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
naïve 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.