Sterne crossed the deck upon the track
of the chief engineer. Jack, the second, retreating
backwards down the engine-room ladder, and still wiping
his hands, treated him to an incomprehensible grin
of white teeth out of his grimy hard face; Massy was
nowhere to be seen. He must have gone straight
into his berth. Sterne scratched at the door softly,
then, putting his lips to the rose of the ventilator,
said
“I must speak to you, Mr. Massy.
Just give me a minute or two.”
“I am busy. Go away from my door.”
“But pray, Mr. Massy . . .”
“You go away. D’you
hear? Take yourself off altogether to
the other end of the ship quite away .
. .” The voice inside dropped low.
“To the devil.”
Sterne paused: then very quietly
“It’s rather pressing. When do you
think you will be at liberty, sir?”
The answer to this was an exasperated
“Never”; and at once Sterne, with a very
firm expression of face, turned the handle.
Mr. Massy’s stateroom a
narrow, one-berth cabin smelt strongly of
soap, and presented to view a swept, dusted, unadorned
neatness, not so much bare as barren, not so much
severe as starved and lacking in humanity, like the
ward of a public hospital, or rather (owing to the
small size) like the clean retreat of a desperately
poor but exemplary person. Not a single photograph
frame ornamented the bulkheads; not a single article
of clothing, not as much as a spare cap, hung from
the brass hooks. All the inside was painted in
one plain tint of pale blue; two big sea-chests in
sailcloth covers and with iron padlocks fitted exactly
in the space under the bunk. One glance was enough
to embrace all the strip of scrubbed planks within
the four unconcealed corners. The absence of
the usual settee was striking; the teak-wood top of
the washing-stand seemed hermetically closed, and
so was the lid of the writing-desk, which protruded
from the partition at the foot of the bed-place, containing
a mattress as thin as a pancake under a threadbare
blanket with a faded red stripe, and a folded mosquito-net
against the nights spent in harbor. There was
not a scrap of paper anywhere in sight, no boots on
the floor, no litter of any sort, not a speck of dust
anywhere; no traces of pipe-ash even, which, in a heavy
smoker, was morally revolting, like a manifestation
of extreme hypocrisy; and the bottom of the old wooden
arm-chair (the only seat there), polished with much
use, shone as if its shabbiness had been waxed.
The screen of leaves on the bank, passing as if unrolled
endlessly in the round opening of the port, sent a
wavering network of light and shade into the place.
Sterne, holding the door open with
one hand, had thrust in his head and shoulders.
At this amazing intrusion Massy, who was doing absolutely
nothing, jumped up speechless.
“Don’t call names,”
murmured Sterne hurriedly. “I won’t
be called names. I think of nothing but your
good, Mr. Massy.”
A pause as of extreme astonishment
followed. They both seemed to have lost their
tongues. Then the mate went on with a discreet
glibness.
“You simply couldn’t conceive
what’s going on on board your ship. It
wouldn’t enter your head for a moment. You
are too good too too upright,
Mr. Massy, to suspect anybody of such a . . .
It’s enough to make your hair stand on end.”
He watched for the effect: Massy
seemed dazed, uncomprehending. He only passed
the palm of his hand on the coal-black wisps plastered
across the top of his head. In a tone suddenly
changed to confidential audacity Sterne hastened on.
“Remember that there’s
only six weeks left to run . . .” The other
was looking at him stonily . . . “so anyhow
you shall require a captain for the ship before long.”
Then only, as if that suggestion had
scarified his flesh in the manner of red-hot iron,
Massy gave a start and seemed ready to shriek.
He contained himself by a great effort.
“Require a captain,” he
repeated with scathing slowness. “Who requires
a captain? You dare to tell me that I need any
of you humbugging sailors to run my ship. You
and your likes have been fattening on me for years.
It would have hurt me less to throw my money overboard.
Pam pe red us e less
f-f-f-frauds. The old ship knows as much as the
best of you.” He snapped his teeth audibly
and growled through them, “The silly law requires
a captain.”
Sterne had taken heart of grace meantime.
“And the silly insurance people
too, as well,” he said lightly. “But
never mind that. What I want to ask is: Why
shouldn’t I do, sir? I don’t
say but you could take a steamer about the world as
well as any of us sailors. I don’t pretend
to tell you that it is a very great trick .
. .” He emitted a short, hollow guffaw,
familiarly . . . “I didn’t make the
law but there it is; and I am an active
young fellow! I quite hold with your ideas; I
know your ways by this time, Mr. Massy. I wouldn’t
try to give myself airs like that that er
lazy specimen of an old man up there.”
He put a marked emphasis on the last
sentence, to lead Massy away from the track in case
. . . but he did not doubt of now holding his success.
The chief engineer seemed nonplused, like a slow man
invited to catch hold of a whirligig of some sort.
“What you want, sir, is a chap
with no nonsense about him, who would be content to
be your sailing-master. Quite right, too.
Well, I am fit for the work as much as that Serang.
Because that’s what it amounts to. Do you
know, sir, that a dam’ Malay like a monkey is
in charge of your ship and no one else.
Just listen to his feet pit-patting above us on the
bridge real officer in charge. He’s
taking her up the river while the great man is wallowing
in the chair perhaps asleep; and if he is,
that would not make it much worse either take
my word for it.”
He tried to thrust himself farther
in. Massy, with lowered forehead, one hand grasping
the back of the arm-chair, did not budge.
“You think, sir, that the man
has got you tight in his agreement . . .”
Massy raised a heavy snarling face at this . . .
“Well, sir, one can’t help hearing of
it on board. It’s no secret. And it
has been the talk on shore for years; fellows have
been making bets about it. No, sir! It’s
you who have got him at your mercy. You
will say that you can’t dismiss him for indolence.
Difficult to prove in court, and so on. Why,
yes. But if you say the word, sir, I can tell
you something about his indolence that will give you
the clear right to fire him out on the spot and put
me in charge for the rest of this very trip yes,
sir, before we leave Batu Beru and make
him pay a dollar a day for his keep till we get back,
if you like. Now, what do you think of that?
Come, sir. Say the word. It’s really
well worth your while, and I am quite ready to take
your bare word. A definite statement from you
would be as good as a bond.”
His eyes began to shine. He insisted.
A simple statement, and he thought to himself
that he would manage somehow to stick in his berth
as long as it suited him. He would make himself
indispensable; the ship had a bad name in her port;
it would be easy to scare the fellows off. Massy
would have to keep him.
“A definite statement from me
would be enough,” Massy repeated slowly.
“Yes, sir. It would.”
Sterne stuck out his chin cheerily and blinked at
close quarters with that unconscious impudence which
had the power to enrage Massy beyond anything.
The engineer spoke very distinctly.
“Listen well to me, then, Mr.
Sterne: I wouldn’t d’ye
hear? I wouldn’t promise you the
value of two pence for anything you can tell
me.”
He struck Sterne’s arm away
with a smart blow, and catching hold of the handle
pulled the door to. The terrific slam darkened
the cabin instantaneously to his eye as if after the
flash of an explosion. At once he dropped into
the chair. “Oh, no! You don’t!”
he whispered faintly.
The ship had in that place to shave
the bank so close that the gigantic wall of leaves
came gliding like a shutter against the port; the
darkness of the primeval forest seemed to flow into
that bare cabin with the odor of rotting leaves, of
sodden soil the strong muddy smell of the
living earth steaming uncovered after the passing of
a deluge. The bushes swished loudly alongside;
above there was a series of crackling sounds, with
a sharp rain of small broken branches falling on the
bridge; a creeper with a great rustle snapped on the
head of a boat davit, and a long, luxuriant green
twig actually whipped in and out of the open port,
leaving behind a few torn leaves that remained suddenly
at rest on Mr. Massy’s blanket. Then, the
ship sheering out in the stream, the light began to
return but did not augment beyond a subdued clearness:
for the sun was very low already, and the river, wending
its sinuous course through a multitude of secular
trees as if at the bottom of a precipitous gorge,
had been already invaded by a deepening gloom the
swift precursor of the night.
“Oh, no, you don’t!”
murmured the engineer again. His lips trembled
almost imperceptibly; his hands too, a little:
and to calm himself he opened the writing-desk, spread
out a sheet of thin grayish paper covered with a mass
of printed figures and began to scan them attentively
for the twentieth time this trip at least.
With his elbows propped, his head
between his hands, he seemed to lose himself in the
study of an abstruse problem in mathematics. It
was the list of the winning numbers from the last
drawing of the great lottery which had been the one
inspiring fact of so many years of his existence.
The conception of a life deprived of that periodical
sheet of paper had slipped away from him entirely,
as another man, according to his nature, would not
have been able to conceive a world without fresh air,
without activity, or without affection. A great
pile of flimsy sheets had been growing for years in
his desk, while the Sofala, driven by the faithful
Jack, wore out her boilers in tramping up and down
the Straits, from cape to cape, from river to river,
from bay to bay; accumulating by that hard labor of
an overworked, starved ship the blackened mass of these
documents. Massy kept them under lock and key
like a treasure. There was in them, as in the
experience of life, the fascination of hope, the excitement
of a half-penetrated mystery, the longing of a half-satisfied
desire.
For days together, on a trip, he would
shut himself up in his berth with them: the thump
of the toiling engines pulsated in his ear; and he
would weary his brain poring over the rows of disconnected
figures, bewildering by their senseless sequence,
resembling the hazards of destiny itself. He
nourished a conviction that there must be some logic
lurking somewhere in the results of chance. He
thought he had seen its very form. His head swam;
his limbs ached; he puffed at his pipe mechanically;
a contemplative stupor would soothe the fretfulness
of his temper, like the passive bodily quietude procured
by a drug, while the intellect remains tensely on
the stretch. Nine, nine, aught, four, two.
He made a note. The next winning number of the
great prize was forty-seven thousand and five.
These numbers of course would have to be avoided in
the future when writing to Manilla for the tickets.
He mumbled, pencil in hand . . . “and five.
Hm . . . hm.” He wetted his finger:
the papers rustled. Ha! But what’s
this? Three years ago, in the September drawing,
it was number nine, aught, four, two that took the
first prize. Most remarkable. There was a
hint there of a definite rule! He was afraid
of missing some recondite principle in the overwhelming
wealth of his material. What could it be? and
for half an hour he would remain dead still, bent
low over the desk, without twitching a muscle.
At his back the whole berth would be thick with a heavy
body of smoke, as if a bomb had burst in there, unnoticed,
unheard.
At last he would lock up the desk
with the decision of unshaken confidence, jump and
go out. He would walk swiftly back and forth on
that part of the foredeck which was kept clear of the
lumber and of the bodies of the native passengers.
They were a great nuisance, but they were also a source
of profit that could not be disdained. He needed
every penny of profit the Sofala could make. Little
enough it was, in all conscience! The incertitude
of chance gave him no concern, since he had somehow
arrived at the conviction that, in the course of years,
every number was bound to have his winning turn.
It was simply a matter of time and of taking as many
tickets as he could afford for every drawing.
He generally took rather more; all the earnings of
the ship went that way, and also the wages he allowed
himself as chief engineer. It was the wages he
paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned and
at the same time a passionate regret. He scowled
at the lascars with their deck brooms, at the
quartermasters rubbing the brass rails with greasy
rags; he was eager to shake his fist and roar abuse
in bad Malay at the poor carpenter a timid,
sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers
for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and
fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over,
before the fury of that “devil.”
But it was when he raised up his eyes to the bridge
where one of these sailor frauds was always planted
by law in charge of his ship that he felt almost dizzy
with rage. He abominated them all; it was an
old feud, from the time he first went to sea, an unlicked
cub with a great opinion of himself, in the engine-room.
The slights that had been put upon him. The persécutions
he had suffered at the hands of skippers of
absolute nobodies in a steamship after all. And
now that he had risen to be a shipowner they were
still a plague to him: he had absolutely to pay
away precious money to the conceited useless loafers: As
if a fully qualified engineer who was the
owner as well were not fit to be trusted
with the whole charge of a ship. Well! he made
it pretty warm for them; but it was a poor consolation.
He had come in time to hate the ship too for the repairs
she required, for the coal-bills he had to pay, for
the poor beggarly freights she earned. He would
clench his hand as he walked and hit the rail a sudden
blow, viciously, as though she could be made to feel
pain. And yet he could not do without er; he
needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and nail
to keep his head above water till the expected flood
of fortune came sweeping up and landed him safely
on the high shore of his ambition.
It was now to do nothing, nothing
whatever, and have plenty of money to do it on.
He had tasted of power, the highest form of it his
limited experience was aware of the power
of shipowning. What a deception! Vanity
of vanities! He wondered at his folly. He
had thrown away the substance for the shadow.
Of the gratification of wealth he did not know enough
to excite his imagination with any visions of luxury.
How could he the child of a drunken boiler-maker going
straight from the workshop into the engine-room of
a north-country collier! But the notion of the
absolute idleness of wealth he could very well conceive.
He reveled in it, to forget his present troubles;
he imagined himself walking about the streets of Hull
(he knew their gutters well as a boy) with his pockets
full of sovereigns. He would buy himself a house;
his married sisters, their husbands, his old workshop
chums, would render him infinite homage. There
would be nothing to think of. His word would
be law. He had been out of work for a long time
before he won his prize, and he remembered how Carlo
Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese
hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had
cringed joyfully before him in the evening, when the
news had come. Poor Charley, though he made his
living by ministering to various abject vices, gave
credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage.
He was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills
being paid, and he reckoned confidently on a spell
of festivities in the cavernous grog-shop downstairs.
Massy remembered the curious, respectful looks of
the “trashy” white men in the place.
His heart had swelled within him. Massy had left
Charley’s infamous den directly he had realized
the possibilities open to him, and with his nose in
the air. Afterwards the memory of these adulations
was a great sadness.
This was the true power of money, and
no trouble with it, nor any thinking required either.
He thought with difficulty and felt vividly; to his
blunt brain the problems offered by any ordered scheme
of life seemed in their cruel toughness to have been
put in his way by the obvious malevolence of men.
As a shipowner everyone had conspired to make him
a nobody. How could he have been such a fool as
to purchase that accursed ship. He had been abominably
swindled; there was no end to this swindling; and
as the difficulties of his improvident ambition gathered
thicker round him, he really came to hate everybody
he had ever come in contact with. A temper naturally
irritable and an amazing sensitiveness to the claims
of his own personality had ended by making of life
for him a sort of inferno a place where
his lost soul had been given up to the torment of
savage brooding.
But he had never hated anyone so much
as that old man who had turned up one evening to save
him from an utter disaster, from the conspiracy
of the wretched sailors. He seemed to have fallen
on board from the sky. His footsteps echoed on
the empty steamer, and the strange deep-toned voice
on deck repeating interrogatively the words, “Mr.
Massy, Mr. Massy there?” had been startling
like a wonder. And coming up from the depths
of the cold engine-room, where he had been pottering
dismally with a candle amongst the enormous shadows,
thrown on all sides by the skeleton limbs of machinery,
Massy had been struck dumb by astonishment in the
presence of that imposing old man with a beard like
a silver plate, towering in the dusk rendered lurid
by the expiring flames of sunset.
“Want to see me on business?
What business? I am doing no business. Can’t
you see that this ship is laid up?” Massy had
turned at bay before the pursuing irony of his disaster.
Afterwards he could not believe his ears. What
was that old fellow getting at? Things don’t
happen that way. It was a dream. He would
presently wake up and find the man vanished like a
shape of mist. The gravity, the dignity, the firm
and courteous tone of that athletic old stranger impressed
Massy. He was almost afraid. But it was
no dream. Five hundred pounds are no dream.
At once he became suspicious. What did it mean?
Of course it was an offer to catch hold of for dear
life. But what could there be behind?
Before they had parted, after appointing
a meeting in a solicitor’s office early on the
morrow, Massy was asking himself, What is his motive?
He spent the night in hammering out the clauses of
the agreement a unique instrument of its
sort whose tenor got bruited abroad somehow and became
the talk and wonder of the port.
Massy’s object had been to secure
for himself as many ways as possible of getting rid
of his partner without being called upon at once to
pay back his share. Captain Whalley’s efforts
were directed to making the money secure. Was
it not Ivy’s money a part of her fortune
whose only other asset was the time-defying body of
her old father? Sure of his forbearance in the
strength of his love for her, he accepted, with stately
serenity, Massy’s stupidly cunning paragraphs
against his incompetence, his dishonesty, his drunkenness,
for the sake of other stringent stipulations.
At the end of three years he was at liberty to withdraw
from the partnership, taking his money with him.
Provision was made for forming a fund to pay him off.
But if he left the Sofala before the term, from whatever
cause (barring death), Massy was to have a whole year
for paying. “Illness?” the lawyer
had suggested: a young man fresh from Europe
and not overburdened with business, who was rather
amused. Massy began to whine unctuously, “How
could he be expected? . . .”
“Let that go,” Captain
Whalley had said with a superb confidence in his body.
“Acts of God,” he added. In the midst
of life we are in death, but he trusted his Maker
with a still greater fearlessness his Maker
who knew his thoughts, his human affections, and his
motives. His Creator knew what use he was making
of his health how much he wanted it . .
. “I trust my first illness will be my
last. I’ve never been ill that I can remember,”
he had remarked. “Let it go.”
But at this early stage he had already
awakened Massy’s hostility by refusing to make
it six hundred instead of five. “I cannot
do that,” was all he had said, simply, but with
so much decision that Massy desisted at once from
pressing the point, but had thought to himself, “Can’t!
Old curmudgeon. Won’t He must have lots
of money, but he would like to get hold of a soft
berth and the sixth part of my profits for nothing
if he only could.”
And during these years Massy’s
dislike grew under the restraint of something resembling
fear. The simplicity of that man appeared dangerous.
Of late he had changed, however, had appeared less
formidable and with a lessened vigor of life, as though
he had received a secret wound. But still he
remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness,
and rectitude. And when Massy learned that he
meant to leave him at the end of the time, to leave
him confronted with the problem of boilers, his dislike
blazed up secretly into hate.
It had made him so clear-eyed that
for a long time now Mr. Sterne could have told him
nothing he did not know. He had much ado in trying
to terrorize that mean sneak into silence; he wanted
to deal alone with the situation; and incredible
as it might have appeared to Mr. Sterne he
had not yet given up the desire and the hope of inducing
that hated old man to stay. Why! there was nothing
else to do, unless he were to abandon his chances
of fortune. But now, suddenly, since the crossing
of the bar at Batu Beru things seemed to be coming
rapidly to a point. It disquieted him so much
that the study of the winning numbers failed to soothe
his agitation: and the twilight in the cabin deepened,
very somber.
He put the list away, muttering once
more, “Oh, no, my boy, you don’t.
Not if I know it.” He did not mean the blinking,
eavesdropping humbug to force his action. He
took his head again into his hands; his immobility
confined in the darkness of this shut-up little place
seemed to make him a thing apart infinitely removed
from the stir and the sounds of the deck.
He heard them: the passengers
were beginning to jabber excitedly; somebody dragged
a heavy box past his door. He heard Captain Whalley’s
voice above
“Stations, Mr. Sterne.”
And the answer from somewhere on deck forward
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“We shall moor head up stream this time; the
ebb has made.”
“Head up stream, sir.”
“You will see to it, Mr. Sterne.”
The answer was covered by the autocratic
clang on the engine-room gong. The propeller
went on beating slowly: one, two, three; one,
two, three with pauses as if hesitating
on the turn. The gong clanged time after time,
and the water churned this way and that by the blades
was making a great noisy commotion alongside.
Mr. Massy did not move. A shore-light on the
other bank, a quarter of a mile across the river,
drifted, no bigger than a tiny star, passing slowly
athwart the circle of the port. Voices from Mr.
Van Wyk’s jetty answered the hails from the
ship; ropes were thrown and missed and thrown again;
the swaying flame of a torch carried in a large sampan
coming to fetch away in state the Rajah from down
the coast cast a sudden ruddy glare into his cabin,
over his very person. Mr. Massy did not move.
After a few last ponderous turns the engines stopped,
and the prolonged clanging of the gong signified that
the captain had done with them. A great number
of boats and canoes of all sizes boarded the off-side
of the Sofala. Then after a time the tumult of
splashing, of cries, of shuffling feet, of packages
dropped with a thump, the noise of the native passengers
going away, subsided slowly. On the shore, a
voice, cultivated, slightly authoritative, spoke very
close alongside
“Brought any mail for me this time?”
“Yes, Mr. Van Wyk.”
This was from Sterne, answering over the rail in a
tone of respectful cordiality. “Shall I
bring it up to you?”
But the voice asked again
“Where’s the captain?”
“Still on the bridge, I believe. He hasn’t
left his chair. Shall I . . .”
The voice interrupted negligently.
“I will come on board.”
“Mr. Van Wyk,” Sterne
suddenly broke out with an eager effort, “will
you do me the favor . . .”
The mate walked away quickly towards the gangway.
A silence fell. Mr.
Massy in the dark did not move.
He did not move even when he heard
slow shuffling footsteps pass his cabin lazily.
He contented himself to bellow out through the closed
door
“You Jack!”
The footsteps came back without haste;
the door handle rattled, and the second engineer appeared
in the opening, shadowy in the sheen of the skylight
at his back, with his face apparently as black as the
rest of his figure.
“We have been very long coming
up this time,” Mr. Massy growled, without changing
his attitude.
“What do you expect with half
the boiler tubes plugged up for leaks.”
The second defended himself loquaciously.
“None of your lip,” said Massy.
“None of your rotten boilers I
say,” retorted his faithful subordinate without
animation, huskily. “Go down there and carry
a head of steam on them yourself if you
dare. I don’t.”
“You aren’t worth your
salt then,” Massy said. The other made a
faint noise which resembled a laugh but might have
been a snarl.
“Better go slow than stop the
ship altogether,” he admonished his admired
superior. Mr. Massy moved at last. He turned
in his chair, and grinding his teeth
“Dam’ you and the ship!
I wish she were at the bottom of the sea. Then
you would have to starve.”
The trusty second engineer closed the door gently.
Massy listened. Instead of passing
on to the bathroom where he should have gone to clean
himself, the second entered his cabin, which was next
door. Mr. Massy jumped up and waited. Suddenly
he heard the lock snap in there. He rushed out
and gave a violent kick to the door.
“I believe you are locking yourself
up to get drunk,” he shouted.
A muffled answer came after a while.
“My own time.”
“If you take to boozing on the trip I’ll
fire you out,” Massy cried.
An obstinate silence followed that
threat. Massy moved away perplexed. On the
bank two figures appeared, approaching the gangway.
He heard a voice tinged with contempt
“I would rather doubt your word.
But I shall certainly speak to him of this.”
The other voice, Sterne’s, said
with a sort of regretful formality
“Thanks. That’s all I want.
I must do my duty.”
Mr. Massy was surprised. A short,
dapper figure leaped lightly on the deck and nearly
bounded into him where he stood beyond the circle of
light from the gangway lamp. When it had passed
towards the bridge, after exchanging a hurried “Good
evening,” Massy said surlily to Sterne who followed
with slow steps
“What is it you’re making up to Mr. Van
Wyk for, now?”
“Far from it, Mr. Massy.
I am not good enough for Mr. Van Wyk. Neither
are you, sir, in his opinion, I am afraid. Captain
Whalley is, it seems. He’s gone to ask
him to dine up at the house this evening.”
Then he murmured to himself darkly
“I hope he will like it.”