As we all went up it occurred to me that there ought to be a man at the helm. I raised my voice not much above a whisper, and, noiselessly, an uncomplaining spirit in a fever-wasted body appeared in the light aft, the head with hollow eyes illuminated against the blackness which had swallowed up our world—and the universe. The bared forearm extended over the upper spokes seemed to shine with a light of its own.
I murmured to that luminous appearance:
“Keep the helm right amidships.”
It answered in a tone of patient suffering:
“Right amidships, sir.”
Then I descended to the quarter-deck. It was impossible to tell whence the blow would come. To look round the ship was to look into a bottomless, black pit. The eye lost itself in inconceivable depths.
I wanted to ascertain whether the ropes had been picked up off the deck. One could only do that by feeling with one’s feet. In my cautious progress I came against a man in whom I recognized Ransome. He possessed an unimpaired physical solidity which was manifest to me at the contact. He was leaning against the quarter-deck capstan and kept silent. It was like a revelation. He was the collapsed figure sobbing for breath I had noticed before we went on the poop.
“You have been helping with the mainsail!” I exclaimed in a low tone.
“Yes, sir,” sounded his quiet voice.
“Man! What were you thinking of? You mustn’t do that sort of thing.”
After a pause he assented: “I suppose I mustn’t.” Then after another short silence he added: “I am all right now,” quickly, between the tell-tale gasps.
I could neither hear nor see anybody else; but when I spoke up, answering sad murmurs filled the quarter-deck, and its shadows seemed to shift here and there. I ordered all the halyards laid down on deck clear for running.
“I’ll see to that, sir,” volunteered Ransome in his natural, pleasant tone, which comforted one and aroused one’s compassion, too, somehow.
That man ought to have been in his bed, resting, and my plain duty was to send him there. But perhaps he would not have obeyed me; I had not the strength of mind to try. All I said was:
“Go about it quietly, Ransome.”
Returning on the poop I approached Gambril. His face, set with hollow shadows in the light, looked awful, finally silenced. I asked him how he felt, but hardly expected an answer. Therefore, I was astonished at his comparative loquacity.
“Them shakes leaves me as weak as a kitten, sir,” he said, preserving finely that air of unconsciousness as to anything but his business a helmsman should never lose. “And before I can pick up my strength that there hot fit comes along and knocks me over again.”
He sighed. There was no reproach in his tone, but the bare words were enough to give me a horrible pang of self-reproach. It held me dumb for a time. When the tormenting sensation had passed off I asked:
“Do you feel strong enough to prevent the rudder taking charge if she gets sternway on her? It wouldn’t do to get something smashed about the steering-gear now. We’ve enough difficulties to cope with as it is.”
He answered with just a shade of weariness that he was strong enough to hang on. He could promise me that she shouldn’t take the wheel out of his hands. More he couldn’t say.
At that moment Ransome appeared quite close to me, stepping out of the darkness into visibility suddenly, as if just created with his composed face and pleasant voice.
Every rope on deck, he said, was laid down clear for running, as far as one could make certain by feeling. It was impossible to see anything. Frenchy had stationed himself forward. He said he had a jump or two left in him yet.
Here a faint smile altered for an instant the clear, firm design of Ransome’s lips. With his serious clear, gray eyes, his serene temperament—he was a priceless man altogether. Soul as firm as the muscles of his body.
He was the only man on board (except me, but I had to preserve my liberty of movement) who had a sufficiency of muscular strength to trust to. For a moment I thought I had better ask him to take the wheel. But the dreadful knowledge of the enemy he had to carry about him made me hesitate. In my ignorance of physiology it occurred to me that he might die suddenly, from excitement, at a critical moment.
While this gruesome fear restrained the ready words on the tip of my tongue, Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight.
At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night.
A flash of lightning would have been a relief—I mean physically. I would have prayed for it if it hadn’t been for my shrinking apprehension of the thunder. In the tension of silence I was suffering from it seemed to me that the first crash must turn me into dust.
And thunder was, most likely, what would happen next. Stiff all over and hardly breathing, I waited with a horribly strained expectation. Nothing happened. It was maddening, but a dull, growing ache in the lower part of my face made me aware that I had been grinding my teeth madly enough, for God knows how long.
It’s extraordinary I should not have heard myself doing it; but I hadn’t. By an effort which absorbed all my faculties I managed to keep my jaw still. It required much attention, and while thus engaged I became bothered by curious, irregular sounds of faint tapping on the deck. They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups. While I wondered at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek. Raindrops. Enormous. Forerunners of something. Tap. Tap. Tap. . . .
I turned about, and, addressing Gambrel earnestly, entreated him to “hang on to the wheel.” But I could hardly speak from emotion. The fatal moment had come. I held my breath. The tapping had stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw. I don’t suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my conviction that there was nothing else for it but to scream.
Suddenly—how am I to convey it? Well, suddenly the darkness turned into water. This is the only suitable figure. A heavy shower, a downpour, comes along, making a noise. You hear its approach on the sea, in the air, too, I verily believe. But this was different. With no preliminary whisper or rustle, without a splash, and even without the ghost of impact, I became instantaneously soaked to the skin. Not a very difficult matter, since I was wearing only my sleeping suit. My hair got full of water in an instant, water streamed on my skin, it filled my nose, my ears, my eyes. In a fraction of a second I swallowed quite a lot of it.
As to Gambril, he was fairly choked. He coughed pitifully, the broken cough of a sick man; and I beheld him as one sees a fish in an aquarium by the light of an electric bulb, an elusive, phosphorescent shape. Only he did not glide away. But something else happened. Both binnaclelamps went out. I suppose the water forced itself into them, though I wouldn’t have thought that possible, for they fitted into the cowl perfectly.
The last gleam of light in the universe had gone, pursued by a low exclamation of dismay from Gambril. I groped for him and seized his arm. How startlingly wasted it was.
“Never mind,” I said. “You don’t want the light. All you need to do is to keep the wind, when it comes, at the back of your head. You understand?”
“Aye, aye, sir. . . . But I should like to have a light,” he added nervously.
All that time the ship lay as steady as a rock. The noise of the water pouring off the sails and spars, flowing over the break of the poop, had stopped short. The poop scuppers gurgled and sobbed for a little while longer, and then perfect silence, joined to perfect immobility, proclaimed the yet unbroken spell of our helplessness, poised on the edge of some violent issue, lurking in the dark.
I started forward restlessly. I did not need my sight to pace the poop of my ill-starred first command with perfect assurance. Every square foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very grain and knots of the planks. Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over something, landing full length on my hands and face.
It was something big and alive. Not a dog—more like a sheep, rather. But there were no animals in the ship. How could an animal. . . . It was an added and fantastic horror which I could not resist. The hair of my head stirred even as I picked myself up, awfully scared; not as a man is scared while his judgment, his reason still try to resist, but completely, boundlessly, and, as it were, innocently scared—like a little child.
I could see It—that Thing! The darkness, of which so much had just turned into water, had thinned down a little. There It was! But I did not hit upon the notion of Mr. Burns issuing out of the companion on all fours till he attempted to stand up, and even then the idea of a bear crossed my mind first.
He growled like one when I seized him round the body. He had buttoned himself up into an enormous winter overcoat of some woolly material, the weight of which was too much for his reduced state. I could hardly feel the incredibly thin lath of his body, lost within the thick stuff, but his growl had depth and substance: Confounded dump ship with a craven, tiptoeing crowd. Why couldn’t they stamp and go with a brace? Wasn’t there one Godforsaken lubber in the lot fit to raise a yell on a rope?
“Skulking’s no good, sir,” he attacked me directly. “You can’t slink past the old murderous ruffian. It isn’t the way. You must go for him boldly—as I did. Boldness is what you want. Show him that you don’t care for any of his damned tricks. Kick up a jolly old row.”
“Good God, Mr. Burns,” I said angrily. “What on earth are you up to? What do you mean by coming up on deck in this state?”
“Just that! Boldness. The only way to scare the old bullying rascal.”
I pushed him, still growling, against the rail. “Hold on to it,” I said roughly. I did not know what to do with him. I left him in a hurry, to go to Gambril, who had called faintly that he believed there was some wind aloft. Indeed, my own ears had caught a feeble flutter of wet canvas, high up overhead, the jingle of a slack chain sheet. . . .
These were eerie, disturbing, alarming sounds in the dead stillness of the air around me. All the instances I had heard of topmasts being whipped out of a ship while there was not wind enough on her deck to blow out a match rushed into my memory.
“I can’t see the upper sails, sir,” declared Gambril shakily.
“Don’t move the helm. You’ll be all right,” I said confidently.
The poor man’s nerves were gone. Mine were not in much better case. It was the moment of breaking strain and was relieved by the abrupt sensation of the ship moving forward as if of herself under my feet. I heard plainly the soughing of the wind aloft, the low cracks of the upper spars taking the strain, long before I could feel the least draught on my face turned aft, anxious and sightless like the face of a blind man.
Suddenly a louder-sounding note filled our ears, the darkness started streaming against our bodies, chilling them exceedingly. Both of us, Gambril and I, shivered violently in our clinging, soaked garments of thin cotton. I said to him:
“You are all right now, my man. All you’ve got to do is to keep the wind at the back of your head. Surely you are up to that. A child could steer this ship in smooth water.”
He muttered: “Aye! A healthy child.” And I felt ashamed of having been passed over by the fever which had been preying on every man’s strength but mine, in order that my remorse might be the more bitter, the feeling of unworthiness more poignant, and the sense of responsibility heavier to bear.
The ship had gathered great way on her almost at once on the calm water. I felt her slipping through it with no other noise but a mysterious rustle alongside. Otherwise, she had no motion at all, neither lift nor roll. It was a disheartening steadiness which had lasted for eighteen days now; for never, never had we had wind enough in that time to raise the slightest run of the sea. The breeze freshened suddenly. I thought it was high time to get Mr. Burns off the deck. He worried me. I looked upon him as a lunatic who would be very likely to start roaming over the ship and break a limb or fall overboard.
I was truly glad to find he had remained holding on where I had left him, sensibly enough. He was, however, muttering to himself ominously.
This was discouraging. I remarked in a matter-of-fact tone:
“We have never had so much wind as this since we left the roads.”
“There’s some heart in it, too,” he growled judiciously. It was a remark of a perfectly sane seaman. But he added immediately: “It was about time I should come on deck. I’ve been nursing my strength for this—just for this. Do you see it, sir?”
I said I did, and proceeded to hint that it would be advisable for him to go below now and take a rest.
His answer was an indignant “Go below! Not if I know it, sir.”
Very cheerful! He was a horrible nuisance. And all at once he started to argue. I could feel his crazy excitement in the dark.
“You don’t know how to go about it, sir. How could you? All this whispering and tiptoeing is no good. You can’t hope to slink past a cunning, wide-awake, evil brute like he was. You never heard him talk. Enough to make your hair stand on end. No! No! He wasn’t mad. He was no more mad than I am. He was just downright wicked. Wicked so as to frighten most people. I will tell you what he was. He was nothing less than a thief and a murderer at heart. And do you think he’s any different now because he’s dead? Not he! His carcass lies a hundred fathom under, but he’s just the same . . . in latitude 8 d 20’ north.”
He snorted defiantly. I noted with weary resignation that the breeze had got lighter while he raved. He was at it again.
“I ought to have thrown the beggar out of the ship over the rail like a dog. It was only on account of the men. . . . Fancy having to read the Burial Service over a brute like that! . . . ‘Our departed brother’ . . . I could have laughed. That was what he couldn’t bear. I suppose I am the only man that ever stood up to laugh at him. When he got sick it used to scare that . . . brother. . . . Brother. . . . Departed. . . . Sooner call a shark brother.”
The breeze had let go so suddenly that the way of the ship brought the wet sails heavily against the mast. The spell of deadly stillness had caught us up again. There seemed to be no escape.
“Hallo!” exclaimed Mr. Burns in a startled voice. “Calm again!”
I addressed him as though he had been sane.
“This is the sort of thing we’ve been having for seventeen days, Mr. Burns,” I said with intense bitterness. “A puff, then a calm, and in a moment, you’ll see, she’ll be swinging on her heel with her head away from her course to the devil somewhere.”
He caught at the word. “The old dodging Devil,” he screamed piercingly and burst into such a loud laugh as I had never heard before. It was a provoking, mocking peal, with a hair-raising, screeching over-note of defiance. I stepped back, utterly confounded.
Instantly there was a stir on the quarter-deck; murmurs of dismay. A distressed voice cried out in the dark below us: “Who’s that gone crazy, now?”
Perhaps they thought it was their captain? Rush is not the word that could be applied to the utmost speed the poor fellows were up to; but in an amazing short time every man in the ship able to walk upright had found his way on to that poop.
I shouted to them: “It’s the mate. Lay hold of him a couple of you. . . .”
I expected this performance to end in a ghastly sort of fight. But Mr. Burns cut his derisive screeching dead short and turned upon them fiercely, yelling:
“Aha! Dog-gone ye! You’ve found your tongues—have ye? I thought you were dumb. Well, then—laugh! Laugh—I tell you. Now then—all together. One, two, three—laugh!”
A moment of silence ensued, of silence so profound that you could have heard a pin drop on the deck. Then Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words:
“I think he has fainted, sir—” The little motionless knot of men stirred, with low murmurs of relief. “I’ve got him under the arms. Get hold of his legs, some one.”
Yes. It was a relief. He was silenced for a time—for a time. I could not have stood another peal of that insane screeching. I was sure of it; and just then Gambril, the austere Gambril, treated us to another vocal performance. He began to sing out for relief. His voice wailed pitifully in the darkness: “Come aft somebody! I can’t stand this. Here she’ll be off again directly and I can’t. . . .”
I dashed aft myself meeting on my way a hard gust of wind whose approach Gambril’s ear had detected from afar and which filled the sails on the main in a series of muffled reports mingled with the low plaint of the spars. I was just in time to seize the wheel while Frenchy who had followed me caught up the collapsing Gambril. He hauled him out of the way, admonished him to lie still where he was, and then stepped up to relieve me, asking calmly:
“How am I to steer her, sir?”
“Dead before it for the present. I’ll get you a light in a moment.”
But going forward I met Ransome bringing up the spare binnacle lamp. That man noticed everything, attended to everything, shed comfort around him as he moved. As he passed me he remarked in a soothing tone that the stars were coming out. They were. The breeze was sweeping clear the sooty sky, breaking through the indolent silence of the sea.
The barrier of awful stillness which had encompassed us for so many days as though we had been accursed, was broken. I felt that. I let myself fall on to the skylight seat. A faint white ridge of foam, thin, very thin, broke alongside. The first for ages—for ages. I could have cheered, if it hadn’t been for the sense of guilt which clung to all my thoughts secretly. Ransome stood before me.
“What about the mate,” I asked anxiously. “Still unconscious?”
“Well, sir—it’s funny,” Ransome was evidently puzzled. “He hasn’t spoken a word, and his eyes are shut. But it looks to me more like sound sleep than anything else.”
I accepted this view as the least troublesome of any, or at any rate, least disturbing. Dead faint or deep slumber, Mr. Burns had to be left to himself for the present. Ransome remarked suddenly:
“I believe you want a coat, sir.”
“I believe I do,” I sighed out.
But I did not move. What I felt I wanted were new limbs. My arms and legs seemed utterly useless, fairly worn out. They didn’t even ache. But I stood up all the same to put on the coat when Ransome brought it up. And when he suggested that he had better now “take Gambril forward,” I said:
“All right. I’ll help you to get him down on the main deck.”
I found that I was quite able to help, too. We raised Gambril up between us. He tried to help himself along like a man but all the time he was inquiring piteously:
“You won’t let me go when we come to the ladder? You won’t let me go when we come to the ladder?”
The breeze kept on freshening and blew true, true to a hair. At daylight by careful manipulation of the helm we got the foreyards to run square by themselves (the water keeping smooth) and then went about hauling the ropes tight. Of the four men I had with me at night, I could see now only two. I didn’t inquire as to the others. They had given in. For a time only I hoped.
Our various tasks forward occupied us for hours, the two men with me moved so slow and had to rest so often. One of them remarked that “every blamed thing in the ship felt about a hundred times heavier than its proper weight.” This was the only complaint uttered. I don’t know what we should have done without Ransome. He worked with us, silent, too, with a little smile frozen on his lips. From time to time I murmured to him: “Go steady”—“Take it easy, Ransome”—and received a quick glance in reply.
When we had done all we could do to make things safe, he disappeared into his galley. Some time afterward, going forward for a look round, I caught sight of him through the open door. He sat upright on the locker in front of the stove, with his head leaning back against the bulkhead. His eyes were closed; his capable hands held open the front of his thin cotton shirt baring tragically his powerful chest, which heaved in painful and laboured gasps. He didn’t hear me.
I retreated quietly and went straight on to the poop to relieve Frenchy, who by that time was beginning to look very sick. He gave me the course with great formality and tried to go off with a jaunty step, but reeled widely twice before getting out of my sight.
And then I remained all alone aft, steering my ship, which ran before the wind with a buoyant lift now and then, and even rolling a little. Presently Ransome appeared before me with a tray. The sight of food made me ravenous all at once. He took the wheel while I sat down of the after grating to eat my breakfast.
“This breeze seems to have done for our crowd,” he murmured. “It just laid them low—all hands.”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose you and I are the only two fit men in the ship.”
“Frenchy says there’s still a jump left in him. I don’t know. It can’t be much,” continued Ransome with his wistful smile. “Good little man that. But suppose, sir, that this wind flies round when we are close to the land—what are we going to do with her?”
“If the wind shifts round heavily after we close in with the land she will either run ashore or get dismasted or both. We won’t be able to do anything with her. She’s running away with us now. All we can do is to steer her. She’s a ship without a crew.”
“Yes. All laid low,” repeated Ransome quietly. “I do give them a look-in forward every now and then, but it’s precious little I can do for them.”
“I, and the ship, and every one on board of her, are very much indebted to you, Ransome,” I said warmly.
He made as though he had not heard me, and steered in silence till I was ready to relieve him. He surrendered the wheel, picked up the tray, and for a parting shot informed me that Mr. Burns was awake and seemed to have a mind to come up on deck.
“I don’t know how to prevent him, sir. I can’t very well stop down below all the time.”
It was clear that he couldn’t. And sure enough Mr. Burns came on deck dragging himself painfully aft in his enormous overcoat. I beheld him with a natural dread. To have him around and raving about the wiles of a dead man while I had to steer a wildly rushing ship full of dying men was a rather dreadful prospect.
But his first remarks were quite sensible in meaning and tone. Apparently he had no recollection of the night scene. And if he had he didn’t betray himself once. Neither did he talk very much. He sat on the skylight looking desperately ill at first, but that strong breeze, before which the last remnant of my crew had wilted down, seemed to blow a fresh stock of vigour into his frame with every gust. One could almost see the process.
By way of sanity test I alluded on purpose to the late captain. I was delighted to find that Mr. Burns did not display undue interest in the subject. He ran over the old tale of that savage ruffian’s iniquities with a certain vindictive gusto and then concluded unexpectedly:
“I do believe, sir, that his brain began to go a year or more before he died.”
A wonderful recovery. I could hardly spare it as much admiration as it deserved, for I had to give all my mind to the steering.
In comparison with the hopeless languour of the preceding days this was dizzy speed. Two ridges of foam streamed from the ship’s bows; the wind sang in a strenuous note which under other circumstances would have expressed to me all the joy of life. Whenever the hauled-up mainsail started trying to slat and bang itself to pieces in its gear, Mr. Burns would look at me apprehensively.
“What would you have me to do, Mr. Burns? We can neither furl it nor set it. I only wish the old thing would thrash itself to pieces and be done with it. That beastly racket confuses me.”
Mr. Burns wrung his hands, and cried out suddenly:
“How will you get the ship into harbour, sir, without men to handle her?”
And I couldn’t tell him.
Well—it did get done about forty hours afterward. By the exorcising virtue of Mr. Burns’ awful laugh, the malicious spectre had been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of a kind and energetic Providence. It was rushing us on. . . .
I shall never forget the last night, dark, windy, and starry. I steered. Mr. Burns, after having obtained from me a solemn promise to give him a kick if anything happened, went frankly to sleep on the deck close to the binnacle. Convalescents need sleep. Ransome, his back propped against the mizzen-mast and a blanket over his legs, remained perfectly still, but I don’t suppose he closed his eyes for a moment. That embodiment of jauntiness, Frenchy, still under the delusion that there was a “jump” left in him, had insisted on joining us; but mindful of discipline, had laid himself down as far on the forepart of the poop as he could get, alongside the bucket-rack.
And I steered, too tired for anxiety, too tired for connected thought. I had moments of grim exultation and then my heart would sink awfully at the thought of that forecastle at the other end of the dark deck, full of fever-stricken men—some of them dying. By my fault. But never mind. Remorse must wait. I had to steer.
In the small hours the breeze weakened, then failed altogether. About five it returned, gentle enough, enabling us to head for the roadstead. Daybreak found Mr. Burns sitting wedged up with coils of rope on the stern-grating, and from the depths of his overcoat steering the ship with very white bony hands; while Ransome and I rushed along the decks letting go all the sheets and halliards by the run. We dashed next up on to the forecastle head. The perspiration of labour and sheer nervousness simply poured off our heads as we toiled to get the anchors cock-billed. I dared not look at Ransome as we worked side by side. We exchanged curt words; I could hear him panting close to me and I avoided turning my eyes his way for fear of seeing him fall down and expire in the act of putting forth his strength—for what? Indeed for some distinct ideal.
The consummate seaman in him was aroused. He needed no directions. He knew what to do. Every effort, every movement was an act of consistent heroism. It was not for me to look at a man thus inspired.
At last all was ready and I heard him say:
“Hadn’t I better go down and open the compressors now, sir?”
“Yes. Do,” I said.
And even then I did not glance his way. After a time his voice came up from the main deck.
“When you like, sir. All clear on the windlass here.”
I made a sign to Mr. Burns to put the helm down and let both anchors go one after another, leaving the ship to take as much cable as she wanted. She took the best part of them both before she brought up. The loose sails coming aback ceased their maddening racket above my head. A perfect stillness reigned in the ship. And while I stood forward feeling a little giddy in that sudden peace, I caught faintly a moan or two and the incoherent mutterings of the sick in the forecastle.
As we had a signal for medical assistance flying on the mizzen it is a fact that before the ship was fairly at rest three steam launches from various men-of-war were alongside; and at least five naval surgeons had clambered on board. They stood in a knot gazing up and down the empty main deck, then looked aloft—where not a man could be seen, either.
I went toward them—a solitary figure, in a blue and gray striped sleeping suit and a pipe-clayed cork helmet on its head. Their disgust was extreme. They had expected surgical cases. Each one had brought his carving tools with him. But they soon got over their little disappointment. In less than five minutes one of the steam launches was rushing shoreward to order a big boat and some hospital people for the removal of the crew. The big steam pinnace went off to her ship to bring over a few bluejackets to furl my sails for me.
One of the surgeons had remained on board. He came out of the forecastle looking impenetrable, and noticed my inquiring gaze.
“There’s nobody dead in there, if that’s what you want to know,” he said deliberately. Then added in a tone of wonder: “The whole crew!”
“And very bad?”
“And very bad,” he repeated. His eyes were roaming all over the ship. “Heavens! What’s that?”
“That,” I said, glancing aft, “is Mr. Burns, my chief officer.”
Mr. Burns with his moribund head nodding on the stalk of his lean neck was a sight for any one to exclaim at. The surgeon asked:
“Is he going to the hospital, too?”
“Oh, no,” I said jocosely. “Mr. Burns can’t go on shore till the mainmast goes. I am very proud of him. He’s my only convalescent.”
“You look—” began the doctor staring at me. But I interrupted him angrily:
“I am not ill.”
“No. . . . You look queer.”
“Well, you see, I have been seventeen days on deck.”
“Seventeen! . . . But you must have slept.”
“I suppose I must have. I don’t know. But I’m certain that I didn’t sleep for the last forty hours.”
“Phew! . . . You will be going ashore presently I suppose?”
“As soon as ever I can. There’s no end of business waiting for me there.”
The surgeon released my hand, which he had taken while we talked, pulled out his pocket-book, wrote in it rapidly, tore out the page and offered it to me.
“I strongly advise you to get this prescription made up for yourself ashore. Unless I am much mistaken you will need it this evening.”
“What is it, then?” I asked with suspicion.
“Sleeping draught,” answered the surgeon curtly; and moving with an air of interest toward Mr. Burns he engaged him in conversation.
As I went below to dress to go ashore, Ransome followed me. He begged my pardon; he wished, too, to be sent ashore and paid off.
I looked at him in surprise. He was waiting for my answer with an air of anxiety.
“You don’t mean to leave the ship!” I cried out.
“I do really, sir. I want to go and be quiet somewhere. Anywhere. The hospital will do.”
“But, Ransome,” I said. “I hate the idea of parting with you.”
“I must go,” he broke in. “I have a right!” . . . He gasped and a look of almost savage determination passed over his face. For an instant he was another being. And I saw under the worth and the comeliness of the man the humble reality of things. Life was a boon to him—this precarious hard life, and he was thoroughly alarmed about himself.
“Of course I shall pay you off if you wish it,” I hastened to say. “Only I must ask you to remain on board till this afternoon. I can’t leave Mr. Burns absolutely by himself in the ship for hours.”
He softened at once and assured me with a smile and in his natural pleasant voice that he understood that very well.
When I returned on deck everything was ready for the removal of the men. It was the last ordeal of that episode which had been maturing and tempering my character—though I did not know it.
It was awful. They passed under my eyes one after another—each of them an embodied reproach of the bitterest kind, till I felt a sort of revolt wake up in me. Poor Frenchy had gone suddenly under. He was carried past me insensible, his comic face horribly flushed and as if swollen, breathing stertorously. He looked more like Mr. Punch than ever; a disgracefully intoxicated Mr. Punch.
The austere Gambril, on the contrary, had improved temporarily. He insisted on walking on his own feet to the rail—of course with assistance on each side of him. But he gave way to a sudden panic at the moment of being swung over the side and began to wail pitifully:
“Don’t let them drop me, sir. Don’t let them drop me, sir!” While I kept on shouting to him in most soothing accents: “All right, Gambril. They won’t! They won’t!”
It was no doubt very ridiculous. The bluejackets on our deck were grinning quietly, while even Ransome himself (much to the fore in lending a hand) had to enlarge his wistful smile for a fleeting moment.
I left for the shore in the steam pinnace, and on looking back beheld Mr. Burns actually standing up by the taffrail, still in his enormous woolly overcoat. The bright sunlight brought out his weirdness amazingly. He looked like a frightful and elaborate scarecrow set up on the poop of a death-stricken ship, set up to keep the seabirds from the corpses.
Our story had got about already in town and everybody on shore was most kind. The Marine Office let me off the port dues, and as there happened to be a shipwrecked crew staying in the Home I had no difficulty in obtaining as many men as I wanted. But when I inquired if I could see Captain Ellis for a moment I was told in accents of pity for my ignorance that our deputy-Neptune had retired and gone home on a pension about three weeks after I left the port. So I suppose that my appointment was the last act, outside the daily routine, of his official life.
It is strange how on coming ashore I was struck by the springy step, the lively eyes, the strong vitality of every one I met. It impressed me enormously. And amongst those I met there was Captain Giles, of course. It would have been very extraordinary if I had not met him. A prolonged stroll in the business part of the town was the regular employment of all his mornings when he was ashore.
I caught the glitter of the gold watch-chain across his chest ever so far away. He radiated benevolence.
“What is it I hear?” he queried with a “kind uncle” smile, after shaking hands. “Twenty-one days from Bangkok?”
“Is this all you’ve heard?” I said. “You must come to tiffin with me. I want you to know exactly what you have let me in for.”
He hesitated for almost a minute.
“Well—I will,” he said condescendingly at last.
We turned into the hotel. I found to my surprise that I could eat quite a lot. Then over the cleared table-cloth I unfolded to Captain Giles the history of these twenty days in all its professional and emotional aspects, while he smoked patiently the big cigar I had given him.
Then he observed sagely:
“You must feel jolly well tired by this time.”
“No,” I said. “Not tired. But I’ll tell you, Captain Giles, how I feel. I feel old. And I must be. All of you on shore look to me just a lot of skittish youngsters that have never known a care in the world.”
He didn’t smile. He looked insufferably exemplary. He declared:
“That will pass. But you do look older—it’s a fact.”
“Aha!” I said.
“No! No! The truth is that one must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.”
“Live at half-speed,” I murmured perversely. “Not everybody can do that.”
“You’ll be glad enough presently if you can keep going even at that rate,” he retorted with his air of conscious virtue. “And there’s another thing: a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience and all that sort of thing. Why—what else would you have to fight against.”
I kept silent. I don’t know what he saw in my face but he asked abruptly:
“Why—you aren’t faint-hearted?”
“God only knows, Captain Giles,” was my sincere answer.
“That’s all right,” he said calmly. “You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything—and that’s what so many of them youngsters don’t understand.”
“Well, I am no longer a youngster.”
“No,” he conceded. “Are you leaving soon?”
“I am going on board directly,” I said. “I shall pick up one of my anchors and heave in to half-cable on the other directly my new crew comes on board and I shall be off at daylight to-morrow!”
“You will,” grunted Captain Giles approvingly, “that’s the way. You’ll do.”
“What did you think? That I would want to take a week ashore for a rest?” I said, irritated by his tone. “There’s no rest for me till she’s out in the Indian Ocean and not much of it even then.”
He puffed at his cigar moodily, as if transformed.
“Yes. That’s what it amounts to,” he said in a musing tone. It was as if a ponderous curtain had rolled up disclosing an unexpected Captain Giles. But it was only for a moment, just the time to let him add, “Precious little rest in life for anybody. Better not think of it.”
We rose, left the hotel, and parted from each other in the street with a warm handshake, just as he began to interest me for the first time in our intercourse.
The first thing I saw when I got back to the ship was Ransome on the quarter-deck sitting quietly on his neatly lashed sea-chest.
I beckoned him to follow me into the saloon where I sat down to write a letter of recommendation for him to a man I knew on shore.
When finished I pushed it across the table. “It may be of some good to you when you leave the hospital.”
He took it, put it in his pocket. His eyes were looking away from me—nowhere. His face was anxiously set.
“How are you feeling now?” I asked.
“I don’t feel bad now, sir,” he answered stiffly. “But I am afraid of its coming on. . . .” The wistful smile came back on his lips for a moment. “I—I am in a blue funk about my heart, sir.”
I approached him with extended hand. His eyes not looking at me had a strained expression. He was like a man listening for a warning call.
“Won’t you shake hands, Ransome?” I said gently.
He exclaimed, flushed up dusky red, gave my hand a hard wrench—and next moment, left alone in the cabin, I listened to him going up the companion stairs cautiously, step by step, in mortal fear of starting into sudden anger our common enemy it was his hard fate to carry consciously within his faithful breast.
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