Sterne went down smirking and apparently
not at all disconcerted, but the engineer Massy remained
on the bridge, moving about with uneasy self-assertion.
Everybody on board was his inferior everyone
without exception. He paid their wages and found
them in their food. They ate more of his bread
and pocketed more of his money than they were worth;
and they had no care in the world, while he alone had
to meet all the difficulties of shipowning. When
he contemplated his position in all its menacing entirety,
it seemed to him that he had been for years the prey
of a band of parasites: and for years he had scowled
at everybody connected with the Sofala except, perhaps,
at the Chinese firemen who served to get her along.
Their use was manifest: they were an indispensable
part of the machinery of which he was the master.
When he passed along his decks he
shouldered those he came across brutally; but the
Malay deck hands had learned to dodge out of his way.
He had to bring himself to tolerate them because of
the necessary manual labor of the ship which must
be done. He had to struggle and plan and scheme
to keep the Sofala afloat and what did he
get for it? Not even enough respect. They
could not have given him enough of that if all their
thoughts and all their actions had been directed to
that end. The vanity of possession, the vainglory
of power, had passed away by this time, and there
remained only the material embarrassments, the fear
of losing that position which had turned out not worth
having, and an anxiety of thought which no abject
subservience of men could repay.
He walked up and down. The bridge
was his own after all. He had paid for it; and
with the stem of the pipe in his hand he would stop
short at times as if to listen with a profound and
concentrated attention to the deadened beat of the
engines (his own engines) and the slight grinding
of the steering chains upon the continuous low wash
of water alongside. But for these sounds, the
ship might have been lying as still as if moored to
a bank, and as silent as if abandoned by every living
soul; only the coast, the low coast of mud and mangroves
with the three palms in a bunch at the back, grew
slowly more distinct in its long straight line, without
a single feature to arrest attention. The native
passengers of the Sofala lay about on mats under the
awnings; the smoke of her funnel seemed the only sign
of her life and connected with her gliding motion
in a mysterious manner.
Captain Whalley on his feet, with
a pair of binoculars in his hand and the little Malay
Serang at his elbow, like an old giant attended by
a wizened pigmy, was taking her over the shallow water
of the bar.
This submarine ridge of mud, scoured
by the stream out of the soft bottom of the river
and heaped up far out on the hard bottom of the sea,
was difficult to get over. The alluvial coast
having no distinguishing marks, the bearings of the
crossing-place had to be taken from the shape of the
mountains inland. The guidance of a form flattened
and uneven at the top like a grinder tooth, and of
another smooth, saddle-backed summit, had to be searched
for within the great unclouded glare that seemed to
shift and float like a dry fiery mist, filling the
air, ascending from the water, shrouding the distances,
scorching to the eye. In this veil of light the
near edge of the shore alone stood out almost coal-black
with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty
miles away the serrated range of the interior stretched
across the horizon, its outlines and shades of blue,
faint and tremulous like a background painted on airy
gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable
curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and
the openings of the estuary appeared, shining white,
like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped
clean and sharp out of the body of the land bordered
with mangroves.
On the forepart of the bridge the
giant and the pigmy muttered to each other frequently
in quiet tones. Behind them Massy stood sideways
with an expression of disdain and suspense on his
face. His globular eyes were perfectly motionless,
and he seemed to have forgotten the long pipe he held
in his hand.
On the fore-deck below the bridge,
steeply roofed with the white slopes of the awnings,
a young lascar seaman had clambered outside the rail.
He adjusted quickly a broad band of sail canvas under
his armpits, and throwing his chest against it, leaned
out far over the water. The sleeves of his thin
cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder, bared
his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny
skin like a woman’s. He swung it rigidly
with the rotary and menacing action of a slinger:
the 14-lb. weight hurtled circling in the air, then
suddenly flew ahead as far as the curve of the bow.
The wet thin line swished like scratched silk running
through the dark fingers of the man, and the plunge
of the lead close to the ship’s side made a vanishing
silvery scar upon the golden glitter; then after an
interval the voice of the young Malay uplifted and
long-drawn declared the depth of the water in his
own language.
“Tiga stengah,” he cried
after each splash and pause, gathering the line busily
for another cast. “Tiga stengah,”
which means three fathom and a half. For a mile
or so from seaward there was a uniform depth of water
right up to the bar. “Half-three. Half-three.
Half-three,” and his modulated cry,
returned leisurely and monotonous, like the repeated
call of a bird, seemed to float away in sunshine and
disappear in the spacious silence of the empty sea
and of a lifeless shore lying open, north and south,
east and west, without the stir of a single cloud-shadow
or the whisper of any other voice.
The owner-engineer of the Sofala remained
very still behind the two seamen of different race,
creed, and color; the European with the time-defying
vigor of his old frame, the little Malay, old, too,
but slight and shrunken like a withered brown leaf
blown by a chance wind under the mighty shadow of
the other. Very busy looking forward at the land,
they had not a glance to spare; and Massy, glaring
at them from behind, seemed to resent their attention
to their duty like a personal slight upon himself.
This was unreasonable; but he had
lived in his own world of unreasonable resentments
for many years. At last, passing his moist palm
over the rare lanky wisps of coarse hair on the top
of his yellow head, he began to talk slowly.
“A leadsman, you want!
I suppose that’s your correct mail-boat style.
Haven’t you enough judgment to tell where you
are by looking at the land? Why, before I had
been a twelvemonth in the trade I was up to that trick and
I am only an engineer. I can point to you from
here where the bar is, and I could tell you besides
that you are as likely as not to stick her in the
mud in about five minutes from now; only you would
call it interfering, I suppose. And there’s
that written agreement of ours, that says I mustn’t
interfere.”
His voice stopped. Captain Whalley,
without relaxing the set severity of his features,
moved his lips to ask in a quick mumble
“How near, Serang?”
“Very near now, Tuan,” the Malay muttered
rapidly.
“Dead slow,” said the Captain aloud in
a firm tone.
The Serang snatched at the handle
of the telegraph. A gong clanged down below.
Massy with a scornful snigger walked off and put his
head down the engineroom skylight.
“You may expect some rare fooling
with the engines, Jack,” he bellowed. The
space into which he stared was deep and full of gloom;
and the gray gleams of steel down there seemed cool
after the intense glare of the sea around the ship.
The air, however, came up clammy and hot on his face.
A short hoot on which it would have been impossible
to put any sort of interpretation came from the bottom
cavernously. This was the way in which the second
engineer answered his chief.
He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive
manner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn
concern for his engines that he seemed to have lost
the use of speech. When addressed directly his
only answer would be a grunt or a hoot, according
to the distance. For all the years he had been
in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as
much as a frank Good-morning with any of his shipmates.
He did not seem aware that men came and went in the
world; he did not seem to see them at all. Indeed
he never recognized his ship mates on shore. At
table (the four white men of the Sofala messed together)
he sat looking into his plate dispassionately, but
at the end of the meal would jump up and bolt down
below as if a sudden thought had impelled him to rush
and see whether somebody had not stolen the engines
while he dined. In port at the end of the trip
he went ashore regularly, but no one knew where he
spent his evenings or in what manner. The local
coasting fleet had preserved a wild and incoherent
tale of his infatuation for the wife of a sergeant
in an Irish infantry regiment. The regiment, however,
had done its turn of garrison duty there ages before,
and was gone somewhere to the other side of the earth,
out of men’s knowledge. Twice or perhaps
three times in the course of the year he would take
too much to drink. On these occasions he returned
on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran across
the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like
a tight-rope walker; and locking the door of his cabin,
he would converse and argue with himself the livelong
night in an amazing variety of tones; storm, sneer,
and whine with an inexhaustible persistence. Massy
in his berth next door, raising himself on his elbow,
would discover that his second had remembered the
name of every white man that had passed through the
Sofala for years and years back. He remembered
the names of men that had died, that had gone home,
that had gone to America: he remembered in his
cups the names of men whose connection with the ship
had been so short that Massy had almost forgotten
its circumstances and could barely recall their faces.
The inebriated voice on the other side of the bulkhead
commented upon them all with an extraordinary and ingenious
venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they
had all offended him in some way, and in return he
had found them all out. He muttered darkly; he
laughed sardonically; he crushed them one after another;
but of his chief, Massy, he babbled with an envious
and naïve admiration. Clever scoundrel!
Don’t meet the likes of him every day. Just
look at him. Ha! Great! Ship of his
own. Wouldn’t catch him going wrong.
No fear the beast! And Massy, after
listening with a gratified smile to these artless
tributes to his greatness, would begin to shout, thumping
at the bulkhead with both fists
“Shut up, you lunatic!
Won’t you let me go to sleep, you fool!”
But a half smile of pride lingered
on his lips; outside the solitary lascar told off
for night duty in harbor, perhaps a youth fresh from
a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows
of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble.
His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of
white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who
pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes, beings
with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable
feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives.