For a while after his second’s
answering hoot Massy hung over the engine-room gloomily.
Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred
pounds, had kept his command for three years, might
have been suspected of never having seen that coast
before. He seemed unable to put down his glasses,
as though they had been glued under his contracted
eyebrows. This settled frown gave to his face
an air of invincible and just severity; but his raised
elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration poured
from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly
blazed up at the zenith by the side of the ardent
still globe already there, in whose blinding white
heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust.
From time to time, still holding up
his glasses, he raised his other hand to wipe his
streaming face. The drops rolled down his cheeks,
fell like rain upon the white hairs of his beard,
and brusquely, as if guided by an uncontrollable and
anxious impulse, his arm reached out to the stand
of the engine-room telegraph.
The gong clanged down below.
The balanced vibration of the dead-slow speed ceased
together with every sound and tremor in the ship, as
if the great stillness that reigned upon the coast
had stolen in through her sides of iron and taken
possession of her innermost recesses. The illusion
of perfect immobility seemed to fall upon her from
the luminous blue dome without a stain arching over
a flat sea without a stir. The faint breeze she
had made for herself expired, as if all at once the
air had become too thick to budge; even the slight
hiss of the water on her stem died out. The narrow,
long hull, carrying its way without a ripple, seemed
to approach the shoal water of the bar by stealth.
The plunge of the lead with the mournful, mechanical
cry of the lascar came at longer and longer intervals;
and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their breath.
The Malay at the helm looked fixedly at the compass
card, the Captain and the Serang stared at the coast.
Massy had left the skylight, and,
walking flat-footed, had returned softly to the very
spot on the bridge he had occupied before. A slow,
lingering grin exposed his set of big white teeth:
they gleamed evenly in the shade of the awning like
the keyboard of a piano in a dusky room.
At last, pretending to talk to himself
in excessive astonishment, he said not very loud
“Stop the engines now. What next, I wonder?”
He waited, stooping from the shoulders,
his head bowed, his glance oblique. Then raising
his voice a shade
“If I dared make an absurd remark
I would say that you haven’t the stomach to
. . .”
But a yelling spirit of excitement,
like some frantic soul wandering unsuspected in the
vast stillness of the coast, had seized upon the body
of the lascar at the lead. The languid monotony
of his sing-song changed to a swift, sharp clamor.
The weight flew after a single whir, the line whistled,
splash followed splash in haste. The water had
shoaled, and the man, instead of the drowsy tale of
fathoms, was calling out the soundings in feet.
“Fifteen feet. Fifteen,
fifteen! Fourteen, fourteen . . .”
Captain Whalley lowered the arm holding
the glasses. It descended slowly as if by its
own weight; no other part of his towering body stirred;
and the swift cries with their eager warning note
passed him by as though he had been deaf.
Massy, very still, and turning an
attentive ear, had fastened his eyes upon the silvery,
close-cropped back of the steady old head. The
ship herself seemed to be arrested but for the gradual
decrease of depth under her keel.
“Thirteen feet . . . Thirteen!
Twelve!” cried the leadsman anxiously below
the bridge. And suddenly the barefooted Serang
stepped away noiselessly to steal a glance over the
side.
Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded
blue cotton, an old gray felt hat rammed down on his
head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and
with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no
bigger than a boy of fourteen. There was a childlike
impulsiveness in the curiosity with which he watched
the spread of the voluminous, yellowish convolutions
rolling up from below to the surface of the blue water
like massive clouds driving slowly upwards on the
unfathomable sky. He was not startled at the
sight in the least. It was not doubt, but the
certitude that the keel of the Sofala must be stirring
the mud now, which made him peep over the side.
His peering eyes, set aslant in a
face of the Chinese type, a little old face, immovable,
as if carved in old brown oak, had informed him long
before that the ship was not headed at the bar properly.
Paid off from the Fair Maid, together with the rest
of the crew, after the completion of the sale, he
had hung, in his faded blue suit and floppy gray hat,
about the doors of the Harbor Office, till one day,
seeing Captain Whalley coming along to get a crew
for the Sofala, he had put himself quietly in the
way, with his bare feet in the dust and an upward mute
glance. The eyes of his old commander had fallen
on him favorably it must have been an auspicious
day and in less than half an hour the white
men in the “Ofiss” had written his name
on a document as Serang of the fire-ship Sofala.
Since that time he had repeatedly looked at that estuary,
upon that coast, from this bridge and from this side
of the bar. The record of the visual world fell
through his eyes upon his unspeculating mind as on
a sensitized plate through the lens of a camera.
His knowledge was absolute and precise; nevertheless,
had he been asked his opinion, and especially if questioned
in the downright, alarming manner of white men, he
would have displayed the hesitation of ignorance.
He was certain of his facts but such a certitude
counted for little against the doubt what answer would
be pleasing. Fifty years ago, in a jungle village,
and before he was a day old, his father (who died
without ever seeing a white face) had had his nativity
cast by a man of skill and wisdom in astrology, because
in the arrangement of the stars may be read the last
word of human destiny. His destiny had been to
thrive by the favor of various white men on the sea.
He had swept the decks of ships, had tended their
helms, had minded their stores, had risen at last
to be a Serang; and his placid mind had remained as
incapable of penetrating the simplest motives of those
he served as they themselves were incapable of detecting
through the crust of the earth the secret nature of
its heart, which may be fire or may be stone.
But he had no doubt whatever that the Sofala was out
of the proper track for crossing the bar at Batu Beru.
It was a slight error. The ship
could not have been more than twice her own length
too far to the northward; and a white man at a loss
for a cause (since it was impossible to suspect Captain
Whalley of blundering ignorance, of want of skill,
or of neglect) would have been inclined to doubt the
testimony of his senses. It was some such feeling
that kept Massy motionless, with his teeth laid bare
by an anxious grin. Not so the Serang. He
was not troubled by any intellectual mistrust of his
senses. If his captain chose to stir the mud it
was well. He had known in his life white men
indulge in outbreaks equally strange. He was only
genuinely interested to see what would come of it.
At last, apparently satisfied, he stepped back from
the rail.
He had made no sound: Captain
Whalley, however, seemed to have observed the movements
of his Serang. Holding his head rigidly, he asked
with a mere stir of his lips
“Going ahead still, Serang?”
“Still going a little, Tuan,”
answered the Malay. Then added casually, “She
is over.”
The lead confirmed his words; the
depth of water increased at every cast, and the soul
of excitement departed suddenly from the lascar swung
in the canvas belt over the Sofala’s side.
Captain Whalley ordered the lead in, set the engines
ahead without haste, and averting his eyes from the
coast directed the Serang to keep a course for the
middle of the entrance.
Massy brought the palm of his hand
with a loud smack against his thigh.
“You grazed on the bar.
Just look astern and see if you didn’t.
Look at the track she left. You can see it plainly.
Upon my soul, I thought you would! What made
you do that? What on earth made you do that?
I believe you are trying to scare me.”
He talked slowly, as it were circumspectly,
keeping his prominent black eyes on his captain.
There was also a slight plaintive note in his rising
choler, for, primarily, it was the clear sense of a
wrong suffered undeservedly that made him hate the
man who, for a beggarly five hundred pounds, claimed
a sixth part of the profits under the three years’
agreement. Whenever his resentment got the better
of the awe the person of Captain Whalley inspired
he would positively whimper with fury.
“You don’t know what to
invent to plague my life out of me. I would not
have thought that a man of your sort would condescend
. . .”
He paused, half hopefully, half timidly,
whenever Captain Whalley made the slightest movement
in the deck-chair, as though expecting to be conciliated
by a soft speech or else rushed upon and hunted off
the bridge.
“I am puzzled,” he went
on again, with the watchful unsmiling baring of his
big teeth. “I don’t know what to think.
I do believe you are trying to frighten me. You
very nearly planted her on the bar for at least twelve
hours, besides getting the engines choked with mud.
Ships can’t afford to lose twelve hours on a
trip nowadays as you ought to know very
well, and do know very well to be sure, only . . .”
His slow volubility, the sideways
cranings of his neck, the black glances out of the
very corners of his eyes, left Captain Whalley unmoved.
He looked at the deck with a severe frown. Massy
waited for some little time, then began to threaten
plaintively.
“You think you’ve got
me bound hand and foot in that agreement. You
think you can torment me in any way you please.
Ah! But remember it has another six weeks to
run yet. There’s time for me to dismiss
you before the three years are out. You will
do yet something that will give me the chance to dismiss
you, and make you wait a twelvemonth for your money
before you can take yourself off and pull out your
five hundred, and leave me without a penny to get
the new boilers for her. You gloat over that
idea don’t you? I do believe
you sit here gloating. It’s as if I had
sold my soul for five hundred pounds to be everlastingly
damned in the end. . . .”
He paused, without apparent exasperation,
then continued evenly
“. . . With the boilers
worn out and the survey hanging over my head, Captain
Whalley Captain Whalley, I say, what do
you do with your money? You must have stacks
of money somewhere a man like you must.
It stands to reason. I am not a fool, you know,
Captain Whalley partner.”
Again he paused, as though he had
done for good. He passed his tongue over his
lips, gave a backward glance at the Serang conning
the ship with quiet whispers and slight signs of the
hand. The wash of the propeller sent a swift
ripple, crested with dark froth, upon a long flat
spit of black slime. The Sofala had entered the
river; the trail she had stirred up over the bar was
a mile astern of her now, out of sight, had disappeared
utterly; and the smooth, empty sea along the coast
was left behind in the glittering desolation of sunshine.
On each side of her, low down, the growth of somber
twisted mangroves covered the semi-liquid banks;
and Massy continued in his old tone, with an abrupt
start, as if his speech had been ground out of him,
like the tune of a music-box, by turning a handle.
“Though if anybody ever got
the best of me, it is you. I don’t mind
saying this. I’ve said it there!
What more can you want? Isn’t that enough
for your pride, Captain Whalley. You got over
me from the first. It’s all of a piece,
when I look back at it. You allowed me to insert
that clause about intemperance without saying anything,
only looking very sick when I made a point of it going
in black on white. How could I tell what was
wrong about you. There’s generally something
wrong somewhere. And, lo and behold! when you
come on board it turns out that you’ve been
in the habit of drinking nothing but water for years
and years.”
His dogmatic reproachful whine stopped.
He brooded profoundly, after the manner of crafty
and unintelligent men. It seemed inconceivable
that Captain Whalley should not laugh at the expression
of disgust that overspread the heavy, yellow countenance.
But Captain Whalley never raised his eyes sitting
in his arm-chair, outraged, dignified, and motionless.
“Much good it was to me,”
Massy remonstrated monotonously, “to insert a
clause for dismissal for intemperance against a man
who drinks nothing but water. And you looked
so upset, too, when I read my draft in the lawyer’s
office that morning, Captain Whalley, you
looked so crestfallen, that I made sure I had gone
home on your weak spot. A shipowner can’t
be too careful as to the sort of skipper he gets.
You must have been laughing at me in your sleeve all
the blessed time. . . . Eh? What are you
going to say?”
Captain Whalley had only shuffled
his feet slightly. A dull animosity became apparent
in Massy’s sideways stare.
“But recollect that there are
other grounds of dismissal. There’s habitual
carelessness, amounting to incompetence there’s
gross and persistent neglect of duty. I am not
quite as big a fool as you try to make me out to be.
You have been careless of late leaving everything
to that Serang. Why! I’ve seen you
letting that old fool of a Malay take bearings for
you, as if you were too big to attend to your work
yourself. And what do you call that silly touch-and-go
manner in which you took the ship over the bar just
now? You expect me to put up with that?”
Leaning on his elbow against the ladder
abaft the bridge, Sterne, the mate, tried to hear,
blinking the while from the distance at the second
engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in
the engine-room companion. Wiping his hands on
a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about with indifference
to the right and left at the river banks slipping
astern of the Sofala steadily.
Massy turned full at the chair.
The character of his whine became again threatening.
“Take care. I may yet dismiss
you and freeze to your money for a year. I may
. . .”
But before the silent, rigid immobility
of the man whose money had come in the nick of time
to save him from utter ruin, his voice died out in
his throat.
“Not that I want you to go,”
he resumed after a silence, and in an absurdly insinuating
tone. “I want nothing better than to be
friends and renew the agreement, if you will consent
to find another couple of hundred to help with the
new boilers, Captain Whalley. I’ve told
you before. She must have new boilers; you know
it as well as I do. Have you thought this over?”
He waited. The slender stem of
the pipe with its bulky lump of a bowl at the end
hung down from his thick lips. It had gone out.
Suddenly he took it from between his teeth and wrung
his hands slightly.
“Don’t you believe me?”
He thrust the pipe bowl into the pocket of his shiny
black jacket.
“It’s like dealing with
the devil,” he said. “Why don’t
you speak? At first you were so high and mighty
with me I hardly dared to creep about my own deck.
Now I can’t get a word from you. You don’t
seem to see me at all. What does it mean?
Upon my soul, you terrify me with this deaf and dumb
trick. What’s going on in that head of yours?
What are you plotting against me there so hard that
you can’t say a word? You will never make
me believe that you you don’t
know where to lay your hands on a couple of hundred.
You have made me curse the day I was born. . . .”
“Mr. Massy,” said Captain
Whalley suddenly, without stirring.
The engineer started violently.
“If that is so I can only beg you to forgive
me.”
“Starboard,” muttered
the Serang to the helmsman; and the Sofala began to
swing round the bend into the second reach.
“Ough!” Massy shuddered.
“You make my blood run cold. What made you
come here? What made you come aboard that evening
all of a sudden, with your high talk and your money tempting
me? I always wondered what was your motive?
You fastened yourself on me to have easy times and
grow fat on my life blood, I tell you. Was that
it? I believe you are the greatest miser in the
world, or else why . . .”
“No. I am only poor,”
interrupted Captain Whalley, stonily.
“Steady,” murmured the
Serang. Massy turned away with his chin on his
shoulder.
“I don’t believe it,”
he said in his dogmatic tone. Captain Whalley
made no movement. “There you sit like a
gorged vulture exactly like a vulture.”
He embraced the middle of the reach
and both the banks in one blank unseeing circular
glance, and left the bridge slowly.