The deep, interminable hoot of the
steam-whistle had, in its grave, vibrating note, something
intolerable, which sent a slight shudder down Mr.
Van Wyk’s back. It was the early afternoon;
the Sofala was leaving Batu Beru for Pangu, the next
place of call. She swung in the stream, scantily
attended by a few canoes, and, gliding on the broad
river, became lost to view from the Van Wyk bungalow.
Its owner had not gone this time to
see her off. Generally he came down to the wharf,
exchanged a few words with the bridge while she cast
off, and waved his hand to Captain Whalley at the
last moment. This day he did not even go as far
as the balustrade of the veranda. “He couldn’t
see me if I did,” he said to himself. “I
wonder whether he can make out the house at all.”
And this thought somehow made him feel more alone
than he had ever felt for all these years. What
was it? six or seven? Seven. A long time.
He sat on the veranda with a closed
book on his knee, and, as it were, looked out upon
his solitude, as if the fact of Captain Whalley’s
blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There
were many sorts of heartaches and troubles, and there
was no place where they could not find a man out.
And he felt ashamed, as though he had for six years
behaved like a peevish boy.
His thought followed the Sofala on
her way. On the spur of the moment he had acted
impulsively, turning to the thing most pressing.
And what else could he have done? Later on he
should see. It seemed necessary that he should
come out into the world, for a time at least.
He had money something could be arranged;
he would grudge no time, no trouble, no loss of his
solitude. It weighed on him now and
Captain Whalley appeared to him as he had sat shading
his eyes, as if, being deceived in the trust of his
faith, he were beyond all the good and evil that can
be wrought by the hands of men.
Mr. Van Wyk’s thoughts followed
the Sofala down the river, winding about through the
belt of the coast forest, between the buttressed shafts
of the big trees, through the mangrove strip, and
over the bar. The ship crossed it easily in broad
daylight, piloted, as it happened, by Mr. Sterne,
who took the watch from four to six, and then went
below to hug himself with delight at the prospect
of being virtually employed by a rich man like
Mr. Van Wyk. He could not see how any hitch could
occur now. He did not seem able to get over the
feeling of being “fixed up at last.”
From six to eight, in the course of duty, the Serang
looked alone after the ship. She had a clear
road before her now till about three in the morning,
when she would close with the Pangu group. At
eight Mr. Sterne came out cheerily to take charge
again till midnight. At ten he was still chirruping
and humming to himself on the bridge, and about that
time Mr. Van Wyk’s thought abandoned the Sofala.
Mr. Van Wyk had fallen asleep at last.
Massy, blocking the engine-room companion,
jerked himself into his tweed jacket surlily, while
the second waited with a scowl.
“Oh. You came out?
You sot! Well, what have you got to say for yourself?”
He had been in charge of the engines
till then. A somber fury darkened his mind:
a hot anger against the ship, against the facts of
life, against the men for their cheating, against
himself too because of an inward tremor
of his heart.
An incomprehensible growl answered him.
“What? Can’t you
open your mouth now? You yelp out your infernal
rot loud enough when you are drunk. What do you
mean by abusing people in that way? you
old useless boozer, you!”
“Can’t help it. Don’t
remember anything about it. You shouldn’t
listen.”
“You dare to tell me! What
do you mean by going on a drunk like this!”
“Don’t ask me. Sick
of the dam’ boilers you would be.
Sick of life.”
“I wish you were dead, then.
You’ve made me sick of you. Don’t
you remember the uproar you made last night?
You miserable old soaker!”
“No; I don’t. Don’t want to.
Drink is drink.”
“I wonder what prevents me from kicking you
out. What do you want here?”
“Relieve you. You’ve been long enough
down there, George.”
“Don’t you George me you
tippling old rascal, you! If I were to die to-morrow
you would starve. Remember that. Say Mr.
Massy.”
“Mr. Massy,” repeated the other stolidly.
Disheveled, with dull blood-shot eyes,
a snuffy, grimy shirt, greasy trowsers, naked feet
thrust into ragged slippers, he bolted in head down
directly Massy had made way for him.
The chief engineer looked around.
The deck was empty as far as the taffrail. All
the native passengers had left in Batu Beru this time,
and no others had joined. The dial of the patent
log tinkled periodically in the dark at the end of
the ship. It was a dead calm, and, under the
clouded sky, through the still air that seemed to cling
warm, with a seaweed smell, to her slim hull, on a
sea of somber gray and unwrinkled, the ship moved
on an even keel, as if floating detached in empty space.
But Mr. Massy slapped his forehead, tottered a little,
caught hold of a belaying-pin at the foot of the mast.
“I shall go mad,” he muttered,
walking across the deck unsteadily. A shovel
was scraping loose coal down below a fire-door
clanged. Sterne on the bridge began whistling
a new tune.
Captain Whalley, sitting on the couch,
awake and fully dressed, heard the door of his cabin
open. He did not move in the least, waiting to
recognize the voice, with an appalling strain of prudence.
A bulkhead lamp blazed on the white
paint, the crimson plush, the brown varnish of mahogany
tops. The white wood packing-case under the bed-place
had remained unopened for three years now, as though
Captain Whalley had felt that, after the Fair Maid
was gone, there could be no abiding-place on earth
for his affections. His hands rested on his knees;
his handsome head with big eyebrows presented a rigid
profile to the doorway. The expected voice spoke
out at last.
“Once more, then. What am I to call you?”
Ha! Massy. Again. The
weariness of it crushed his heart and the
pain of shame was almost more than he could bear without
crying out.
“Well. Is it to be ‘partner’
still?”
“You don’t know what you ask.”
“I know what I want . . .”
Massy stepped in and closed the door.
“. . . And I am going to
have a try for it with you once more.”
His whine was half persuasive, half menacing.
“For it’s no manner of
use to tell me that you are poor. You don’t
spend anything on yourself, that’s true enough;
but there’s another name for that. You
think you are going to have what you want out of me
for three years, and then cast me off without hearing
what I think of you. You think I would have submitted
to your airs if I had known you had only a beggarly
five hundred pounds in the world. You ought to
have told me.”
“Perhaps,” said Captain
Whalley, bowing his head. “And yet it has
saved you.” . . . Massy laughed scornfully.
. . . “I have told you often enough since.”
“And I don’t believe you
now. When I think how I let you lord it over
my ship! Do you remember how you used to bullyrag
me about my coat and your bridge? It was
in his way. His bridge! ’And I won’t
be a party to this and I couldn’t
think of doing that.’ Honest man! And
now it all comes out. ’I am poor, and I
can’t. I have only this five hundred in
the world.’”
He contemplated the immobility of
Captain Whalley, that seemed to present an inconquerable
obstacle in his path. His face took a mournful
cast.
“You are a hard man.”
“Enough,” said Captain
Whalley, turning upon him. “You shall get
nothing from me, because I have nothing of mine to
give away now.”
“Tell that to the marines!”
Mr. Massy, going out, looked back
once; then the door closed, and Captain Whalley, alone,
sat as still as before. He had nothing of his
own even his past of honor, of truth, of
just pride, was gone. All his spotless life had
fallen into the abyss. He had said his last good-by
to it. But what belonged to her, that he
meant to save. Only a little money. He would
take it to her in his own hands this last
gift of a man that had lasted too long. And an
immense and fierce impulse, the very passion of paternity,
flamed up with all the unquenched vigor of his worthless
life in a desire to see her face.
Just across the deck Massy had gone
straight to his cabin, struck a light, and hunted
up the note of the dreamed number whose figures had
flamed up also with the fierceness of another passion.
He must contrive somehow not to miss a drawing.
That number meant something. But what expedient
could he contrive to keep himself going?
“Wretched miser!” he mumbled.
If Mr. Sterne could at no time have
told him anything new about his partner, he could
have told Mr. Sterne that another use could be made
of a man’s affliction than just to kick him
out, and thus defer the term of a difficult payment
for a year. To keep the secret of the affliction
and induce him to stay was a better move. If without
means, he would be anxious to remain; and that settled
the question of refunding him his share. He did
not know exactly how much Captain Whalley was disabled;
but if it so happened that he put the ship ashore somewhere
for good and all, it was not the owner’s fault was
it? He was not obliged to know that there was
anything wrong. But probably nobody would raise
such a point, and the ship was fully insured.
He had had enough self-restraint to pay up the premiums.
But this was not all. He could not believe Captain
Whalley to be so confoundedly destitute as not to have
some more money put away somewhere. If he, Massy,
could get hold of it, that would pay for the boilers,
and everything went on as before. And if she
got lost in the end, so much the better. He hated
her: he loathed the troubles that took his mind
off the chances of fortune. He wished her at
the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money in his
pocket. And as, baffled, he left Captain Whalley’s
cabin, he enveloped in the same hatred the ship with
the worn-out boilers and the man with the dimmed eyes.
And our conduct after all is so much
a matter of outside suggestion, that had it not been
for his Jack’s drunken gabble he would have there
and then had it out with this miserable man, who would
neither help, nor stay, nor yet lose the ship.
The old fraud! He longed to kick him out.
But he restrained himself. Time enough for that when
he liked. There was a fearful new thought put
into his head. Wasn’t he up to it after
all? How that beast Jack had raved! “Find
a safe trick to get rid of her.” Well,
Jack was not so far wrong. A very clever trick
had occurred to him. Aye! But what of the
risk?
A feeling of pride the
pride of superiority to common prejudices crept
into his breast, made his heart beat fast, his mouth
turn dry. Not everybody would dare; but he was
Massy, and he was up to it!
Six bells were struck on deck.
Eleven! He drank a glass of water, and sat down
for ten minutes or so to calm himself. Then he
got out of his chest a small bull’s-eye lantern
of his own and lit it.
Almost opposite his berth, across
the narrow passage under the bridge, there was, in
the iron deck-structure covering the stokehold fiddle
and the boiler-space, a storeroom with iron sides,
iron roof, iron-plated floor, too, on account of the
heat below. All sorts of rubbish was shot there:
it had a mound of scrap-iron in a corner; rows of empty
oil-cans; sacks of cotton-waste, with a heap of charcoal,
a deck-forge, fragments of an old hencoop, winch-covers
all in rags, remnants of lamps, and a brown felt hat,
discarded by a man dead now (of a fever on the Brazil
coast), who had been once mate of the Sofala, had remained
for years jammed forcibly behind a length of burst
copper pipe, flung at some time or other out of the
engine-room. A complete and imperious blackness
pervaded that Capharnaum of forgotten things.
A small shaft of light from Mr. Massy’s bull’s-eye
fell slanting right through it.
His coat was unbuttoned; he shot the
bolt of the door (there was no other opening), and,
squatting before the scrap-heap, began to pack his
pockets with pieces of iron. He packed them carefully,
as if the rusty nuts, the broken bolts, the links
of cargo chain, had been so much gold he had that
one chance to carry away. He packed his side-pockets
till they bulged, the breast pocket, the pockets inside.
He turned over the pieces. Some he rejected.
A small mist of powdered rust began to rise about
his busy hands. Mr. Massy knew something of the
scientific basis of his clever trick. If you
want to deflect the magnetic needle of a ship’s
compass, soft iron is the best; likewise many small
pieces in the pockets of a jacket would have more
effect than a few large ones, because in that way
you obtain a greater amount of surface for weight in
your iron, and it’s surface that tells.
He slipped out swiftly two
strides sufficed and in his cabin he perceived
that his hands were all red red with rust.
It disconcerted him, as though he had found them covered
with blood: he looked himself over hastily.
Why, his trowsers too! He had been rubbing his
rusty palms on his legs.
He tore off the waistband button in
his haste, brushed his coat, washed his hands.
Then the air of guilt left him, and he sat down to
wait.
He sat bolt upright and weighted with
iron in his chair. He had a hard, lumpy bulk
against each hip, felt the scrappy iron in his pockets
touch his ribs at every breath, the downward drag
of all these pounds hanging upon his shoulders.
He looked very dull too, sitting idle there, and his
yellow face, with motionless black eyes, had something
passive and sad in its quietness.
When he heard eight bells struck above
his head, he rose and made ready to go out. His
movements seemed aimless, his lower lip had dropped
a little, his eyes roamed about the cabin, and the
tremendous tension of his will had robbed them of
every vestige of intelligence.
With the last stroke of the bell the
Serang appeared noiselessly on the bridge to relieve
the mate. Sterne overflowed with good nature,
since he had nothing more to desire.
“Got your eyes well open yet,
Serang? It’s middling dark; I’ll wait
till you get your sight properly.”
The old Malay murmured, looked up
with his worn eyes, sidled away into the light of
the binnacle, and, crossing his hands behind his back,
fixed his eyes on the compass-card.
“You’ll have to keep a
good look-out ahead for land, about half-past three.
It’s fairly clear, though. You have looked
in on the captain as you came along eh?
He knows the time? Well, then, I am off.”
At the foot of the ladder he stood
aside for the captain. He watched him go up with
an even, certain tread, and remained thoughtful for
a moment. “It’s funny,” he
said to himself, “but you can never tell whether
that man has seen you or not. He might have heard
me breathe this time.”
He was a wonderful man when all was
said and done. They said he had had a name in
his day. Mr. Sterne could well believe it; and
he concluded serenely that Captain Whalley must be
able to see people more or less as himself
just now, for instance but not being certain
of anybody, had to keep up that unnoticing silence
of manner for fear of giving himself away. Mr.
Sterne was a shrewd guesser.
This necessity of every moment brought
home to Captain Whalley’s heart the humiliation
of his falsehood. He had drifted into it from
paternal love, from incredulity, from boundless trust
in divine justice meted out to men’s feelings
on this earth. He would give his poor Ivy the
benefit of another month’s work; perhaps the
affliction was only temporary. Surely God would
not rob his child of his power to help, and cast him
naked into a night without end. He had caught
at every hope; and when the evidence of his misfortune
was stronger than hope, he tried not to believe the
manifest thing.
In vain. In the steadily darkening
universe a sinister clearness fell upon his ideas.
In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life,
men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden
of created nature, as he had never seen them before.
Sometimes he was seized with a sudden
vertigo and an overwhelming terror; and then the image
of his daughter appeared. Her, too, he had never
seen so clearly before. Was it possible that he
should ever be unable to do anything whatever for
her? Nothing. And not see her any more?
Never.
Why? The punishment was too great
for a little presumption, for a little pride.
And at last he came to cling to his deception with
a fierce determination to carry it out to the end,
to save her money intact, and behold her once more
with his own eyes. Afterwards what?
The idea of suicide was revolting to the vigor of
his manhood. He had prayed for death till the
prayers had stuck in his throat. All the days
of his life he had prayed for daily bread, and not
to be led into temptation, in a childlike humility
of spirit. Did words mean anything? Whence
did the gift of speech come? The violent beating
of his heart reverberated in his head seemed
to shake his brain to pieces.
He sat down heavily in the deck-chair
to keep the pretense of his watch. The night
was dark. All the nights were dark now.
“Serang,” he said, half aloud.
“Ada, Tuan. I am here.”
“There are clouds on the sky?”
“There are, Tuan.”
“Let her be steered straight. North.”
“She is going north, Tuan.”
The Serang stepped back. Captain
Whalley recognized Massy’s footfalls on the
bridge.
The engineer walked over to port and
returned, passing behind the chair several times.
Captain Whalley detected an unusual character as of
prudent care in this prowling. The near presence
of that man brought with it always a recrudescence
of moral suffering for Captain Whalley. It was
not remorse. After all, he had done nothing but
good to the poor devil. There was also a sense
of danger the necessity of a greater care.
Massy stopped and said
“So you still say you must go?”
“I must indeed.”
“And you couldn’t at least leave the money
for a term of years?”
“Impossible.”
“Can’t trust it with me without your care,
eh?”
Captain Whalley remained silent.
Massy sighed deeply over the back of the chair.
“It would just do to save me,” he said
in a tremulous voice.
“I’ve saved you once.”
The chief engineer took off his coat
with careful movements, and proceeded to feel for
the brass hook screwed into the wooden stanchion.
For this purpose he placed himself right in front of
the binnacle, thus hiding completely the compass-card
from the quartermaster at the wheel. “Tuan!”
the lascar at last murmured softly, meaning to let
the white man know that he could not see to steer.
Mr. Massy had accomplished his purpose.
The coat was hanging from the nail, within six inches
of the binnacle. And directly he had stepped
aside the quartermaster, a middle-aged, pock-marked,
Sumatra Malay, almost as dark as a negro, perceived
with amazement that in that short time, in this smooth
water, with no wind at all, the ship had gone swinging
far out of her course. He had never known her
get away like this before. With a slight grunt
of astonishment he turned the wheel hastily to bring
her head back north, which was the course. The
grinding of the steering-chains, the chiding murmurs
of the Serang, who had come over to the wheel, made
a slight stir, which attracted Captain Whalley’s
anxious attention. He said, “Take better
care.” Then everything settled to the usual
quiet on the bridge. Mr. Massy had disappeared.
But the iron in the pockets of the
coat had done its work; and the Sofala, heading north
by the compass, made untrue by this simple device,
was no longer making a safe course for Pangu Bay.
The hiss of water parted by her stem,
the throb of her engines, all the sounds of her faithful
and laborious life, went on uninterrupted in the great
calm of the sea joining on all sides the motionless
layer of cloud over the sky. A gentle stillness
as vast as the world seemed to wait upon her path,
enveloping her lovingly in a supreme caress. Mr.
Massy thought there could be no better night for an
arranged shipwreck.
Run up high and dry on one of the
reefs east of Pangu wait for daylight hole
in the bottom out boats Pangu
Bay same evening. That’s about it.
As soon as she touched he would hasten on the bridge,
get hold of the coat (nobody would notice in the dark),
and shake it upside-down over the side, or even fling
it into the sea. A detail. Who could guess?
Coat been seen hanging there from that hook hundreds
of times. Nevertheless, when he sat down on the
lower step of the bridge-ladder his knees knocked
together a little. The waiting part was the worst
of it. At times he would begin to pant quickly,
as though he had been running, and then breathe largely,
swelling with the intimate sense of a mastered fate.
Now and then he would hear the shuffle of the Serang’s
bare feet up there: quiet, low voices would exchange
a few words, and lapse almost at once into silence.
. . .
“Tell me directly you see any land, Serang.”
“Yes, Tuan. Not yet.”
“No, not yet,” Captain Whalley would agree.
The ship had been the best friend
of his decline. He had sent all the money he
had made by and in the Sofala to his daughter.
His thought lingered on the name. How often he
and his wife had talked over the cot of the child
in the big stern-cabin of the Condor; she would grow
up, she would marry, she would love them, they would
live near her and look at her happiness it
would go on without end. Well, his wife was dead,
to the child he had given all he had to give; he wished
he could come near her, see her, see her face once,
live in the sound of her voice, that could make the
darkness of the living grave ready for him supportable.
He had been starved of love too long. He imagined
her tenderness.
The Serang had been peering forward,
and now and then glancing at the chair. He fidgeted
restlessly, and suddenly burst out close to Captain
Whalley
“Tuan, do you see anything of the land?”
The alarmed voice brought Captain
Whalley to his feet at once. He! See!
And at the question, the curse of his blindness seemed
to fall on him with a hundredfold force.
“What’s the time?” he cried.
“Half-past three, Tuan.”
“We are close. You must see.
Look, I say. Look.”
Mr. Massy, awakened by the sudden
sound of talking from a short doze on the lowest step,
wondered why he was there. Ah! A faintness
came over him. It is one thing to sow the seed
of an accident and another to see the monstrous fruit
hanging over your head ready to fall in the sound of
agitated voices.
“There’s no danger,” he muttered
thickly.
The horror of incertitude had seized
upon Captain Whalley, the miserable mistrust of men,
of things of the very earth. He had
steered that very course thirty-six times by the same
compass if anything was certain in this
world it was its absolute, unerring correctness.
Then what had happened? Did the Serang lie?
Why lie? Why? Was he going blind too?
“Is there a mist? Look low on the water.
Low down, I say.”
“Tuan, there’s no mist. See for yourself.”
Captain Whalley steadied the trembling
of his limbs by an effort. Should he stop the
engines at once and give himself away. A gust
of irresolution swayed all sorts of bizarre notions
in his mind. The unusual had come, and he was
not fit to deal with it. In this passage of inexpressible
anguish he saw her face the face of a young
girl with an amazing strength of illusion.
No, he must not give himself away after having gone
so far for her sake. “You steered the course?
You made it? Speak the truth.”
“Ya, Tuan. On the course now. Look.”
Captain Whalley strode to the binnacle,
which to him made such a dim spot of light in an infinity
of shapeless shadow. By bending his face right
down to the glass he had been able before . . .
Having to stoop so low, he put out,
instinctively, his arm to where he knew there was
a stanchion to steady himself against. His hand
closed on something that was not wood but cloth.
The slight pull adding to the weight, the loop broke,
and Mr. Massy’s coat falling, struck the deck
heavily with a dull thump, accompanied by a lot of
clicks.
“What’s this?”
Captain Whalley fell on his knees,
with groping hands extended in a frank gesture of
blindness. They trembled, these hands feeling
for the truth. He saw it. Iron near the
compass. Wrong course. Wreck her! His
ship. Oh no. Not that.
“Jump and stop her!” he
roared out in a voice not his own.
He ran himself hands forward,
a blind man, and while the clanging of the gong echoed
still all over the ship, she seemed to butt full tilt
into the side of a mountain.
It was low water along the north side
of the strait. Mr. Massy had not reckoned on
that. Instead of running aground for half her
length, the Sofala butted the sheer ridge of a stone
reef which would have been awash at high water.
This made the shock absolutely terrific. Everybody
in the ship that was standing was thrown down headlong:
the shaken rigging made a great rattling to the very
trucks. All the lights went out: several
chain-guys, snapping, clattered against the funnel:
there were crashes, pings of parted wire-rope, splintering
sounds, loud cracks, the masthead lamp flew over the
bows, and all the doors about the deck began to bang
heavily. Then, after having hit, she rebounded,
hit the second time the very same spot like a battering-ram.
This completed the havoc: the funnel, with all
the guys gone, fell over with a hollow sound of thunder,
smashing the wheel to bits, crushing the frame of
the awnings, breaking the lockers, filling the bridge
with a mass of splinters, sticks, and broken wood.
Captain Whalley picked himself up and stood knee-deep
in wreckage, torn, bleeding, knowing the nature of
the danger he had escaped mostly by the sound, and
holding Mr. Massy’s coat in his arms.
By this time Sterne (he had been flung
out of his bunk) had set the engines astern.
They worked for a few turns, then a voice bawled out,
“Get out of the damned engine-room, Jack!” and
they stopped; but the ship had gone clear of the reef
and lay still, with a heavy cloud of steam issuing
from the broken deckpipes, and vanishing in wispy shapes
into the night. Notwithstanding the suddenness
of the disaster there was no shouting, as if the very
violence of the shock had half-stunned the shadowy
lot of people swaying here and there about her decks.
The voice of the Serang pronounced distinctly above
the confused murmurs
“Eight fathom.” He had heaved the
lead.
Mr. Sterne cried out next in a strained pitch
“Where the devil has she got to? Where
are we?”
Captain Whalley replied in a calm bass
“Amongst the reefs to the eastward.”
“You know it, sir? Then she will never
get out again.”
“She will be sunk in five minutes.
Boats, Sterne. Even one will save you all in
this calm.”
The Chinaman stokers went in
a disorderly rush for the port boats. Nobody
tried to check them. The Malays, after a moment
of confusion, became quiet, and Mr. Sterne showed
a good countenance. Captain Whalley had not moved.
His thoughts were darker than this night in which he
had lost his first ship.
“He made me lose a ship.”
Another tall figure standing before
him amongst the litter of the smash on the bridge
whispered insanely
“Say nothing of it.”
Massy stumbled closer. Captain
Whalley heard the chattering of his teeth.
“I have the coat.”
“Throw it down and come along,”
urged the chattering voice. “B-b-b-b-boat!”
“You will get fifteen years for this.”
Mr. Massy had lost his voice.
His speech was a mere dry rustling in his throat.
“Have mercy!”
“Had you any when you made me
lose my ship? Mr. Massy, you shall get fifteen
years for this!”
“I wanted money! Money!
My own money! I will give you some money.
Take half of it. You love money yourself.”
“There’s a justice . . .”
Massy made an awful effort, and in a strange, half
choked utterance
“You blind devil! It’s you that drove
me to it.”
Captain Whalley, hugging the coat
to his breast, made no sound. The light had ebbed
for ever from the world let everything go.
But this man should not escape scot-free.
Sterne’s voice commanded
“Lower away!”
The blocks rattled.
“Now then,” he cried,
“over with you. This way. You, Jack,
here. Mr. Massy! Mr. Massy! Captain!
Quick, sir! Let’s get
“I shall go to prison for trying
to cheat the insurance, but you’ll get exposed;
you, honest man, who has been cheating me. You
are poor. Aren’t you? You’ve
nothing but the five hundred pounds. Well, you
have nothing at all now. The ship’s lost,
and the insurance won’t be paid.”
Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s
money! Gone in this wreck.
Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed
at the end of his tether.
Urgent voices cried out together alongside.
Massy did not seem able to tear himself away from
the bridge. He chattered and hissed despairingly
“Give it up to me! Give it up!”
“No,” said Captain Whalley;
“I could not give it up. You had better
go. Don’t wait, man, if you want to live.
She’s settling down by the head fast. No;
I shall keep it, but I shall stay on board.”
Massy did not seem to understand;
but the love of life, awakened suddenly, drove him
away from the bridge.
Captain Whalley laid the coat down,
and stumbled amongst the heaps of wreckage to the
side.
“Is Mr. Massy in with you?” he called
out into the night.
Sterne from the boat shouted
“Yes; we’ve got him. Come along,
sir. It’s madness to stay longer.”
Captain Whalley felt along the rail
carefully, and, without a word, cast off the painter.
They were expecting him still down there. They
were waiting, till a voice suddenly exclaimed
“We are adrift! Shove off!”
“Captain Whalley! Leap!
. . . pull up a little . . . leap! You can swim.”
In that old heart, in that vigorous
body, there was, that nothing should be wanting, a
horror of death that apparently could not be overcome
by the horror of blindness. But after all, for
Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness
to the very verge of a crime. God had not listened
to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing
out of the world; not a glimmer. It was a dark
waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had
gone so far to carry a point should continue to live.
He must pay the price.
“Leap as far as you can, sir; we will pick you
up.”
They did not hear him answer.
But their shouting seemed to remind him of something.
He groped his way back, and sought for Mr. Massy’s
coat. He could swim indeed; people sucked down
by the whirlpool of a sinking ship do come up sometimes
to the surface, and it was unseemly that a Whalley,
who had made up his mind to die, should be beguiled
by chance into a struggle. He would put all these
pieces of iron into his own pockets.
They, looking from the boat, saw the
Sofala, a black mass upon a black sea, lying still
at an appalling cant. No sound came from her.
Then, with a great bizarre shuffling noise, as if
the boilers had broken through the bulkheads, and
with a faint muffled detonation, where the ship had
been there appeared for a moment something standing
upright and narrow, like a rock out of the sea.
Then that too disappeared.
When the Sofala failed to come back
to Batu Beru at the proper time, Mr. Van Wyk understood
at once that he would never see her any more.
But he did not know what had happened till some months
afterwards, when, in a native craft lent him by his
Sultan, he had made his way to the Sofala’s
port of registry, where already her existence and the
official inquiry into her loss was beginning to be
forgotten.
It had not been a very remarkable
or interesting case, except for the fact that the
captain had gone down with his sinking ship. It
was the only life lost; and Mr. Van Wyk would not
have been able to learn any details had it not been
for Sterne, whom he met one day on the quay near the
bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot where
Captain Whalley, to preserve his daughter’s
five hundred pounds intact, had turned to get a sampan
which would take him on board the Sofala.
From afar Mr. Van Wyk saw Sterne blink
straight at him and raise his hand to his hat.
They drew into the shade of a building (it was a bank),
and the mate related how the boat with the crew got
into Pangu Bay about six hours after the accident,
and how they had lived for a fortnight in a state
of destitution before they found an opportunity to
get away from that beastly place. The inquiry
had exonerated everybody from all blame. The
loss of the ship was put down to an unusual set of
the current. Indeed, it could not have been anything
else: there was no other way to account for the
ship being set seven miles to the eastward of her
position during the middle watch.
“A piece of bad luck for me, sir.”
Sterne passed his tongue on his lips,
and glanced aside. “I lost the advantage
of being employed by you, sir. I can never be
sorry enough. But here it is: one man’s
poison, another man’s meat. This could not
have been handier for Mr. Massy if he had arranged
that shipwreck himself. The most timely total
loss I’ve ever heard of.”
“What became of that Massy?” asked Mr.
Van Wyk.
“He, sir? Ha! ha!
He would keep on telling me that he meant to buy another
ship; but as soon as he had the money in his pocket
he cleared out for Manilla by mail-boat early in the
morning. I gave him chase right aboard, and he
told me then he was going to make his fortune dead
sure in Manilla. I could go to the devil for all
he cared. And yet he as good as promised to give
me the command if I didn’t talk too much.”
“You never said anything . . .” Mr.
Van Wyk began.
“Not I, sir. Why should
I? I mean to get on, but the dead aren’t
in my way,” said Sterne. His eyelids were
beating rapidly, then drooped for an instant.
“Besides, sir, it would have been an awkward
business. You made me hold my tongue just a bit
too long.”
“Do you know how it was that
Captain Whalley remained on board? Did he really
refuse to leave? Come now! Or was it perhaps
an accidental . . .?”
“Nothing!” Sterne interrupted
with energy. “I tell you I yelled for him
to leap overboard. He simply must have
cast off the painter of the boat himself. We
all yelled to him that is, Jack and I. He
wouldn’t even answer us. The ship was as
silent as a grave to the last. Then the boilers
fetched away, and down she went. Accident!
Not it! The game was up, sir, I tell you.”
This was all that Sterne had to say.
Mr. Van Wyk had been of course made
the guest of the club for a fortnight, and it was
there that he met the lawyer in whose office had been
signed the agreement between Massy and Captain Whalley.
“Extraordinary old man,”
he said. “He came into my office from nowhere
in particular as you may say, with his five hundred
pounds to place, and that engineer fellow following
him anxiously. And now he is gone out a little
inexplicably, just as he came. I could never understand
him quite. There was no mystery at all about
that Massy, eh? I wonder whether Whalley refused
to leave the ship. It would have been foolish.
He was blameless, as the court found.”
Mr. Van Wyk had known him well, he
said, and he could not believe in suicide. Such
an act would not have been in character with what he
knew of the man.
“It is my opinion, too,”
the lawyer agreed. The general theory was that
the captain had remained too long on board trying to
save something of importance. Perhaps the chart
which would clear him, or else something of value
in his cabin. The painter of the boat had come
adrift of itself it was supposed. However, strange
to say, some little time before that voyage poor Whalley
had called in his office and had left with him a sealed
envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded
to her in case of his death. Still it was nothing
very unusual, especially in a man of his age.
Mr. Van Wyk shook his head. Captain Whalley looked
good for a hundred years.
“Perfectly true,” assented
the lawyer. “The old fellow looked as though
he had come into the world full-grown and with that
long beard. I could never, somehow, imagine him
either younger or older don’t you
know. There was a sense of physical power about
that man too. And perhaps that was the secret
of that something peculiar in his person which struck
everybody who came in contact with him. He looked
indestructible by any ordinary means that put an end
to the rest of us. His deliberate, stately courtesy
of manner was full of significance. It was as
though he were certain of having plenty of time for
everything. Yes, there was something indestructible
about him; and the way he talked sometimes you might
have thought he believed it himself. When he called
on me last with that letter he wanted me to take charge
of, he was not depressed at all. Perhaps a shade
more deliberate in his talk and manner. Not depressed
in the least. Had he a presentiment, I wonder?
Perhaps! Still it seems a miserable end for such
a striking figure.”
“Oh yes! It was a miserable
end,” Mr. Van Wyk said, with so much fervor
that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards,
after parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance
“Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter
from Batu Beru. Know anything of him?”
“Heaps of money,” answered
the bank manager. “I hear he’s going
home by the next mail to form a company to take over
his estates. Another tobacco district thrown
open. He’s wise, I think. These good
times won’t last for ever.”
In the southern hemisphere Captain
Whalley’s daughter had no presentiment of evil
when she opened the envelope addressed to her in the
lawyer’s handwriting. She had received it
in the afternoon; all the boarders had gone out, her
boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs in his
big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in
rugs to the waist. The house was still, and the
grayness of a cloudy day lay against the panes of
three lofty windows.
In a shabby dining-room, where a faint
cold smell of dishes lingered all the year round,
sitting at the end of a long table surrounded by many
chairs pushed in with their backs close against the
edge of the perpetually laid table-cloth, she read
the opening sentence: “Most profound regret painful
duty your father is no more in
accordance with his instructions fatal
casualty consolation no blame
attached to his memory. . . .”
Her face was thin, her temples a little
sunk under the smooth bands of black hair, her lips
remained resolutely compressed, while her dark eyes
grew larger, till at last, with a low cry, she stood
up, and instantly stooped to pick up another envelope
which had slipped off her knees on to the floor.
She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . .
.
“My dearest child,” it
said, “I am writing this while I am able yet
to write legibly. I am trying hard to save for
you all the money that is left; I have only kept it
to serve you better. It is yours. It shall
not be lost: it shall not be touched. There’s
five hundred pounds. Of what I have earned I
have kept nothing back till now. For the future,
if I live, I must keep back some a little to
bring me to you. I must come to you. I must
see you once more.
“It is hard to believe that
you will ever look on these lines. God seems
to have forgotten me. I want to see you and
yet death would be a greater favor. If you ever
read these words, I charge you to begin by thanking
a God merciful at last, for I shall be dead then, and
it will be well. My dear, I am at the end of
my tether.”
The next paragraph began with the
words: “My sight is going . . .”
She read no more that day. The
hand holding up the paper to her eyes fell slowly,
and her slender figure in a plain black dress walked
rigidly to the window. Her eyes were dry:
no cry of sorrow or whisper of thanks went up to heaven
from her lips. Life had been too hard, for all
the efforts of his love. It had silenced her emotions.
But for the first time in all these years its sting
had departed, the carking care of poverty, the meanness
of a hard struggle for bread. Even the image of
her husband and of her children seemed to glide away
from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s
face alone that she saw, as though he had come to
see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him
last, but with something more august and tender in
his aspect.
She slipped his folded letter between
the two buttons of her plain black bodice, and leaning
her forehead against a window-pane remained there
till dusk, perfectly motionless, giving him all the
time she could spare. Gone! Was it possible?
My God, was it possible! The blow had come softened
by the spaces of the earth, by the years of absence.
There had been whole days when she had not thought
of him at all had no time. But she
had loved him, she felt she had loved him, after all.