With her anchor at the bow and clothed in canvas to her very trucks, my
command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams
and shadows of polished marble. It was impossible to distinguish land
from water in the enigmatical tranquillity of the immense forces of the
world. A sudden impatience possessed me.
"Won't she answer the helm at all?" I said irritably to the man whose
strong brown hands grasping the spokes of the wheel stood out lighted on
the darkness; like a symbol of mankind's claim to the direction of its
own fate.
He answered me.
"Yes, sir. She's coming-to slowly."
"Let her head come up to south."
"Aye, aye, sir."
I paced the poop. There was not a sound but that of my footsteps, till
the man spoke again.
"She is at south now, sir."
I felt a slight tightness of the chest before I gave out the first
course of my first command to the silent night, heavy with dew and
sparkling with stars. There was a finality in the act committing me to
the endless vigilance of my lonely task.
"Steady her head at that," I said at last. "The course is south."
"South, sir," echoed the man.
I sent below the second mate and his watch and remained in charge,
walking the deck through the chill, somnolent hours that precede the
dawn.
Slight puffs came and went, and whenever they were strong enough to wake
up the black water the murmur alongside ran through my very heart in
a delicate crescendo of delight and died away swiftly. I was bitterly
tired. The very stars seemed weary of waiting for daybreak. It came at
last with a mother-of-pearl sheen at the zenith, such as I had never
seen before in the tropics, unglowing, almost gray, with a strange
reminder of high latitudes.
The voice of the look-out man hailed from forward:
"Land on the port bow, sir."
"All right."
Leaning on the rail I never even raised my eyes.
The motion of the ship was imperceptible. Presently Ransome brought me
the cup of morning coffee. After I had drunk it I looked ahead, and
in the still streak of very bright pale orange light I saw the land
profiled flatly as if cut out of black paper and seeming to float on
the water as light as cork. But the rising sun turned it into mere dark
vapour, a doubtful, massive shadow trembling in the hot glare.
The watch finished washing decks. I went below and stopped at Mr. Burns'
door (he could not bear to have it shut), but hesitated to speak to him
till he moved his eyes. I gave him the news.
"Sighted Cape Liant at daylight. About fifteen miles."
He moved his lips then, but I heard no sound till I put my ear down, and
caught the peevish comment: "This is crawling. . . . No luck."
"Better luck than standing still, anyhow," I pointed out resignedly, and
left him to whatever thoughts or fancies haunted his awful immobility.
Later that morning, when relieved by my second officer, I threw myself
on my couch and for some three hours or so I really found oblivion. It
was so perfect that on waking up I wondered where I was. Then came the
immense relief of the thought: on board my ship! At sea! At sea!
Through the port-holes I beheld an unruffled, sun-smitten horizon. The
horizon of a windless day. But its spaciousness alone was enough to give
me a sense of a fortunate escape, a momentary exultation of freedom.
I stepped out into the saloon with my heart lighter than it had been for
days. Ransome was at the sideboard preparing to lay the table for the
first sea dinner of the passage. He turned his head, and something in
his eyes checked my modest elation.
Instinctively I asked: "What is it now?" not expecting in the least the
answer I got. It was given with that sort of contained serenity which
was characteristic of the man.
"I am afraid we haven't left all sickness behind us, sir."
"We haven't! What's the matter?"
He told me then that two of our men had been taken bad with fever in
the night. One of them was burning and the other was shivering, but he
thought that it was pretty much the same thing. I thought so, too. I
felt shocked by the news. "One burning, the other shivering, you say?
No. We haven't left the sickness behind. Do they look very ill?"
"Middling bad, sir." Ransome's eyes gazed steadily into mine. We
exchanged smiles. Ransome's a little wistful, as usual, mine no doubt
grim enough, to correspond with my secret exasperation.
I asked:
"Was there any wind at all this morning?"
"Can hardly say that, sir. We've moved all the time though. The land
ahead seems a little nearer."
That was it. A little nearer. Whereas if we had only had a little more
wind, only a very little more, we might, we should, have been abreast
of Liant by this time and increasing our distance from that contaminated
shore. And it was not only the distance. It seemed to me that a stronger
breeze would have blown away the contamination which clung to the ship.
It obviously did cling to the ship. Two men. One burning, one shivering.
I felt a distinct reluctance to go and look at them. What was the good?
Poison is poison. Tropical fever is tropical fever. But that it
should have stretched its claw after us over the sea seemed to me an
extraordinary and unfair license. I could hardly believe that it could
be anything worse than the last desperate pluck of the evil from which
we were escaping into the clean breath of the sea. If only that breath
had been a little stronger. However, there was the quinine against the
fever. I went into the spare cabin where the medicine chest was kept to
prepare two doses. I opened it full of faith as a man opens a miraculous
shrine. The upper part was inhabited by a collection of bottles, all
square-shouldered and as like each other as peas. Under that orderly
array there were two drawers, stuffed as full of things as one could
imagine--paper packages, bandages, cardboard boxes officially labelled.
The lower of the two, in one of its compartments, contained our
provision of quinine.
There were five bottles, all round and all of a size. One was about
a third full. The other four remained still wrapped up in paper and
sealed. But I did not expect to see an envelope lying on top of them. A
square envelope, belonging, in fact, to the ship's stationery.
It lay so that I could see it was not closed down, and on picking it
up and turning it over I perceived that it was addressed to myself. It
contained a half-sheet of notepaper, which I unfolded with a queer sense
of dealing with the uncanny, but without any excitement as people meet
and do extraordinary things in a dream.
"My dear Captain," it began, but I ran to the signature. The writer was
the doctor. The date was that of the day on which, returning from my
visit to Mr. Burns in the hospital, I had found the excellent doctor
waiting for me in the cabin; and when he told me that he had been
putting in time inspecting the medicine chest for me. How bizarre! While
expecting me to come in at any moment he had been amusing himself by
writing me a letter, and then as I came in had hastened to stuff it into
the medicine-chest drawer. A rather incredible proceeding. I turned to
the text in wonder.
In a large, hurried, but legible hand the good, sympathetic man for some
reason, either of kindness or more likely impelled by the irresistible
desire to express his opinion, with which he didn't want to damp my
hopes before, was warning me not to put my trust in the beneficial
effects of a change from land to sea. "I didn't want to add to your
worries by discouraging your hopes," he wrote. "I am afraid that,
medically speaking, the end of your troubles is not yet." In short,
he expected me to have to fight a probable return of tropical illness.
Fortunately I had a good provision of quinine. I should put my trust in
that, and administer it steadily, when the ship's health would certainly
improve.
I crumpled up the letter and rammed it into my pocket. Ransome carried
off two big doses to the men forward. As to myself, I did not go on deck
as yet. I went instead to the door of Mr. Burns' room, and gave him that
news, too.
It was impossible to say the effect it had on him. At first I thought
that he was speechless. His head lay sunk in the pillow. He moved his
lips enough, however, to assure me that he was getting much stronger; a
statement shockingly untrue on the face of it.
That afternoon I took my watch as a matter of course. A great
over-heated stillness enveloped the ship and seemed to hold her
motionless in a flaming ambience composed in two shades of blue. Faint,
hot puffs eddied nervelessly from her sails. And yet she moved. She must
have. For, as the sun was setting, we had drawn abreast of Cape Liant
and dropped it behind us: an ominous retreating shadow in the last
gleams of twilight.
In the evening, under the crude glare of his lamp, Mr. Burns seemed to
have come more to the surface of his bedding. It was as if a
depressing hand had been lifted off him. He answered my few words by a
comparatively long, connected speech. He asserted himself strongly.
If he escaped being smothered by this stagnant heat, he said, he was
confident that in a very few days he would be able to come up on deck
and help me.
While he was speaking I trembled lest this effort of energy should leave
him lifeless before my eyes. But I cannot deny that there was something
comforting in his willingness. I made a suitable reply, but pointed out
to him that the only thing that could really help us was wind--a fair
wind.
He rolled his head impatiently on the pillow. And it was not comforting
in the least to hear him begin to mutter crazily about the late captain,
that old man buried in latitude 8 d 20', right in our way--ambushed at
the entrance of the Gulf.
"Are you still thinking of your late captain, Mr. Burns?" I said. "I
imagine the dead feel no animosity against the living. They care nothing
for them."
"You don't know that one," he breathed out feebly.
"No. I didn't know him, and he didn't know me. And so he can't have any
grievance against me, anyway."
"Yes. But there's all the rest of us on board," he insisted.
I felt the inexpugnable strength of common sense being insidiously
menaced by this gruesome, by this insane, delusion. And I said:
"You mustn't talk so much. You will tire yourself."
"And there is the ship herself," he persisted in a whisper.
"Now, not a word more," I said, stepping in and laying my hand on his
cool forehead. It proved to me that this atrocious absurdity was rooted
in the man himself and not in the disease, which, apparently, had
emptied him of every power, mental and physical, except that one fixed
idea.
I avoided giving Mr. Burns any opening for conversation for the next few
days. I merely used to throw him a hasty, cheery word when passing his
door. I believe that if he had had the strength he would have called out
after me more than once. But he hadn't the strength. Ransome, however,
observed to me one afternoon that the mate "seemed to be picking up
wonderfully."
"Did he talk any nonsense to you of late?" I asked casually.
"No, sir." Ransome was startled by the direct question; but, after a
pause, he added equably: "He told me this morning, sir, that he was
sorry he had to bury our late captain right in the ship's way, as one
may say, out of the Gulf."
"Isn't this nonsense enough for you?" I asked, looking confidently at
the intelligent, quiet face on which the secret uneasiness in the man's
breast had thrown a transparent veil of care.
Ransome didn't know. He had not given a thought to the matter. And with
a faint smile he flitted away from me on his never-ending duties, with
his usual guarded activity.
Two more days passed. We had advanced a little way--a very little
way--into the larger space of the Gulf of Siam. Seizing eagerly upon
the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of
Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has
got perhaps to be paid for in some way. I had held, professionally,
a review of my chances. I was competent enough for that. At least, I
thought so. I had a general sense of my preparedness which only a man
pursuing a calling he loves can know. That feeling seemed to me the most
natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing. I imagined I could
not have lived without it.
I don't know what I expected. Perhaps nothing else than that
special intensity of existence which is the quintessence of youthful
aspirations. Whatever I expected I did not expect to be beset by
hurricanes. I knew better than that. In the Gulf of Siam there are no
hurricanes. But neither did I expect to find myself bound hand and foot
to the hopeless extent which was revealed to me as the days went on.
Not that the evil spell held us always motionless. Mysterious currents
drifted us here and there, with a stealthy power made manifest only by
the changing vistas of the islands fringing the east shore of the Gulf.
And there were winds, too, fitful and deceitful. They raised hopes only
to dash them into the bitterest disappointment, promises of advance
ending in lost ground, expiring in sighs, dying into dumb stillness in
which the currents had it all their own way--their own inimical way.
The island of Koh-ring, a great, black, upheaved ridge amongst a lot of
tiny islets, lying upon the glassy water like a triton amongst minnows,
seemed to be the centre of the fatal circle. It seemed impossible to get
away from it. Day after day it remained in sight. More than once, in
a favourable breeze, I would take its bearings in the fast-ebbing
twilight, thinking that it was for the last time. Vain hope. A night of
fitful airs would undo the gains of temporary favour, and the rising
sun would throw out the black relief of Koh-ring looking more barren,
inhospitable, and grim than ever.
"It's like being bewitched, upon my word," I said once to Mr. Burns,
from my usual position in the doorway.
He was sitting up in his bed-place. He was progressing toward the world
of living men; if he could hardly have been said to have rejoined it
yet. He nodded to me his frail and bony head in a wisely mysterious
assent.
"Oh, yes, I know what you mean," I said. "But you cannot expect me
to believe that a dead man has the power to put out of joint the
meteorology of this part of the world. Though indeed it seems to have
gone utterly wrong. The land and sea breezes have got broken up into
small pieces. We cannot depend upon them for five minutes together."
"It won't be very long now before I can come up on deck," muttered Mr.
Burns, "and then we shall see."
Whether he meant this for a promise to grapple with supernatural evil I
couldn't tell. At any rate, it wasn't the kind of assistance I needed.
On the other hand, I had been living on deck practically night and day
so as to take advantage of every chance to get my ship a little more to
the southward. The mate, I could see, was extremely weak yet, and not
quite rid of his delusion, which to me appeared but a symptom of his
disease. At all events, the hopefulness of an invalid was not to be
discouraged. I said:
"You will be most welcome there, I am sure, Mr. Burns. If you go on
improving at this rate you'll be presently one of the healthiest men in
the ship."
This pleased him, but his extreme emaciation converted his
self-satisfied smile into a ghastly exhibition of long teeth under the
red moustache.
"Aren't the fellows improving, sir?" he asked soberly, with an extremely
sensible expression of anxiety on his face.
I answered him only with a vague gesture and went away from the door.
The fact was that disease played with us capriciously very much as the
winds did. It would go from one man to another with a lighter or heavier
touch, which always left its mark behind, staggering some, knocking
others over for a time, leaving this one, returning to another, so that
all of them had now an invalidish aspect and a hunted, apprehensive look
in their eyes; while Ransome and I, the only two completely untouched,
went amongst them assiduously distributing quinine. It was a double
fight. The adverse weather held us in front and the disease pressed on
our rear. I must say that the men were very good. The constant toil of
trimming yards they faced willingly. But all spring was out of their
limbs, and as I looked at them from the poop I could not keep from my
mind the dreadful impression that they were moving in poisoned air.
Down below, in his cabin, Mr. Burns had advanced so far as not only to
be able to sit up, but even to draw up his legs. Clasping them with bony
arms, like an animated skeleton, he emitted deep, impatient sighs.
"The great thing to do, sir," he would tell me on every occasion, when I
gave him the chance, "the great thing is to get the ship past 8 d 20' of
latitude. Once she's past that we're all right."
At first I used only to smile at him, though, God knows, I had not much
heart left for smiles. But at last I lost my patience.
"Oh, yes. The latitude 8 d 20'. That's where you buried your late
captain, isn't it?" Then with severity: "Don't you think, Mr. Burns,
it's about time you dropped all that nonsense?"
He rolled at me his deep-sunken eyes in a glance of invincible
obstinacy. But for the rest he only muttered, just loud enough for me
to hear, something about "Not surprised . . . find . . . play us some
beastly trick yet. . . ."
Such passages as this were not exactly wholesome for my resolution. The
stress of adversity was beginning to tell on me. At the same time, I
felt a contempt for that obscure weakness of my soul. I said to myself
disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the
smallest degree my fortitude.
I didn't know then how soon and from what unexpected direction it would
be attacked.
It was the very next day. The sun had risen clear of the southern
shoulder of Koh-ring, which still hung, like an evil attendant, on our
port quarter. It was intensely hateful to my sight. During the night
we had been heading all round the compass, trimming the yards again and
again, to what I fear must have been for the most part imaginary puffs
of air. Then just about sunrise we got for an hour an inexplicable,
steady breeze, right in our teeth. There was no sense in it. It fitted
neither with the season of the year nor with the secular experience
of seamen as recorded in books, nor with the aspect of the sky. Only
purposeful malevolence could account for it. It sent us travelling at
a great pace away from our proper course; and if we had been out on
pleasure sailing bent it would have been a delightful breeze, with the
awakened sparkle of the sea, with the sense of motion and a feeling of
unwonted freshness. Then, all at once, as if disdaining to carry farther
the sorry jest, it dropped and died out completely in less than five
minutes. The ship's head swung where it listed; the stilled sea took on
the polish of a steel plate in the calm.
I went below, not because I meant to take some rest, but simply because
I couldn't bear to look at it just then. The indefatigable Ransome was
busy in the saloon. It had become a regular practice with him to give
me an informal health report in the morning. He turned away from the
sideboard with his usual pleasant, quiet gaze. No shadow rested on his
intelligent forehead.
"There are a good many of them middling bad this morning, sir," he said
in a calm tone.
"What? All knocked out?"
"Only two actually in their bunks, sir, but--"
"It's the last night that has done for them. We have had to pull and
haul all the blessed time."
"I heard, sir. I had a mind to come out and help only, you know. . . ."
"Certainly not. You mustn't. . . . The fellows lie at night about the
decks, too. It isn't good for them."
Ransome assented. But men couldn't be looked after like children.
Moreover, one could hardly blame them for trying for such coolness and
such air as there was to be found on deck. He himself, of course, knew
better.
He was, indeed, a reasonable man. Yet it would have been hard to say
that the others were not. The last few days had been for us like the
ordeal of the fiery furnace. One really couldn't quarrel with their
common, imprudent humanity making the best of the moments of relief,
when the night brought in the illusion of coolness and the starlight
twinkled through the heavy, dew-laden air. Moreover, most of them were
so weakened that hardly anything could be done without everybody that
could totter mustering on the braces. No, it was no use remonstrating
with them. But I fully believed that quinine was of very great use
indeed.
I believed in it. I pinned my faith to it. It would save the men, the
ship, break the spell by its medicinal virtue, make time of no account,
the weather but a passing worry and, like a magic powder working against
mysterious malefices, secure the first passage of my first command
against the evil powers of calms and pestilence. I looked upon it as
more precious than gold, and unlike gold, of which there ever hardly
seems to be enough anywhere, the ship had a sufficient store of it. I
went in to get it with the purpose of weighing out doses. I stretched my
hand with the feeling of a man reaching for an unfailing panacea, took
up a fresh bottle and unrolled the wrapper, noticing as I did so that
the ends, both top and bottom, had come unsealed. . . .
But why record all the swift steps of the appalling discovery? You have
guessed the truth already. There was the wrapper, the bottle, and the
white powder inside, some sort of powder! But it wasn't quinine. One
look at it was quite enough. I remember that at the very moment of
picking up the bottle, before I even dealt with the wrapper, the weight
of the object I had in my hand gave me an instant premonition. Quinine
is as light as feathers; and my nerves must have been exasperated into
an extraordinary sensibility. I let the bottle smash itself on the
floor. The stuff, whatever it was, felt gritty under the sole of my
shoe. I snatched up the next bottle and then the next. The weight alone
told the tale. One after another they fell, breaking at my feet, not
because I threw them down in my dismay, but slipping through my fingers
as if this disclosure were too much for my strength.
It is a fact that the very greatness of a mental shock helps one to bear
up against it by producing a sort of temporary insensibility. I came out
of the state-room stunned, as if something heavy had dropped on my head.
From the other side of the saloon, across the table, Ransome, with a
duster in his hand, stared open-mouthed. I don't think that I looked
wild. It is quite possible that I appeared to be in a hurry because
I was instinctively hastening up on deck. An example this of training
become instinct. The difficulties, the dangers, the problems of a ship
at sea must be met on deck.
To this fact, as it were of nature, I responded instinctively; which
may be taken as a proof that for a moment I must have been robbed of my
reason.
I was certainly off my balance, a prey to impulse, for at the bottom of
the stairs I turned and flung myself at the doorway of Mr. Burns' cabin.
The wildness of his aspect checked my mental disorder. He was sitting up
in his bunk, his body looking immensely long, his head drooping a little
sideways, with affected complacency. He flourished, in his trembling
hand, on the end of a forearm no thicker than a walking-stick, a shining
pair of scissors which he tried before my very eyes to jab at his
throat.
I was to a certain extent horrified; but it was rather a secondary sort
of effect, not really strong enough to make me yell at him in some such
manner as: "Stop!" . . . "Heavens!" . . . "What are you doing?"
In reality he was simply overtaxing his returning strength in a shaky
attempt to clip off the thick growth of his red beard. A large towel was
spread over his lap, and a shower of stiff hairs, like bits of copper
wire, was descending on it at every snip of the scissors.
He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams,
one cheek all bushy as if with a swollen flame, the other denuded and
sunken, with the untouched long moustache on that side asserting itself,
lonely and fierce. And while he stared thunderstruck, with the gaping
scissors on his fingers, I shouted my discovery at him fiendishly, in
six words, without comment.