“Good Lord!” he cried, horrified, and banged-to the iron door upon this vision.
This was what he had come on the bridge to tell. He could not keep it to himself; and on board ship there is only one man to whom it is worth while to unburden yourself. On his passage back the hands in the alleyway swore at him for a fool. Why didn’t he bring that lamp? What the devil did the coolies matter to anybody? And when he came out, the extremity of the ship made what went on inside of her appear of little moment.
At first he thought he had left the alleyway in the very moment of her sinking. The bridge ladders had been washed away, but an enormous sea filling the after-deck floated him up. After that he had to lie on his stomach for some time, holding to a ring-bolt, getting his breath now and then, and swallowing salt water. He struggled farther on his hands and knees, too frightened and distracted to turn back. In this way he reached the after-part of the wheelhouse. In that comparatively sheltered spot he found the second mate.
The boatswain was pleasantly surprised — his impression being that everybody on deck must have been washed away a long time ago. He asked eagerly where the Captain was.
The second mate was lying low, like a malignant little animal under a hedge.
“Captain? Gone overboard, after getting us into this mess.” The mate, too, for all he knew or cared. Another fool. Didn’t matter. Everybody was going by-and-by.
The boatswain crawled out again into the strength of the wind; not because he much expected to find anybody, he said, but just to get away from “that man.” He crawled out as outcasts go to face an inclement world. Hence his great joy at finding Jukes and the Captain. But what was going on in the ‘tween-deck was to him a minor matter by that time. Besides, it was difficult to make yourself heard. But he managed to convey the idea that the Chinaman had broken adrift together with their boxes, and that he had come up on purpose to report this. As to the hands, they were all right. Then, appeased, he subsided on the deck in a sitting posture, hugging with his arms and legs the stand of the engine-room telegraph — an iron casting as thick as a post. When that went, why, he expected he would go, too. He gave no more thought to the coolies.
Captain MacWhirr had made Jukes understand that he wanted him to go down below — to see.
“What am I to do then, sir?” And the trembling of his whole wet body caused Jukes’ voice to sound like bleating.
“See first . . . Boss’n . . . says . . . adrift.”
“That boss’n is a confounded fool,” howled Jukes, shakily.
The absurdity of the demand made upon him revolted Jukes. He was as unwilling to go as if the moment he had left the deck the ship were sure to sink.
“I must know . . . can’t leave. . . .”
“They’ll settle, sir.”
“Fight . . . boss’n says they fight. . . . Why? Can’t have . . . fighting . . . board ship. . . . Much rather keep you here . . . case . . . I should . . . washed overboard myself. . . . Stop it . . . some way. You see and tell me . . . through engine-room tube. Don’t want you . . . come up here . . . too often. Dangerous . . . moving about . . . deck.”
Jukes, held with his head in chancery, had to listen to what seemed horrible suggestions.
“Don’t want . . . you get lost . . . so long . . . ship isn’t. . . . . Rout . . . Good man . . . Ship . . . may . . . through this . . . all right yet.”
All at once Jukes understood he would have to go.
“Do you think she may?” he screamed.
But the wind devoured the reply, out of which Jukes heard only the one word, pronounced with great energy “. . . . Always. . . .”
Captain MacWhirr released Jukes, and bending over the boatswain, yelled, “Get back with the mate.” Jukes only knew that the arm was gone off his shoulders. He was dismissed with his orders — to do what? He was exasperated into letting go his hold carelessly, and on the instant was blown away. It seemed to him that nothing could stop him from being blown right over the stern. He flung himself down hastily, and the boatswain, who was following, fell on him.
“Don’t you get up yet, sir,” cried the boatswain. “No hurry!”
A sea swept over. Jukes understood the boatswain to splutter that the bridge ladders were gone. “I’ll lower you down, sir, by your hands,” he screamed. He shouted also something about the smoke-stack being as likely to go overboard as not. Jukes thought it very possible, and imagined the fires out, the ship helpless. . . . The boatswain by his side kept on yelling. “What? What is it?” Jukes cried distressfully; and the other repeated, “What would my old woman say if she saw me now?”
In the alleyway, where a lot of water had got in and splashed in the dark, the men were still as death, till Jukes stumbled against one of them and cursed him savagely for being in the way. Two or three voices then asked, eager and weak, “Any chance for us, sir?”
“What’s the matter with you fools?” he said brutally. He felt as though he could throw himself down amongst them and never move any more. But they seemed cheered; and in the midst of obsequious warnings, “Look out! Mind that manhole lid, sir,” they lowered him into the bunker. The boatswain tumbled down after him, and as soon as he had picked himself up he remarked, “She would say, ‘Serve you right, you old fool, for going to sea.’“
The boatswain had some means, and made a point of alluding to them frequently. His wife — a fat woman — and two grown-up daughters kept a greengrocer’s shop in the East-end of London.
In the dark, Jukes, unsteady on his legs, listened to a faint thunderous patter. A deadened screaming went on steadily at his elbow, as it were; and from above the louder tumult of the storm descended upon these near sounds. His head swam. To him, too, in that bunker, the motion of the ship seemed novel and menacing, sapping his resolution as though he had never been afloat before.
He had half a mind to scramble out again; but the remembrance of Captain MacWhirr’s voice made this impossible. His orders were to go and see. What was the good of it, he wanted to know. Enraged, he told himself he would see — of course. But the boatswain, staggering clumsily, warned him to be careful how he opened that door; there was a blamed fight going on. And Jukes, as if in great bodily pain, desired irritably to know what the devil they were fighting for.
“Dollars! Dollars, sir. All their rotten chests got burst open. Blamed money skipping all over the place, and they are tumbling after it head over heels — tearing and biting like anything. A regular little hell in there.”
Jukes convulsively opened the door. The short boatswain peered under his arm.
One of the lamps had gone out, broken perhaps. Rancorous, guttural cries burst out loudly on their ears, and a strange panting sound, the working of all these straining breasts. A hard blow hit the side of the ship: water fell above with a stunning shock, and in the forefront of the gloom, where the air was reddish and thick, Jukes saw a head bang the deck violently, two thick calves waving on high, muscular arms twined round a naked body, a yellow-face, open-mouthed and with a set wild stare, look up and slide away. An empty chest clattered turning over; a man fell head first with a jump, as if lifted by a kick; and farther off, indistinct, others streamed like a mass of rolling stones down a bank, thumping the deck with their feet and flourishing their arms wildly. The hatchway ladder was loaded with coolies swarming on it like bees on a branch. They hung on the steps in a crawling, stirring cluster, beating madly with their fists the underside of the battened hatch, and the headlong rush of the water above was heard in the intervals of their yelling. The ship heeled over more, and they began to drop off: first one, then two, then all the rest went away together, falling straight off with a great cry.
Jukes was confounded. The boatswain, with gruff anxiety, begged him, “Don’t you go in there, sir.”
The whole place seemed to twist upon itself, jumping incessantly the while; and when the ship rose to a sea Jukes fancied that all these men would be shot upon him in a body. He backed out, swung the door to, and with trem
bling hands pushed at the bolt. . . .
As soon as his mate had gone Captain MacWhirr, left alone on the bridge, sidled and staggered as far as the wheelhouse. Its door being hinged forward, he had to fight the gale for admittance, and when at last he managed to enter, it was with an instantaneous clatter and a bang, as though he had been fired through the wood. He stood within, holding on to the handle.
The steering-gear leaked steam, and in the confined space the glass of the binnacle made a shiny oval of light in a thin white fog. The wind howled, hummed, whistled, with sudden booming gusts that rattled the doors and shutters in the vicious patter of sprays. Two coils of lead-line and a small canvas bag hung on a long lanyard, swung wide off, and came back clinging to the bulkheads. The gratings underfoot were nearly afloat; with every sweeping blow of a sea, water squirted violently through the cracks all round the door, and the man at the helm had flung down his cap, his coat, and stood propped against the gear-casing in a striped cotton shirt open on his breast. The little brass wheel in his hands had the appearance of a bright and fragile toy. The cords of his neck stood hard and lean, a dark patch lay in the hollow of his throat, and his face was still and sunken as in death.
Captain MacWhirr wiped his eyes. The sea that had nearly taken him overboard had, to his great annoyance, washed his sou’-wester hat off his bald head. The fluffy, fair hair, soaked and darkened, resembled a mean skein of cotton threads festooned round his bare skull. His face, glistening with sea-water, had been made crimson with the wind, with the sting of sprays. He looked as though he had come off sweating from before a furnace.
“You here?” he muttered, heavily.
The second mate had found his way into the wheelhouse some time before. He had fixed himself in a corner with his knees up, a fist pressed against each temple; and this attitude suggested rage, sorrow, resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated unforgiveness. He said mournfully and defiantly, “Well, it’s my watch below now: ain’t it?”
The steam gear clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman’s eyeballs seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compass card behind the binnacle glass had been meat. God knows how long he had been left there to steer, as if forgotten by all his shipmates. The bells had not been struck; there had been no reliefs; the ship’s routine had gone down wind; but he was trying to keep her head north-north-east. The rudder might have been gone for all he knew, the fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse. He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the compass-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was horribly afraid, also, of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it. When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched.
Captain MacWhirr looked up at the wheelhouse clock. Screwed to the bulk-head, it had a white face on which the black hands appeared to stand quite still. It was half-past one in the morning.
“Another day,” he muttered to himself.
The second mate heard him, and lifting his head as one grieving amongst ruins, “You won’t see it break,” he exclaimed. His wrists and his knees could be seen to shake violently. “No, by God! You won’t. . . .”
He took his face again between his fists.
The body of the helmsman had moved slightly, but his head didn’t budge on his neck, — like a stone head fixed to look one way from a column. During a roll that all but took his booted legs from under him, and in the very stagger to save himself, Captain MacWhirr said austerely, “Don’t you pay any attention to what that man says.” And then, with an indefinable change of tone, very grave, he added, “He isn’t on duty.”
The sailor said nothing.
The hurricane boomed, shaking the little place, which seemed air-tight; and the light of the binnacle flickered all the time.
“You haven’t been relieved,” Captain MacWhirr went on, looking down. “I want you to stick to the helm, though, as long as you can. You’ve got the hang of her. Another man coming here might make a mess of it. Wouldn’t do. No child’s play. And the hands are probably busy with a job down below. . . . Think you can?”
The steering-gear leaped into an abrupt short clatter, stopped smouldering like an ember; and the still man, with a motionless gaze, burst out, as if all the passion in him had gone into his lips: “By Heavens, sir! I can steer for ever if nobody talks to me.”
“Oh! aye! All right. . . .” The Captain lifted his eyes for the first time to the man, “. . . Hackett.”
And he seemed to dismiss this matter from his mind. He stooped to the engine-room speaking-tube, blew in, and bent his head. Mr. Rout below answered, and at once Captain MacWhirr put his lips to the mouthpiece.
With the uproar of the gale around him he applied alternately his lips and his ear, and the engineer’s voice mounted to him, harsh and as if out of the heat of an engagement. One of the stokers was disabled, the others had given in, the second engineer and the donkey-man were firing-up. The third engineer was standing by the steam-valve. The engines were being tended by hand. How was it above?
“Bad enough. It mostly rests with you,” said Captain MacWhirr. Was the mate down there yet? No? Well, he would be presently. Would Mr. Rout let him talk through the speaking-tube? — through the deck speaking-tube, because he — the Captain — was going out again on the bridge directly. There was some trouble amongst the Chinamen. They were fighting, it seemed. Couldn’t allow fighting anyhow. . . .
Mr. Rout had gone away, and Captain MacWhirr could feel against his ear the pulsation of the engines, like the beat of the ship’s heart. Mr. Rout’s voice down there shouted something distantly. The ship pitched headlong, the pulsation leaped with a hissing tumult, and stopped dead. Captain MacWhirr’s face was impassive, and his eyes were fixed aimlessly on the crouching shape of the second mate. Again Mr. Rout’s voice cried out in the depths, and the pulsating beats recommenced, with slow strokes — growing swifter.
Mr. Rout had returned to the tube. “It don’t matter much what they do,” he said, hastily; and then, with irritation, “She takes these dives as if she never meant to come up again.”
“Awful sea,” said the Captain’s voice from above.
“Don’t let me drive her under,” barked Solomon Rout up the pipe.
“Dark and rain. Can’t see what’s coming,” uttered the voice. “Must — keep — her — moving — enough to steer — and chance it,” it went on to state distinctly.
“I am doing as much as I dare.”
“We are — getting — smashed up — a good deal up here,” proceeded the voice mildly. “Doing — fairly well — though. Of course, if the wheelhouse should go. . . .”
Mr. Rout, bending an attentive ear, muttered peevishly something under his breath.
But the deliberate voice up there became animated to ask: “Jukes turned up yet?” Then, after a short wait, “I wish he would bear a hand. I want him to be done and come up here in case of anything. To look after the ship. I am all alone. The second mate’s lost. . . .”
“What?” shouted Mr. Rout into the engine-room, taking his head away. Then up the tube he cried, “Gone overboard?” and clapped his ear to.
“Lost his nerve,” the voice from above continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “Damned awkward circumstance.”
Mr. Rout, listening with bowed neck, opened his eyes wide at this. However, he heard something like the sounds of a scuffle and broken exclamations coming down to him. He strained his hearing; and all the time Beale, the third engineer, with his arms uplifted, held between the palms of his hands the rim of a little black wheel projecting at the side of a big copper pipe.
He seemed to be poising it above his head, as though it were a correct attitude in some sort of game.
To steady himself, he pressed his shoulder against the white bulkhead, one knee bent, and a sweat-rag tucked in his belt hanging on his
hip. His smooth cheek was begrimed and flushed, and the coal dust on his eyelids, like the black pencilling of a make-up, enhanced the liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to his youthful face something of a feminine, exotic and fascinating aspect. When the ship pitched he would with hasty movements of his hands screw hard at the little wheel.
“Gone crazy,” began the Captain’s voice suddenly in the tube. “Rushed at me. . . . Just now. Had to knock him down. . . . This minute. You heard, Mr. Rout?”
“The devil!” muttered Mr. Rout. “Look out, Beale!”
His shout rang out like the blast of a warning trumpet, between the iron walls of the engine-room. Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a roof; and the whole lofty space resembled the interior of a monument, divided by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering at different levels, and a mass of gloom lingering in the middle, within the columnar stir of machinery under the motionless swelling of the cylinders. A loud and wild resonance, made up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air. There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam. The blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from side to side.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 128