Chapter V
The Cyclone
We enjoyed our voyage exceedingly. In Egypt, a land I was glad
to revisit, we only stopped a week while the Star of the South,
which we rejoined at Suez, coaled and went through the Canal.
This, however, gave us time to spend a few days in Cairo, visit
the Pyramids and Sakkara which Bastin and Bickley had never seen
before, and inspect the great Museum. The journey up the Nile was
postponed until our return. It was a pleasant break and gave
Bickley, a most omnivorous reader who was well acquainted with
Egyptian history and theology, the opportunity of trying to prove
to Bastin that Christianity was a mere development of the ancient
Egyptian faith. The arguments that ensued may be imagined. It
never seemed to occur to either of them that all faiths may be
and indeed probably are progressive; in short, different rays of
light thrown from the various facets of the same crystal, as in
turn these are shone upon by the sun of Truth.
Our passage down the Red Sea was cool and agreeable. Thence we
shaped our course for Ceylon. Here again we stopped a little
while to run up to Kandy and to visit the ruined city of
Anarajapura with its great Buddhist topes that once again gave
rise to religious argument between my two friends. Leaving Ceylon
we struck across the Indian Ocean for Perth in Western Australia.
It was a long voyage, since to save our coal we made most of it
under canvas. However, we were not dull as Captain Astley was a
good companion, and even out of the melancholy Dane, Jacobsen, we
had entertainment. He insisted on holding seances in the cabin,
at which the usual phenomena occurred. The table twisted about,
voices were heard and Jacobsen's accordion wailed out tunes above
our heads. These happenings drove Bickley to a kind of madness,
for here were events which he could not explain. He was convinced
that someone was playing tricks upon him, and devised the most
elaborate snares to detect the rogue, entirely without result.
First he accused Jacobsen, who was very indignant, and then me,
who laughed. In the end Jacobsen and I left the "circle" and the
cabin, which was locked behind us; only Bastin and Bickley
remaining there in the dark. Presently we heard sounds of
altercation, and Bickley emerged looking very red in the face,
followed by Bastin, who was saying:
"Can I help it if something pulled your nose and snatched off
your eyeglasses, which anyhow are quite useless to you when there
is no light? Again, is it possible for me, sitting on the other
side of that table, to have placed the concertina on your head
and made it play the National Anthem, a thing that I have not the
slightest idea how to do?"
"Please do not try to explain," snapped Bickley. "I am
perfectly aware that you deceived me somehow, which no doubt you
think a good joke."
"My dear fellow," I interrupted, "is it possible to imagine old
Basil deceiving anyone?"
"Why not," snorted Bickley, "seeing that he deceives himself
from one year's end to the other?"
"I think," said Bastin, "that this is an unholy business and
that we are both deceived by the devil. I will have no more to do
with it," and he departed to his cabin, probably to say some
appropriate prayers.
After this the seances were given up but Jacobsen produced an
instrument called a planchette and with difficulty persuaded
Bickley to try it, which he did after many precautions. The
thing, a heart-shaped piece of wood mounted on wheels and with a
pencil stuck at its narrow end, cantered about the sheet of paper
on which it was placed, Bickley, whose hands rested upon it,
staring at the roof of the cabin. Then it began to scribble and
after a while stopped still.
"Will the Doctor look?" said Jacobsen. "Perhaps the spirits
have told him something."
"Oh! curse all this silly talk about spirits," exclaimed
Bickley, as he arranged his eyeglasses and held up the paper to
the light, for it was after dinner.
He stared, then with an exclamation which I will not repeat,
and a glance of savage suspicion at the poor Dane and the rest of
us, threw it down and left the cabin. I picked it up and next
moment was screaming with laughter. There on the top of the sheet
was a rough but entirely recognizable portrait of Bickley with
the accordion on his head, and underneath, written in a delicate,
Italian female hand, absolutely different from his own, were
these words taken from one of St. Paul's Epistles--"Oppositions
of science falsely so called." Underneath them again in a
scrawling, schoolboy fist, very like Bastin's, was inscribed,
"Tell us how this is done, you silly doctor, who think yourself
so clever."
"It seems that the devil really can quote Scripture," was
Bastin's only comment, while Jacobsen stared before him and
smiled.
Bickley never alluded to the matter, but for days afterwards I
saw him experimenting with paper and chemicals, evidently trying
to discover a form of invisible ink which would appear upon the
application of the hand. As he never said anything about it, I
fear that he failed.
This planchette business had a somewhat curious ending. A few
nights later Jacobsen was working it and asked me to put a
question. To oblige him I inquired on what day we should reach
Fremantle, the port of Perth. It wrote an answer which, I may
remark, subsequently proved to be quite correct.
"That is not a good question," said Jacobsen, "since as a
sailor I might guess the reply. Try again, Mr. Arbuthnot."
"Will anything remarkable happen on our voyage to the South
Seas?" I inquired casually.
The planchette hesitated a while then wrote rapidly and
stopped. Jacobsen took up the paper and began to read the answer
aloud--"To A, B the D, and B the C, the most remarkable things
will happen that have happened to men living in the world."
"That must mean me, Bickley the doctor and Bastin the
clergyman," I said, laughing.
Jacobsen paid no attention, for he was reading what followed.
As he did so I saw his face turn white and his eyes begin to
start from his head. Then suddenly he tore the paper in pieces
which he thrust into his pocket. Lifting his great fist he
uttered some Danish oath and with a single blow smashed the
planchette to fragments, after which he strode away, leaving me
astonished and somewhat disturbed. When I met him the next
morning I asked him what was on the paper.
"Oh!" he said quietly, "something I should not like you too-
proper English gentlemens to see. Something not nice. You
understand. Those spirits not always good; they do that kind of
thing sometimes. That's why I broke up this planchette."
Then he began to talk of something else and there the matter
ended.
I should have said that, principally with a view to putting
themselves in a position to confute each other, ever since we had
started from Marseilles both Bastin and Bickley spent a number of
hours each day in assiduous study of the language of the South
Sea Islands. It became a kind of competition between them as to
which could learn the most. Now Bastin, although simple and even
stupid in some ways, was a good scholar, and as I knew at
college, had quite a faculty for acquiring languages in which he
had taken high marks at examinations. Bickley, too, was an
extraordinarily able person with an excellent memory, especially
when he was on his mettle. The result was that before we ever
reached a South Sea island they had a good working knowledge of
the local tongues.
As it chanced, too, at Perth we picked up a Samoan and his wife
who, under some of the "white Australia" regulations, were not
allowed to remain in the country and offered to work as servants
in return for a passage to Apia where we proposed to call some
time or other. With these people Bastin and Bickley talked all
day long till really they became fairly proficient in their soft
and beautiful dialect. They wished me to learn also, but I said
that with two such excellent interpreters and the natives while
they remained with us, it seemed quite unnecessary. Still, I
picked up a good deal in a quiet way, as much as they did
perhaps.
At length, travelling on and on as a voyager to the planet Mars
might do, we sighted the low shores of Australia and that same
evening were towed, for our coal was quite exhausted, to the
wharf at Fremantle. Here we spent a few days exploring the
beautiful town of Perth and its neighbourhood where it was very
hot just then, and eating peaches and grapes till we made
ourselves ill, as a visitor often does who is unaware that fruit
should not be taken in quantity in Australia while the sun is
high. Then we departed for Melbourne almost before our arrival
was generally known, since I did not wish to advertise our
presence or the object of our journey.
We crossed the Great Australian Bight, of evil reputation, in
the most perfect weather; indeed it might have been a mill pond,
and after a short stay at Melbourne, went on to Sydney, where we
coaled again and laid in supplies.
Then our real journey began. The plan we laid out was to sail
to Suva in Fiji, about 1,700 miles away, and after a stay there,
on to Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands, stopping perhaps at the
Phoenix Islands and the Central Polynesian Sporades, such as
Christmas and Fanning Isles. Then we proposed to turn south again
through the Marshall Archipelago and the Caroline Islands, and so
on to New Guinea and the Coral Sea. Particularly did we wish to
visit Easter Island on account of its marvelous sculptures that
are supposed to be the relics of a preeminent-historic race. In truth,
however, we had no fixed plan except to go wherever circumstance
and chance might take us. Chance, I may add, or something else,
took full advantage of its opportunities.
We came to Suva in safety and spent a while in exploring the
beautiful Fiji Isles where both Bastin and Bickley made full
inquiries about the work of the missionaries, each of them
drawing exactly opposite conclusions from the same set of
admitted facts. Thence we steamed to Samoa and put our two
natives ashore at Apia, where we procured some coal. We did not
stay long enough in these islands to investigate them, however,
because persons of experience there assured us from certain
familiar signs that one of the terrible hurricanes with which
they are afflicted, was due to arrive shortly and that we should
do well to put ourselves beyond its reach. So having coaled and
watered we departed in a hurry.
Up to this time I should state we had met with the most
wonderful good fortune in the matter of weather, so good indeed
that never on one occasion since we left Marseilles, had we been
obliged to put the fiddles on the tables. With the superstition
of a sailor Captain Astley, when I alluded to the matter, shook
his head saying that doubtless we should pay for it later on,
since "luck never goes all the way" and cyclones were reported to
be about.
Here I must tell that after we were clear of Apia, it was
discovered that the Danish mate who was believed to be in his
cabin unwell from something he had eaten, was missing. The
question arose whether we should put back to find him, as we
supposed that he had made a trip inland and met with an accident,
or been otherwise delayed. I was in favour of doing so though the
captain, thinking of the threatened hurricane, shook his head and
said that Jacobsen was a queer fellow who might just as well have
gone overboard as anywhere else, if he thought he heard "the
spirits, of whom he was so fond," calling him. While the matter
was still in suspense I happened to go into my own stateroom and
there, stuck in the looking-glass, saw an envelope in the Dane's
handwriting addressed to myself. On opening it I found another
sealed letter, unaddressed, also a note that ran as follows:
"Honoured Sir,
"You will think very badly of me for leaving you, but the
enclosed which I implore you not to open until you have seen the
last of the Star of the South, will explain my reason and I hope
clear my reputation. I thank you again and again for all your
kindness and pray that the Spirits who rule the world may bless
and preserve you, also the Doctor and Mr. Bastin."
This letter, which left the fate of Jacobsen quite unsolved,
for it might mean either that he had deserted or drowned himself,
I put away with the enclosure in my pocket. Of course there was
no obligation on me to refrain from opening the letter, but I
shrank from doing so both from some kind of sense of honour and,
to tell the truth, for fear of what it might contain. I felt that
this would be disagreeable; also, although there was nothing to
connect them together, I bethought me of the scene when Jacobsen
had smashed the planchette.
On my return to the deck I said nothing whatsoever about the
discovery of the letter, but only remarked that on reflection I
had changed my mind and agreed with the captain that it would be
unwise to attempt to return in order to look for Jacobsen. So the
boatswain, a capable individual who had seen better days, was
promoted to take his watches and we went on as before. How
curiously things come about in the world! For nautical reasons
that were explained to me, but which I will not trouble to set
down, if indeed I could remember them, I believe that if we had
returned to Apia we should have missed the great gale and
subsequent cyclone, and with these much else. But it was not so
fated.
It was on the fourth day, when we were roughly seven hundred
miles or more north of Samoa, that we met the edge of this gale
about sundown. The captain put on steam in the hope of pushing
through it, but that night we dined for the first time with the
fiddles on, and by eleven o'clock it was as much as one could do
to stand in the cabin, while the water was washing freely over
the deck. Fortunately, however, the wind veered more aft of us,
so that by putting about her head a little (seamen must forgive
me if I talk of these matters as a landlubber) we ran almost
before the wind, though not quite in the direction that we wished
to go.
When the light came it was blowing very hard indeed, and the
sky was utterly overcast, so that we got no glimpse of the sun,
or of the stars on the following night. Unfortunately, there was
no moon visible; indeed, if there had been I do not suppose that
it would have helped us because of the thick pall of clouds. For
quite seventy-two hours we ran on beneath bare poles before that
gale. The little vessel behaved splendidly, riding the seas like
a duck, but I could see that Captain Astley was growing alarmed.
When I said something complimentary to him about the conduct of
the Star of the South, he replied that she was forging ahead all
right, but the question was--where to? He had been unable to take
an observation of any sort since we left Samoa; both his patent
logs had been carried away, so that now only the compass
remained, and he had not the slightest idea where we were in that
great ocean studded with atolls and islands.
I asked him whether we could not steam back to our proper
course, but he answered that to do so he would have to travel
dead in the eye of the gale, and he doubted whether the engines
would stand it. Also there was the question of coal to be
considered. However, he had kept the fires going and would do
what he could if the weather moderated.
That night during dinner which now consisted of tinned foods
and whisky and water, for the seas had got to the galley fire,
suddenly the gale dropped, whereat we rejoiced exceedingly. The
captain came down into the saloon very white and shaken, I
thought, and I asked him to have a nip of whisky to warm him up,
and to celebrate our good fortune in having run out of the wind.
He took the bottle and, to my alarm, poured out a full half
tumbler of spirit, which he swallowed undiluted in two or three
gulps.
"That's better!" he said with a hoarse laugh. "But man, what is
it you are saying about having run out of the wind? Look at the
glass!"
"We have," said Bastin, "and it is wonderfully steady. About 29
degrees or a little over, which it has been for the last three
days."
Again Astley laughed in a mirthless fashion, as he answered:
"Oh, that thing! That's the passengers' glass. I told the
'steward to put it out of gear so that you might not be
frightened; it is an old trick. Look at this," and he produced
one of the portable variety out of his pocket.
We looked, and it stood somewhere between 27 degrees and 28
degrees.
"That's the lowest glass I ever saw in the Polynesian or any
other seas during thirty years. It's right, too, for I have
tested it by three others," he said.
"What does it mean?" I asked rather anxiously.
"South Sea cyclone of the worst breed," he replied. "That
cursed Dane knew it was coming and that's why he left the ship.
Pray as you never prayed before," and again he stretched out his
hand towards the whisky bottle. But I stepped between him and it,
shaking my head. Thereon he laughed for the third time and left
the cabin. Though I saw him once or twice afterwards, these were
really the last words of intelligible conversation that I ever
had with Captain Astley.
"It seems that we are in some danger," said Bastin, in an
unmoved kind of way. "I think that was a good idea of the
captain's, to put up a petition, I mean, but as Bickley will
scarcely care to join in it I will go into the cabin and do so
myself."
Bickley snorted, then said:
"Confound that captain! Why did he play such a trick upon us
about the barometer? Humphrey, I believe he had been drinking."
"So do I," I said, looking at the whisky bottle. "Otherwise,
after taking those precautions to keep us in the dark, he would
not have let on like that."
"Well," said Bickley, "he can't get to the liquor, except
through this saloon, as it is locked up forward with the other
stores."
"That's nothing," I replied, "as doubtless he has a supply of
his own; rum, I expect. We must take our chance."
Bickley nodded, and suggested that we should go on deck to see
what was happening. So we went. Not a breath of wind was
stirring, and even the sea seemed to be settling down a little.
At least, so we judged from the motion, for we could not see
either it or the sky; everything was as black as pitch. We heard
the sailors, however, engaged in rigging guide ropes fore and
aft, and battening down the hatches with extra tarpaulins by the
light of lanterns. Also they were putting ropes round the boats
and doing something to the spars and topmasts.
Presently Bastin joined us, having, I suppose, finished his
devotions.
"Really, it is quite pleasant here," he said. "One never knows
how disagreeable so much wind is until it stops."
I lit my pipe, making no answer, and the match burned quite
steadily there in the open air.
"What is that?" exclaimed Bickley, staring at something which
now I saw for the first time. It looked like a line of white
approaching through the gloom. With it came a hissing sound, and
although there was still no wind, the rigging began to moan
mysteriously like a thing in pain. A big drop of water also fell
from the sides into my pipe and put it out. Then one of the
sailors cried in a hoarse voice:
"Get down below, governors, unless you want to go out to sea!"
"Why?" inquired Bastin.
"Why? Becos the 'urricane is coming, that's all. Coming as
though the devil had kicked it out of 'ell."
Bastin seemed inclined to remonstrate at this sort of language,
but we pushed him down the companion and followed, propelling the
spaniel Tommy in front of us. Next moment I heard the sailors
battening the hatch with hurried blows, and when this was done to
their satisfaction, heard their feet also as they ran into
shelter.
Another instant and we were all lying in a heap on the cabin
floor with poor Tommy on top of us. The cyclone had struck the
ship! Above the wash of water and the screaming of the gale we
heard other mysterious sounds, which doubtless were caused by the
yards hitting the seas, for the yacht was lying on her side. I
thought that all was over, but presently there came a rending,
crashing noise. The masts, or one of them, had gone, and by
degrees we righted.
"Near thing!" said Bickley. "Good heavens, what's that?"
I listened, for the electric light had temporarily gone out,
owing, I suppose, to the dynamo having stopped for a moment. A
most unholy and hollow sound was rising from the cabin floor. It
might have been caused by a bullock with its windpipe cut, trying
to get its breath and groaning. Then the light came on again and
we saw Bastin lying at full length on the carpet.
"He's broken his neck or something," I said.
Bickley crept to him and having looked, sang out:
"It's all right! He's only sea-sick. I thought it would come to
that if he drank so much tea."
"Sea-sick," I said faintly--"sea-sick?"
"That's all," said Bickley. "The nerves of the stomach acting
on the brain or vice-versa--that is, if Bastin has a brain," he
added sotto voce.
"Oh!" groaned the prostrate clergyman. "I wish that I were
dead!"
"Don't trouble about that," answered Bickley. "I expect you
soon will be. Here, drink some whisky, you donkey."
Bastin sat up and obeyed, out of the bottle, for it was
impossible to pour anything into a glass, with results too
dreadful to narrate.
"I call that a dirty trick," he said presently, in a feeble
voice, glowering at Bickley.
"I expect I shall have to play you a dirtier before long, for
you are a pretty bad case, old fellow."
As a matter of fact he had, for once Bastin had begun really we
thought that he was going to die. Somehow we got him into his
cabin, which opened off the saloon, and as he could drink nothing
more, Bickley managed to inject morphia or some other compound
into him, which made him insensible for a long while.
"He must be in a poor way," he said, "for the needle went more
than a quarter of an inch into him, and he never cried out or
stirred. Couldn't help it in that rolling."
But now I could hear the engines working, and I think that the
bow of the vessel was got head on to the seas, for instead of
rolling we pitched, or rather the ship stood first upon one end
and then upon the other. This continued for a while until the
first burst of the cyclone had gone by. Then suddenly the engines
stopped; I suppose that they had broken down, but I never
learned, and we seemed to veer about, nearly sinking in the
process, and to run before the hurricane at terrific speed.
"I wonder where we are going to?" I said to Bickley. "To the
land of sleep, Humphrey, I imagine," he replied in a more gentle
voice than I had often heard him use, adding: "Good-bye, old boy,
we have been real friends, haven't we, notwithstanding my
peculiarities? I only wish that I could think that there was
anything in Bastin's views. But I can't, I can't. It's good night
for us poor creatures!"
