“Tuan!”

“You are watching the compass well?”

“Yes, I am watching, Tuan.”

“The ship is making her course?”

“She is, Tuan. Very straight.”

“It is well; and remember, Serang, that the order is that you are to

mind the helmsmen and keep a lookout with care, the same as if I were

not on deck.”

Then, when the Serang had made his answer, the low tones on the bridge

would cease, and everything round Sterne seemed to become more still

and more profoundly silent. Slightly chilled and with his back aching a

little from long immobility, he would steal away to his room on the

port side of the deck. He had long since parted with the last vestige

of incredulity; of the original emotions, set into a tumult by the

discovery, some trace of the first awe alone remained. Not the awe of

the man himself--he could blow him up sky-high with six words--rather it

was an awestruck indignation at the reckless perversity of avarice (what

else could it be?), at the mad and somber resolution that for the

sake of a few dollars more seemed to set at naught the common rule

of conscience and pretended to struggle against the very decree of

Providence.

You could not find another man like this one in the whole round

world--thank God. There was something devilishly dauntless in the

character of such a deception which made you pause.

Other considerations occurring to his prudence had kept him tongue-tied

from day to day. It seemed to him now that it would yet have been easier

to speak out in the first hour of discovery. He almost regretted

not having made a row at once. But then the very monstrosity of the

disclosure . . . Why! He could hardly face it himself, let alone

pointing it out to somebody else. Moreover, with a desperado of that

sort one never knew. The object was not to get him out (that was as well

as done already), but to step into his place. Bizarre as the thought

seemed he might have shown fight. A fellow up to working such a fraud

would have enough cheek for anything; a fellow that, as it were, stood

up against God Almighty Himself. He was a horrid marvel--that’s what he

was: he was perfectly capable of brazening out the affair scandalously

till he got him (Sterne) kicked out of the ship and everlastingly

damaged his prospects in this part of the East. Yet if you want to get

on something must be risked. At times Sterne thought he had been unduly

timid of taking action in the past; and what was worse, it had come to

this, that in the present he did not seem to know what action to take.

Massy’s savage moroseness was too disconcerting. It was an incalculable

factor of the situation. You could not tell what there was behind that

insulting ferocity. How could one trust such a temper; it did not put

Sterne in bodily fear for himself, but it frightened him exceedingly as

to his prospects.

Though of course inclined to credit himself with exceptional powers of

observation, he had by now lived too long with his discovery. He had

gone on looking at nothing else, till at last one day it occurred to him

that the thing was so obvious that no one could miss seeing it. There

were four white men in all on board the Sofala. Jack, the second

engineer, was too dull to notice anything that took place out of his

engine-room. Remained Massy--the owner--the interested person--nearly

going mad with worry. Sterne had heard and seen more than enough on

board to know what ailed him; but his exasperation seemed to make him

deaf to cautious overtures. If he had only known it, there was the very

thing he wanted. But how could you bargain with a man of that sort? It

was like going into a tiger’s den with a piece of raw meat in your hand.

He was as likely as not to rend you for your pains. In fact, he was

always threatening to do that very thing; and the urgency of the case,

combined with the impossibility of handling it with safety, made Sterne

in his watches below toss and mutter open-eyed in his bunk, for hours,

as though he had been burning with fever.

Occurrences like the crossing of the bar just now were extremely

alarming to his prospects. He did not want to be left behind by some

swift catastrophe. Massy being on the bridge, the old man had to brace

himself up and make a show, he supposed. But it was getting very bad

with him, very bad indeed, now. Even Massy had been emboldened to find

fault this time; Sterne, listening at the foot of the ladder, had heard

the other’s whimpering and artless denunciations. Luckily the beast was

very stupid and could not see the why of all this. However, small blame

to him; it took a clever man to hit upon the cause. Nevertheless, it was

high time to do something. The old man’s game could not be kept up for

many days more.

“I may yet lose my life at this fooling--let alone my chance,” Sterne

mumbled angrily to himself, after the stooping back of the chief

engineer had disappeared round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no

doubt--he thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his

prospects. On the contrary, it would blast them utterly as likely as

not. He dreaded another failure. He had a vague consciousness of not

being much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inexplicably

enough, for he had done nothing to them. Envy, he supposed. People were

always down on a clever chap who made no bones about his determination

to get on. To do your duty and count on the gratitude of that brute

Massy would be sheer folly. He was a bad lot. Unmanly! A vicious man!

Bad! Bad! A brute! A brute without a spark of anything human about him;

without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely he would have

responded in some way to all these hints he had been given. . . . Such

insensibility was almost mysterious. Massy’s state of exasperation

seemed to Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness

of shipowners.

Sterne, meditating on the embarrassments of that stupidity, forgot

himself completely. His stony, unwinking stare was fixed on the planks

of the deck.

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more

perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest

path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the

coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping

banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the

earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut,

denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in

the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried

on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall

of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar

soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball,

disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade

of the virgin forest. The thump of the engines reverberated regularly

like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence,

the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the

smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship,

spread a thin dusky veil over the somber water, which, checked by the

flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the

reaches.

Sterne’s body, as if rooted on the spot, trembled slightly from top to

toe with the internal vibration of the ship; from under his feet came

sometimes a sudden clang of iron, the noisy burst of a shout below; to

the right the leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun,

and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their own shimmering

around the highest boughs which stood out black against a smooth blue

sky that seemed to droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a

tent. The passengers for Batu Beru, kneeling on the planks, were engaged

in rolling their bedding of mats busily; they tied up bundles, they

snapped the locks of wooden chests. A pockmarked peddler of small wares

threw his head back to drain into his throat the last drops out of an

earthenware bottle before putting it away in a roll of blankets. Knots

of traveling traders standing about the deck conversed in low tones;

the followers of a small Rajah from down the coast, broad-faced, simple

young fellows in white drawers and round white cotton caps with their

colored sarongs twisted across their bronze shoulders, squatted on their

hams on the hatch, chewing betel with bright red mouths as if they had

been tasting blood. Their spears, lying piled up together within the

circle of their bare toes, resembled a casual bundle of dry bamboos; a

thin, livid Chinaman, with a bulky package wrapped up in leaves already

thrust under his arm, gazed ahead eagerly; a wandering Kling rubbed his

teeth with a bit of wood, pouring over the side a bright stream of water

out of his lips; the fat Rajah dozed in a shabby deck-chair,--and at the

turn of every bend the two walls of leaves reappeared running parallel

along the banks, with their impenetrable solidity fading at the top to

a vaporous mistiness of countless slender twigs growing free, of young

delicate branches shooting from the topmost limbs of hoary trunks,

of feathery heads of climbers like delicate silver sprays standing up

without a quiver. There was not a sign of a clearing anywhere; not a

trace of human habitation, except when in one place, on the bare end of

a low point under an isolated group of slender tree-ferns, the jagged,

tangled remnants of an old hut on piles appeared with that peculiar

aspect of ruined bamboo walls that look as if smashed with a club.

Farther on, half hidden under the drooping bushes, a canoe containing a

man and a woman, together with a dozen green cocoanuts in a heap, rocked

helplessly after the Sofala had passed, like a navigating contrivance of

venturesome insects, of traveling ants; while two glassy folds of water

streaming away from each bow of the steamer across the whole width of

the river ran with her up stream smoothly, fretting their outer ends

into a brown whispering tumble of froth against the miry foot of each

bank.

“I must,” thought Sterne, “bring that brute Massy to his bearings. It’s

getting too absurd in the end. Here’s the old man up there buried in his

chair--he may just as well be in his grave for all the use he’ll ever be

in the world--and the Serang’s in charge. Because that’s what he is.

In charge. In the place that’s mine by rights. I must bring that savage

brute to his bearings. I’ll do it at once, too . . .”

When the mate made an abrupt start, a little brown half-naked boy, with

large black eyes, and the string of a written charm round his neck,

became panic-struck at once. He dropped the banana he had been munching,

and ran to the knee of a grave dark Arab in flowing robes, sitting like

a Biblical figure, incongruously, on a yellow tin trunk corded with a

rope of twisted rattan. The father, unmoved, put out his hand to pat the

little shaven poll protectingly.