--_D’autre fois, calme plat, grand miroir De mon desespoir_.
--BAUDELAIRE
I
Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The
very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege
of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful
continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness--and enters an
enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of
the path has its seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered
country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that
way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an
uncommon or personal sensation--a bit of one’s own.
One goes on recognizing the landmarks of the predecessors, excited,
amused, taking the hard luck and the good luck together--the kicks and
the half-pence, as the saying is--the picturesque common lot that holds
so many possibilities for the deserving or perhaps for the lucky. Yes.
One goes on. And the time, too, goes on--till one perceives ahead a
shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be
left behind.
This is the period of life in which such moments of which I have spoken
are likely to come. What moments? Why, the moments of boredom, of
weariness, of dissatisfaction. Rash moments. I mean moments when the
still young are inclined to commit rash actions, such as getting married
suddenly or else throwing up a job for no reason.
This is not a marriage story. It wasn’t so bad as that with me. My
action, rash as it was, had more the character of divorce--almost of
desertion. For no reason on which a sensible person could put a finger I
threw up my job--chucked my berth--left the ship of which the worst that
could be said was that she was a steamship and therefore, perhaps, not
entitled to that blind loyalty which. . . . However, it’s no use trying
to put a gloss on what even at the time I myself half suspected to be a
caprice.
It was in an Eastern port. She was an Eastern ship, inasmuch as then
she belonged to that port. She traded among dark islands on a blue
reef-scarred sea, with the Red Ensign over the taffrail and at her
masthead a house-flag, also red, but with a green border and with a
white crescent in it. For an Arab owned her, and a Syed at that. Hence
the green border on the flag. He was the head of a great House of
Straits Arabs, but as loyal a subject of the complex British Empire as
you could find east of the Suez Canal. World politics did not trouble
him at all, but he had a great occult power amongst his own people.
It was all one to us who owned the ship. He had to employ white men in
the shipping part of his business, and many of those he so employed had
never set eyes on him from the first to the last day. I myself saw him
but once, quite accidentally on a wharf--an old, dark little man blind
in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers. He was having his hand
severely kissed by a crowd of Malay pilgrims to whom he had done some
favour, in the way of food and money. His alms-giving, I have heard, was
most extensive, covering almost the whole Archipelago. For isn’t it said
that “The charitable man is the friend of Allah”?
Excellent (and picturesque) Arab owner, about whom one needed not to
trouble one’s head, a most excellent Scottish ship--for she was that
from the keep up--excellent sea-boat, easy to keep clean, most handy in
every way, and if it had not been for her internal propulsion, worthy of
any man’s love, I cherish to this day a profound respect for her memory.
As to the kind of trade she was engaged in and the character of my
shipmates, I could not have been happier if I had had the life and the
men made to my order by a benevolent Enchanter.
And suddenly I left all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential
manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was
as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something.
Well--perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was
gone--glamour, flavour, interest, contentment--everything. It was one
of these moments, you know. The green sickness of late youth descended
on me and carried me off. Carried me off that ship, I mean.
We were only four white men on board, with a large crew of Kalashes and
two Malay petty officers. The Captain stared hard as if wondering what
ailed me. But he was a sailor, and he, too, had been young at one time.
Presently a smile came to lurk under his thick iron-gray moustache, and
he observed that, of course, if I felt I must go he couldn’t keep me
by main force. And it was arranged that I should be paid off the
next morning. As I was going out of his cabin he added suddenly, in a
peculiar wistful tone, that he hoped I would find what I was so anxious
to go and look for. A soft, cryptic utterance which seemed to reach
deeper than any diamond-hard tool could have done. I do believe he
understood my case.
But the second engineer attacked me differently. He was a sturdy young
Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes. His honest red countenance
emerged out of the engine-room companion and then the whole robust man,
with shirt sleeves turned up, wiping slowly the massive fore-arms with
a lump of cotton-waste. And his light eyes expressed bitter distaste, as
though our friendship had turned to ashes. He said weightily: “Oh! Aye!
I’ve been thinking it was about time for you to run away home and get
married to some silly girl.”
It was tacitly understood in the port that John Nieven was a fierce
misogynist; and the absurd character of the sally convinced me that he
meant to be nasty--very nasty--had meant to say the most crushing thing
he could think of. My laugh sounded deprecatory. Nobody but a friend
could be so angry as that. I became a little crestfallen. Our chief
engineer also took a characteristic view of my action, but in a kindlier
spirit.
He was young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard
all round his haggard face. All day long, at sea or in harbour, he could
be seen walking hastily up and down the after-deck, wearing an
intense, spiritually rapt expression, which was caused by a perpetual
consciousness of unpleasant physical sensations in his internal economy.
For he was a confirmed dyspeptic. His view of my case was very simple.
He said it was nothing but deranged liver. Of course! He suggested I
should stay for another trip and meantime dose myself with a certain
patent medicine in which his own belief was absolute. “I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. I’ll buy you two bottles, out of my own pocket. There. I
can’t say fairer than that, can I?”
I believe he would have perpetrated the atrocity (or generosity) at the
merest sign of weakening on my part. By that time, however, I was more
discontented, disgusted, and dogged than ever. The past eighteen months,
so full of new and varied experience, appeared a dreary, prosaic waste
of days. I felt--how shall I express it?--that there was no truth to be
got out of them.
What truth? I should have been hard put to it to explain. Probably, if
pressed, I would have burst into tears simply. I was young enough for
that.
Next day the Captain and I transacted our business in the Harbour
Office. It was a lofty, big, cool, white room, where the screened light
of day glowed serenely. Everybody in it--the officials, the public--were
in white. Only the heavy polished desks gleamed darkly in a central
avenue, and some papers lying on them were blue. Enormous punkahs sent
from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and upon
our perspiring heads.
The official behind the desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it
up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, “Sign off and on again?”
my Captain answered, “No! Signing off for good.” And then his grin
vanished in sudden solemnity. He did not look at me again till he
handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been my
passports for Hades.
While I was putting them away he murmured some question to the Captain,
and I heard the latter answer good-humouredly:
“No. He leaves us to go home.”
“Oh!” the other exclaimed, nodding mournfully over my sad condition.
I didn’t know him outside the official building, but he leaned forward
the desk to shake hands with me, compassionately, as one would with some
poor devil going out to be hanged; and I am afraid I performed my part
ungraciously, in the hardened manner of an impenitent criminal.
No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days. Being now a
man without a ship, and having for a time broken my connection with the
sea--become, in fact, a mere potential passenger--it would have been
more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to stay at an hotel. There it
was, too, within a stone’s throw of the Harbour Office, low, but somehow
palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim
grass plots. I would have felt a passenger indeed in there! I gave it a
hostile glance and directed my steps toward the Officers’ Sailors’ Home.
I walked in the sunshine, disregarding it, and in the shade of the big
trees on the esplanade without enjoying it. The heat of the tropical
East descended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly-clad body,
clinging to my rebellious discontent, as if to rob it of its freedom.
The Officers’ Home was a large bungalow with a wide verandah and a
curiously suburban-looking little garden of bushes and a few trees
between it and the street. That institution partook somewhat of the
character of a residential club, but with a slightly Governmental
flavour about it, because it was administered by the Harbour Office. Its
manager was officially styled Chief Steward. He was an unhappy, wizened
little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to
perfection. But it was obvious that at some time or other in his life,
in some capacity or other, he had been connected with the sea. Possibly
in the comprehensive capacity of a failure.
I should have thought his employment a very easy one, but he used to
affirm for some reason or other that his job would be the death of him
some day. It was rather mysterious. Perhaps everything naturally was too
much trouble for him. He certainly seemed to hate having people in the
house.
On entering it I thought he must be feeling pleased. It was as still as
a tomb. I could see no one in the living rooms; and the verandah, too,
was empty, except for a man at the far end dozing prone in a long chair.
At the noise of my footsteps he opened one horribly fish-like eye. He
was a stranger to me. I retreated from there, and crossing the dining
room--a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over the
centre table--I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: “Chief
Steward.”
The answer to my knock being a vexed and doleful plaint: “Oh, dear! Oh,
dear! What is it now?” I went in at once.
It was a strange room to find in the tropics. Twilight and stuffiness
reigned in there. The fellow had hung enormously ample, dusty, cheap
lace curtains over his windows, which were shut. Piles of cardboard
boxes, such as milliners and dressmakers use in Europe, cumbered the
corners; and by some means he had procured for himself the sort of
furniture that might have come out of a respectable parlour in the East
End of London--a horsehair sofa, arm-chairs of the same. I glimpsed
grimy antimacassars scattered over that horrid upholstery, which
was awe-inspiring, insomuch that one could not guess what mysterious
accident, need, or fancy had collected it there. Its owner had taken
off his tunic, and in white trousers and a thin, short-sleeved singlet
prowled behind the chair-backs nursing his meagre elbows.
An exclamation of dismay escaped him when he heard that I had come for a
stay; but he could not deny that there were plenty of vacant rooms.
“Very well. Can you give me the one I had before?”
He emitted a faint moan from behind a pile of cardboard boxes on the
table, which might have contained gloves or handkerchiefs or neckties. I
wonder what the fellow did keep in them? There was a smell of decaying
coral, or Oriental dust of zoological speciments in that den of his. I
could only see the top of his head and his unhappy eyes levelled at me
over the barrier.
“It’s only for a couple of days,” I said, intending to cheer him up.
“Perhaps you would like to pay in advance?” he suggested eagerly.
“Certainly not!” I burst out directly I could speak. “Never heard of
such a thing! This is the most infernal cheek. . . .”
He had seized his head in both hands--a gesture of despair which checked
my indignation.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Don’t fly out like this. I am asking everybody.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said bluntly.
“Well, I am going to. And if you gentlemen all agreed to pay in advance
I could make Hamilton pay up, too. He’s always turning up ashore dead
broke, and even when he has some money he won’t settle his bills. I
don’t know what to do with him. He swears at me and tells me I can’t
chuck a white man out into the street here. So if you only would. . . .”
I was amazed. Incredulous, too. I suspected the fellow of gratuitous
impertinence. I told him with marked emphasis that I would see him and
Hamilton hanged first, and requested him to conduct me to my room with
no more of his nonsense. He produced then a key from somewhere and led
the way out of his lair, giving me a vicious sidelong look in passing.
“Any one I know staying here?” I asked him before he left my room.
He had recovered his usual pained impatient tone, and said that Captain
Giles was there, back from a Solo Sea trip. Two other guests were
staying also. He paused. And, of course, Hamilton, he added.
“Oh, yes! Hamilton,” I said, and the miserable creature took himself off
with a final groan.
His impudence still rankled when I came into the dining room at tiffin
time. He was there on duty overlooking the Chinamen servants. The tiffin
was laid on one end only of the long table, and the punkah was stirring
the hot air lazily--mostly above a barren waste of polished wood.
We were four around the cloth. The dozing stranger from the chair was
one. Both his eyes were partly opened now, but they did not seem to see
anything. He was supine. The dignified person next him, with short side
whiskers and a carefully scraped chin, was, of course, Hamilton. I have
never seen any one so full of dignity for the station in life Providence
had been pleased to place him in. I had been told that he regarded me as
a rank outsider. He raised not only his eyes, but his eyebrows as well,
at the sound I made pulling back my chair.
Captain Giles was at the head of the table. I exchanged a few words of
greeting with him and sat down on his left. Stout and pale, with a great
shiny dome of a bald forehead and prominent brown eyes, he might have
been anything but a seaman. You would not have been surprised to learn
that he was an architect. To me (I know how absurd it is) to me he
looked like a churchwarden. He had the appearance of a man from whom you
would expect sound advice, moral sentiments, with perhaps a platitude or
two thrown in on occasion, not from a desire to dazzle, but from honest
conviction.
Though very well known and appreciated in the shipping world, he had
no regular employment. He did not want it. He had his own peculiar
position. He was an expert. An expert in--how shall I say it?--in
intricate navigation. He was supposed to know more about remote and
imperfectly charted parts of the Archipelago than any man living. His
brain must have been a perfect warehouse of reefs, positions, bearings,
images of headlands, shapes of obscure coasts, aspects of innumerable
islands, desert and otherwise. Any ship, for instance, bound on a trip
to Palawan or somewhere that way would have Captain Giles on board,
either in temporary command or “to assist the master.” It was said that
he had a retaining fee from a wealthy firm of Chinese steamship owners,
in view of such services. Besides, he was always ready to relieve any
man who wished to take a spell ashore for a time. No owner was ever
known to object to an arrangement of that sort. For it seemed to be the
established opinion at the port that Captain Giles was as good as
the best, if not a little better. But in Hamilton’s view he was an
“outsider.” I believe that for Hamilton the generalisation “outsider”
covered the whole lot of us; though I suppose that he made some
distinctions in his mind.
I didn’t try to make conversation with Captain Giles, whom I had not
seen more than twice in my life. But, of course, he knew who I was.
After a while, inclining his big shiny head my way, he addressed me
first in his friendly fashion. He presumed from seeing me there, he
said, that I had come ashore for a couple of days’ leave.
He was a low-voiced man. I spoke a little louder, saying that: No--I had
left the ship for good.
“A free man for a bit,” was his comment.
“I suppose I may call myself that--since eleven o’clock,” I said.
Hamilton had stopped eating at the sound of our voices. He laid down
his knife and fork gently, got up, and muttering something about “this
infernal heat cutting one’s appetite,” went out of the room. Almost
immediately we heard him leave the house down the verandah steps.
On this Captain Giles remarked easily that the fellow had no doubt gone
off to look after my old job. The Chief Steward, who had been leaning
against the wall, brought his face of an unhappy goat nearer to the
table and addressed us dolefully. His object was to unburden himself of
his eternal grievance against Hamilton. The man kept him in hot water
with the Harbour Office as to the state of his accounts. He wished
to goodness he would get my job, though in truth what would it be?
Temporary relief at best.
I said: “You needn’t worry. He won’t get my job. My successor is on
board already.”
He was surprised, and I believe his face fell a little at the news.
Captain Giles gave a soft laugh. We got up and went out on the verandah,
leaving the supine stranger to be dealt with by the Chinamen. The last
thing I saw they had put a plate with a slice of pine-apple on it before
him and stood back to watch what would happen. But the experiment seemed
a failure. He sat insensible.
It was imparted to me in a low voice by Captain Giles that this was
an officer of some Rajah’s yacht which had come into our port to be
dry-docked. Must have been “seeing life” last night, he added, wrinkling
his nose in an intimate, confidential way which pleased me vastly. For
Captain Giles had prestige. He was credited with wonderful adventures
and with some mysterious tragedy in his life. And no man had a word to
say against him. He continued:
“I remember him first coming ashore here some years ago. Seems only the
other day. He was a nice boy. Oh! these nice boys!”
I could not help laughing aloud. He looked startled, then joined in the
laugh. “No! No! I didn’t mean that,” he cried. “What I meant is that
some of them do go soft mighty quick out here.”
Jocularly I suggested the beastly heat as the first cause. But Captain
Giles disclosed himself possessed of a deeper philosophy. Things out
East were made easy for white men. That was all right. The difficulty
was to go on keeping white, and some of these nice boys did not know
how. He gave me a searching look, and in a benevolent, heavy-uncle
manner asked point blank:
“Why did you throw up your berth?”
I became angry all of a sudden; for you can understand how exasperating
such a question was to a man who didn’t know. I said to myself that I
ought to shut up that moralist; and to him aloud I said with challenging
politeness:
“Why . . . ? Do you disapprove?”
He was too disconcerted to do more than mutter confusedly: “I! . . . In
a general way. . .” and then gave me up. But he retired in good order,
under the cover of a heavily humorous remark that he, too, was getting
soft, and that this was his time for taking his little siesta--when he
was on shore. “Very bad habit. Very bad habit.”
There was a simplicity in the man which would have disarmed a touchiness
even more youthful than mine. So when next day at tiffin he bent his
head toward me and said that he had met my late Captain last evening,
adding in an undertone: “He’s very sorry you left. He had never had a
mate that suited him so well,” I answered him earnestly, without any
affectation, that I certainly hadn’t been so comfortable in any ship or
with any commander in all my sea-going days.
“Well--then,” he murmured.
“Haven’t you heard, Captain Giles, that I intend to go home?”
“Yes,” he said benevolently. “I have heard that sort of thing so often
before.”
“What of that?” I cried. I thought he was the most dull, unimaginative
man I had ever met. I don’t know what more I would have said, but the
much-belated Hamilton came in just then and took his usual seat. So I
dropped into a mumble.
“Anyhow, you shall see it done this time.”
Hamilton, beautifully shaved, gave Captain Giles a curt nod, but didn’t
even condescend to raise his eyebrows at me; and when he spoke it was
only to tell the Chief Steward that the food on his plate wasn’t fit
to be set before a gentleman. The individual addressed seemed much too
unhappy to groan. He cast his eyes up to the punkah and that was all.
Captain Giles and I got up from the table, and the stranger next to
Hamilton followed our example, manoeuvring himself to his feet with
difficulty. He, poor fellow, not because he was hungry but I verily
believe only to recover his self-respect, had tried to put some of that
unworthy food into his mouth. But after dropping his fork twice and
generally making a failure of it, he had sat still with an air of
intense mortification combined with a ghastly glazed stare. Both Giles
and I had avoided looking his way at table.
On the verandah he stopped short on purpose to address to us anxiously
a long remark which I failed to understand completely. It sounded like
some horrible unknown language. But when Captain Giles, after only an
instant for reflection, assured him with homely friendliness, “Aye, to
be sure. You are right there,” he appeared very much gratified indeed,
and went away (pretty straight, too) to seek a distant long chair.
“What was he trying to say?” I asked with disgust.
“I don’t know. Mustn’t be down too much on a fellow. He’s feeling pretty
wretched, you may be sure; and to-morrow he’ll feel worse yet.”
Judging by the man’s appearance it seemed impossible. I wondered
what sort of complicated debauch had reduced him to that unspeakable
condition. Captain Giles’ benevolence was spoiled by a curious air of
complacency which I disliked. I said with a little laugh:
“Well, he will have you to look after him.” He made a deprecatory
gesture, sat down, and took up a paper. I did the same. The papers
were old and uninteresting, filled up mostly with dreary stereotyped
descriptions of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee celebrations. Probably we
should have quickly fallen into a tropical afternoon doze if it had not
been for Hamilton’s voice raised in the dining room. He was finishing
his tiffin there. The big double doors stood wide open permanently, and
he could not have had any idea how near to the doorway our chairs
were placed. He was heard in a loud, supercilious tone answering some
statement ventured by the Chief Steward.
“I am not going to be rushed into anything. They will be glad enough to
get a gentleman I imagine. There is no hurry.”
A loud whispering from the Steward succeeded and then again Hamilton was
heard with even intenser scorn.
“What? That young ass who fancies himself for having been chief mate
with Kent so long? . . . Preposterous.”
Giles and I looked at each other. Kent being the name of my late
commander, Captain Giles’ whisper, “He’s talking of you,” seemed to me
sheer waste of breath. The Chief Steward must have stuck to his point,
whatever it was, because Hamilton was heard again more supercilious if
possible, and also very emphatic:
“Rubbish, my good man! One doesn’t _compete_ with a rank outsider like
that. There’s plenty of time.”
Then there were pushing of chairs, footsteps in the next room, and
plaintive expostulations from the Steward, who was pursuing Hamilton,
even out of doors through the main entrance.
“That’s a very insulting sort of man,” remarked Captain
Giles--superfluously, I thought. “Very insulting. You haven’t offended
him in some way, have you?”
“Never spoke to him in my life,” I said grumpily. “Can’t imagine what
he means by competing. He has been trying for my job after I left--and
didn’t get it. But that isn’t exactly competition.”
Captain Giles balanced his big benevolent head thoughtfully. “He didn’t
get it,” he repeated very slowly. “No, not likely either, with Kent.
Kent is no end sorry you left him. He gives you the name of a good
seaman, too.”
I flung away the paper I was still holding. I sat up, I slapped the
table with my open palm. I wanted to know why he would keep harping on
that, my absolutely private affair. It was exasperating, really.
Captain Giles silenced me by the perfect equanimity of his gaze.
“Nothing to be annoyed about,” he murmured reasonably, with an evident
desire to soothe the childish irritation he had aroused. And he was
really a man of an appearance so inoffensive that I tried to explain
myself as much as I could. I told him that I did not want to hear
any more about what was past and gone. It had been very nice while it
lasted, but now it was done with I preferred not to talk about it or
even think about it. I had made up my mind to go home.
He listened to the whole tirade in a particular lending-the-ear
attitude, as if trying to detect a false note in it somewhere; then
straightened himself up and appeared to ponder sagaciously over the
matter.
“Yes. You told me you meant to go home. Anything in view there?”
Instead of telling him that it was none of his business I said sullenly:
“Nothing that I know of.”
I had indeed considered that rather blank side of the situation I had
created for myself by leaving suddenly my very satisfactory employment.
And I was not very pleased with it. I had it on the tip of my tongue
to say that common sense had nothing to do with my action, and that
therefore it didn’t deserve the interest Captain Giles seemed to be
taking in it. But he was puffing at a short wooden pipe now, and looked
so guileless, dense, and commonplace, that it seemed hardly worth while
to puzzle him either with truth or sarcasm.
He blew a cloud of smoke, then surprised me by a very abrupt: “Paid your
passage money yet?”
Overcome by the shameless pertinacity of a man to whom it was rather
difficult to be rude, I replied with exaggerated meekness that I had
not done so yet. I thought there would be plenty of time to do that
to-morrow.
And I was about to turn away, withdrawing my privacy from his fatuous,
objectless attempts to test what sort of stuff it was made of, when he
laid down his pipe in an extremely significant manner, you know, as if a
critical moment had come, and leaned sideways over the table between us.
“Oh! You haven’t yet!” He dropped his voice mysteriously. “Well, then I
think you ought to know that there’s something going on here.”
I had never in my life felt more detached from all earthly goings on.
Freed from the sea for a time, I preserved the sailor’s consciousness of
complete independence from all land affairs. How could they concern
me? I gazed at Captain Giles’ animation with scorn rather than with
curiosity.
To his obviously preparatory question whether our Steward had spoken to
me that day I said he hadn’t. And what’s more he would have had precious
little encouragement if he had tried to. I didn’t want the fellow to
speak to me at all.
Unrebuked by my petulance, Captain Giles, with an air of immense
sagacity, began to tell me a minute tale about a Harbour Office peon.
It was absolutely pointless. A peon was seen walking that morning on the
verandah with a letter in his hand. It was in an official envelope. As
the habit of these fellows is, he had shown it to the first white man
he came across. That man was our friend in the arm-chair. He, as I knew,
was not in a state to interest himself in any sublunary matters. He
could only wave the peon away. The peon then wandered on along the
verandah and came upon Captain Giles, who was there by an extraordinary
chance. . . .
At this point he stopped with a profound look. The letter, he continued,
was addressed to the Chief Steward. Now what could Captain Ellis, the
Master Attendant, want to write to the Steward for? The fellow went
every morning, anyhow, to the Harbour Office with his report, for orders
or what not. He hadn’t been back more than an hour before there was an
office peon chasing him with a note. Now what was that for?
And he began to speculate. It was not for this--and it could not be for
that. As to that other thing it was unthinkable.
The fatuousness of all this made me stare. If the man had not been
somehow a sympathetic personality I would have resented it like an
insult. As it was, I felt only sorry for him. Something remarkably
earnest in his gaze prevented me from laughing in his face. Neither did
I yawn at him. I just stared.
His tone became a shade more mysterious. Directly the fellow (meaning
the Steward) got that note he rushed for his hat and bolted out of the
house. But it wasn’t because the note called him to the Harbour Office.
He didn’t go there. He was not absent long enough for that. He came
darting back in no time, flung his hat away, and raced about the dining
room moaning and slapping his forehead. All these exciting facts and
manifestations had been observed by Captain Giles. He had, it seems,
been meditating upon them ever since.
I began to pity him profoundly. And in a tone which I tried to make
as little sarcastic as possible I said that I was glad he had found
something to occupy his morning hours.
With his disarming simplicity he made me observe, as if it were a matter
of some consequence, how strange it was that he should have spent the
morning indoors at all. He generally was out before tiffin, visiting
various offices, seeing his friends in the harbour, and so on. He had
felt out of sorts somewhat on rising. Nothing much. Just enough to make
him feel lazy.
All this with a sustained, holding stare which, in conjunction with
the general inanity of the discourse, conveyed the impression of mild,
dreary lunacy. And when he hitched his chair a little and dropped
his voice to the low note of mystery, it flashed upon me that high
professional reputation was not necessarily a guarantee of sound mind.
It never occurred to me then that I didn’t know in what soundness
of mind exactly consisted and what a delicate and, upon the whole,
unimportant matter it was. With some idea of not hurting his feelings I
blinked at him in an interested manner. But when he proceeded to ask me
mysteriously whether I remembered what had passed just now between that
Steward of ours and “that man Hamilton,” I only grunted sourly assent
and turned away my head.
“Aye. But do you remember every word?” he insisted tactfully.
“I don’t know. It’s none of my business,” I snapped out, consigning,
moreover, the Steward and Hamilton aloud to eternal perdition.
I meant to be very energetic and final, but Captain Giles continued to
gaze at me thoughtfully. Nothing could stop him. He went on to point out
that my personality was involved in that conversation. When I tried to
preserve the semblance of unconcern he became positively cruel. I heard
what the man had said? Yes? What did I think of it then?--he wanted to
know.
Captain Giles’ appearance excluding the suspicion of mere sly malice,
I came to the conclusion that he was simply the most tactless idiot
on earth. I almost despised myself for the weakness of attempting to
enlighten his common understanding. I started to explain that I did not
think anything whatever. Hamilton was not worth a thought. What such an
offensive loafer . . . “Aye! that he is,” interjected Captain Giles
. . . thought or said was below any decent man’s contempt, and I did not
propose to take the slightest notice of it.
This attitude seemed to me so simple and obvious that I was really
astonished at Giles giving no sign of assent. Such perfect stupidity was
almost interesting.
“What would you like me to do?” I asked, laughing. “I can’t start a row
with him because of the opinion he has formed of me. Of course, I’ve
heard of the contemptuous way he alludes to me. But he doesn’t intrude
his contempt on my notice. He has never expressed it in my hearing.
For even just now he didn’t know we could hear him. I should only make
myself ridiculous.”
That hopeless Giles went on puffing at his pipe moodily. All at once his
face cleared, and he spoke.
“You missed my point.”
“Have I? I am very glad to hear it,” I said.
With increasing animation he stated again that I had missed his point.
Entirely. And in a tone of growing self-conscious complacency he told me
that few things escaped his attention, and he was rather used to think
them out, and generally from his experience of life and men arrived at
the right conclusion.
This bit of self-praise, of course, fitted excellently the laborious
inanity of the whole conversation. The whole thing strengthened in
me that obscure feeling of life being but a waste of days, which,
half-unconsciously, had driven me out of a comfortable berth, away from
men I liked, to flee from the menace of emptiness . . . and to find
inanity at the first turn. Here was a man of recognized character and
achievement disclosed as an absurd and dreary chatterer. And it was
probably like this everywhere--from east to west, from the bottom to the
top of the social scale.
A great discouragement fell on me. A spiritual drowsiness. Giles’
voice was going on complacently; the very voice of the universal hollow
conceit. And I was no longer angry with it. There was nothing original,
nothing new, startling, informing, to expect from the world; no
opportunities to find out something about oneself, no wisdom to acquire,
no fun to enjoy. Everything was stupid and overrated, even as Captain
Giles was. So be it.
The name of Hamilton suddenly caught my ear and roused me up.
“I thought we had done with him,” I said, with the greatest possible
distaste.
“Yes. But considering what we happened to hear just now I think you
ought to do it.”
“Ought to do it?” I sat up bewildered. “Do what?”
Captain Giles confronted me very much surprised.
“Why! Do what I have been advising you to try. You go and ask the
Steward what was there in that letter from the Harbour Office. Ask him
straight out.”
I remained speechless for a time. Here was something unexpected
and original enough to be altogether incomprehensible. I murmured,
astounded:
“But I thought it was Hamilton that you . . .”
“Exactly. Don’t you let him. You do what I tell you. You tackle that
Steward. You’ll make him jump, I bet,” insisted Captain Giles, waving
his smouldering pipe impressively at me. Then he took three rapid puffs
at it.
His aspect of triumphant acuteness was indescribable. Yet the man
remained a strangely sympathetic creature. Benevolence radiated from
him ridiculously, mildly, impressively. It was irritating, too. But I
pointed out coldly, as one who deals with the incomprehensible, that I
didn’t see any reason to expose myself to a snub from the fellow. He
was a very unsatisfactory steward and a miserable wretch besides, but I
would just as soon think of tweaking his nose.
“Tweaking his nose,” said Captain Giles in a scandalized tone. “Much use
it would be to you.”
That remark was so irrelevant that one could make no answer to it.
But the sense of the absurdity was beginning at last to exercise its
well-known fascination. I felt I must not let the man talk to me any
more. I got up, observing curtly that he was too much for me--that I
couldn’t make him out.
Before I had time to move away he spoke again in a changed tone of
obstinacy and puffing nervously at his pipe.
“Well--he’s a--no account cuss--anyhow. You just--ask him. That’s all.”
That new manner impressed me--or rather made me pause. But sanity
asserting its sway at once I left the verandah after giving him a
mirthless smile. In a few strides I found myself in the dining room, now
cleared and empty. But during that short time various thoughts occurred
to me, such as: that Giles had been making fun of me, expecting some
amusement at my expense; that I probably looked silly and gullible; that
I knew very little of life. . . .
The door facing me across the dining room flew open to my extreme
surprise. It was the door inscribed with the word “Steward” and the
man himself ran out of his stuffy, Philistinish lair in his absurd,
hunted-animal manner, making for the garden door.
To this day I don’t know what made me call after him. “I say! Wait a
minute.” Perhaps it was the sidelong glance he gave me; or possibly I
was yet under the influence of Captain Giles’ mysterious earnestness.
Well, it was an impulse of some sort; an effect of that force somewhere
within our lives which shapes them this way or that. For if these words
had not escaped from my lips (my will had nothing to do with that) my
existence would, to be sure, have been still a seaman’s existence, but
directed on now to me utterly inconceivable lines.
No. My will had nothing to do with it. Indeed, no sooner had I made that
fateful noise than I became extremely sorry for it. Had the man stopped
and faced me I would have had to retire in disorder. For I had no notion
to carry out Captain Giles’ idiotic joke, either at my own expense or at
the expense of the Steward.
But here the old human instinct of the chase came into play. He
pretended to be deaf, and I, without thinking a second about it, dashed
along my own side of the dining table and cut him off at the very door.
“Why can’t you answer when you are spoken to?” I asked roughly.
He leaned against the lintel of the door. He looked extremely wretched.
Human nature is, I fear, not very nice right through. There are ugly
spots in it. I found myself growing angry, and that, I believe, only
because my quarry looked so woe-begone. Miserable beggar!
I went for him without more ado. “I understand there was an official
communication to the Home from the Harbour Office this morning. Is that
so?”
Instead of telling me to mind my own business, as he might have done,
he began to whine with an undertone of impudence. He couldn’t see me
anywhere this morning. He couldn’t be expected to run all over the town
after me.
“Who wants you to?” I cried. And then my eyes became opened to the
inwardness of things and speeches the triviality of which had been so
baffling and tiresome.
I told him I wanted to know what was in that letter. My sternness of
tone and behaviour was only half assumed. Curiosity can be a very fierce
sentiment--at times.
He took refuge in a silly, muttering sulkiness. It was nothing to me, he
mumbled. I had told him I was going home. And since I was going home he
didn’t see why he should. . . .
That was the line of his argument, and it was irrelevant enough to be
almost insulting. Insulting to one’s intelligence, I mean.
In that twilight region between youth and maturity, in which I had my
being then, one is peculiarly sensitive to that kind of insult. I am
afraid my behaviour to the Steward became very rough indeed. But it
wasn’t in him to face out anything or anybody. Drug habit or solitary
tippling, perhaps. And when I forgot myself so far as to swear at him he
broke down and began to shriek.
I don’t mean to say that he made a great outcry. It was a cynical
shrieking confession, only faint--piteously faint. It wasn’t very
coherent either, but sufficiently so to strike me dumb at first. I
turned my eyes from him in righteous indignation, and perceived Captain
Giles in the verandah doorway surveying quietly the scene, his own
handiwork, if I may express it in that way. His smouldering black pipe
was very noticeable in his big, paternal fist. So, too, was the glitter
of his heavy gold watch-chain across the breast of his white tunic.
He exhaled an atmosphere of virtuous sagacity serene enough for any
innocent soul to fly to confidently. I flew to him.
“You would never believe it,” I cried. “It was a notification that a
master is wanted for some ship. There’s a command apparently going about
and this fellow puts the thing in his pocket.”
The Steward screamed out in accents of loud despair: “You will be the
death of me!”
The mighty slap he gave his wretched forehead was very loud, too. But
when I turned to look at him he was no longer there. He had rushed away
somewhere out of sight. This sudden disappearance made me laugh.
This was the end of the incident--for me. Captain Giles, however,
staring at the place where the Steward had been, began to haul at his
gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket
like solid truth from a well. Solemnly he lowered it down again and only
then said:
“Just three o’clock. You will be in time--if you don’t lose any, that
is.”
“In time for what?” I asked.
“Good Lord! For the Harbour Office. This must be looked into.”
Strictly speaking, he was right. But I’ve never had much taste for
investigation, for showing people up and all that no doubt ethically
meritorious kind of work. And my view of the episode was purely ethical.
If any one had to be the death of the Steward I didn’t see why it
shouldn’t be Captain Giles himself, a man of age and standing, and a
permanent resident. Whereas, I in comparison, felt myself a mere bird
of passage in that port. In fact, it might have been said that I had
already broken off my connection. I muttered that I didn’t think--it was
nothing to me. . . .
“Nothing!” repeated Captain Giles, giving some signs of quiet,
deliberate indignation. “Kent warned me you were a peculiar young
fellow. You will tell me next that a command is nothing to you--and
after all the trouble I’ve taken, too!”
“The trouble!” I murmured, uncomprehending. What trouble? All I could
remember was being mystified and bored by his conversation for a solid
hour after tiffin. And he called that taking a lot of trouble.
He was looking at me with a self-complacency which would have been
odious in any other man. All at once, as if a page of a book had been
turned over disclosing a word which made plain all that had gone before,
I perceived that this matter had also another than an ethical aspect.
And still I did not move. Captain Giles lost his patience a little. With
an angry puff at his pipe he turned his back on my hesitation.
But it was not hesitation on my part. I had been, if I may express
myself so, put out of gear mentally. But as soon as I had convinced
myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained
such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of
locomotion.
It’s a good step from the Officers’ Home to the Harbour Office; but with
the magic word “Command” in my head I found myself suddenly on the quay
as if transported there in the twinkling of an eye, before a portal of
dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white steps.
All this seemed to glide toward me swiftly. The whole great roadstead
to the right was just a mere flicker of blue, and the dim cool hall
swallowed me up out of the heat and glare of which I had not been aware
till the very moment I passed in from it.
The broad inner staircase insinuated itself under my feet somehow.
Command is a strong magic. The first human beings I perceived distinctly
since I had parted with the indignant back of Captain Giles were the
crew of the harbour steam-launch lounging on the spacious landing about
the curtained archway of the shipping office.
It was there that my buoyancy abandoned me. The atmosphere of
officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human
endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of
paper and ink. I passed heavily under the curtain which the Malay
coxswain of the harbour launch raised for me. There was nobody in the
office except the clerks, writing in two industrious rows. But the head
Shipping-Master hopped down from his elevation and hurried along on the
thick mats to meet me in the broad central passage.
He had a Scottish name, but his complexion was of a rich olive hue, his
short beard was jet black, and his eyes, also black, had a languishing
expression. He asked confidentially:
“You want to see Him?”
All lightness of spirit and body having departed from me at the touch
of officialdom, I looked at the scribe without animation and asked in my
turn wearily:
“What do you think? Is it any use?”
“My goodness! He has asked for you twice today.”
This emphatic He was the supreme authority, the Marine Superintendent,
the Harbour-Master--a very great person in the eyes of every single
quill-driver in the room. But that was nothing to the opinion he had of
his own greatness.
Captain Ellis looked upon himself as a sort of divine (pagan) emanation,
the deputy-Neptune for the circumambient seas. If he did not actually
rule the waves, he pretended to rule the fate of the mortals whose lives
were cast upon the waters.
This uplifting illusion made him inquisitorial and peremptory. And as
his temperament was choleric there were fellows who were actually afraid
of him. He was redoubtable, not in virtue of his office, but because of
his unwarrantable assumptions. I had never had anything to do with him
before.
I said: “Oh! He has asked for me twice. Then perhaps I had better go
in.”
“You must! You must!”
The Shipping-Master led the way with a mincing gait around the whole
system of desks to a tall and important-looking door, which he opened
with a deferential action of the arm.
He stepped right in (but without letting go of the handle) and, after
gazing reverently down the room for a while, beckoned me in by a silent
jerk of the head. Then he slipped out at once and shut the door after me
most delicately.
Three lofty windows gave on the harbour. There was nothing in them but
the dark-blue sparkling sea and the paler luminous blue of the sky. My
eye caught in the depths and distances of these blue tones the white
speck of some big ship just arrived and about to anchor in the outer
roadstead. A ship from home--after perhaps ninety days at sea. There is
something touching about a ship coming in from sea and folding her white
wings for a rest.
The next thing I saw was the top-knot of silver hair surmounting Captain
Ellis’ smooth red face, which would have been apoplectic if it hadn’t
had such a fresh appearance.
Our deputy-Neptune had no beard on his chin, and there was no trident
to be seen standing in a corner anywhere, like an umbrella. But his
hand was holding a pen--the official pen, far mightier than the sword in
making or marring the fortune of simple toiling men. He was looking over
his shoulder at my advance.
When I had come well within range he saluted me by a nerve-shattering:
“Where have you been all this time?”
As it was no concern of his I did not take the slightest notice of the
shot. I said simply that I had heard there was a master needed for some
vessel, and being a sailing-ship man I thought I would apply. . . .
He interrupted me. “Why! Hang it! _You_ are the right man for that job--if
there had been twenty others after it. But no fear of that. They are all
afraid to catch hold. That’s what’s the matter.”
He was very irritated. I said innocently: “Are they, sir. I wonder why?”
“Why!” he fumed. “Afraid of the sails. Afraid of a white crew. Too much
trouble. Too much work. Too long out here. Easy life and deck-chairs
more their mark. Here I sit with the Consul-General’s cable before me,
and the only man fit for the job not to be found anywhere. I began to
think you were funking it, too. . . .”
“I haven’t been long getting to the office,” I remarked calmly.
“You have a good name out here, though,” he growled savagely without
looking at me.
“I am very glad to hear it from you, sir,” I said.
“Yes. But you are not on the spot when you are wanted. You know you
weren’t. That steward of yours wouldn’t dare to neglect a message from
this office. Where the devil did you hide yourself for the best part of
the day?”
I only smiled kindly down on him, and he seemed to recollect himself,
and asked me to take a seat. He explained that the master of a British
ship having died in Bangkok the Consul-General had cabled to him a
request for a competent man to be sent out to take command.
Apparently, in his mind, I was the man from the first, though for the
looks of the thing the notification addressed to the Sailors’ Home was
general. An agreement had already been prepared. He gave it to me to
read, and when I handed it back to him with the remark that I accepted
its terms, the deputy-Neptune signed it, stamped it with his own exalted
hand, folded it in four (it was a sheet of blue foolscap) and presented
it to me--a gift of extraordinary potency, for, as I put it in my
pocket, my head swam a little.
“This is your appointment to the command,” he said with a certain
gravity. “An official appointment binding the owners to conditions which
you have accepted. Now--when will you be ready to go?”
I said I would be ready that very day if necessary. He caught me at my
word with great alacrity. The steamer Melita was leaving for Bangkok
that evening about seven. He would request her captain officially to
give me a passage and wait for me till ten o’clock.
Then he rose from his office chair, and I got up, too. My head swam,
there was no doubt about it, and I felt a certain heaviness of limbs as
if they had grown bigger since I had sat down on that chair. I made my
bow.
A subtle change in Captain Ellis’ manner became perceptible as though
he had laid aside the trident of deputy-Neptune. In reality, it was only
his official pen that he had dropped on getting up.