‘Ahoy! . . . Ship ahoy! . . . What ship’s that?’
3
We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game the beginning and end of which are in ourselves. In this dream of Abel Keeling’s a voice replied.
‘Hallo, it’s found its tongue . . . Ahoy there! What are you?’
Loudly and in a clear voice Abel Keeling called: ‘Are you a ship?’
With a nervous giggle the answer came:
‘We are a ship, aren’t we, Ward? I hardly feel sure . . . Yes, of course, we’re a ship. No question about us. The question is what the dickens you are.’
Not all the words these voices used were intelligible to Abel Keeling, and he knew not what it was in the tone of these last words that reminded him of the honour due to the Mary of the Tower. Blister-white and at the end of her life as she was, Abel Keeling was still jealous of her dignity; the voice had a youngish ring; and it was not fitting that young chins should be wagged about his galleon. He spoke curtly.
‘You that spoke – are you the master of that ship?’
‘Officer of the watch,’ the words floated back; ‘the captain’s below.’
‘Then send for him. It is with masters that masters hold speech,’ Abel Keeling replied.
He could see the two shapes, flat and without relief, standing on a high narrow structure with rails. One of them gave a low whistle, and seemed to be fanning his face; but the other rumbled something into a sort of funnel. Presently the two shapes became three. There was a murmuring, as of a consultation, and then suddenly a new voice spoke. At its thrill and tone a sudden tremor ran through Abel Keeling’s frame. He wondered what response it was that that voice found in the forgotten recesses of his memory . . .
‘Ahoy’ seemed to call this new yet faintly remembered voice. ‘What’s all this about? Listen. We’re His Majesty’s destroyer Seapink, out of Devonport last October, and nothing particular the matter with us. Now who are you?’
‘The Mary of the Tower, out of the Port of Rye on the day of Saint Anne, and only two men –’
A gasp interrupted him.
‘Out of WHERE?’ that voice that so strangely moved Abel Keeling said unsteadily, while Bligh broke into groans of renewed rapture.
‘Out of the Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex . . . nay, give ear, else I cannot make you hear me while this man’s spirit and flesh wrestle so together! . . . Ahoy! Are you gone?’ For the voices had become a low murmur, and the ship-shape had faded before Abel Keeling’s eyes. Again and again he called. He wished to be informed of the disposition and economy of the wind-chamber . . .
‘The wind-chamber!’ he called, in an agony lest the knowledge almost within his grasp should be lost. ‘I would know about the wind-chamber . . . ’
Like an echo, there came back the words, uncomprehendingly uttered, ‘The wind-chamber? . . . ’
‘ . . . that driveth the vessel – perchance ’tis not wind – a steel bow that is bent also conserveth force – the force you store, to move at will through calm and storm . . . ’
‘Can you make out what it’s driving at?’
‘Oh, we shall all wake up in a minute . . . ’
‘Quiet, I have it; the engines; it wants to know about our engines. It’ll be wanting to see our papers presently. Rye Port! . . . Well, no harm in humouring it; let’s see what it can make of this. Ahoy there!’ came the voice to Abel Keeling, a little more strongly, as if a shifting wind carried it, and speaking faster and faster as it went on. ‘Not wind, but steam; d’you hear? Steam, steam. Steam, in eight Yarrow water-tube boilers. S-t-e-a-m, steam. Got it? And we’ve twin-screw triple expansion engines, indicated horse-power four thousand, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute; savvy? Is there anything your phantomhood would like to know about our armament? . . . ’
Abel Keeling was muttering fretfully to himself. It annoyed him that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him. How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake? The Seapink – that was the name of this ship; but a pink was long and narrow, low-carged and square-built aft . . .
‘And as for our armament,’ the voice with the tones that so profoundly troubled Abel Keeling’s memory continued, ‘we’ve two revolving Whitehead torpedo-tubes, three six-pounders on the upper deck, and that’s a twelve-pounder forward there by the conning-tower. I forgot to mention that we’re nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our top. Care to come aboard?’
But the voice was speaking still more rapidly and feverishly, as if to fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it was straining forward anxiously over the rail.
‘Ugh! But I’m glad this happened in the daylight,’ another voice was muttering.
‘I wish I was sure it was happening at all . . . Poor old spook!’
‘I suppose it would keep its feet if her deck was quite vertical. Think she’ll go down, or just melt?’
‘Kind of go down . . . without wash . . . ’
‘Listen – here’s the other one now –’
For Bligh was singing again.
For, Lord, Thou know’st our nature such
If we great things obtain,
And in the getting of the same
Do feel no grief or pain,
‘We little do esteem thereof;
But, hardly brought to pass,
A thousand times we do esteem
More than the other was.
‘But oh, look – look – look at the other! . . . Oh, I say, wasn’t he a grand old boy! Look!’
For, transfiguring Abel Keeling’s form as a prophet’s form is transfigured in the instant of his rapture, flooding his brain with the white eureka-light of perfect knowledge, that for which he and his dream had been at a standstill had come. He knew her, this ship of the future, as if God’s Finger had bitten her lines into his brain. He knew her as those already sinking into the grave know things, miraculously, completely, accepting Life’s impossibilities with a nodded ‘Of course’. From the ardent mouths of her eight furnaces to the last drip from her lubricators, from her bed-plates to the breeches of her quick-firers, he knew her – read her gauges, thumbed her bearings, gave the ranges from her range-finders, and lived the life he lived who was in command of her. And he would not forget on the morrow, as he had forgotten on many morrows, for at last he had seen the water about his feet, and knew that there would be no morrow for him in this world . . .
And even in that moment, with but a sand or two to run in his glass, indomitable, insatiable, dreaming dream on dream, he could not die until he knew more. He had two questions to ask, and a master-question; and but a moment remained. Sharply his voice rang out.
‘Ho, there! . . . This ancient ship, the Mary of the Tower, cannot steam thirty and a quarter knots, but yet she can sail the waters. What more does your ship? Can she soar above them, as the fowls of the air soar?’
‘Lord, he thinks we’re an aeroplane! . . . No, she can’t . . . ’
‘And can you dive, even as the fishes of the deep?’
‘No . . . Those are submarines . . . we aren’t a submarine . . . ’
But Abel Keeling waited for no more. He gave an exulting chuckle.
‘Oho, oho – thirty knots, and but on the face of the waters – no more than that? Oho! . . . Now my ship, the ship I see as a mother sees full-grown the child she has but conceived – my ship, I say – oho! – my ship shall . . . Below there – trip that gun!’
The cry came suddenly and alertly, as a muffled sound came from below and an ominous tremor shook the galleon.
‘By Jove, her guns are breaking loose below – that’s her finish –’
‘Trip that gun, and double-breec
h the others!’ Abel Keeling’s voice rang out, as if there had been any to obey him. He had braced himself within the belfry frame; and then in the middle of the next order his voice suddenly failed him. His ship-shape, that for the moment he had forgotten, rode once more before his eyes. This was the end, and his master-question, apprehension for the answer to which was now torturing his face and well-nigh bursting his heart, was still unasked.
‘Ho – he that spoke with me – the master,’ he cried in a voice that ran high, ‘is he there?’
‘Yes, yes!’ came the other voice across the water, sick with suspense. ‘Oh, be quick!’
There was a moment in which hoarse cries from many voices, a heavy thud and rumble on wood, and a crash of timbers and a gurgle and a splash were indescribably mingled; the gun under which Abel Keeling had lain had snapped her rotten breechings and plunged down the deck, carrying Bligh’s unconscious form with it. The deck came up vertical, and for one instant longer Abel Keeling clung to the belfry.
‘I cannot see your face,’ he screamed, ‘but meseems your voice is a voice I know. What is your name?’
In a torn sob the answer came across the water:
‘Keeling – Abel Keeling . . . Oh, my God!’
And Abel Keeling’s cry of triumph, that mounted to a victorious ‘Huzza!’ was lost in the downward plunge of the Mary of the Tower, that left the strait empty save for the sun’s fiery blaze and the last smoke-like evaporation of the mists.
Rooum
For all I ever knew to the contrary, it was his own name; and something about him, name or man or both, always put me in mind, I can’t tell you how, of negroes. As regards the name, I dare say it was something huggermugger in the mere sound – something that I classed, for no particular reason, with the dark and ignorant sort of words, such as ‘Obi’ and ‘Hoodoo’. I only know that after I learned that his name was Rooum, I couldn’t for the life of me have thought of him as being called anything else.
The first impression that you got of his head was that it was a patchwork of black and white – black bushy hair and short white beard, or else the other way about. As a matter of fact, both hair and beard were piebald, so that if you saw him in the gloom a dim patch of white showed down one side of his head, and dark tufts cropped up here and there in his beard. His eyebrows alone were entirely black, with a little sprouting of hair almost joining them. And perhaps his skin helped to make me think of negroes, for it was very dark, of the dark brown that always seems to have more than a hint of green behind it. His forehead was low, and scored across with deep horizontal furrows.
We never knew when he was going to turn up on a job. We might not have seen him for weeks, but his face was always as likely as not to appear over the edge of a crane-platform just when that marvellous mechanical intuition of his was badly needed. He wasn’t certificated. He wasn’t even trained, as the rest of us understood training; and he scoffed at the drawing-office, and laughed outright at logarithms and our laborious methods of getting out quantities. But he could set sheers and tackle in a way that made the rest of us look silly. I remember once how, through the parting of a chain, a sixty-foot girder had come down and lay under a ruck of other stuff, as the bottom chip lies under a pile of spellikins – a hopeless-looking smash. Myself, I’m certificated twice or three times over; but I can only assure you that I wanted to kick myself when, after I’d spent a day and a sleepless night over the job, I saw the game of tit-tat-toe that Rooum made of it in an hour or two. Certificated or not, a man isn’t a fool who can do that sort of thing. And he was one of these fellows, too, who can ‘find water’ – tell you where water is and what amount of getting it is likely to take, by just walking over the place. We aren’t certificated up to that yet.
He was offered good money to stick to us – to stick to our firm – but he always shook his black-and-white piebald head. He’d never be able to keep the bargain if he were to make it, he told us quite fairly. I know there are these chaps who can’t endure to be clocked to their work with a patent time-clock in the morn-ing and released of an evening with a whistle – and it’s one of the things no master can ever understand. So Rooum came and went erratically, showing up maybe in Leeds or Liverpool, perhaps next on Plymouth breakwater, and once he turned up in an out-of-the-way place in Glamorganshire just when I was wondering what had become of him.
The way I got to know him (got to know him, I mean, more than just to nod) was that he tacked himself on to me one night down Vauxhall way, where we were setting up some small plant or other. We had knocked off for the day, and I was walking in the direction of the bridge when he came up. We walked along together; and we had not gone far before it appeared that his reason for joining me was that he wanted to know ‘what a molecule was’.
I stared at him a bit.
‘What do you want to know that for?’ I said. ‘What does a chap like you, who can do it all backwards, want with molecules?’
Oh, he just wanted to know, he said.
So, on the way across the bridge, I gave it him more or less from the book – molecular theory and all the rest of it. But, from the childish questions he put, it was plain that he hadn’t got the hang of it at all. ‘Did the molecular theory allow things to pass through one another?’ he wanted to know; ‘Could things pass through one another?’ and a lot of ridiculous things like that. I gave it up.
‘You’re a genius in your own way, Rooum,’ I said finally; ‘you know these things without the books we plodders have to depend on. If I’d luck like that, I think I should be content with it.’
But he didn’t seem satisfied, though he dropped the matter for that time. But I had his acquaintance, which was more than most of us had. He asked me, rather timidly, if I’d lend him a book or two. I did so, but they didn’t seem to contain what he wanted to know, and he soon returned them, without remark.
Now you’d expect a fellow to be specially sensitive, one way or another, who can tell when there’s water a hundred feet beneath him; and as you know, the big men are squabbling yet about this water-finding business. But, somehow, the water-finding puzzled me less than it did that Rooum should be extraordinarily sensitive to something far commoner and easier to understand – ordinary echoes. He couldn’t stand echoes. He’d go a mile round rather than pass a place that he knew had an echo; and if he came on one by chance, sometimes he’d hurry through as quick as he could, and sometimes he’d loiter and listen very intently. I rather joked about this at first, till I found it really distressed him; then, of course, I pretended not to notice. We’re all cranky somewhere, and for that matter, I can’t touch a spider myself.
For the remarkable thing that overtook Rooum – (that, by the way, is an odd way to put it, as you’ll see presently; but the words came that way into my head, so let them stand) – for the remarkable thing that overtook Rooum, I don’t think I can begin better than with the first time, or very soon after the first time, that I noticed this peculiarity about the echoes.
It was early on a particularly dismal November evening, and this time we were somewhere out south-east London way, just beyond what they are pleased to call the building-line – you know these districts of wretched trees and grimy fields and market-gardens that are about the same to real country that a slum is to a town. It rained that night; rain was the most appropriate weather for the brickfields and sewage-farms and yards of old carts and railway-sleepers we were passing. The rain shone on the black hand-bag that Rooum always carried; and I sucked at the dottle of a pipe that it was too much trouble to fill and light again. We were walking in the direction of Lewisham (I think it would be), and were still a little way from that eruption of red-brick houses that . . . but you’ve doubtless seen them.
You know how, when they’re laying out new roads, they lay down the narrow strip of kerb first, with neither setts on the one hand nor flagstones on the other? We had come upon one of these. (I ha
d noticed how, as we had come a few minutes before under a tall hollow-ringing railway arch, Rooum had all at once stopped talking – it was the echo, of course, that bothered him.) The unmade road to which we had come had headless lamp-standards at intervals, and ramparts of grey road-metal ready for use; and save for the strip of kerb, it was a broth of mud and stiff clay. A red light or two showed where the road-barriers were – they were laying the mains; a green railway light showed on an embankment; and the Lewisham lamps made a rusty glare through the rain. Rooum went first, walking along the narrow strip of kerb.
The lamp-standards were a little difficult to see, and when I heard Rooum stop suddenly and draw in his breath sharply, I thought he had walked into one of them.
‘Hurt yourself?’ I said.
He walked on without replying; but half a dozen yards farther on he stopped again. He was listening again. He waited for me to come up.
‘I say,’ he said, in an odd sort of voice, ‘go a yard or two ahead, will you?’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, as I passed ahead. He didn’t answer.
Well, I hadn’t been leading for more than a minute before he wanted to change again. He was breathing very quick and short.
‘Why, what ails you?’ I demanded, stopping.
‘It’s all right . . . You’re not playing any tricks, are you? . . . ’
I saw him pass his hand over his brow.
‘Come, get on,’ I said shortly; and we didn’t speak again till we struck the pavement with the lighted lamps. Then I happened to glance at him.
‘Here,’ I said brusquely, taking him by the sleeve, ‘you’re not well. We’ll call somewhere and get a drink.’
‘Yes,’ he said, again wiping his brow. ‘I say . . . did you hear?’
‘Hear what?’
‘Ah, you didn’t . . . and, of course, you didn’t feel anything . . . ’
The Dead of Night Page 11