“No hurry, but the old man is aboard. Give him time to find himself, then go to him. I’ve had a talk with him.”
Captain Hale, in his shirt-sleeves, but wearing a bowler hat, was in his cabin advising the steward how he desired his property to be stowed. When Jimmy entered the room his step had to be stretched over a mound of clothes. The captain showed no surprise at his presence. “Come in, Mr. Colet. Sinclair has reported to me.” He motioned the steward out of the cabin. “Come back in five minutes.”
They talked, but the captain never took his eyes off a stack of shirts on the floor. Jimmy got an impression that somehow there was a difficulty with the laundry. They were discussing that. Some collars were missing? Even the neat pile of clean linen before him did not appear to interest the captain very much. Perhaps it was only old stuff which had gone astray; not much good. A grey and shy little man. The captain stooped and picked up a garment; turned it about as though in depreciating examination. Neither of them spoke for so long a spell that Jimmy was on the nervous point of bringing the encounter to a close and, going out to find Sinclair arid a boat. The captain silently considered the garment in his hands
“It’s irregular,” he murmured at last, as if in dispraise of those pants. “A bit off the course. But I can log it, I suppose.” He changed his regard to Colet, though not to his face; about as high as his knees. Merely comparing their pants?
“We leave as soon as our engineers are ready. They’ve uncoupled something below, but they won’t be long. Well, what will you do then? Go on with us?”
“What? Yes, if I may.”
“Well. It’s your affair. I suppose it’s in order. We’ll know some day. Only thing to do is what seems best at the time. I’ll see you at dinner.”
That night at dinner hardly a general word went across the table. The captain was new to the ship, and he presided over the soup as though he were not sure that the others would care for the stuff. “Too much onion in this, steward. Remember that.” Sinclair’s stern interest was fixed where nothing could be seen. He was merely performing a duty in eating, and he picked up his cap from a sideboard and left the saloon as though glad to get out of it. The captain and the chief engineer then conversed in undertones of some technical matters. Jimmy wished to learn to where in the world the ship was bound, but he had to do without it.
Yet, when he got away from that confinement with strangers who were talking apart and confidentially of much which he did not understand and more that he did not hear, and was alone on deck, their destination, wherever it was, did not loom importantly. It was incidental. They were outward bound. Enough for one day; and one day at a time. He leaned on the lee-rail, amidships, watching a distant light. That was the last spark of the old interests. It was low down. It was a wonder that it could persist. Sometimes it did go out, but reappeared, to attach and remind them. Then a big warm presence bringing the smell of a cheroot was beside him. He did not hear it approach. He smelt it first. A dark night. It said nothing. Occasionally the cigar glowed. The chief engineer? They didn’t know each other yet. That warm shadow also seemed to be contemplating the light. It remained there in solid ease for some time, but it did not speak. Then it stood up, and stretched. “Aye?” it soliloquised interrogatively; and then, as though in confirmation, “aye”; and that was all. Its place was empty.
So this, conjectured Jimmy, groping over his clammy door for its handle, is romance. There’s no fuss about it. You wouldn’t know it, unless you were told what it was. Altogether casual and insignificant; as if it were as silly as life itself.
Chapter XII
Gillespie extolled the Scots. His hardihood left nothing else to talk about. The steward brisked about with the morning dishes. Jimmy, in a way that was new to him, noticed that the odour of the coffee had the effect of a clarion, of a hymn of praise. It smelt better than it tasted. The mornings were good. And this the Bay of Biscay, too! The seas were actually chanting. A stray beam of shine from the skylight swayed leisurely to and fro across the table-cloth; the water-bottle was in its track and answered the light by decorating the table linen with the spectrum. A rum thing, but as soon as you approached the matter of the resounding ballads and the tall tales, it was like this. On the whole, Colet thought he preferred it as it was. Look at Gillespie, that bold seaman! Or Hale, whose downcast thoughts seemed absorbed into the emptiness of his plate! Easy-going and friendly. No deeps of evil and heroism there. Hale hardly ever spoke but his words then certainly hinted that he knew what he was talking about. Gillespie continued to admonish Sinclair about the Scots, and the chief officer was smiling derisively.
“Where would you have been without them? Answer that now. Talk of your Shakespeare! Aye, he wasn’t so bad. Not so bad. But there’s Burns. There’s a man for ye. Have ye the like of him? And who did all that was worth doing, marine engines, the best ships, whisky, now?”
“And macadam, Gillespie. Don’t forget that.”
Jimmy had heard all this before. It was probably as constant at a ship’s mess-table as bloaters. Gillespie’s face was big and comforting, and its bronze made his grey eyes, and his crimped and wiry hair, oddly pale and noticeable; his back was as broad as the mahogany. Sinclair had confided to Colet that the chief engineer could smell in his sleep a minor fault in the engine-room and go to it by divination. Sinclair handsomely confessed now, pulling bread apart, that he would not so strongly object to the Scots if they could talk English.
“Man! I tell ye that Scotch is the original English, anyway.”
“Of course, when we were hairy savages, living on heather tops. Before we learned better manners. I say, Gillespie. Didn’t I ever tell you? There was a Scotchman, an Aberdonian, I sailed with once. He was an engineer, on his first voyage. I had to guess twice before I knew what it was he wished to tell me, but couldn’t pronounce properly. Well, we were coaling out East, and this fellow-countryman of yours was at a hatch with the Chinese Number One. They were rowing. Pidgin-English and your kind of English. You never heard such a shocking noise. The work was getting all balled up. Nothing to do with me, of course, but I strolled along to hear what the trouble was. The young engineer tried to tell me, but the Chink broke in. He was so jolly wild. He pointed at your countryman. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘No speakee English. No speakee Chinee. All same bloody Scotchman.’”
Sinclair went out of the room triumphant while Gillespie was considering a shot at him. The captain took no part in the discussion. “He’s a lively young man,” he remarked to the engineer. “You know, Gillespie, I’m told that I’m a Scot, or that I was.”
Thus that day drew insensibly towards noon. The next day was like it, and the day after was separated but by another night. Time was alternate day and night. Their ship was enchanted in the centre of a vast and empty world. It was the dot and focus of a radiant vacuity; and it was a handhold when about them was nothing but stars and the dirge of the abyss. It laboured, it beat down without ceasing glassy upheavals into fields of hissing white, but it could never escape to that dark and distant line where the wall of heaven stood about them. They were alone. The romance of the sea had flown off, perhaps, on the wings of the clippers, and was lost. It was not there. But the sea and the sky were unaware of any loss. They were beautiful, but were aloof from the desires and anxieties of man. The deck was orange and crimson with rust. Even iron-rust, when it was seen in the right place, accorded with a mind in which perturbation was lessening. Jimmy had a word with Sinclair about that rust. Sinclair surveyed it, and advised Colet that it would do him more good to take a chipping hammer to it. What was more, it would have to be done. The black funnel and the yellow masts leaned this way and that, and sometimes swung in a half-circle.
A coast appeared, late one afternoon. It was illusive, but it must have been land. The shape of earth there, Colet saw, had the luminous indistinction of a pale blue flower in sunlight; those strips of orange would be its beaches. The sky over the inland hills of violet was a clear height of greenish e
ther. They were lost, very likely. They had strayed to a younger and brighter planet. An opposite coast formed with a scatter of white specks down by the sea. The captain stood with Colet on the starboard side of the bridge. “There’s Tangier,” said Hale.
Names. Bare names. They were no nearer the reality than ever. The only reality was their present ship and its men. Hale and that spellbound seaman inside the wheel-house were solid. They were there. But beyond them was the old vaporous abstraction. Perhaps an Odyssey could begin with every voyage of every ship. But how was a voyager to know that? What would be the alarming signal: “Here you start?” It must all depend on the spectator himself. Perhaps there is no adventurous morning light showing things anew for those who sleep on. But there is no knowing whether one is awake or asleep.
Captain Hale, having indicated the presence of Africa, remained in the same position, leaning on the weather dodger, with his thin brown hands clasped before him. His white shirt cuffs were linked with gold. A neat, precise, and sensible deacon. He was still regarding Tangier in apparent belief. Somebody was playing an accordion in the forecastle.
“How strange,” commented the ship’s master. “I don’t think I’ve heard that tune since one night at the Queen’s Palace of Varieties. You wouldn’t know that music hall. Poplar High Street. I was a youngster then, in a barque in the South Dock. I heard Jenny Hill that night. Before your time, I think. No, you wouldn’t know her. They called her the Vital Spark.” Captain Hale was still considering the portentous loom of Africa, and seemed pleased with it.
Good Lord, thought Jimmy. Here we are, and the men together on the same ship are in different seas, and only appear to be together. They see different things. What would make this world common for us all?
“The Great Macdermott was on the programme that night,” quietly continued Hale.
“We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do?”
“Yes. You’ve got him. That’s the fellow.”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“Yesterday, or thereabouts, my boy. Just feel our revolutions.”
Jimmy gave conscious attention to the incessant and energetic throbbing which was the only warning of their progress.
“She’s doing her best,” he reported
“She is,” said Hale. “Well, that’s how time goes.” He turned to look at their wake. Jimmy turned. The track of their past diminished to infinity on the uneventful sea towards the declining sun.
Chapter XIII
A little concentration with a chipping hammer will do more to the inexperienced back than to a rusty deck. Colet, not to be beaten, ached while he chipped, and the sun burned his neck. The rust was even drier than ledgers. How long to go to one bell? A flake struck his eye and he gave it a rest; he stretched his back. The sea, after the near red deck, expanded into an astonishing sapphire. An island was in sight in the blaze of day, a desert of tawny rock. It quivered under the sun and the lucent breeze. Where had that place come from? Conjured up? Sinclair, on his way aft, rebukingly active, descended an iron ladder to the deck with a rapid tattoo of his feet, but checked alongside Colet to peer at the island. One tiny house by the shore, a white cube, was all that showed in the desert.
“That’s where she lives,” confided Sinclair. “Circe waits for me there, but alone. No leopards. And especially no swine. Only jars of wine.”
“Have you ever seen her?”
“On my first voyage. Yes, I think I saw her. Just a glimpse.”
“But that line of white along the shore. That’ll be the bones of sailors.”
“Served ’em right. I’m the man. One day I shall land, and then she’ll come down to the beach. No good looking today. You won’t see her. She knows I’m passing the place. Not the time yet to stop. Farewell, Circe, my love!” Sinclair kissed his hand to the mirage.
Their ship touched earth again at Port Said. That was a solid abode of men, with the assured smells of historical contamination and well-established intercourse. No doubt about Port Said. It was an area of understandable life, noisy and lusty. It was ramshackle, insistent, predatory, and raucous. Goats reclined in its gutterways. Its crowds hinted indifference or hostility. Vendors of obscenities, purveyors of cosmopolitan lesions, enticed with the smirking confidence that the desires of their own species were well known to them. It swarmed with flies. Its Canal was a lucky way of escape.
But by Suez, one daybreak, Colet sat up in his bunk from sleep with the instant waking certainty that something was going to happen. The ship, too, he could feel, was waiting for it. She was still and reconciled. She was anchored. The cabin was as close and quiet as a crypt. A crypt; this might be the breathless resurrection day. There was no sign. It had not begun yet. The book he had been reading late into the night was just discernible, open on the floor, where it had fallen from his bunk. Something in his favour. It was the Bible. The book looked up at him. It counselled him nothing from that distance below. The ship, he thought, was abandoned; he was left aboard, to make the best of it on his own.
Colet glanced out of the cabin port. There he saw, though not without doubt, what must have been the usual stanchion. A loose rope was beside it hanging from above. The rope was as still as the iron. That appearance of waiting in resignation was more than strange. It was a warning. The queer thing was that London seemed of less consequence to him now than that book on the floor. Reading that book had been his last act. The bare shadow of London moved but once in his thought, as he sat up; but Billiter Avenue had gone. Of no importance. What was important now? Through the port, beyond the stanchion, the distance deepened as he looked. Light was coming. Land formed under it.
Syria, very likely. Somewhere hereabouts Moses used to roam with his aboriginal mob and his first laws done in stone. Perhaps this was the chosen region of earth, whenever it was decided to vouchsafe a new light. That silence and brooding obscurity would make a man contrite and willing to learn. Out there, something would soon begin. The eastern sky seemed to be indicating the dread judgment to come, but no sign was under it of the works of men. Or else all that work was in hiding. Men and their work guessed what was coming. They had crawled under the film of sin and night which the past had left on the earth. But the upstanding ship would be terribly conspicuous.
That stanchion was already plain. A level flush of reddish gold beyond made the earth shrink into a deeper dark, but the elevated iron of the ship from London, unable to escape, was brightly caught. Without the sound of a trumpet the eye of Heaven suddenly lifted and blazed. Bones and opinions were like glass. The earth was prostrate under that unremitting celestial stare.
And every man at breakfast that morning was dressed in white. Immaculate linen for a transcendent day, when the old things had passed! Colet surveyed his messmates in surprise. Were they all confident they would be approved, and had anticipated it in pure raiment? Captain Hale waved aside the bloater and bacon. No more grease. There was a stifling suggestion that furnace doors were somewhere open. “Not now,” he said to the steward with the dishes. “This Gulf is the easier for a little fasting,” he explained to his colleagues at the table.
“Man, never give in to the Red Sea,” said Gillespie. “How would you care for yon engine-room now?” he asked Sinclair.
The chief officer was glum. He wiped his wet face. He glared malignantly at old Gillespie. “Engine-room! This is about the place where all that began, isn’t it? Civilisation and engines. God seems to be savage about it now. On the bridge you’d think He was trying to burn out a mistake.”
“It’s no right. That’s no the way to talk. Sun and rock and no wind. What would ye expect?”
“I tell you he is sorry he let us start it. This place is being paid out. That’s what makes it so damned hot.”
“Och. Get away, man!”
“It’s your cursed engines and science, that’s my idea, Mr. Engineer.”
The captain smiled; he was not at breakfast; he was waiting for a message from the shore. “Don’t l
et it worry you. We can’t alter it. It’s not Gillespie’s fault.”
“I think so, sir. If it wasn’t for engines, we shouldn’t be here.”
“An’ where would ye be? Piddling aroun’ south with a bit canvas. I tell ye. The engineers are the men. Ye couldna do withoot them.”
“I think,” said Hale, “Sinclair is not really annoyed with the engines. He must find them handy at times. Perhaps he is is only thinking of the uses to which we put our knowledge. Is that it, Mr Sinclair?”
The chief officer had not seen this turn to his petulance. “Well, sir. No. I don’t know. I was only hot.”
The engineer presently left, still argumentative. “Hot! I never heard the like of it.” The captain shook his head in amusement at his lieutenant. “Be careful, Mister. If you must get peevish, don’t blaspheme science. Nobody will mind if you round on God. But leave the engines alone. They’re sacred.”
Sinclair looked round at the master in a little surprise. That elderly man was sitting with his eyes cast down, but he looked up in a friendly way at his junior. “You’ll find it so,” he said. “It’s no good getting annoyed with the way of things. We might as well argue with the seasons. They change, when the turn comes. Some day—perhaps—even engines may not be sacred.” He went out of the saloon, but came back to put his head in the door, “We get going in half an hour.”
They went on. The ship came to sullen life, grumbling and stuffy, breathing cinders heavily all over them from a languid bulge of smoke. She had entered another region of earth, and was committed to another existence. Europe was far off, and out of mind; they were beset by another order, and must make the best of it with the little they knew. The shores near to them on either beam showed that Sinclair was right in one thing. Those coasts were burnt out. There the earth had finished with men. There was no more darkness in the high bergs of Africa. They were masses of radiant bronze and brass. The very sea was lumpish and resentful of the intrusion of keels. It did not want them to pass. At sunset it was a level of heavy lava, polished and opaque, where their ship was fixed centrally in a glow between fulgent metallic shores. Sounds had gone from that world, for no men were there, no rain, and no wind.
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