In Hazard (20 page)

It was in the late afternoon, not long before sunset, that Dick descried an island, almost right ahead. It was Swan Island: one of a lonely little pair a hundred miles from the nearest other land. Edwardes was heartily glad the storm had dropped him when it did, had not driven him on that island. For no tidal wave in the world could have lifted them over the sixty-foot line of cliffs that for half a mile fringe the eastern side.

Ordinarily, these cliffs are crowned with trees—for it is a guano island, plaguy fertile. But as they drew near, Captain Edwardes noticed the trees were gone. The brow of the cliff was bald as a roughly plucked chicken, and showing the same occasional broken stumps.

Captain Edwardes scanned it with his binoculars.

“Seem to have caught it a bit on land, too,” he said to Captain Abraham.

“I'll say they have!” said Captain Abraham. “We're darned lucky to be at sea. The hurricane hit Cuba last night—just the western end. Do you know Santa Lucia?—No, I guess you wouldn't: it's a little coasting port in the Canal di Guaniguanicos. Only small craft ever put in there: one of the old buccaneering hide-outs, I've been told. I had a radio this morning. A tidal wave hit the town, and drowned two thousand people. That's about all there was living there, I should reckon. Washed it right out.”

(That same tidal wave which, by lifting them over the reefs had saved their lives!)

“And we haven't lost a man!” said Captain Edwardes: “Captain, the Lord our God is very merciful!”

Captain Abraham cleared his throat in an embarrassed way.

By the time they passed the islands, at their slow pace, it was dark—too dark to see how the guano station on the western island had fared. But there were no lights to be seen.

The officers ate their share of the supper in the saloon, as usual: but all somehow crowded round two tables, since the third was smashed. Deck and engine-room mixed at last.

Dick could not get the memory of that Chinaman he had arrested out of his head: so that he ventured to ask the Captain:

“That Chinaman, Sir, you ordered under arrest: what is going to be done with him?”

“He'll be sent back to Hongkong. Then I expect he'll be extradited to Canton, by the Chinese authorities.”

“And then, Sir?”

Captain Edwardes pulled an imaginary trigger in the air.

“Good God alive!” Dick dropped his fork, suddenly unable to eat.

Captain Edwardes sighed.

“I don't like it either,” he said: “but we have our duty to do. And I don't think you need waste any pity on him. He's a bandit—that means he has probably murdered and tortured countless innocent people.”

Dick sat silent, all the missionary stories of Chinese tortures that he had ever read rising in his mind. Could this decent-looking fireman have really done them? Toasted babies? Cut off old men's eyelids, and buried them up to the neck in sand? And that one with the ants (he could not remember quite how it is done)?

Perhaps he had. You can't tell by an oriental's face whether he is wicked or not—not like an Englishman.

But he was so light—he couldn't weigh more than seven stone.

“Dinna alloo your min' tae dwell on it, Mr. Watchett,” Mr. MacDonald broke in. “Shootin' is naught tae a Chinaman. They dinna min' daith, whit way a whit' mon min's it. It's a scienteefic fack that a Chinaman has fewer nairves in his body than whit we ha'e; they canna feel pain. Nearer beasts than men, they are!”

MacDonald rose, and went out onto the deck, walking aft to the shattered poop.

The pumping of the after hold had raised her stern a little, but on the lower side the sea still seemed very close. Leaning on a bit of rail, Mr. MacDonald gazed at the sea. The sky was thick with a multitude of stars, of all ranges of brilliance. The water broke in phosphorescence, their faint streaming replica. Aft, a white light at last winked out on the island astern of them.

The luminous water flowed by like a river.

How he hated the water! Hated it as if it had been another man. But now he was saved from it: it would not drown him this time. Thereupon Mr. MacDonald made a vow to himself, that it should not get another chance. He would retire. True, he had meant to wait another year or two. But these days had aged him more than a year or two. And he had a bit of money laid by, in the bank: enough to live on. True, the bairns had not finished their schooling. Well, if Jean wanted to go to High-school she must work for scholarships, the same as he had. He had earned a rest.

He turned his back on the hated sea: climbed onto the rail and sat there, like a boy. He began to think of the paradise-life he would lead, when he had retired from the sea. Some trim-clipt bushes, with a neatly swept path between. There in Gloucestershire? True, it was far from the sea. But mebbe he would go back near his old home, in Dumbartonshire.

Now that he had firmly resolved to leave the sea, that little hard, feverish knot in his mind, whose continual spinning had kept him for five days and nights from even a wink of sleep, seemed to dissolve. There was a pool of sleep in his mind, in which it melted fast. Suddenly—with no warning at all—deep sleep overcame him: and he fell off the rail backwards into the sea.

The shock of the water, of course, woke him, and he swam for quite a time.

Dick's mind was rather deeply affected by the arrest of Ao Ling: and neither the Captain nor Mr. MacDonald had really relieved him. Like most white young men, he had not really looked on the Chinese as human until he had touched one. In consequence, the shock of that touch had been much greater than it would have been in the case of another white man. If he had been grappling with a white man, he would have known what to expect, in the way of feel: whereas the feel of Ao Ling took him quite by surprise.

Moreover, Ao Ling was the first man he had ever knocked out: he was not prepared for what a satisfying pleasure that can be.

But it is the curious mood that succeeded this satisfactory instant which puzzles me. Why should he have found the feel of Ao Ling, as he carried him to the hospital, so curiously reminiscent of the feel of Sukie, as he carried her to the sofa? Was it just because they were much the same weight, and both had smooth skins?

Whatever the reason, he could not get the man's fate out of his mind, he kept going over it, again and again: was inordinately concerned about it. It fell to his lot to accompany the Captain and the doctor on their inspection, the next morning. His heart beat rather wildly, at the thought of seeing Ao Ling face to face. What would a man who is going to be executed look like? Surely he would not look like other men: certain death must surely set its seal beforehand on a face. And what would Ao Ling feel, when he saw the man who had seized him? Who had set his wheels, as it were, on the track that ran straight down to death?

Ao Ling was sitting on the bed, when they came in: his elbows on his knees, his manacled hands supporting his chin. His straight black hair stood forward from his forehead. Only the flat nose, the habitually parted lips, really showed. But he looked up: saw Dick's curiously inquisitive gaze fastened on him. He had in fact no memory at all of whose sudden blow had felled him. He stared back, in surprise.

Dick stared as if his eyes were gimlets. But he could make nothing of the Chinaman's expression. Stare, stare.—But how could those two young men see beyond each other's eyes? They were both the same age; and in some ways, very similar. But their upbringings had been very different.

Now their prospects for the future, it seemed, were rather different also.

Later in the morning, as Dick was trying to get some order among the possessions in his room, he was seized with a complete change of mood: a feeling of dramatic pride, like what he felt when he was oiling in the forward latrine. It is not every young man who has overcome a notorious Chinese bandit with his bare hands—knocked him out, handcuffed him, and carried him bodily to prison. For that, after all, is what he had done, when you put it into plain words without any trimmings (so why add the trimmings?).

It was a pity, in a way, that he had no souvenir of it. The Colonel has a tiger-skin on the hall floor: you trip over the thing, and he launches easily into the story of how he shot it. It is a pity that when you arrest a murderer there are no horns or anything you can keep, to get the story started (I am sure it would stimulate our police in making arrests if they knew that the judge, when it was all over, would send them, suitably mounted, the “mask”).

And yet it was curious, if Ao Ling really was a bandit and a murderer, that his face did not look more fiendish. Of course, villains can cover their wickedness with a look of the utmost benevolence: but not, surely, for ever. At the moment of arrest —that, according to Dick's reading-matter, was when the innocent look should have dropped, a look of baffled and fiendish cruelty should have contorted the man's features. But instead of that Dick could not, for the life of him, remember any other look than one of silly surprise.

Dick sought out Dr. Frangcon, and questioned him. Was Ao Ling really a bandit? The doctor knew Chinamen better than anyone else on board.

Dr. Frangcon listened seriously and rather sadly.

“How can I tell?” he said. “Also, it is not my job—and it is not your job. He certainly came on board with false papers. That alone makes it our duty to arrest him and hand him over to the police. What else he has done is their business, not ours.”

That sounded logical. But an illogical voice in Dick insisted on urging still, that if you give over a man to be shot dead you have at least a measure of responsibility in the matter.

He found himself suddenly remembering the little girl laid out flat on the trolley.

Captain Abraham left his own vessel in charge of his Chief Officer: as long as any of his sixteen men remained on board the “Archimedes,” he intended to stay there with them. He could trust them, up to a point: they had behaved with great patience up to now. But it would not take more than a spark, he knew, to start a fight. And when men in the condition of the “Archimedes's” men fight, they fight to kill and without thought of fair play.

Captain Abraham observed the condition of the “Archimedes's” men very carefully: it was part of his job, and he would probably be expected to furnish, in the strictest confidence, a report on them. Captain Edwardes, he thought, did not seem very greatly affected, now the incident of the boarding-party was over. He seemed worried, increasingly worried: not like a man bowled over by anything past, but rather like a man with an anxious ordeal ahead of him. Captain Abraham guessed easily what that was. The Enquiry which would presently take place into his every minutest action and motive throughout the whole storm was not a thing which any master would look forward to. Captain Abraham had been a witness at many such Enquiries. He knew what a tendency there is for the experts, with all the facts before them, with wisdom after the event, to declare unjustly but in all honesty that a man has acted wrongly. Nothing is harder than to bear in mind, when conducting such an Enquiry, only the knowledge that was available to the Master at each time his decisions had to be made: to rule out completely from the reckoning indications which came to light even, it may be, only a few minutes later.

That Captain Edwardes was fortunate in his officers, and especially in Mr. Buxton and Mr. Rabb, Abraham also decided. They were a sound pair, those two: unemotional and efficient. Men on whom you could well rely. Of the two, it was Rabb who showed least signs of wear and tear. And yet there was something very odd about him. He carried out all his duties with meticulous efficiency; but he seemed to avoid his fellow-officers: he seemed to have a grievance against them. Captain Abraham wondered what it was.

When they all gathered in the saloon for lunch, Captain Abraham continued his observation: but you would not have guessed it by his manner. He was telling stories. And not stories of storms at sea, either.

Mr. MacDonald's chair of course was empty. But only the two captains and the doctor and Mr. Soutar knew that he was missing. They gave it out that he had had a breakdown, and had been transferred to the “Patricia.” For it never entered their heads that he had fallen overboard: they thought he had jumped. And once jumping begins it is likely to go on. Best keep it quiet for the present.

Captain Abraham's stories merged from one into another: but nobody listened much.

Things were nearly back to normal, now. Already the carpenters had replaced the missing table, and Deck and Engine-room were sorted out again. The Chief Steward presided in his pantry; and two yellow waiters, in clean jackets, ceremoniously served the dishes.

A ships's saloon is never a very talkative place, but this one was more silent than usual: that is probably the only difference you would have noticed: and Captain Abraham's stories went on and on.

Presently he ran out of stories, with no-one to cap them: so for want of anything better to say he began to describe Belize (none of them had ever seen the place, not even Edwardes).

“Ha'n't you put in there before, Captain? No? Well, it's not a bad berth, in the dry season. It's no Shanghai, mind you: it's a quiet little place. But it's a purty sight, as you come into harbour—that is, if you like old-fashioned places, same as me: peepin' out of the palms and oleanders, with the mountains dim and hazy in the distance, and the sea dotted with little cays and islands like ... like ...”

His voice tailed away: he could not think what they were like, except cays and islands: and nobody seemed to care.

—That was an idea, Dick thought: suppose he was to let the Chinaman loose, when they reached Belize? The man would not have a very good chance, perhaps; but he
might
get away. At the least he would have a run for his money. At the thought of stealing to the cell quietly in the night, and letting the man go, a feeling of pleasurable warmth suffused Dick's body: the thought of Ao Ling's unspoken gratitude. Of meeting him, perhaps years later, in some desperate fracas in Central China, when all seemed lost: of Ao Ling recognising him, and saving his life in turn (for a Chinaman never forgets).