Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (163 page)

“Ah, well,” muttered the Captain. He stood watchful by Jukes’ side.

“The second mate’s in there, too, holding his head. Is he hurt, sir?”

“No — crazy,” said Captain MacWhirr, curtly.

“Looks as if he had a tumble, though.”

“I had to give him a push,” explained the Captain.

Jukes gave an impatient sigh.

“It will come very sudden,” said Captain MacWhirr, “and from over there, I fancy. God only knows though. These books are only good to muddle your head and make you jumpy. It will be bad, and there’s an end. If we only can steam her round in time to meet it. . . .”

A minute passed. Some of the stars winked rapidly and vanished.

“You left them pretty safe?” began the Captain abruptly, as though the silence were unbearable.

“Are you thinking of the coolies, sir? I rigged lifelines all ways across that ‘tween-deck.”

“Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes.”

“I didn’t . . . think you cared to . . . know,” said Jukes — the lurching of the ship cut his speech as though somebody had been jerking him around while he talked — ”how I got on with . . . that infernal job. We did it. And it may not matter in the end.”

“Had to do what’s fair, for all — they are only Chinamen. Give them the same chance with ourselves — hang it all. She isn’t lost yet. Bad enough to be shut up below in a gale — ”

“That’s what I thought when you gave me the job, sir,” interjected Jukes, moodily.

“ — without being battered to pieces,” pursued Captain MacWhirr with rising vehemence. “Couldn’t let that go on in my ship, if I knew she hadn’t five minutes to live. Couldn’t bear it, Mr. Jukes.”

A hollow echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship — and went out.

“Now for it!” muttered Captain MacWhirr. “Mr. Jukes.”

“Here, sir.”

The two men were growing indistinct to each other.

“We must trust her to go through it and come out on the other side. That’s plain and straight. There’s no room for Captain Wilson’s storm-strategy here.”

“No, sir.”

“She will be smothered and swept again for hours,” mumbled the Captain. “There’s not much left by this time above deck for the sea to take away — unless you or me.”

“Both, sir,” whispered Jukes, breathlessly.

“You are always meeting trouble half way, Jukes,” Captain MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly. “Though it’s a fact that the second mate is no good. D’ye hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left alone if. . . .”

Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all sides, remained silent.

“Don’t you be put out by anything,” the Captain continued, mumbling rather fast. “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it — always facing it — that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.

In the next few seconds the Captain spoke to the engine-room and got an answer.

For some reason Jukes experienced an access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a warm breath, and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the darkness stole into his ears. He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point.

The ship laboured without intermission amongst the black hills of water, paying with this hard tumbling the price of her life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking a white plummet of steam into the night, and Jukes’ thought skimmed like a bird through the engine-room, where Mr. Rout — good man — was ready. When the rumbling ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every sound, a dead pause in which Captain MacWhirr’s voice rang out startlingly.

“What’s that? A puff of wind?” — it spoke much louder than Jukes had ever heard it before — ”On the bow. That’s right. She may come out of it yet.”

The mutter of the winds drew near apace. In the forefront could be distinguished a drowsy waking plaint passing on, and far off the growth of a multiple clamour, marching and expanding. There was the throb as of many drums in it, a vicious rushing note, and like the chant of a tramping multitude.

Jukes could no longer see his captain distinctly. The darkness was absolutely piling itself upon the ship. At most he made out movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up.

Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: “I wouldn’t like to lose her.”

He was spared that annoyance.

VI

On A bright sunshiny day, with the breeze chasing her smoke far ahead, the Nan-Shan came into Fu-chau. Her arrival was at once noticed on shore, and the seamen in harbour said: “Look! Look at that steamer. What’s that? Siamese — isn’t she? Just look at her!”

She seemed, indeed, to have been used as a running target for the secondary batteries of a cruiser. A hail of minor shells could not have given her upper works a more broken, torn, and devastated aspect: and she had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world — and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. She was incrusted and gray with salt to the trucks of her masts and to the top of her funnel; as though (as some facetious seaman said) “the crowd on board had fished her out somewhere from the bottom of the sea and brought her in here for salvage.” And further, excited by the felicity of his own wit, he offered to give five pounds for her — ”as she stands.”

Before she had been quite an hour at rest, a meagre little man, with a red-tipped nose and a face cast in an angry mould, landed from a sampan on the quay of the Foreign Concession, and incontinently turned to shake his fist at her.

A tall individual, with legs much too thin for a rotund stomach, and with watery eyes, strolled up and remarked, “Just left her — eh? Quick work.”

He wore a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat.

“Hallo! what are you doing here?” asked the ex-second-mate of the Nan-Shan, shaking hands hurriedly.

“Standing by for a job — chance worth taking — got a quiet hint,” explained the man with the broken hat, in jerky, apathetic wheezes.

The second shook his fist again at the Nan-Shan. “There’s a fellow there that ain’t fit to have the command of a scow,” he declared, quivering with passion, while the other looked about listlessly.

“Is there?”

But he caught sight on the quay of a heavy seaman’s chest, painted brown under a fringed sailcloth cover, and lashed with new manila line. He eyed it with awakened interest.

“I would talk and raise trouble if it wasn’t for that damned Siamese flag. Nobody to go to — or I would make it hot for him. The fraud! Told his chief engineer — that’s another fraud for you — I had lost my nerve. The greatest lot of ignorant fools that ever sailed the seas. No! You can’t think . . .”

“Got your money all right?” inquired his seedy acquaintance suddenly.

“Yes. Paid me off on board,” raged the second mate. “‘Get your breakfast on shore,’ says he.”

“Mean skunk!” commented the tall man, vaguely, and passed his tongue on his lips. “What about having a drink of some sort?”

“He struck me,” hissed the second mate.

“No! Struck! You don’t say?” The man in blue began to bustle about sympathetically. “Can’t possibly talk here. I want to know all about it. Struck — eh? Let’s get a fellow to carry your chest. I know a quiet place where they have some bottled beer. . . .”

Mr. Jukes, who had been scanning the shore through a pair of glasses, informed the chief engineer afterwards that “our late second mate hasn’t been long in finding a friend. A chap looking uncommonly like a bummer. I saw them walk away together from the quay.”

The hammering and banging of the needful repairs did not disturb Captain MacWhirr. The steward found in the letter he wrote, in a tidy chart-room, passages of such absorbing interest that twice he was nearly caught in the act. But Mrs. MacWhirr, in the drawing-room of the forty-pound house, stifled a yawn — perhaps out of self-respect — for she was alone.

She reclined in a plush-bottomed and gilt hammock-chair near a tiled fireplace, with Japanese fans on the mantel and a glow of coals in the grate. Lifting her hands, she glanced wearily here and there into the many pages. It was not her fault they were so prosy, so completely uninteresting — from “My darling wife” at the beginning, to “Your loving husband” at the end. She couldn’t be really expected to understand all these ship affairs. She was glad, of course, to hear from him, but she had never asked herself why, precisely.

“. . . They are called typhoons . . . The mate did not seem to like it . . . Not in books . . . Couldn’t think of letting it go on. . . .”

The paper rustled sharply. “. . . . A calm that lasted more than twenty minutes,” she read perfunctorily; and the next words her thoughtless eyes caught, on the top of another page, were: “see you and the children again. . . .” She had a movement of impatience. He was always thinking of coming home. He had never had such a good salary before. What was the matter now?

It did not occur to her to turn back overleaf to look. She would have found it recorded there that between 4 and 6 A. M. on December 25th, Captain MacWhirr did actually think that his ship could not possibly live another hour in such a sea, and that he would never see his wife and children again. Nobody was to know this (his letters got mislaid so quickly) — nobody whatever but the steward, who had been greatly impressed by that disclosure. So much so, that he tried to give the cook some idea of the “narrow squeak we all had” by saying solemnly, “The old man himself had a dam’ poor opinion of our chance.”

“How do you know?” asked, contemptuously, the cook, an old soldier. “He hasn’t told you, maybe?”

“Well, he did give me a hint to that effect,” the steward brazened it out.

“Get along with you! He will be coming to tell me next,” jeered the old cook, over his shoulder.

Mrs. MacWhirr glanced farther, on the alert. “. . . Do what’s fair. . . Miserable objects . . . . Only three, with a broken leg each, and one . . . Thought had better keep the matter quiet . . . hope to have done the fair thing. . . .”

She let fall her hands. No: there was nothing more about coming home. Must have been merely expressing a pious wish. Mrs. MacWhirr’s mind was set at ease, and a black marble clock, priced by the local jeweller at 3L. 18s. 6d., had a discreet stealthy tick.

The door flew open, and a girl in the long-legged, short-frocked period of existence, flung into the room.

A lot of colourless, rather lanky hair was scattered over her shoulders. Seeing her mother, she stood still, and directed her pale prying eyes upon the letter.

“From father,” murmured Mrs. MacWhirr. “What have you done with your ribbon?”

The girl put her hands up to her head and pouted.

“He’s well,” continued Mrs. MacWhirr languidly. “At least I think so. He never says.” She had a little laugh. The girl’s face expressed a wandering indifference, and Mrs. MacWhirr surveyed her with fond pride.

“Go and get your hat,” she said after a while. “I am going out to do some shopping. There is a sale at Linom’s.”

“Oh, how jolly!” uttered the child, impressively, in unexpectedly grave vibrating tones, and bounded out of the room.

It was a fine afternoon, with a gray sky and dry sidewalks. Outside the draper’s Mrs. MacWhirr smiled upon a woman in a black mantle of generous proportions armoured in jet and crowned with flowers blooming falsely above a bilious matronly countenance. They broke into a swift little babble of greetings and exclamations both together, very hurried, as if the street were ready to yawn open and swallow all that pleasure before it could be expressed.

Behind them the high glass doors were kept on the swing. People couldn’t pass, men stood aside waiting patiently, and Lydia was absorbed in poking the end of her parasol between the stone flags. Mrs. MacWhirr talked rapidly.

“Thank you very much. He’s not coming home yet. Of course it’s very sad to have him away, but it’s such a comfort to know he keeps so well.” Mrs. MacWhirr drew breath. “The climate there agrees with him,” she added, beamingly, as if poor MacWhirr had been away touring in China for the sake of his health.

Neither was the chief engineer coming home yet. Mr. Rout knew too well the value of a good billet.

“Solomon says wonders will never cease,” cried Mrs. Rout joyously at the old lady in her armchair by the fire. Mr. Rout’s mother moved slightly, her withered hands lying in black half-mittens on her lap.

The eyes of the engineer’s wife fairly danced on the paper. “That captain of the ship he is in — a rather simple man, you remember, mother? — has done something rather clever, Solomon says.”

“Yes, my dear,” said the old woman meekly, sitting with bowed silvery head, and that air of inward stillness characteristic of very old people who seem lost in watching the last flickers of life. “I think I remember.”

Solomon Rout, Old Sol, Father Sol, the Chief, “Rout, good man” — Mr. Rout, the condescending and paternal friend of youth, had been the baby of her many children — all dead by this time. And she remembered him best as a boy of ten — long before he went away to serve his apprenticeship in some great engineering works in the North. She had seen so little of him since, she had gone through so many years, that she had now to retrace her steps very far back to recognize him plainly in the mist of time. Sometimes it seemed that her daughter-in-law was talking of some strange man.