The first thing I saw down there was the upper part of a man’s body
projecting backward, as it were, from one of the doors at the foot of
the stairs. His eyes looked at me very wide and still. In one hand he
held a dinner plate, in the other a cloth.
“I am your new Captain,” I said quietly.
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he had got rid of the plate and
the cloth and jumped to open the cabin door. As soon as I passed into
the saloon he vanished, but only to reappear instantly, buttoning up a
jacket he had put on with the swiftness of a “quick-change” artist.
“Where’s the chief mate?” I asked.
“In the hold, I think, sir. I saw him go down the after-hatch ten
minutes ago.”
“Tell him I am on board.”
The mahogany table under the skylight shone in the twilight like a dark
pool of water. The sideboard, surmounted by a wide looking-glass in an
ormulu frame, had a marble top. It bore a pair of silver-plated lamps
and some other pieces--obviously a harbour display. The saloon itself was
panelled in two kinds of wood in the excellent simple taste prevailing
when the ship was built.
I sat down in the armchair at the head of the table--the captain’s
chair, with a small tell-tale compass swung above it--a mute reminder of
unremitting vigilance.
A succession of men had sat in that chair. I became aware of that
thought suddenly, vividly, as though each had left a little of himself
between the four walls of these ornate bulkheads; as if a sort of
composite soul, the soul of command, had whispered suddenly to mine of
long days at sea and of anxious moments.
“You, too!” it seemed to say, “you, too, shall taste of that peace and
that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self--obscure as we
were and as supreme in the face of all the winds and all the seas, in an
immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no
reckoning of lives.”
Deep within the tarnished ormulu frame, in the hot half-light sifted
through the awning, I saw my own face propped between my hands. And I
stared back at myself with the perfect detachment of distance, rather
with curiosity than with any other feeling, except of some sympathy for
this latest representative of what for all intents and purposes was a
dynasty, continuous not in blood indeed, but in its experience, in its
training, in its conception of duty, and in the blessed simplicity of
its traditional point of view on life.
It struck me that this quietly staring man whom I was watching, both as
if he were myself and somebody else, was not exactly a lonely figure.
He had his place in a line of men whom he did not know, of whom he had
never heard; but who were fashioned by the same influences, whose souls
in relation to their humble life’s work had no secrets for him.
Suddenly I perceived that there was another man in the saloon, standing
a little on one side and looking intently at me. The chief mate. His
long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which
struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.
How long had he been there looking at me, appraising me in my unguarded
day-dreaming state? I would have been more disconcerted if, having the
clock set in the top of the mirror-frame right in front of me, I had not
noticed that its long hand had hardly moved at all.
I could not have been in that cabin more than two minutes altogether.
Say three. . . . So he could not have been watching me more than a mere
fraction of a minute, luckily. Still, I regretted the occurrence.
But I showed nothing of it as I rose leisurely (it had to be leisurely)
and greeted him with perfect friendliness.
There was something reluctant and at the same time attentive in his
bearing. His name was Burns. We left the cabin and went round the ship
together. His face in the full light of day appeared very pale, meagre,
even haggard. Somehow I had a delicacy as to looking too often at him;
his eyes, on the contrary, remained fairly glued on my face. They were
greenish and had an expectant expression.
He answered all my questions readily enough, but my ear seemed to catch
a tone of unwillingness. The second officer, with three or four hands,
was busy forward. The mate mentioned his name and I nodded to him in
passing. He was very young. He struck me as rather a cub.
When we returned below, I sat down on one end of a deep, semi-circular,
or, rather, semi-oval settee, upholstered in red plush. It extended
right across the whole after-end of the cabin. Mr. Burns motioned to sit
down, dropped into one of the swivel-chairs round the table, and kept
his eyes on me as persistently as ever, and with that strange air as if
all this were make-believe and he expected me to get up, burst into a
laugh, slap him on the back, and vanish from the cabin.
There was an odd stress in the situation which began to make me
uncomfortable. I tried to react against this vague feeling.
“It’s only my inexperience,” I thought.
In the face of that man, several years, I judged, older than myself, I
became aware of what I had left already behind me--my youth. And that
was indeed poor comfort. Youth is a fine thing, a mighty power--as
long as one does not think of it. I felt I was becoming self-conscious.
Almost against my will I assumed a moody gravity. I said: “I see you
have kept her in very good order, Mr. Burns.”
Directly I had uttered these words I asked myself angrily why the deuce
did I want to say that? Mr. Burns in answer had only blinked at me. What
on earth did he mean?
I fell back on a question which had been in my thoughts for a long
time--the most natural question on the lips of any seaman whatever
joining a ship. I voiced it (confound this self-consciousness) in a
degaged cheerful tone: “I suppose she can travel--what?”
Now a question like this might have been answered normally, either in
accents of apologetic sorrow or with a visibly suppressed pride, in a
“I don’t want to boast, but you shall see,” sort of tone. There are
sailors, too, who would have been roughly outspoken: “Lazy brute,” or
openly delighted: “She’s a flyer.” Two ways, if four manners.
But Mr. Burns found another way, a way of his own which had, at all
events, the merit of saving his breath, if no other.
Again he did not say anything. He only frowned. And it was an angry
frown. I waited. Nothing more came.
“What’s the matter? . . . Can’t you tell after being nearly two years in
the ship?” I addressed him sharply.
He looked as startled for a moment as though he had discovered my
presence only that very moment. But this passed off almost at once. He
put on an air of indifference. But I suppose he thought it better to say
something. He said that a ship needed, just like a man, the chance to
show the best she could do, and that this ship had never had a chance
since he had been on board of her. Not that he could remember. The last
captain. . . . He paused.
“Has he been so very unlucky?” I asked with frank incredulity. Mr. Burns
turned his eyes away from me. No, the late captain was not an unlucky
man. One couldn’t say that. But he had not seemed to want to make use of
his luck.
Mr. Burns--man of enigmatic moods--made this statement with an inanimate
face and staring wilfully at the rudder casing. The statement itself was
obscurely suggestive. I asked quietly:
“Where did he die?”
“In this saloon. Just where you are sitting now,” answered Mr. Burns.
I repressed a silly impulse to jump up; but upon the whole I was
relieved to hear that he had not died in the bed which was now to be
mine. I pointed out to the chief mate that what I really wanted to know
was where he had buried his late captain.
Mr. Burns said that it was at the entrance to the gulf. A roomy grave; a
sufficient answer. But the mate, overcoming visibly something within
him--something like a curious reluctance to believe in my advent (as an
irrevocable fact, at any rate), did not stop at that--though, indeed, he
may have wished to do so.
As a compromise with his feelings, I believe, he addressed himself
persistently to the rudder-casing, so that to me he had the appearance
of a man talking in solitude, a little unconsciously, however.
His tale was that at seven bells in the forenoon watch he had all hands
mustered on the quarterdeck and told them they had better go down to say
good-bye to the captain.
Those words, as if grudged to an intruding personage, were enough for
me to evoke vividly that strange ceremony: The bare-footed, bare-headed
seamen crowding shyly into that cabin, a small mob pressed against that
sideboard, uncomfortable rather than moved, shirts open on sunburnt
chests, weather-beaten faces, and all staring at the dying man with the
same grave and expectant expression.
“Was he conscious?” I asked.
“He didn’t speak, but he moved his eyes to look at them,” said the mate.
After waiting a moment, Mr. Burns motioned the crew to leave the cabin,
but he detained the two eldest men to stay with the captain while he
went on deck with his sextant to “take the sun.” It was getting toward
noon and he was anxious to obtain a good observation for latitude. When
he returned below to put his sextant away he found that the two men had
retreated out into the lobby. Through the open door he had a view of the
captain lying easy against the pillows. He had “passed away” while Mr.
Burns was taking this observation. As near noon as possible. He had
hardly changed his position.
Mr. Burns sighed, glanced at me inquisitively, as much as to say,
“Aren’t you going yet?” and then turned his thoughts from his new
captain back to the old, who, being dead, had no authority, was not in
anybody’s way, and was much easier to deal with.
Mr. Burns dealt with him at some length. He was a peculiar man--of
sixty-five about--iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative.
He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would
come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows
why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play
on the violin for hours--till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most
of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took
him. Very loud, too.
It came to this, that Mr. Burns mustered his courage one day and
remonstrated earnestly with the captain. Neither he nor the second mate
could get a wink of sleep in their watches below for the noise. . . .
And how could they be expected to keep awake while on duty? He pleaded.
The answer of that stern man was that if he and the second mate didn’t
like the noise, they were welcome to pack up their traps and walk over
the side. When this alternative was offered the ship happened to be 600
miles from the nearest land.
Mr. Burns at this point looked at me with an air of curiosity. I began
to think that my predecessor was a remarkably peculiar old man.
But I had to hear stranger things yet. It came out that this stern,
grim, wind-tanned, rough, sea-salted, taciturn sailor of sixty-five was
not only an artist, but a lover as well. In Haiphong, when they got
there after a course of most unprofitable peregrinations (during which
the ship was nearly lost twice), he got himself, in Mr. Burns’ own
words, “mixed up” with some woman. Mr. Burns had had no personal
knowledge of that affair, but positive evidence of it existed in the
shape of a photograph taken in Haiphong. Mr. Burns found it in one of
the drawers in the captain’s room.
In due course I, too, saw that amazing human document (I even threw it
overboard later). There he sat, with his hands reposing on his knees,
bald, squat, gray, bristly, recalling a wild boar somehow; and by his
side towered an awful mature, white female with rapacious nostrils and a
cheaply ill-omened stare in her enormous eyes. She was disguised in some
semi-oriental, vulgar, fancy costume. She resembled a low-class medium
or one of those women who tell fortunes by cards for half a crown. And
yet she was striking. A professional sorceress from the slums. It was
incomprehensible. There was something awful in the thought that she was
the last reflection of the world of passion for the fierce soul which
seemed to look at one out of the sardonically savage face of that
old seaman. However, I noticed that she was holding some musical
instrument--guitar or mandoline--in her hand. Perhaps that was the secret
of her sortilege.
For Mr. Burns that photograph explained why the unloaded ship had kept
sweltering at anchor for three weeks in a pestilential hot harbour
without air. They lay there and gasped. The captain, appearing now and
then on short visits, mumbled to Mr. Burns unlikely tales about some
letters he was waiting for.
Suddenly, after vanishing for a week, he came on board in the middle
of the night and took the ship out to sea with the first break of dawn.
Daylight showed him looking wild and ill. The mere getting clear of the
land took two days, and somehow or other they bumped slightly on a
reef. However, no leak developed, and the captain, growling “no matter,”
informed Mr. Burns that he had made up his mind to take the ship to
Hong-Kong and drydock her there.
At this Mr. Burns was plunged into despair. For indeed, to beat up
to Hong-Kong against a fierce monsoon, with a ship not sufficiently
ballasted and with her supply of water not completed, was an insane
project.
But the captain growled peremptorily, “Stick her at it,” and Mr. Burns,
dismayed and enraged, stuck her at it, and kept her at it, blowing away
sails, straining the spars, exhausting the crew--nearly maddened by the
absolute conviction that the attempt was impossible and was bound to end
in some catastrophe.
Meantime the captain, shut up in his cabin and wedged in a corner of his
settee against the crazy bounding of the ship, played the violin--or, at
any rate, made continuous noise on it.
When he appeared on deck he would not speak and not always answer when
spoken to. It was obvious that he was ill in some mysterious manner, and
beginning to break up.
As the days went by the sounds of the violin became less and less loud,
till at last only a feeble scratching would meet Mr. Burns’ ear as
he stood in the saloon listening outside the door of the captain’s
state-room.
One afternoon in perfect desperation he burst into that room and made
such a scene, tearing his hair and shouting such horrid imprecations
that he cowed the contemptuous spirit of the sick man. The water-tanks
were low, they had not gained fifty miles in a fortnight. She would
never reach Hong-Kong.
It was like fighting desperately toward destruction for the ship and the
men. This was evident without argument. Mr. Burns, losing all restraint,
put his face close to his captain’s and fairly yelled: “You, sir, are
going out of the world. But I can’t wait till you are dead before I put
the helm up. You must do it yourself. You must do it now!”
The man on the couch snarled in contempt. “So I am going out of the
world--am I?”
“Yes, sir--you haven’t many days left in it,” said Mr. Burns calming
down. “One can see it by your face.”
“My face, eh? . . . Well, put up the helm and be damned to you.”
Burns flew on deck, got the ship before the wind, then came down again
composed, but resolute.
“I’ve shaped a course for Pulo Condor, sir,” he said. “When we make it,
if you are still with us, you’ll tell me into what port you wish me to
take the ship and I’ll do it.”
The old man gave him a look of savage spite, and said those atrocious
words in deadly, slow tones.
“If I had my wish, neither the ship nor any of you would ever reach a
port. And I hope you won’t.”
Mr. Burns was profoundly shocked. I believe he was positively frightened
at the time. It seems, however, that he managed to produce such an
effective laugh that it was the old man’s turn to be frightened. He
shrank within himself and turned his back on him.
“And his head was not gone then,” Mr. Burns assured me excitedly. “He
meant every word of it.”
“Such was practically the late captain’s last speech. No connected
sentence passed his lips afterward. That night he used the last of his
strength to throw his fiddle over the side. No one had actually seen
him in the act, but after his death Mr. Burns couldn’t find the thing
anywhere. The empty case was very much in evidence, but the fiddle
was clearly not in the ship. And where else could it have gone to but
overboard?”
“Threw his violin overboard!” I exclaimed.
“He did,” cried Mr. Burns excitedly. “And it’s my belief he would have
tried to take the ship down with him if it had been in human power. He
never meant her to see home again. He wouldn’t write to his owners, he
never wrote to his old wife, either--he wasn’t going to. He had made up
his mind to cut adrift from everything. That’s what it was. He didn’t
care for business, or freights, or for making a passage--or anything. He
meant to have gone wandering about the world till he lost her with all
hands.”
Mr. Burns looked like a man who had escaped great danger. For a little
he would have exclaimed: “If it hadn’t been for me!” And the transparent
innocence of his indignant eyes was underlined quaintly by the arrogant
pair of moustaches which he proceeded to twist, and as if extend,
horizontally.
I might have smiled if I had not been busy with my own sensations,
which were not those of Mr. Burns. I was already the man in command. My
sensations could not be like those of any other man on board. In that
community I stood, like a king in his country, in a class all by myself.
I mean an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state. I was
brought there to rule by an agency as remote from the people and as
inscrutable almost to them as the Grace of God.
And like a member of a dynasty, feeling a semimystical bond with the
dead, I was profoundly shocked by my immediate predecessor.
That man had been in all essentials but his age just such another man
as myself. Yet the end of his life was a complete act of treason, the
betrayal of a tradition which seemed to me as imperative as any guide
on earth could be. It appeared that even at sea a man could become the
victim of evil spirits. I felt on my face the breath of unknown powers
that shape our destinies.
Not to let the silence last too long I asked Mr. Burns if he had written
to his captain’s wife. He shook his head. He had written to nobody.
In a moment he became sombre. He never thought of writing. It took him
all his time to watch incessantly the loading of the ship by a rascally
Chinese stevedore. In this Mr. Burns gave me the first glimpse of the
real chief mate’s soul which dwelt uneasily in his body.
He mused, then hastened on with gloomy force.
“Yes! The captain died as near noon as possible. I looked through his
papers in the afternoon. I read the service over him at sunset and
then I stuck the ship’s head north and brought her in here.
I--brought--her--in.”
He struck the table with his fist.
“She would hardly have come in by herself,” I observed. “But why didn’t
you make for Singapore instead?”
His eyes wavered. “The nearest port,” he muttered sullenly.
I had framed the question in perfect innocence, but his answer (the
difference in distance was insignificant) and his manner offered me a
clue to the simple truth. He took the ship to a port where he expected
to be confirmed in his temporary command from lack of a qualified master
to put over his head. Whereas Singapore, he surmised justly, would
be full of qualified men. But his naive reasoning forgot to take into
account the telegraph cable reposing on the bottom of the very Gulf up
which he had turned that ship which he imagined himself to have saved
from destruction. Hence the bitter flavour of our interview. I tasted it
more and more distinctly--and it was less and less to my taste.
“Look here, Mr. Burns,” I began very firmly. “You may as well understand
that I did not run after this command. It was pushed in my way. I’ve
accepted it. I am here to take the ship home first of all, and you may
be sure that I shall see to it that every one of you on board here does
his duty to that end. This is all I have to say--for the present.”
He was on his feet by this time, but instead of taking his dismissal
he remained with trembling, indignant lips, and looking at me hard as
though, really, after this, there was nothing for me to do in common
decency but to vanish from his outraged sight. Like all very simple
emotional states this was moving. I felt sorry for him--almost
sympathetic, till (seeing that I did not vanish) he spoke in a tone of
forced restraint.
“If I hadn’t a wife and a child at home you may be sure, sir, I would
have asked you to let me go the very minute you came on board.”
I answered him with a matter-of-course calmness as though some remote
third person were in question.
“And I, Mr. Burns, would not have let you go. You have signed the ship’s
articles as chief officer, and till they are terminated at the final
port of discharge I shall expect you to attend to your duty and give me
the benefit of your experience to the best of your ability.”
Stony incredulity lingered in his eyes: but it broke down before my
friendly attitude. With a slight upward toss of his arms (I got to know
that gesture well afterward) he bolted out of the cabin.
We might have saved ourselves that little passage of harmless sparring.
Before many days had elapsed it was Mr. Burns who was pleading with me
anxiously not to leave him behind; while I could only return him but
doubtful answers. The whole thing took on a somewhat tragic complexion.
And this horrible problem was only an extraneous episode, a mere
complication in the general problem of how to get that ship--which was
mine with her appurtenances and her men, with her body and her spirit
now slumbering in that pestilential river--how to get her out to sea.
Mr. Burns, while still acting captain, had hastened to sign a
charter-party which in an ideal world without guile would have been
an excellent document. Directly I ran my eye over it I foresaw trouble
ahead unless the people of the other part were quite exceptionally
fair-minded and open to argument.
Mr. Burns, to whom I imparted my fears, chose to take great umbrage
at them. He looked at me with that usual incredulous stare, and said
bitterly:
“I suppose, sir, you want to make out I’ve acted like a fool?”
I told him, with my systematic kindliness which always seemed to augment
his surprise, that I did not want to make out anything. I would leave
that to the future.
And, sure enough, the future brought in a lot of trouble. There were
days when I used to remember Captain Giles with nothing short of
abhorrence. His confounded acuteness had let me in for this job; while
his prophecy that I “would have my hands full” coming true, made it
appear as if done on purpose to play an evil joke on my young innocence.
Yes. I had my hands full of complications which were most valuable
as “experience.” People have a great opinion of the advantages of
experience. But in this connection experience means always something
disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions.
I must say I was losing mine rapidly. But on these instructive
complications I must not enlarge more than to say that they could all be
resumed in the one word: Delay.
A mankind which has invented the proverb, “Time is money,” will
understand my vexation. The word “Delay” entered the secret chamber of
my brain, resounded there like a tolling bell which maddens the ear,
affected all my senses, took on a black colouring, a bitter taste, a
deadly meaning.
“I am really sorry to see you worried like this. Indeed, I am. . . .”
It was the only humane speech I used to hear at that time. And it came
from a doctor, appropriately enough.
A doctor is humane by definition. But that man was so in reality. His
speech was not professional. I was not ill. But other people were, and
that was the reason of his visiting the ship.
He was the doctor of our Legation and, of course, of the Consulate,
too. He looked after the ship’s health, which generally was poor, and
trembling, as it were, on the verge of a break-up. Yes. The men ailed.
And thus time was not only money, but life as well.
I had never seen such a steady ship’s company. As the doctor remarked to
me: “You seem to have a most respectable lot of seamen.” Not only were
they consistently sober, but they did not even want to go ashore. Care
was taken to expose them as little as possible to the sun. They
were employed on light work under the awnings. And the humane doctor
commended me.
“Your arrangements appear to me to be very judicious, my dear Captain.”
It is difficult to express how much that pronouncement comforted me.
The doctor’s round, full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the
perfection of a dignified amenity. He was the only human being in
the world who seemed to take the slightest interest in me. He would
generally sit in the cabin for half an hour or so at every visit.