Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (156 page)

Thus Captain MacWhirr expostulated against the use of images in speech, and at the end electrified Jukes by a contemptuous snort, followed by words of passion and resentment: “Damme! I’ll fire him out of the ship if he don’t look out.”

And Jukes, incorrigible, thought: “Goodness me! Somebody’s put a new inside to my old man. Here’s temper, if you like. Of course it’s the weather; what else? It would make an angel quarrelsome — let alone a saint.”

All the Chinamen on deck appeared at their last gasp.

At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive tint, and lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid obstacle in the path of the ship. She went floundering towards it like an exhausted creature driven to its death. The coppery twilight retired slowly, and the darkness brought out overhead a swarm of unsteady, big stars, that, as if blown upon, flickered exceedingly and seemed to hang very near the earth. At eight o’clock Jukes went into the chart-room to write up the ship’s log.

He copies neatly out of the rough-book the number of miles, the course of the ship, and in the column for “wind” scrawled the word “calm” from top to bottom of the eight hours since noon. He was exasperated by the continuous, monotonous rolling of the ship. The heavy inkstand would slide away in a manner that suggested perverse intelligence in dodging the pen. Having written in the large space under the head of “Remarks” “Heat very oppressive,” he stuck the end of the penholder in his teeth, pipe fashion, and mopped his face carefully.

“Ship rolling heavily in a high cross swell,” he began again, and commented to himself, “Heavily is no word for it.” Then he wrote: “Sunset threatening, with a low bank of clouds to N. and E. Sky clear overhead.”

Sprawling over the table with arrested pen, he glanced out of the door, and in that frame of his vision he saw all the stars flying upwards between the teakwood jambs on a black sky. The whole lot took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a blackness flecked with white flashes, for the sea was as black as the sky and speckled with foam afar. The stars that had flown to the roll came back on the return swing of the ship, rushing downwards in their glittering multitude, not of fiery points, but enlarged to tiny discs brilliant with a clear wet sheen.

Jukes watched the flying big stars for a moment, and then wrote: “8 P.M. Swell increasing. Ship labouring and taking water on her decks. Battened down the coolies for the night. Barometer still falling.” He paused, and thought to himself, “Perhaps nothing whatever’ll come of it.” And then he closed resolutely his entries: “Every appearance of a typhoon coming on.”

On going out he had to stand aside, and Captain MacWhirr strode over the doorstep without saying a word or making a sign.

“Shut the door, Mr. Jukes, will you?” he cried from within.

Jukes turned back to do so, muttering ironically: “Afraid to catch cold, I suppose.” It was his watch below, but he yearned for communion with his kind; and he remarked cheerily to the second mate: “Doesn’t look so bad, after all — does it?”

The second mate was marching to and fro on the bridge, tripping down with small steps one moment, and the next climbing with difficulty the shifting slope of the deck. At the sound of Jukes’ voice he stood still, facing forward, but made no reply.

“Hallo! That’s a heavy one,” said Jukes, swaying to meet the long roll till his lowered hand touched the planks. This time the second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly nature.

He was an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face. He had been shipped in a hurry in Shanghai, that trip when the second officer brought from home had delayed the ship three hours in port by contriving (in some manner Captain MacWhirr could never understand) to fall overboard into an empty coal-lighter lying alongside, and had to be sent ashore to the hospital with concussion of the brain and a broken limb or two.

Jukes was not discouraged by the unsympathetic sound. “The Chinamen must be having a lovely time of it down there,” he said. “It’s lucky for them the old girl has the easiest roll of any ship I’ve ever been in. There now! This one wasn’t so bad.”

“You wait,” snarled the second mate.

With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. All his time off duty he spent in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still in there that he was supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had disappeared; but the man who came in to wake him for his watch on deck would invariably find him with his eyes wide open, flat on his back in the bunk, and glaring irritably from a soiled pillow. He never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house. He was one of those men who are picked up at need in the ports of the world. They are competent enough, appear hopelessly hard up, show no evidence of any sort of vice, and carry about them all the signs of manifest failure. They come aboard on an emergency, care for no ship afloat, live in their own atmosphere of casual connection amongst their shipmates who know nothing of them, and make up their minds to leave at inconvenient times. They clear out with no words of leavetaking in some God-forsaken port other men would fear to be stranded in, and go ashore in company of a shabby sea-chest, corded like a treasure-box, and with an air of shaking the ship’s dust off their feet.

“You wait,” he repeated, balanced in great swings with his back to Jukes, motionless and implacable.

“Do you mean to say we are going to catch it hot?” asked Jukes with boyish interest.

“Say? . . . I say nothing. You don’t catch me,” snapped the little second mate, with a mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning, as if Jukes’ question had been a trap cleverly detected. “Oh, no! None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it,” he mumbled to himself.

Jukes reflected rapidly that this second mate was a mean little beast, and in his heart he wished poor Jack Allen had never smashed himself up in the coal-lighter. The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth — the starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe, revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.

“Whatever there might be about,” said Jukes, “we are steaming straight into it.”

“You’ve said it,” caught up the second mate, always with his back to Jukes. “You’ve said it, mind — not I.”

“Oh, go to Jericho!” said Jukes, frankly; and the other emitted a triumphant little chuckle.

“You’ve said it,” he repeated.

“And what of that?”

“I’ve known some real good men get into trouble with their skippers for saying a dam’ sight less,” answered the second mate feverishly. “Oh, no! You don’t catch me.”

“You seem deucedly anxious not to give yourself away,” said Jukes, completely soured by such absurdity. “I wouldn’t be afraid to say what I think.”

“Aye, to me! That’s no great trick. I am nobody, and well I know it.”

The ship, after a pause of comparative steadiness, started upon a series of rolls, one worse than the other, and for a time Jukes, preserving his equilibrium, was too busy to open his mouth. As soon as the violent swinging had quieted down somewhat, he said: “This is a bit too much of a good thing. Whether anything is coming or not I think she ought to be put head on to that swell. The old man is just gone in to lie down. Hang me if I don’t speak to him.”

But when he opened the door of the chart-room he saw his captain reading a book. Captain MacWhirr was not lying down: he was standing up with one hand grasping the edge of the bookshelf and the other holding open before his face a thick volume. The lamp wriggled in the gimbals, the loosened books toppled from side to side on the shelf, the long barometer swung in jerky circles, the table altered its slant every moment. In the midst of all this stir and movement Captain MacWhirr, holding on, showed his eyes above the upper edge, and asked, “What’s the matter?”

“Swell getting worse, sir.”

“Noticed that in here,” muttered Captain MacWhirr. “Anything wrong?”

Jukes, inwardly disconcerted by the seriousness of the eyes looking at him over the top of the book, produced an embarrassed grin.

“Rolling like old boots,” he said, sheepishly.

“Aye! Very heavy — very heavy. What do you want?”

At this Jukes lost his footing and began to flounder. “I was thinking of our passengers,” he said, in the manner of a man clutching at a straw.

“Passengers?” wondered the Captain, gravely. “What passengers?”

“Why, the Chinamen, sir,” explained Jukes, very sick of this conversation.

“The Chinamen! Why don’t you speak plainly? Couldn’t tell what you meant. Never heard a lot of coolies spoken of as passengers before. Passengers, indeed! What’s come to you?”

Captain MacWhirr, closing the book on his forefinger, lowered his arm and looked completely mystified. “Why are you thinking of the Chinamen, Mr. Jukes?” he inquired.

Jukes took a plunge, like a man driven to it. “She’s rolling her decks full of water, sir. Thought you might put her head on perhaps — for a while. Till this goes down a bit — very soon, I dare say. Head to the eastward. I never knew a ship roll like this.”

He held on in the doorway, and Captain MacWhirr, feeling his grip on the shelf inadequate, made up his mind to let go in a hurry, and fell heavily on the couch.

“Head to the eastward?” he said, struggling to sit up. “That’s more than four points off her course.”

“Yes, sir. Fifty degrees. . . . Would just bring her head far enough round to meet this. . . .”

Captain MacWhirr was now sitting up. He had not dropped the book, and he had not lost his place.

“To the eastward?” he repeated, with dawning astonishment. “To the . . . Where do you think we are bound to? You want me to haul a full-powered steamship four points off her course to make the Chinamen comfortable! Now, I’ve heard more than enough of mad things done in the world — but this. . . . If I didn’t know you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor. Steer four points off. . . . And what afterwards? Steer four points over the other way, I suppose, to make the course good. What put it into your head that I would start to tack a steamer as if she were a sailing-ship?”

“Jolly good thing she isn’t,” threw in Jukes, with bitter readiness. “She would have rolled every blessed stick out of her this afternoon.”

“Aye! And you just would have had to stand and see them go,” said Captain MacWhirr, showing a certain animation. “It’s a dead calm, isn’t it?”

“It is, sir. But there’s something out of the common coming, for sure.”

“Maybe. I suppose you have a notion I should be getting out of the way of that dirt,” said Captain MacWhirr, speaking with the utmost simplicity of manner and tone, and fixing the oilcloth on the floor with a heavy stare. Thus he noticed neither Jukes’ discomfiture nor the mixture of vexation and astonished respect on his face.

“Now, here’s this book,” he continued with deliberation, slapping his thigh with the closed volume. “I’ve been reading the chapter on the storms there.”

This was true. He had been reading the chapter on the storms. When he had entered the chart-room, it was with no intention of taking the book down. Some influence in the air — the same influence, probably, that caused the steward to bring without orders the Captain’s sea-boots and oilskin coat up to the chart-room — had as it were guided his hand to the shelf; and without taking the time to sit down he had waded with a conscious effort into the terminology of the subject. He lost himself amongst advancing semi-circles, left- and right-hand quadrants, the curves of the tracks, the probable bearing of the centre, the shifts of wind and the readings of barometer. He tried to bring all these things into a definite relation to himself, and ended by becoming contemptuously angry with such a lot of words, and with so much advice, all head-work and supposition, without a glimmer of certitude.

“It’s the damnedest thing, Jukes,” he said. “If a fellow was to believe all that’s in there, he would be running most of his time all over the sea trying to get behind the weather.”

Again he slapped his leg with the book; and Jukes opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“Running to get behind the weather! Do you understand that, Mr. Jukes? It’s the maddest thing!” ejaculated Captain MacWhirr, with pauses, gazing at the floor profoundly. “You would think an old woman had been writing this. It passes me. If that thing means anything useful, then it means that I should at once alter the course away, away to the devil somewhere, and come booming down on Fu-chau from the northward at the tail of this dirty weather that’s supposed to be knocking about in our way. From the north! Do you understand, Mr. Jukes? Three hundred extra miles to the distance, and a pretty coal bill to show. I couldn’t bring myself to do that if every word in there was gospel truth, Mr. Jukes. Don’t you expect me. . . .”

And Jukes, silent, marvelled at this display of feeling and loquacity.

“But the truth is that you don’t know if the fellow is right, anyhow. How can you tell what a gale is made of till you get it? He isn’t aboard here, is he? Very well. Here he says that the centre of them things bears eight points off the wind; but we haven’t got any wind, for all the barometer falling. Where’s his centre now?”

“We will get the wind presently,” mumbled Jukes.

“Let it come, then,” said Captain MacWhirr, with dignified indignation. “It’s only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you don’t find everything in books. All these rules for dodging breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes, seem to me the maddest thing, when you come to look at it sensibly.”

He raised his eyes, saw Jukes gazing at him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his meaning.