The deep, interminable hoot of the steam-whistle had, in its grave,
vibrating note, something intolerable, which sent a slight shudder down
Mr. Van Wyk’s back. It was the early afternoon; the Sofala was leaving
Batu Beru for Pangu, the next place of call. She swung in the stream,
scantily attended by a few canoes, and, gliding on the broad river,
became lost to view from the Van Wyk bungalow.
Its owner had not gone this time to see her off. Generally he came down
to the wharf, exchanged a few words with the bridge while she cast off,
and waved his hand to Captain Whalley at the last moment. This day he
did not even go as far as the balustrade of the veranda. “He couldn’t
see me if I did,” he said to himself. “I wonder whether he can make out
the house at all.” And this thought somehow made him feel more alone
than he had ever felt for all these years. What was it? six or seven?
Seven. A long time.
He sat on the veranda with a closed book on his knee, and, as it were,
looked out upon his solitude, as if the fact of Captain Whalley’s
blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There were many sorts of
heartaches and troubles, and there was no place where they could not
find a man out. And he felt ashamed, as though he had for six years
behaved like a peevish boy.
His thought followed the Sofala on her way. On the spur of the moment he
had acted impulsively, turning to the thing most pressing. And what else
could he have done? Later on he should see. It seemed necessary that
he should come out into the world, for a time at least. He had
money--something could be arranged; he would grudge no time, no trouble,
no loss of his solitude. It weighed on him now--and Captain Whalley
appeared to him as he had sat shading his eyes, as if, being deceived in
the trust of his faith, he were beyond all the good and evil that can be
wrought by the hands of men.
Mr. Van Wyk’s thoughts followed the Sofala down the river, winding about
through the belt of the coast forest, between the buttressed shafts of
the big trees, through the mangrove strip, and over the bar. The ship
crossed it easily in broad daylight, piloted, as it happened, by Mr.
Sterne, who took the watch from four to six, and then went below to hug
himself with delight at the prospect of being virtually employed by a
rich man--like Mr. Van Wyk. He could not see how any hitch could occur
now. He did not seem able to get over the feeling of being “fixed up at
last.” From six to eight, in the course of duty, the Serang looked alone
after the ship. She had a clear road before her now till about three
in the morning, when she would close with the Pangu group. At eight Mr.
Sterne came out cheerily to take charge again till midnight. At ten he
was still chirruping and humming to himself on the bridge, and about
that time Mr. Van Wyk’s thought abandoned the Sofala. Mr. Van Wyk had
fallen asleep at last.
Massy, blocking the engine-room companion, jerked himself into his tweed
jacket surlily, while the second waited with a scowl.
“Oh. You came out? You sot! Well, what have you got to say for
yourself?”
He had been in charge of the engines till then. A somber fury darkened
his mind: a hot anger against the ship, against the facts of life,
against the men for their cheating, against himself too--because of an
inward tremor of his heart.
An incomprehensible growl answered him.
“What? Can’t you open your mouth now? You yelp out your infernal rot
loud enough when you are drunk. What do you mean by abusing people in
that way?--you old useless boozer, you!”
“Can’t help it. Don’t remember anything about it. You shouldn’t listen.”
“You dare to tell me! What do you mean by going on a drunk like this!”
“Don’t ask me. Sick of the dam’ boilers--you would be. Sick of life.”
“I wish you were dead, then. You’ve made me sick of you. Don’t you
remember the uproar you made last night? You miserable old soaker!”
“No; I don’t. Don’t want to. Drink is drink.”
“I wonder what prevents me from kicking you out. What do you want here?”
“Relieve you. You’ve been long enough down there, George.”
“Don’t you George me--you tippling old rascal, you! If I were to die
to-morrow you would starve. Remember that. Say Mr. Massy.”
“Mr. Massy,” repeated the other stolidly.
Disheveled, with dull blood-shot eyes, a snuffy, grimy shirt, greasy
trowsers, naked feet thrust into ragged slippers, he bolted in head down
directly Massy had made way for him.
The chief engineer looked around. The deck was empty as far as the
taffrail. All the native passengers had left in Batu Beru this time, and
no others had joined. The dial of the patent log tinkled periodically
in the dark at the end of the ship. It was a dead calm, and, under the
clouded sky, through the still air that seemed to cling warm, with a
seaweed smell, to her slim hull, on a sea of somber gray and unwrinkled,
the ship moved on an even keel, as if floating detached in empty space.
But Mr. Massy slapped his forehead, tottered a little, caught hold of a
belaying-pin at the foot of the mast.
“I shall go mad,” he muttered, walking across the deck unsteadily. A
shovel was scraping loose coal down below--a fire-door clanged. Sterne
on the bridge began whistling a new tune.
Captain Whalley, sitting on the couch, awake and fully dressed, heard
the door of his cabin open. He did not move in the least, waiting to
recognize the voice, with an appalling strain of prudence.
A bulkhead lamp blazed on the white paint, the crimson plush, the
brown varnish of mahogany tops. The white wood packing-case under the
bed-place had remained unopened for three years now, as though Captain
Whalley had felt that, after the Fair Maid was gone, there could be
no abiding-place on earth for his affections. His hands rested on his
knees; his handsome head with big eyebrows presented a rigid profile to
the doorway. The expected voice spoke out at last.
“Once more, then. What am I to call you?”
Ha! Massy. Again. The weariness of it crushed his heart--and the pain of
shame was almost more than he could bear without crying out.
“Well. Is it to be ‘partner’ still?”
“You don’t know what you ask.”
“I know what I want . . .”
Massy stepped in and closed the door.
“. . . And I am going to have a try for it with you once more.”
His whine was half persuasive, half menacing.
“For it’s no manner of use to tell me that you are poor. You don’t spend
anything on yourself, that’s true enough; but there’s another name for
that. You think you are going to have what you want out of me for three
years, and then cast me off without hearing what I think of you. You
think I would have submitted to your airs if I had known you had only a
beggarly five hundred pounds in the world. You ought to have told me.”
“Perhaps,” said Captain Whalley, bowing his head. “And yet it has saved
you.” . . . Massy laughed scornfully. . . . “I have told you often
enough since.”
“And I don’t believe you now. When I think how I let you lord it over
my ship! Do you remember how you used to bullyrag me about my coat and
_your_ bridge? It was in his way. _His_ bridge! ‘And I won’t be a party
to this--and I couldn’t think of doing that.’ Honest man! And now it all
comes out. ‘I am poor, and I can’t. I have only this five hundred in the
world.’”
He contemplated the immobility of Captain Whalley, that seemed to
present an inconquerable obstacle in his path. His face took a mournful
cast.
“You are a hard man.”
“Enough,” said Captain Whalley, turning upon him. “You shall get nothing
from me, because I have nothing of mine to give away now.”
“Tell that to the marines!”
Mr. Massy, going out, looked back once; then the door closed, and
Captain Whalley, alone, sat as still as before. He had nothing of his
own--even his past of honor, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his
spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last good-by
to it. But what belonged to _her_, that he meant to save. Only a little
money. He would take it to her in his own hands--this last gift of a man
that had lasted too long. And an immense and fierce impulse, the very
passion of paternity, flamed up with all the unquenched vigor of his
worthless life in a desire to see her face.
Just across the deck Massy had gone straight to his cabin, struck a
light, and hunted up the note of the dreamed number whose figures had
flamed up also with the fierceness of another passion. He must contrive
somehow not to miss a drawing. That number meant something. But what
expedient could he contrive to keep himself going?
“Wretched miser!” he mumbled.
If Mr. Sterne could at no time have told him anything new about his
partner, he could have told Mr. Sterne that another use could be made of
a man’s affliction than just to kick him out, and thus defer the term of
a difficult payment for a year. To keep the secret of the affliction
and induce him to stay was a better move. If without means, he would be
anxious to remain; and that settled the question of refunding him his
share. He did not know exactly how much Captain Whalley was disabled;
but if it so happened that he put the ship ashore somewhere for good and
all, it was not the owner’s fault--was it? He was not obliged to know
that there was anything wrong. But probably nobody would raise such a
point, and the ship was fully insured. He had had enough self-restraint
to pay up the premiums. But this was not all. He could not believe
Captain Whalley to be so confoundedly destitute as not to have some more
money put away somewhere. If he, Massy, could get hold of it, that would
pay for the boilers, and everything went on as before. And if she
got lost in the end, so much the better. He hated her: he loathed the
troubles that took his mind off the chances of fortune. He wished her
at the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money in his pocket. And
as, baffled, he left Captain Whalley’s cabin, he enveloped in the same
hatred the ship with the worn-out boilers and the man with the dimmed
eyes.
And our conduct after all is so much a matter of outside suggestion,
that had it not been for his Jack’s drunken gabble he would have there
and then had it out with this miserable man, who would neither help, nor
stay, nor yet lose the ship. The old fraud! He longed to kick him out.
But he restrained himself. Time enough for that--when he liked. There
was a fearful new thought put into his head. Wasn’t he up to it after
all? How that beast Jack had raved! “Find a safe trick to get rid of
her.” Well, Jack was not so far wrong. A very clever trick had occurred
to him. Aye! But what of the risk?
A feeling of pride--the pride of superiority to common prejudices--crept
into his breast, made his heart beat fast, his mouth turn dry. Not
everybody would dare; but he was Massy, and he was up to it!
Six bells were struck on deck. Eleven! He drank a glass of water, and
sat down for ten minutes or so to calm himself. Then he got out of his
chest a small bull’s-eye lantern of his own and lit it.
Almost opposite his berth, across the narrow passage under the bridge,
there was, in the iron deck-structure covering the stokehold fiddle and
the boiler-space, a storeroom with iron sides, iron roof, iron-plated
floor, too, on account of the heat below. All sorts of rubbish was shot
there: it had a mound of scrap-iron in a corner; rows of empty oil-cans;
sacks of cotton-waste, with a heap of charcoal, a deck-forge, fragments
of an old hencoop, winch-covers all in rags, remnants of lamps, and a
brown felt hat, discarded by a man dead now (of a fever on the Brazil
coast), who had been once mate of the Sofala, had remained for years
jammed forcibly behind a length of burst copper pipe, flung at some
time or other out of the engine-room. A complete and imperious blackness
pervaded that Capharnaum of forgotten things. A small shaft of light
from Mr. Massy’s bull’s-eye fell slanting right through it.
His coat was unbuttoned; he shot the bolt of the door (there was no
other opening), and, squatting before the scrap-heap, began to pack his
pockets with pieces of iron. He packed them carefully, as if the rusty
nuts, the broken bolts, the links of cargo chain, had been so much gold
he had that one chance to carry away. He packed his side-pockets till
they bulged, the breast pocket, the pockets inside. He turned over the
pieces. Some he rejected. A small mist of powdered rust began to rise
about his busy hands. Mr. Massy knew something of the scientific basis
of his clever trick. If you want to deflect the magnetic needle of a
ship’s compass, soft iron is the best; likewise many small pieces in
the pockets of a jacket would have more effect than a few large ones,
because in that way you obtain a greater amount of surface for weight in
your iron, and it’s surface that tells.
He slipped out swiftly--two strides sufficed--and in his cabin he
perceived that his hands were all red--red with rust. It disconcerted
him, as though he had found them covered with blood: he looked himself
over hastily. Why, his trowsers too! He had been rubbing his rusty palms
on his legs.
He tore off the waistband button in his haste, brushed his coat, washed
his hands. Then the air of guilt left him, and he sat down to wait.
He sat bolt upright and weighted with iron in his chair. He had a hard,
lumpy bulk against each hip, felt the scrappy iron in his pockets touch
his ribs at every breath, the downward drag of all these pounds hanging
upon his shoulders. He looked very dull too, sitting idle there, and his
yellow face, with motionless black eyes, had something passive and sad
in its quietness.
When he heard eight bells struck above his head, he rose and made ready
to go out. His movements seemed aimless, his lower lip had dropped a
little, his eyes roamed about the cabin, and the tremendous tension of
his will had robbed them of every vestige of intelligence.
With the last stroke of the bell the Serang appeared noiselessly on the
bridge to relieve the mate. Sterne overflowed with good nature, since he
had nothing more to desire.
“Got your eyes well open yet, Serang? It’s middling dark; I’ll wait till
you get your sight properly.”
The old Malay murmured, looked up with his worn eyes, sidled away into
the light of the binnacle, and, crossing his hands behind his back,
fixed his eyes on the compass-card.
“You’ll have to keep a good look-out ahead for land, about half-past
three. It’s fairly clear, though. You have looked in on the captain as
you came along--eh? He knows the time? Well, then, I am off.”
At the foot of the ladder he stood aside for the captain. He watched him
go up with an even, certain tread, and remained thoughtful for a moment.
“It’s funny,” he said to himself, “but you can never tell whether that
man has seen you or not. He might have heard me breathe this time.”
He was a wonderful man when all was said and done. They said he had had
a name in his day. Mr. Sterne could well believe it; and he concluded
serenely that Captain Whalley must be able to see people more or less
--as himself just now, for instance--but not being certain of anybody,
had to keep up that unnoticing silence of manner for fear of giving
himself away. Mr. Sterne was a shrewd guesser.
This necessity of every moment brought home to Captain Whalley’s heart
the humiliation of his falsehood. He had drifted into it from paternal
love, from incredulity, from boundless trust in divine justice meted out
to men’s feelings on this earth. He would give his poor Ivy the benefit
of another month’s work; perhaps the affliction was only temporary.
Surely God would not rob his child of his power to help, and cast him
naked into a night without end. He had caught at every hope; and when
the evidence of his misfortune was stronger than hope, he tried not to
believe the manifest thing.
In vain. In the steadily darkening universe a sinister clearness fell
upon his ideas. In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life,
men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden of created nature,
as he had never seen them before.
Sometimes he was seized with a sudden vertigo and an overwhelming
terror; and then the image of his daughter appeared. Her, too, he had
never seen so clearly before. Was it possible that he should ever be
unable to do anything whatever for her? Nothing. And not see her any
more? Never.
Why? The punishment was too great for a little presumption, for a little
pride. And at last he came to cling to his deception with a fierce
determination to carry it out to the end, to save her money intact, and
behold her once more with his own eyes. Afterwards--what? The idea of
suicide was revolting to the vigor of his manhood. He had prayed for
death till the prayers had stuck in his throat. All the days of his life
he had prayed for daily bread, and not to be led into temptation, in a
childlike humility of spirit. Did words mean anything? Whence did the
gift of speech come? The violent beating of his heart reverberated in
his head--seemed to shake his brain to pieces.
He sat down heavily in the deck-chair to keep the pretense of his watch.
The night was dark. All the nights were dark now.
“Serang,” he said, half aloud.
“Ada, Tuan. I am here.”
“There are clouds on the sky?”
“There are, Tuan.”
“Let her be steered straight. North.”
“She is going north, Tuan.”
The Serang stepped back. Captain Whalley recognized Massy’s footfalls on
the bridge.
The engineer walked over to port and returned, passing behind the chair
several times. Captain Whalley detected an unusual character as of
prudent care in this prowling. The near presence of that man brought
with it always a recrudescence of moral suffering for Captain Whalley.
It was not remorse. After all, he had done nothing but good to the poor
devil. There was also a sense of danger--the necessity of a greater
care.