by Talbot Mundy
Then he began to count the periods — and then the seconds in between them. The chunking of the oars against the thole pins became the measured intervals before the light appeared, and it irritated him when their tale differed. He swore at the Somalis, ordering them to keep better time; and the Somalis swore back at him. That was his first reminder that authority depended now upon himself, and that he was alone, with no traditions and training of the Fifty-Fifth to back him up. The discontented men whom he had picked had consented readily enough to row him shoreward; for on Mathew he had been a sergeant, and what he said seemed good. But here, in the welter of the sea, he was nothing but a white man at the mercy of four blacks. Ashore they would be the men who knew the ropes, not he; conditions would be reversed, and he would have nothing but a very little money and a nearly inexhaustible supply of ignorance to sustain him in command. Might and right and the proof of both of them are what give control in Red Sea waters; here were wrong and helplessness, and the Somalis recognized them — and began to show it. They snarled. He drew out a small revolver and laid it ostentatiously upon the seat beside him.
For a while after that the heavy breathing and the laboring at the oars went on in silence. The Somali who rowed stroke had only one foot braced against the stretcher; the big toe protruded up above it, and it moved — once toward Stanley, once away again — with each strain at the oar. Thirty times between each two revolutions of the light the stretcher creaked, and the toe jerked forward and back again. if it were thirty-one times, or twenty-nine times, the universe was wrong, and Stanley was ill at ease. That timing of the toe became even more important than direction.
Before long, if the big toe beckoned to him thirty times exactly he would have luck that night, and if it didn’t — He hated to think what would happen if it didn’t! He counted, and it beckoned twenty-nine times; so he tried again. He might have counted wrong, he thought, or have missed one movement in the darkness. He waited two revolutions, and then commenced — one ... kunk ... two ... kunk ... three ... kunk — twenty-nine, and no light had appeared. He lived a lifetime almost, between the last stroke and the reappearance of the light, screwing his head round to catch the first glint of it and listening with both ears for the squeaking of the stretcher. And when the light did come, the Somalis had stopped rowing!
The luck was out, then! Well, luck or no luck, he was going on! He rose from his seat and cursed the rowers, letting the tiller bang to whichever side it would while he emphasized his rhetoric with shaken fists. “Row!” he growled. “Thirty times a minute, d’ye hear!”
He could see the stroke-man’s face, but not the others. He heard a voice, though, from the bow — one low, guttural exclamation that made the stroke-man prick his ears and look behind him; when he looked back he was grinning, and from then on he ceased to watch the light. When he started to row again, he set the time hardly half as fast as formerly; and count how he might, Stanley could not make the oar-strokes fit in with the light. He cursed them, and coaxed them, and threatened them, and offered them rewards; but they only laughed, and kept on pulling at their own pace. Away up forward, somewhere in the illimitable blackness, the bow-oar began to croon a Somali boat-song — leisurely as the gait of centuries, minor keyed and melancholy — and the pace slowed down still further to the time of it. And suddenly the stroke-oar shouted a long, deep-throated ululating howl that pierced the blackness all around them, and brought the gooseflesh breaking on Stanley’s skin.
He thought he heard an answering yell, but he told himself that would be impossible; there was no land between him and Matthew, or between him and Arabia either. His pipe had gone out, and he tried to light it, to show how perfectly at ease he was; but his hand, curved into a shelter round the blazing match, shook so violently that the stroke-oar grinned again.
He looked behind him, to judge how great a distance lay between them and the lighthouse, and — one on either hand, twenty yards away, and well outside the phosphorescent swirl the oars had made — he saw two other little pools of fire that kept pace with them. He forgot the steering then, to watch them, fascinated. Sometimes they diverged a little to the right or left, but they always followed, and when the rowers ceased, to call his attention to the steering, the pools of fire came nearer — much nearer. One came right under the counter of the boat, and from the middle of it a big black fin protruded. Something bumped the bottom of the boat.
“Row!” yelled Stanley.
He picked up his revolver, in a frenzy of night-intensified horror, hurled it at the fin, and missed.
The revolver bubbled downward in a splurge of phosphorus, and the shark, rolling lazily, dived after it, belly upward — eighteen feet of black, fire-dripping, hungry cruelty.
“Give way there!” shouted Stanley, now beside himself with fear. “Row!”
He had no revolver now. He shook his fists at them, and the stroke-man suddenly unshipped his oar, thrust at him, and sent him sprawling on the seat. The older shark swept nearer silently. The stroke-man shouted. Stanley drew his hand inside the boat one-fiftieth of a second ahead of the snapping jaws. The shark’s nose brushed his sleeve! The boat rocked as the whole length of the monster rolled, porpoise-like, against its side. Stanley leaned forward with his head between his hands. He was voiceless, almost — physically sick with fear.
“O God!!” he groaned. ‘Not that way! That’s a dog’s death!”
The Somalis began to row again, listlessly, not troubling about direction; Stanley slipped off his seat on to the bottom, and sat there where the sides of the boat would hide the horrors from him. They seemed less awful when he could not see them. The stroke-oar shouted again, and stopped rowing, and this time Stanley was sure that he heard an answering shout. Suddenly, he caught the chunk of oars behind him. He leaped up like a maniac.
He was a deserter. They were after him! Was this to be the end of his attempt! Back to the torment of the island he had left — with disgrace, and irons, and trial, and ignominy added to it! Reduced to the ranks — two years maybe four years on the Andamans ... caught like a noosed steer — punished — and turned loose, pensionless without a character!
He would die sooner! He would dive among the sharks before they caught him! With the foolish, childish instinct of a man hard gripped by fear, he began to pull his boots off.
Then another thought occurred to him. He sprang forward, sat down on the stroke-man’s thwart and seized the oar. The man resisted. Stanley kicked and pushed him away toward the stern. After that he set the pace himself and made it a rowser — rowing until the veins swelled on his temples, and his breath came in noisy gasps; his head grew giddy with the heat and sweat and effort. The others had hard work to keep pace with him, but he kept them going until he noticed that the Somali in the stern had put the helm hard up and held it so. And when he saw what had happened, it was too late. Splitting the phosphorescent wave in front of it like a fire-lit wedge — chunking regularly like the stroke of Nemesis — swirling, fire-hung, and beautiful a four-oared cutter swung out of the darkness suddenly, bow-on. The fire-splashed oars tossed upward — the helm went hard over in a gurling, phosphorescent welter — and the two, lighthouse cutter and station whale-boat, rose and fell side by side in the same trough of the lazy-looking waves.
Then long brown arms seized Stanley by the shoulders and the legs; and — too sick with fear, and shame, and disappointment even to struggle — he was lifted out and laid, back downward, in the cutter.
“Hayah!” said a voice he had not heard before.
“How!” came the ready answer.
“Hunk ... kunk! Hunk ... kunk! Hunk ... kunk!” began the oars again.
The revolving light on Matthew began growing nearer, and the cutter’s oars were echoed by the laboring whale boat crew, who kept their station close behind, between the following tiger-sharks. The stroke-man passed Stanley a can of drinking-water, and he emptied it.
“Who sent you?” he demanded.
No one answered him. O
nly the revolving light on Matthew winked, and grew brighter every time it turned.
III
A BLACK crag loomed up from the blackness: the oars flashed upward at a muttered order and rattled on the thwarts; and the cutter’s side ground against stone steps hewn at the lighthouse foot.
“Bring him along!” said a quiet voice. Stanley looked up to see the shadow of a grizzled man who held a lantern and looked down on him from the top step with little more than curiosity.
The Somalis seized and carried him, protesting, up the steps, where steps, where they held him for the lantern-bearer to look him over. It was old Jim Bates, the lighthouse-keeper. Stanley flushed from head to foot. “Is this your doing?” he demanded. “What d’you mean by—” “That’ll do!” said the lighthouse-keeper, lowering the light.
He turned his back without a word of explanation and walked up the winding path that led to the white tower on the cliff above him. The Somalis hustled the unwilling Stanley up the path behind him; he struggled, and the sweat on his wrists made them slippery, so that he almost broke away. Then they pulled their loin-cloths off and twisted them like tourniquets around his elbows, and Stanley yelled aloud with the pain of it. But Jim Bates never once looked round.
A moment later, Stanley saw him talking to the sentry on an upstanding crag that jutted out seaward by the lighthouse; he could just make out their two forms, like black shadows — the sentry leaning on his rifle, and the old man pointing somewhere away beyond. But the Somalis hustled him along and pushed him through the lighthouse door and up some more steps, and turned the key of a round, whitewashed, bare-walled room on him.
There was no light in there, but a little that was something less than light filtered in through a slit in the outer wall, and once a minute he could see the flash as the revolving lantern up above swept round on its interminable vigil. On the floor above him, too, he could hear the purr and click of the revolving mechanism.
Ten minutes later the door opened again and a Somali beckoned him.
“Come on!” he said, and preceded him without any explanation.
Stanley followed. He felt like a fool, obeying the behest of a nearly naked savage.
He wanted to be proud, but he could not feel proud; he had to do as he was told, and follow up the winding steps.
The door was open on the floor above, and he saw Jim Bates, with a long- necked oil-can in his hand, stooping down above the mechanism, testing something. The Somali left Stanley standing there, but Jim Bates took no notice. Stanley coughed, to call attention to himself, but Bates continued oiling; then he pulled his watch out, studied the indicator, and gave a half- turn to a finely threaded screw, when he appeared satisfied, for he laid the oil-can down and walked toward the door.
“Come on!” he said to Stanley, as he started up the steps. Stanley, without the slightest notion why he did so, followed him.
They wound on and on, up the narrowing spiral — past a clean-swept sleeping-room, through which the shaft of the revolving lantern passed; past a kitchen and a living room, with indicators in them, so that the man in charge might watch the revolutions of the light even while he cooked and ate; past a store-room, and an oil-room, and another engine-room — up on to an iron-railed platform round the outside of the light.
“Sit down!” said Jim Bates, jerking his thumb in the direction of a camp- stool.
Stanley sat on it, for his knees were trembling from the climb, and the steamy heat affected him. He tried to speak, but the light raced round and dazzled him; up there on the platform it seemed to be turning three times to the minute instead of one, and before he had time to recover from the glare of it, it was round again, purring on its roller bearings, and looking straight into his soul and mocking at him.
“Look out yonder!” said the lighthouse-keeper. “Don’t try to face the lamp!”
Stanley did as he was told. He looked out and downward across a world of blackness that might have been the Pit. Once in every minute every single inch of the horizon and the black welter in between was eyed out by the blood-red rays behind him; and dancing on the night-black wave-tops, the phosphorescent fire seemed to be laughing back at the man-made, man-watched, man-protecting lamp.
“See yonder!” said the keeper, pointing.
Over to the eastward twenty little lights were dancing on the water, irregularly spaced. They were yellow and they looked like hearth-lights.
“Dhows!” said Bates, as if the one word conveyed a history, and a treatise on the history, with a lecture on morality thrown in. It was five minutes before he spoke again. “They dowse them glims when they’re busy!” he said presently.
Stanley cared nothing for the lights; he was busy thinking. What evidence was there against him? Nothing! He had got a night’s leave, and had gone off in a whale boat, and had come back again. How and when, and why he came back, was nobody’s concern except his own — unless he chose to force an explanation from the lighthouse-keeper!
“They’re fishing now!” confided Bates suddenly, in his usual abrupt tones that invited no reply. “They come where they can see the light and curse it while they fish!” he added, as if he felt rather sorry for them.
“Good luck to ’em then!” growled Stanley. “They can’t curse it more emphatic than what I do!”
But Bates took no notice of him; when he did talk he seemed to be talking to himself, and he never appeared to listen to an answer.
“If any one deserted from this island, they’d catch him sure!” he volunteered, after another five-minutes’ vigil with a watch in his hand and one eye on the lantern.
“Who said I was a deserter?” snarled Stanley promptly. Here was his opening at last; he could clear himself of suspicion and make the lighthouse- keeper feel like a fool!
But Bates did not answer him. He waited until the light flashed round, took one quick, keen look at him, and then went down the steps again. He was gone ten minutes, while Stanley sat motionless, with his chin resting on the blood warm iron rail in front of him.
“They’d kill a man for the buttons on his shirt!” said a voice behind him suddenly, and Stanley started, to find that Bates was back again, looking across his shoulder at the dancing lights.
“Used to be a wreck here, maybe once a month!” he added. Then he walked round the platform and leaned against the railing on the far side.
Stanley wanted to swear, but the words would not come. He wanted to jeer at Bates for an interfering fool — to laugh at him — to threaten him with dire vengeance — to force an apology — to reassert his dignity and sergeantdom. But Bates’s silence and the darkness of the mystery of the night had taken hold of him, and he had begun to feel very unimportant, away up there above the purring engines. A sergeant of the line seemed a very little thing, and his personal opinions even less, amid that teeming, hungry desolation with its black, steel-dotted dome.
“See yonder!” said Bates, after a minute or two of communing. He certainly was communing, this grizzled veteran; his silence was as eloquent as other people’s speech, if only one could understand it, as the Somalis evidently did. He pointed to another group of lights — four of them this time, red and green beside each other, and two white lights up above; they were far away on the horizon.
“She’s headin’ this way!” he remarked.
The white lights spaced a little, and the green light disappeared.
“Changed her course, you see!”
The steamer light grew gradually nearer; other lights blazed out as her sides came into view, and she passed — a little group of heaving and falling dots of fire, that died away at last below the southern sky-line.
“Three more of ’em!” said the lighthouse-keeper. “Look!” A liner went by, in a blaze of light, and with a dull-red glow above her smoke-stacks; Stanley could hear her twin propellers chugging, and — when the great light swung its rays to wink at her — he could see the bellying wind-sail up on the forward mast.
“She’ll be a Frenchman
! There’ll be eight hundred souls aboard of her!” Jim Bates seemed in a communicative mood.
“Why should we watch out for Frenchies?” demanded Stanley, in another effort to assert his manhood.
“Why not?” said the lighthouse-keeper, pulling out his watch, and counting revolutions. Then he went down the steps again, and was absent for ten minutes.
Stanley sat still and watched the sky-line, facing alternately to the north and south. Almost incessantly the steamer lights seemed to pop upon the sky-line — coming and going up and down the hell-hot gateway of the East.
“Frenchies!” said a voice beside him. “Dutchmen — Germans — Roosians - Eyetalians — Norwegians — English — they’re maybe half o’ them English. They make us from the north or south, as the case may be, and steer wide. ‘Hum dekta hai!’ as the lascars say. ‘I’m on the watch!’”
“What do they care?” growled Stanley.
Jim Bates walked once around the platform, and pulled his watch out, and checked off a revolution before he answered him. “The point is, we care, my son!”
Then he went down again, and Stanley sat and watched the heaving steamer lights for fifteen minutes. By the time Bates came back he had decided to make friends with him. He had not exactly changed his opinion about Bates’s ignorance, but he felt forced to admit a certain respect for him; and it was just possible, too, that Bates had decided not to report him to the lieutenant in the morning. He decided to do a little tactful questioning on the last point. “Have a smoke?” he suggested, holding out his pouch when Bates appeared again.
“Don’t smoke!”
“Try a chew, then!”
“Don’t chew!”