In Hazard (13 page)

Dick had not prayed for material things for many years, because he had thought it was wrong. In his heart of hearts he still believed he would get them, if he did: but when you are grown up you have no business praying for them. So God, while granting your prayer, would probably see it went bad on you: would give you ample cause to wish you had never asked for the thing. Grace was all you were supposed to ask for, and general spiritual well-being. But oh, Sweet Lord! It was not spiritual well-being he wanted just now, he wanted to bloody well not be drowned in his twenty-first year.

He got down on his knees, with his arm braced round a pillar, and prayed till he sweated, there in the forward starboard latrine:

“Oh Lord God, I was a fool ever to go to sea. Oh Lord God, get me back home safe off it. Oh Lord God, I do most heartily repent of my wasted years, and of what I thought about when I was shut in my room instead of Thee—Oh Lord God don't hold that against me, don't drown me because of that. Oh Lord God, I pray Thee, save me off the sea!”

But then misgivings assailed him. Suppose God did save him: gave him the bare thing he asked, but turned it bad on him? Saved him from drowning only to perish at once in a house-on-fire, or be hanged? How had he better put it? Glimmerings of his Confirmation-teaching began to come back to him:

“Oh Lord,” he went on, “that is to say, only save me from drowning if that be already Thy Will: at any rate, don't let it be to my harm to be saved from drowning: and if Thou savest me, use the rest of my life for Thy purposes, not as it has been up to now.”

That apparently was all right: for at that moment he felt a most distinct and stabbing promise, of the kind he remembered so well, that he should be saved alive kindly.

To make his praying more intense, he ground his knuckles hard into his eyes. The pain was almost unbearable: his eyes being cracked and inflamed, and his hands smeared with engine-oil and salt.

Then he got back to work again.

Then he got back to work again, and after a while the heroic part he was filling dawned upon him, as he poured the saving oil, in single-handed combat for his ship against the whole wrath of the sea. It was light again now, it must be morning: a grey light filled the latrine. He had been at his post since early yesterday afternoon, without relief: it would soon be twenty-four hours. And indeed he had been on duty with the rest of them, without sleep or rest, for four whole days and nights (or was it only three?).

If only Sukie could see him now! No shore-going uniform and brass buttons, like a tailor's dummy; but stripped and steely, fighting the storm with a superhuman strength, a dour devotion to duty. Hour after hour, hour after hour. Day after day. Indefatigable. Surely, if she could see him like this, she would love him with her whole heart?

And yet, I don't know. Would she have loved him? She had liked well enough to sit on the knees of his shore-going uniform, to rub her cheek against his pink smooth cheek. Would she really have preferred to sit on the knees of oily and sodden dungarees, her cheek against his sore and stubbly jaw?

His face did not wear, as he thought, the lean, drawn, and lion-like aspect one expects of an unflinching hero. For the immediate effect on a hero's face of unflinching effort is seldom to make him look romantic. More often it makes him look liverish. You know that noble look of open, wise patience, that you have seen on the face of some great explorer? That look did not come to him in the desert. The desert may have begotten it, but it only came to him afterwards, in safety and comfort. In the desert he looked at times brutal, at times petulant, at times frightened. Never noble.

If Sukie heard of all this afterwards, told graphically, so that she could imagine the scene according to her own ideas, then indeed it might sway her towards him. But not if she had been there.

For lift Dick for a moment out of his surroundings, and give him the once-over. It is hard to tell the immediate effects of heroism from those of indulgence. With nothing but appearances to go on, you would probably guess that figure to be one of Life's Failures, who, sodden with drink, had spent the night on a garbage pile. His face now was dirty, swollen, puffy, weak-looking—in fact, ugly and pretty contemptible. And he smelt disgusting.

“Archimedes” carried plenty of engineers, more engineers than deck-officers: and now there was very little for them to do. During the early part of the storm they had congregated in the saloon: but as the conflict deepened they withdrew from there, one by one, and congregated on the engine-flat. The deck-officers could not understand that: could not understand why, when the ship was in peril, they should like to penetrate down there where they had no hope of escape; where they would not even know she was sinking, if she did, until she did. The engineers for their part could not understand why the deck-officers should prefer to remain high up, near the open deck, where you were almost exposed to the storm itself.

I suppose really both had the same reason for what they did. Each wanted to be in a familiar place. For surely you feel safest in your most familiar place. A small child, in the dark, feels wholly safe in his own bed: would rather face the lion in the room from his bed (from which there is no chance of escape) than standing barefoot near the door with a chance of bolting down the passage if it springs.

So the engineers, with common accord, took their station by their sleeping engines; and indeed Mr. MacDonald had never left that station.

Mr. MacDonald had a mattress brought down for him: but I do not say that he passed an easy night. He could not close his eyes. I do not mean just that he could not sleep: he could not close his eyes. They felt as if the lids were propped apart with short lengths of stick. He tried closing them with his fingers, but they would not stay shut: released, the lids crept back off the ball.

Most of the night his mind tried to run on water, the water he would drink if he could: but instead, fiery were the things he saw. The dead furnaces were shooting out flames again (as they did when they were blowing back): and every flame a Chinaman. Chinamen were licking round his knees, trying to catch them. Blasts of Chinamen burst from each furnace-door: or ran in coveys squealing across the floors, like rats in a hold. Some of them took lengths of cotton waste to tie round the steering-rods, and jam into the joints, for fear these steering-rods might ever again be used: others, flying by in threes with a buzz, alighted on the turbines and the reducing-gear, and drawing the corkscrews that were hidden in their trousers used them to prise out the most vital parts, which, turned soft and succulent in their hands, they ate irrevocably.

Do not think Mr. MacDonald was asleep. I told you the poor chap could not even shut his eyes. He saw these things with his eyes open, long after he had left his mattress and was parading round and round the place. He told Soutar about them: but Soutar was too angry to care whether his Chief was mad or sane. But he too had his suspicions: and all night they kept up an endless round, for fear of what the filthy Chinese might do in anger and treacherousness to the engines.

Gaston was asleep, dog-asleep, when MacDonald woke him by shaking.

“Fetch me a cup of water,” ordered the Chief: but when Gaston fell asleep again without answering he let him bide. For he could see a cascade of good water bursting out of the engine-room telegraph. Only, when he got near, he found a Chinaman had drunk the lot.

Mr. MacDonald had a little villa outside Cirencester, where he lived when on leave: a wife with a rather red face, and with grey hair strained straight up from her forehead over a brownish, sausage-shaped pad. Yet they had three children of only school-age, for they had married rather late. As the cloud of Chinamen cleared and his mind grew more lucid, it was of this he thought: and especially of his pride, the three children, hopping home from school in good outer clothes, and good warm underclothes, well-fed and confident that the world was their oyster, their faces shining with unintelligence and unawakened sex. How deeply he resented their security, while he, their father, was waiting to go down in the sea! For they would never understand that the price of each little suit of winter-weight all-wool underwear was an hour of this hell. They thought it was just money: but it was not, it was his life, and they were sucking it out of his old bones, but he could no more stir and escape than the soil can escape from around the guzzling roots of a tree.

“I'm worth ten of those kids,” he suddenly remarked out loud, with feeling.

Of course he was: there was so much more of him. For in the long run, if you want to say how much of a chap there is you can only measure his memory. The more he has in his memory the more of a chap there is. By that reckoning the old are often huge, and the young, for all their vanity, midgets. For surely somebody's person—well, it is the whole content of his mind. And there is very little in anybody's mind, at any time, except memory: the mind is nine parts memory, just as a jelly-fish is nine parts water.

And yet it is supposed to be a terribly sad thing, when a young man dies: but quite right and proper when an old one does! The old man dying gets little sympathy, he ought not to mind it. But does he mind it!

I expect you have seen people die: a young man bite his lip, and go out—pouf! like falling off a horse. Why, the giddy things will often go out of their way to take risks with death. But MacDonald had also once seen an old woman, aged eighty-six, on her death-bed.
She
fought for her life as a mother-tigress fights. Her last words were, as her last sun set: “I do hope I wake up alive in the morning!” Though Heaven knows what she thought she was going to wake up to. Her legs had already been dead for three days.

After all, which would you rather lose: an empty purse, or one you had spent laborious years in filling? Look what she was losing: memories of more than eighty years. But when a child dies, people get quite lyrical in their pity. Yet it is a very small loss to the child, his life: a small shimmering bagatelle. A purse with only twopence in it, and an I.O.U.

All the old know this, in an inarticulate way: Mr. MacDonald knew it: and revolved it, in deep indignation, as he paced the engine-room. But then a sudden new thought struck him. Was death in fact the end?

All his life he had been a religious man: had believed in God: had believed in Sin. But did he believe in a future life? He had really hardly considered it. He believed in Heaven and Hell, of course. But was that a real future life, or was it just a manner of speaking, a sort of Sanctions? Yes, this was a new idea altogether. When his body went down in the deep, would his soul come out of it like a bubble, and rise to the top? Not only an impersonal soul, a wisp of spiritual vapour, but the actual essential him, the only William Ramsay MacDonald? Michty me! If there was any real hope of that, things were not quite so dark as they looked, not by a long chalk! He began, for the first time in his life, to wonder just what sort of a place Heaven really was.

“Mr. Soutar,” he said, when the two sentries met on their beat, “dae ye beleeve in a future life?”

Mr. Soutar paused and considered carefully before answering.

“Aye,” he said brusquely, and went on with his beat.

But the next time they met, it was Soutar who stopped MacDonald.

“It's nae sae easy,” he said, “the subjeck is crammt wi' deeficoolties. Ye mean a future life o' a pairsonal kin', A tak' it? Me, William Edgar Soutar, and you, William Ramsay MacDonald?”

“Cairtainly,” said Mr. MacDonald.

“A future life for every man born o' wumman?”

“For every Chreestian,” Mr. MacDonald amended.

“Weel, noo. Are we to tak' it that a human Chreestian is compoondit o' three pairts; his body, his min', an' his speerit?”

MacDonald grunted.

“The body dees, the speerit leeves?”

MacDonald grunted again.

“Than whit o' the min'? That's nayther speerit nor body. Yet it's vera boont up wi' the body. A disease o' the body can disease the min'. A blow on the body can blot oot the min'. The min', like the body, graws auld an' decays. The daith o' the body, than: is that the daith o' the min' tae?”

“Allooin' it be,” said MacDonald.

“Than the future life canna be of a vera pairsonal nature, A'm thinkin': it is a saft, imbecile sort o' thing ma speerit would be wi'oot ma min': nae William Edgar Soutar at a'.”

He turned again on his beat: for an hour they talked no more when they met. Then MacDonald stopped him with a hand on his shoulder:

“Mr. Soutar,” he said, “the human min' is hingt on reason: whit is ayont reason, reason canna camprehen'. Mebbe in the Next Worrl' we shall cast reason, as a growing bairn casts his nappies.”

Soutar tore himself free and passed on. It was not till they met again he could allow himself to speak: and when he did his words burst out in passion:

“The Almichty gied us Reason tae be the only pairt in Diveenity we hae, not to be despisit! Man, ye're taukin' lik' a Sotheran!”

Once more the two men glared in each other's faces with apoplectic hate; and then passed by each other on their endless round.

As soon as it was light, Captain Edwardes saw with relief that they were in deep water again. The colour of the water showed it, and the more natural shape of the seas. Nevertheless he deemed it prudent to go on oiling. For he estimated that now no less than a thousand tons of water had gone below through the broken hatches: and totting up this and that, it seemed likely that all she could be expected to hold in her belly was some twelve hundred tons. The margin was getting very small.

Moreover, this deep water might not last long. Serrana Bank and Serranilla are only the south-easterly outposts (with Quito Sueno and Baxo Nuevo) of a long line of banks and cays, that stretch from Cape Gracias a Dios, in Central America, right across to the shores of Jamaica: Half-moon Reef and Gorda Bank, Thunder Knoll and Rosalind Bank, and the great Pedro Bank with Portland Rock. If this was Serranilla he had passed, Rosalind Bank must be under his lee. And even when all the banks were passed, whither was he drifting? The Yucatan Channel is only a little more than a hundred miles wide, from Cape Catoche to Cape San Antonio. What hope was there of striking it, and so winning the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, without being blown on the shores of either Yucatan or Cuba?