by Nevil Shute
The woodworker looked up. “Get the barrel?”
“We’ve got that with us, too.”
“Huh.” Mr. Donelly stood in thought. “Better bring the barrel down ‘n see if these chocks fit,” he said at last. “It’s going here.” He indicated a spot behind the ladder, which seemed to have been moved forwards.
“We might need a hand getting it on board,” said Keith. “It’s an awkward thing to handle.”
Mr. Donelly laid down the spokeshave and started up the ladder. Keith checked him. “What about a pair of trousers, Jack?” he said. “There’s ladies about.”
“Huh?”
Mr. King said, “They’ll put you in quod if you come out on deck without your trousers on.”
“This place makes me sick,” said Mr. Donelly. “You see some of the girls on these hooch ships. They don’t wear practically nothing.” Grumbling, he turned and pulled on his soiled trousers, and came out on deck.
They got the drum on board, Jack lowering it quickly and expertly from the quayside with the two ends of a warp around it, and lowered it down through the hatch into the cabin. Dick King and Keith carried all the rest of the stuff on board; there was no room to stow anything below till Jack was finished with the oil drum so they stacked it all by the tiller. There was little more then that they could do till Jack had finished except watch him through the hatch, which they did for a time. He worked on oblivious of their presence. Both Keith and Dick King were impressed with the quality of his woodwork; he worked accurately and quickly, putting a loving finish with a few strokes of glasspaper on each chock before laying it aside. Presently Keith leaned down the hatch and told him that he was going on shore to say good-bye to the ship’s officers and to the aircrew, but would be back later. Mr. Donelly only grunted in reply, intent upon the job.
7
KEITH MOVED INTO the Mary Belle that evening. The installation of the new oil drum was finished when he arrived and it was ready to be filled with water in the morning. There had been no opportunity to get Jack’s drum steamed out, that had once held kerosene, for the Cathay Princess was due to sail for Yokohama in the morning. Keith was to regret most bitterly that he had not taken action upon that earlier when he drank his first cup of coffee.
They stowed the tins mostly beneath the bunks, the tins of biscuit going in the forecastle and the perishables in the one cupboard. The cooking equipment of the Mary Belle consisted of a frying pan and two battered saucepans; there were two chipped enamel plates and an inadequate supply of knives and forks. Keith found them sufficient for his needs, however, because Jack Donelly ate mostly with his fingers.
They supped off tinned sausages and beans, cooked by Keith, followed by a half loaf of stale bread that he discovered in a locker, and a tin of jam. As he had suspected, Jack Donelly was a voracious eater; he ate everything in sight and then leaned back with a contented sigh. “You cook good chow,” he said. “What you got in that wood box?”
“A sextant,” Keith said. “I’ve got some charts here, too.” He opened the box, took out the sextant carefully, and gave it to his captain, who handled it gingerly.
“I seen them in shop windows,” he observed presently. “Marine stores and that. You know how to use it?”
“Not very well,” Keith said. “They put me in the way of the noon sight on board the tanker.”
“Huh.” Mr. Donelly handed the mystery back to him. “Tells you where you are, don’t it?”
“Not quite. Not unless you’re better at it than I am. But I think it may tell us how far we’ve gone.”
Jack Donelly said, “Well, I can tell you that.” He turned to the soiled wooden bulkhead at his side and showed a long vertical line of pencil-scrawled figures. “That’s how far we went each day coming from San Francisco.”
Keith got up and examined the record with interest. “How did you know how far you went each day?” he asked.
Mr. Donelly said, “Well, each day after sunrise I’d sit down and put my thinking cap on and reckon we were doing five knots yesterday morning, say, four hours, well that makes fifteen knots.” He paused in thought, and then started counting on his fingers rather expertly. “No, that makes twenty.” He went on, “Then around midday maybe it fell light and then I’d reckon up that. Then maybe I’d heave to in the night, catch up a bit on the sleep, ‘n reckon on a knot or maybe a knot and a half. So then I’d tot it up for the day ‘n write it down up there.”
Keith was deeply interested. “How did it come out?” he asked. “I mean, how did it compare with the real distance when you got here?”
“I never got it added up,” Mr. Donelly admitted. “Sometimes I’d try adding all those figures up, but it always came out something different to last time.” He reached for his atlas and scrutinized the dirty page of the Pacific Ocean. “It says here two thousand and ninety-eight,” he remarked. “A guy came on board one time, said he was from a newspaper. He added it up and wrote it underneath.”
Beneath the horizontal line, written neatly in another hand, was the figure 2237.
“That makes it about a hundred and fifty miles too much,” said Keith in wonder. “Less than that — about seven per cent.”
“You don’t go straight all the time,” said Mr. Donelly. “You get way off course ‘n then that makes it more.”
Keith nodded. “I think it’s very good indeed,” he said. He sat in wonder for a moment. If you took off a bit, say, four per cent, for course deviations, then Jack Donelly’s estimate of the distance made good was only three per cent in error, and that error was on the safe side. “How do you know how fast the ship is going through the water?” he asked.
“My Dad taught me. He used to know.”
“Do you look at the waves she leaves behind, or something?”
“I dunno. Just how she goes.”
He could not explain himself, and Keith did not pursue the subject. Jack’s dead reckoning was clearly most important to them; Jim Fairlie had warned him that at that time of year the skies might well be overcast as they got further south, making the noon sight impossible. If he could only get an occasional sight as a check on their progress they might well depend more on Jack’s estimates than on his sights. “We’ll do this again,” he said.
Mr. Donelly ran a dirty finger down the woodwork. “Put another lot of figures right alongside, there,” he said. He was seized with doubts. “Think you can add them up right, all those tiddy little numbers?” he asked.
“I can have a try.”
“Huh.” There was a pause, and then the captain said, “You bring the little motor along, what makes the electricity?”
Keith nodded. “I’ve got it here.” He reached into his suitcase and pulled out the box, unwrapped the model, and set it going with a flick of his thumb. He placed it on the floor, and Jack Donelly got down on his hands and knees and gazed at it, entranced. “Smallest in the world,” he breathed. He looked up. “That’s right?”
“I think so.”
A disturbing thought crossed the captain’s mind. “How long does it go on one fill of gas?”
“Ten or twelve minutes.” He added, “I’ve got a bottle with me.”
“A bottle of gas?”
Keith nodded.
“We could run it every day?”
“I think so.” He let it run till the miniature tank was dry and it stopped, and then put it in its box on the fiddled top of the cupboard. “We’ll keep it there.”
He washed the dishes, a proceeding which his captain obviously considered to be quite unnecessary. The cabin was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp in gimbals, too dark for reading if there had been anything to read. They sat on deck for a while, smoking and listening to the radio music from the yachts in the row, brought to them by the cool, scented breeze. “Get the hose along first thing, ‘n fill the barrels,” said Jack Donelly. “Then we’re all set to go.”
Keith thought about ship’s papers and the strange thing called a bill of health, and decided that they were
matters which concerned the captain of the ship, and not himself. He asked, “How much paraffin have we got — I mean, kero?”
“Kero? There’s a jerrican. I guess it’s still about half full.”
“I’ll get it filled up tomorrow.” Four gallons, he thought, should take them to Tahiti since there was only one Primus stove and the cabin lamp. “I saw a store at the end.”
“I wouldn’t buy nothing there. They’ll skin you alive.”
“Is there any other place I could buy kero?”
“I dunno.”
They retired to bed soon after. Keith found that Jack’s preparations for the night consisted simply in taking off his pants and lying down upon his dirty mattress with a soiled blanket ready to pull over if he felt cold. Keith followed his example, having made a pillow of some of the clothes from his suitcase, and put out the lamp. He was tired, but for a time he was kept awake by the strangeness of his surroundings, the hardness of his bed. The wind blowing steadily from the east kept the main halliards tapping rhythmically against the mast, the water lapped against the ship’s side by his ear with little liquid noises; from time to time as the ship moved in her moorings the rudder in its pintles made a clunking sound. He did not know what any of these noises were except the lapping water, but Jack Donelly was already asleep so they were probably all right.
This was Monday, Monday night. It was only on Thursday morning that he had left his home in Ealing, but how far away it seemed! Even Katie seemed distant and remote, and Janice in whose interest he was here, hardly more than a little wistful dream. He tried to reckon sleepily how many thousand miles he was away from his workshop in Somerset Road, and gave up the attempt. Eight or ten thousand miles, perhaps. But he still had the case-hardened egg that he had made for Janice, the grey egg, safe in a little box within his suitcase.
The warm wind blew softly through the cabin, scented with frangipani and salt water.
Presently he slept.
He woke in the dawn to the sound of Jack Donelly getting out on deck and the sound of a thin stream of water falling by the ship’s side, and realized that he was out on deck without a stitch of clothes on. He got up, put on his trousers, and put his head out of the hatch. “Are you allowed to do that here?” he asked mildly.
“Morning,” said his captain. “Isn’t nobody around. Cleaner’n doing it in the bucket.”
Since there was only one bucket on board to be used for washing and all other purposes, Keith could not but agree. “I think I’ll go ashore,” he said.
“Up the end there, by the store. How you sleep?”
“Fine.”
Keith put his shoes on and took a little walk. Returning to the ship he asked, “What would you like for breakfast?”
“Cornmeal fritters,” said Mr. Donelly.
“You’ll have to show me how to do that,” Keith said.
He received his lesson over the Primus stove, Jack picking the maggots expertly out of the cornmeal and putting them in a tin for future use as bait. He had a dirty tin of fat smelling strongly of fish, carefully hoarded and poured back after the fry. Keith added some bacon rashers and a loaf of bread that he had bought at the store. To his surprise the cornmeal fritters were very good if you could forget about the maggots, and the coffee brewed by Jack was excellent but for the kerosene. All told, he didn’t do too badly, and sat for a while smoking before washing the two plates.
He went off after breakfast with the jerrican for kerosene while Jack looked for a hose along the quayside that he could borrow without permission. The can had only a little kero in the bottom, and though it seemed to Keith that there must be sufficient in the drinking water to get them to Tahiti it was as well to fill the can. He did so at the store and bought a few tinned delicacies that took his fancy, and walked back heavily laden to find Jack with a hose watering the ship.
“I let the forward barrel overflow a little, get rid of some of the kero,” he said. “She might need pumping out now, if you’ve nothing else to do.”
Keith bent to the bilge pump, a crude affair with a straight pull upon the plunger, awkward to the novice. It worked well, however, and a steady stream of dirty water flowed out on the deck and away by the scuppers, gradually becoming clearer. Jack finished filling the barrels below and put the running hose on deck in the warm sun, turned it off upon the quay and returned it to wherever he had got it from while Keith continued his back-breaking work. Finally the pump sucked, and Keith rested his aching muscles.
“Guess we’re all set to go,” said Jack. “You don’t know of anything we might want?”
Keith shook his head. “I can’t think of anything.”
Jack went below and fetched up his atlas, which opened at the soiled page of the Pacific. “Captain Davies, he said to steer one five three,” he said, looking at the scrawled pencil figure on the smudged line. “He said that was the same as south twenty-seven east on the compass, but the real course was sump’n different.” He sat in puzzled silence, the thinking cap firmly on his head. “I guess we’ll go on board the three-stick schooner,” he said at last. “She’s a wooden ship, same as Mary Belle.”
Keith asked, “Do you think it would be a good thing if I brought the charts along?”
“Sure,” said Mr. Donelly affably. “Can’t do no harm.”
They set off for the schooner, Jack Donelly clad in pants alone and Keith in trousers, cricket shirt, and braces crowned by the somewhat crumpled Panama hat that he wore on holidays in Cornwall. He seemed pale and fat and undersized in comparison with the magnificent torso of the man beside him, and he was very conscious of his physical deficiencies. Whatever one might think of Jack Donelly’s mental ability, and Keith was now beginning to differ from Captain Davies, there was no denying that he was a fine figure of a man.
They walked round the head of the yacht basin and down the long tier of vessels to the immaculate schooner yacht at the end. As they approached her Keith’s heart sank. She exuded wealth at every glance, from the polished bronze cap on the end of her bowsprit to the gilt emblem on the top of her ensign jackstaff at the stern. Her paintwork, her varnished brightwork were spotless and brilliant; her halliards were of stainless-steel wire rope running to hydraulic winches at the foot of each mast, her sheets of gleaming white nylon. A wireless aerial ran from the truck of the mainmast to the mizzen and down to the wheelhouse and deck lounge at the stem, from which a television aerial and a direction-finding loop protruded. A deck hand in immaculate white overalls lounged by the varnished gangway leading to the deck. Keith would never have dreamed of setting foot on such a ship himself; he decided that negotiations here were his captain’s responsibility.
No such qualms beset Jack Donelly. He marched down the gangway to the deck, Keith following behind. The lounging sailor stood erect. “What can we do for you, brother?” he asked.
Jack said, “See the captain.”
“What do you want with him?”
“None o’ your business. Just tell the captain I got sump’n to talk to him about.”
“You got to say what you want. The captain’s busy.”
Jack flared into a quick anger that Keith had not seen before. He advanced a threatening step towards the man. “You go tell him.”
The deckhand stepped back hurriedly. “Okay, Superman, okay. But he won’t see you till he’s finished breakfast. Just wait up on the jetty.”
“We’ll wait right here.”
The man hesitated, and then went towards the wheelhouse door. He almost collided with a woman who came flying out on the deck. “Who’s that?” she asked him urgently.
“Coupla guys want to see the captain, lady,” he replied. “They won’t say what they want.”
She hesitated, and then brushed past him and walked quickly to Jack and Keith by the gangway. “You haven’t come from Manuel?” she asked. She had bright auburn hair, almost red in the Honolulu sunlight, that probably owed something to art. Keith judged she might have been about thirty years of age.
Jack looked at Keith blankly; the situation was beyond him. Keith said, “We’ve come to see the captain.”
“Oh.” She was plainly disappointed. “I was expecting . . . somebody else.”
“We just want to see the captain.”
She looked them up and down. “Want a job?” She said to Jack, “You’re a sailor by the look of you. He might have one for you. I don’t suppose he’d have one for your friend.”
“We don’t want no job,” Jack Donelly replied. “Just want to see the captain — ask him about the course down to The Islands.”
She stood in silence, her lips drooping. Keith had a queer feeling that at any moment she was likely to start crying. “You’re nothing to do with Manuel?” she asked dully.
Jack looked blank, and Keith shook his head. “We’ve never met him, I don’t think,” he told her. “Who is he?”
“At the Royal Waikiki Hotel, with his orchestra,” she said. “ ’Music with Manuel,’ every Thursday evening on CBS. You must have seen it. Everyone knows Manuel.”
Jack Donelly said, “We just want to see the captain.”
She turned away from them and walked slowly to the deckhouse door, and vanished inside. They stood in the sun at the end of the gangway, waiting. Jack smiled thoughtfully. “Like to see her with no clothes on,” he remarked. “She’d peel off nice.”
Keith laughed. “You’re not likely to get the chance.”
The deckhand reappeared. “Captain, he’s at breakfast,” he told them. “He said to tell you to wait, or else come back again in half an hour.”
“Guess we’ll wait,” said Jack patiently.
They waited for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. Then the captain came out of the deckhouse door and walked towards them, a tall, bronzed, efficient-looking man in naval whites and a white-topped naval cap. “You want to see me about something?” he asked. “I’m Captain Petersen.”
Jack said awkwardly, “I was wondering if we could check a course with you down to The Islands. I’m Jack Donelly, and this is Mr. Keats, sailing with me.”