On turning to descend Massy perceived the head of Sterne the mate
loitering, with his sly confident smile, his red mustaches and blinking
eyes, at the foot of the ladder.
Sterne had been a junior in one of the larger shipping concerns before
joining the Sofala. He had thrown up his berth, he said, "on general
principles." The promotion in the employ was very slow, he complained,
and he thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit in the world.
It seemed as though nobody would ever die or leave the firm; they all
stuck fast in their berths till they got mildewed; he was tired of
waiting; and he feared that when a vacancy did occur the best servants
were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides, the captain he
had to serve under--Captain Provost--was an unaccountable sort of man,
and, he fancied, had taken a dislike to him for some reason or other.
For doing rather more than his bare duty as likely as not. When he
had done anything wrong he could take a talking to, like a man; but
he expected to be treated like a man too, and not to be addressed
invariably as though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost plump
and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and Captain Provost, in a
most scornful way, had told him that he was a perfect officer, and that
if he disliked the way he was being spoken to there was the gangway--he
could take himself off ashore at once. But everybody knew what sort of
man Captain Provost was. It was no use appealing to the office. Captain
Provost had too much influence in the employ. All the same, they had to
give him a good character. He made bold to say there was nothing in the
world against him, and, as he had happened to hear that the mate of the
Sofala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he
thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. . . .
He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-faced, thin-flanked,
throwing out his lean chest; and had recited his little tale with an
open and manly assurance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,
his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming mustache; his eyebrows
were straight, furry, of a chestnut color, and the directness of his
frank gaze seemed to tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley
had engaged him temporarily; then, the other man having been ordered
home by the doctors, he had remained for the next trip, and then the
next. He had now attained permanency, and the performance of his duties
was marked by an air of serious, single-minded application. Directly
he was spoken to, he began to smile attentively, with a great deference
expressed in his whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking
which went on all the time something quizzical, as though he had
possessed the secret of some universal joke cheating all creation and
impenetrable to other mortals.
Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step by step; when the
chief engineer had reached the deck he swung about, and they found
themselves face to face. Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar,
they confronted each other as if there had been something between
them--something else than the bright strip of sunlight that, falling
through the wide lacing of two awnings, cut crosswise the narrow
planking of the deck and separated their feet as it were a stream;
something profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unexpressed
understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort of fear.
At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking forward his
scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the rest of his face, murmured--
"You've seen? He grazed! You've seen?"
Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow, fleshy countenance,
replied in the same pitch--
"Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been stuck fast in the
mud."
"Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course a shipowner may say
what he jolly well pleases on his own deck. That's all right; but I beg
to . . ."
"Get out of my way!"
The other had a slight start, the impulse of suppressed indignation
perhaps, but held his ground. Massy's downward glance wandered right and
left, as though the deck all round Sterne had been bestrewn with eggs
that must not be broken, and he had looked irritably for places where
he could set his feet in flight. In the end he too did not move, though
there was plenty of room to pass on.
"I heard you say up there," went on the mate--"and a very just remark it
was too--that there's always something wrong. . . ."
"Eavesdropping is what's wrong with _you_, Mr. Sterne."
"Now, if you would only listen to me for a moment, Mr. Massy, sir, I
could . . ."
"You are a sneak," interrupted Massy in a great hurry, and even managed
to get so far as to repeat, "a common sneak," before the mate had broken
in argumentatively--
"Now, sir, what is it you want? You want . . ."
"I want--I want," stammered Massy, infuriated and astonished--"I want.
How do you know that I want anything? How dare you? . . . What do you
mean? . . . What are you after--you . . ."
"Promotion." Sterne silenced him with a sort of candid bravado. The
engineer's round soft cheeks quivered still, but he said quietly
enough--
"You are only worrying my head off," and Sterne met him with a confident
little smile.
"A chap in business I know (well up in the world he is now) used to tell
me that this was the proper way. 'Always push on to the front,' he would
say. 'Keep yourself well before your boss. Interfere whenever you get a
chance. Show him what you know. Worry him into seeing you.' That was his
advice. Now I know no other boss than you here. You are the owner, and
no one else counts for _that_ much in my eyes. See, Mr. Massy? I want to
get on. I make no secret of it that I am one of the sort that means to
get on. These are the men to make use of, sir. You haven't arrived at
the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out--I dare say."
"Worry your boss in order to get on," mumbled Massy, as if awestruck by
the irreverent originality of the idea. "I shouldn't wonder if this was
just what the Blue Anchor people kicked you out of the employ for. Is
that what you call getting on? You shall get on in the same way here if
you aren't careful--I can promise you."
At this Sterne hung his head, thoughtful, perplexed, winking hard at
the deck. All his attempts to enter into confidential relations with
his owner had led of late to nothing better than these dark threats
of dismissal; and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into a
hesitating silence as though he were not sure that the proper time for
defying it had come. On this occasion he seemed to have lost his tongue
for a moment, and Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with
an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it by stepping
aside. He turned then swiftly, opening his mouth very wide as if to
shout something after the engineer, but seemed to think better of it.
Always--as he was ready to confess--on the lookout for an opening to
get on, it had become an instinct with him to watch the conduct of his
immediate superiors for something "that one could lay hold of." It was
his belief that no skipper in the world would keep his command for a
day if only the owners could be "made to know." This romantic and
naive theory had led him into trouble more than once, but he remained
incorrigible; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that
whenever he joined a ship the intention of ousting his commander out
of the berth and taking his place was always present at the back of his
head, as a matter of course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours
with the reveries of careful plans and compromising discoveries--the
dreams of his sleep with images of lucky turns and favorable accidents.
Skippers had been known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing
could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing what he's made
of. They also would tumble overboard sometimes: he had heard of one or
two such cases. Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally,
he was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single one of them
would stand the test of careful watching by a man who "knew what's what"
and who kept his eyes "skinned pretty well" all the time.
After he had gained a permanent footing on board the Sofala he allowed
his perennial hope to rise high. To begin with, it was a great advantage
to have an old man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the
nature of things was likely to give up the job before long from one
cause or another. Sterne was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that
he did not seem anyway near being past his work yet. Still, these
old men go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the
owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal and steadiness.
Sterne never for a moment doubted the obvious nature of his own merits
(he was really an excellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit
alone does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must have some push
in him, and must keep his wits at work too to help him forward. He made
up his mind to inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done
at all; not indeed estimating the command of the Sofala as a very great
catch, but for the reason that, out East especially, to make a start is
everything, and one command leads to another.
He began by promising himself to behave with great circumspection;
Massy's somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside
one's usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to
realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an
exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagination penetrated it
quickly; the feeling that there was in it an element which eluded his
grasp exasperated his impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an
end, then another, and he had begun his third before he saw an opening
by which he could step in with any sort of effect. It had all been very
queer and very obscure; something had been going on near him, as if
separated by a chasm from the common life and the working routine of
the ship, which was exactly like the life and the routine of any other
coasting steamer of that class.
Then one day he made his discovery.
It came to him after all these weeks of watchful observation and puzzled
surmises, suddenly, like the long-sought solution of a riddle that
suggests itself to the mind in a flash. Not with the same authority,
however. Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remaining
thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake it off with
self-contumely, as though it had been the product of an unhealthy bias
towards the Incredible, the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of--the Mad!
This--the illuminating moment--had occurred the trip before, on the
return passage. They had just left a place of call on the mainland
called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a
massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky
strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny
creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the
coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,
seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering
fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across the wide opening
the nearest of a group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy
yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the hummocky tops
of other islets peeped out motionless above the water of the channels
between, scoured tumultuously by the breeze.
The usual track of the Sofala both going and returning on every trip led
her for a few miles along this reefinfested region. She followed a broad
lane of water, dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the
earth's crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks run in disorder
upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals. Some of these fragments of land
appeared, indeed, no bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat,
lay awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts of stone;
several, heavily timbered and round at the base, emerged in squat domes
of deep green foliage that shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch
of cloud shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally season. The
thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently over that cluster; it turned
then shadowy in its whole extent; it turned more dark, and as if more
still in the play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals
of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished--dissolving utterly at times
in the thick rain--to reappear clear-cut and black in the stormy light
against the gray sheet of the cloud--scattered on the slaty round table
of the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of years, unfretted
by the strife of the world, there it lay unchanged as on that day, four
hundred years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of a
high-pooped caravel.
It was one of these secluded spots that may be found on the busy sea,
as on land you come sometimes upon the clustered houses of a hamlet
untouched by men's restlessness, untouched by their need, by their
thought, and as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted
generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of seafowl, urging
their way from all the points of the horizon to sleep on the outer rocks
of the group, unrolled the converging evolutions of their flight in
long somber streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating cloud of
their wings soared and stooped over the pinnacles of the rocks, over
the rocks slender like spires, squat like martello towers; over the
pyramidal heaps like fallen ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders
showing like a wall of stones battered to pieces and scorched by
lightning--with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach. The
noise of their continuous and violent screaming filled the air.
This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from Batu Beru; it
would meet her on quiet evenings, a pitiless and savage clamor enfeebled
by distance, the clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for
a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it especially on board;
it was the voice of their ship's unerring landfall, ending the steady
stretch of a hundred miles. She had made good her course, she had run
her distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by one, the
points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . . and the cloud of birds
hovered--the restless cloud emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the
sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,
of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a flaw.
But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she
would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night.
All would be still, dumb, almost invisible--but for the blotting out of
the low constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses of the
islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst the dark spaces of the
heaven: and the ship's three lights, resembling three stars--the red and
the green with the white above--her three lights, like three companion
stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving course for the
passage at the southern end of the group. Sometimes there were human
eyes open to watch them come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber
void; the eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a reef.
He thought drowsily: "Ha! The fire-ship that once in every moon goes in
and comes out of Pangu bay." More he did not know of her. And just as he
had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating the calm water
a mile and a half away, the time would come for the Sofala to alter her
course, the lights would swing off him their triple beam--and disappear.
A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast tribe of
long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove for their living in this
lonely wilderness of islets, lying like an abandoned outwork of the land
at the gates of the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the
water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky
canoes, scooped out of the trunk of a tree: the forms of the bottom
undulated slightly to the dip of a paddle; and the men seemed to hang
in the air, they seemed to hang inclosed within the fibers of a dark,
sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, unsteady, pellucid, green
air above the shoals.
Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried up in the sunshine;
their lives ran out silently; the homes where they were born, went to
rest, and died--flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with a
few ragged mats--were hidden out of sight from the open sea. No glow
of their household fires ever kindled for a seaman a red spark upon the
blind night of the group: and the calms of the coast, the flaming long
calms of the equator, the unbreathing, concentrated calms like the deep
introspection of a passionate nature, brooded awfully for days and weeks
together over the unchangeable inheritance of their children; till at
last the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole, till
the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thickened, about the legs of
lean men with girded loins, wading thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the
shallows. And it would happen now and then that the Sofala, through some
delay in one of the ports of call, would heave in sight making for Pangu
bay as late as noonday.
Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her smoke would arise
mysteriously from an empty point on the clear line of sea and sky. The
taciturn fishermen within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards
the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny beaches, the
brown figures of men, women, and children grubbing in the sand in search
of turtles' eggs, would rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over
the eyes, to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve
off--and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes
followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going
at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the
very bosom of the earth.
On such days the luminous sea would give no sign of the dangers lurking
on both sides of her path. Everything remained still, crushed by the
overwhelming power of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the
sunshine,--the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resembling spires,
the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of islets resembling beehives,
resembling mole-hills, the islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the
contours of ivy-clad towers,--would stand reflected together upside
down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony disposed on the
silvered plate-glass of a mirror.
The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the whole at once in
the spume of the windward breakers, as if in a sudden cloudlike burst
of steam; and the clear water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages.
The provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam the wide
base of the group; the submerged level of broken waste and refuse left
over from the building of the coast near by, projecting its dangerous
spurs, all awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked long
spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of froth and stones.
And even nothing more than a brisk breeze--as on that morning, the
voyage before, when the Sofala left Pangu bay early, and Mr. Sterne's
discovery was to blossom out like a flower of incredible and evil aspect
from the tiny seed of instinctive suspicion,--even such a breeze had
enough strength to tear the placid mask from the face of the sea. To
Sterne, gazing with indifference, it had been like a revelation to
behold for the first time the dangers marked by the hissing livid
patches on the water as distinctly as on the engraved paper of a chart.
It came into his mind that this was the sort of day most favorable for a
stranger attempting the passage: a clear day, just windy enough for the
sea to break on every ledge, buoying, as it were, the channel plainly
to the sight; whereas during a calm you had nothing to depend on but the
compass and the practiced judgment of your eye. And yet the successive
captains of the Sofala had had to take her through at night more than
once. Nowadays you could not afford to throw away six or seven hours
of a steamer's time. That you couldn't. But then use is everything, and
with proper care . . . The channel was broad and safe enough; the main
point was to hit upon the entrance correctly in the dark--for if a man
got himself involved in that stretch of broken water over yonder he
would never get out with a whole ship--if he ever got out at all.
This was Sterne's last train of thought independent of the great
discovery. He had just seen to the securing of the anchor, and had
remained forward idling away a moment or two. The captain was in charge
on the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away from his survey of
the sea and had leaned his shoulders against the fish davit.
These, properly speaking, were the very last moments of ease he was to
know on board the Sofala. All the instants that came after were to be
pregnant with purpose and intolerable with perplexity. No more idle,
random thoughts; the discovery would put them on the rack, till
sometimes he wished to goodness he had been fool enough not to make
it at all. And yet, if his chance to get on rested on the discovery of
"something wrong," he could not have hoped for a greater stroke of luck.