CHAPTER TWO
The sea, perhaps because of its saltness, roughens the outside
but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul. The old sea;
the sea of many years ago, whose servants were devoted slaves and
went from youth to age or to a sudden grave without needing to
open the book of life, because they could look at eternity
reflected on the element that gave the life and dealt the death.
Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was
glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious,
enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to
fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into
boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed.
But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable
mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery
of its possible favour. Strong men with childlike hearts were
faithful to it, were content to live by its grace--to die by its
will. That was the sea before the time when the French mind set
the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but
profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by
countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the
Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the
terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers
might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. Like all
mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers. The
hearts changed; the men changed. The once loving and devoted
servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering the
fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and
exacting masters. The sea of the past was an incomparably
beautiful mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and
promising eyes. The sea of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled
and defaced by the churned-up wakes of brutal propellers, robbed
of the enslaving charm of its vastness, stripped of its beauty,
of its mystery and of its promise.
Tom Lingard was a master, a lover, a servant of the sea. The sea
took him young, fashioned him body and soul; gave him his fierce
aspect, his loud voice, his fearless eyes, his stupidly guileless
heart. Generously it gave him his absurd faith in himself, his
universal love of creation, his wide indulgence, his contemptuous
severity, his straightforward simplicity of motive and honesty of
aim. Having made him what he was, womanlike, the sea served him
humbly and let him bask unharmed in the sunshine of its terribly
uncertain favour. Tom Lingard grew rich on the sea and by the
sea. He loved it with the ardent affection of a lover, he made
light of it with the assurance of perfect mastery, he feared it
with the wise fear of a brave man, and he took liberties with it
as a spoiled child might do with a paternal and good-natured
ogre. He was grateful to it, with the gratitude of an honest
heart. His greatest pride lay in his profound conviction of its
faithfulness--in the deep sense of his unerring knowledge of its
treachery.
The little brig Flash was the instrument of Lingard's fortune.
They came north together--both young--out of an Australian port,
and after a very few years there was not a white man in the
islands, from Palembang to Ternate, from Ombawa to Palawan, that
did not know Captain Tom and his lucky craft. He was liked for
his reckless generosity, for his unswerving honesty, and at first
was a little feared on account of his violent temper. Very soon,
however, they found him out, and the word went round that Captain
Tom's fury was less dangerous than many a man's smile. He
prospered greatly. After his first--and successful--fight with
the sea robbers, when he rescued, as rumour had it, the yacht of
some big wig from home, somewhere down Carimata way, his great
popularity began. As years went on it grew apace. Always
visiting out-of-the-way places of that part of the world, always
in search of new markets for his cargoes--not so much for profit
as for the pleasure of finding them--he soon became known to the
Malays, and by his successful recklessness in several encounters
with pirates, established the terror of his name. Those white
men with whom he had business, and who naturally were on the
look-out for his weaknesses, could easily see that it was enough
to give him his Malay title to flatter him greatly. So when there
was anything to be gained by it, and sometimes out of pure and
unprofitable good nature, they would drop the ceremonious
"Captain Lingard" and address him half seriously as Rajah
Laut--the King of the Sea.
He carried the name bravely on his broad shoulders. He had
carried it many years already when the boy Willems ran barefooted
on the deck of the ship Kosmopoliet IV. in Samarang roads,
looking with innocent eyes on the strange shore and objurgating
his immediate surroundings with blasphemous lips, while his
childish brain worked upon the heroic idea of running away. From
the poop of the Flash Lingard saw in the early morning the Dutch
ship get lumberingly under weigh, bound for the eastern ports.
Very late in the evening of the same day he stood on the quay of
the landing canal, ready to go on board of his brig. The night
was starry and clear; the little custom-house building was shut
up, and as the gharry that brought him down disappeared up the
long avenue of dusty trees leading to the town, Lingard thought
himself alone on the quay. He roused up his sleeping boat-crew
and stood waiting for them to get ready, when he felt a tug at
his coat and a thin voice said, very distinctly--
"English captain."
Lingard turned round quickly, and what seemed to be a very lean
boy jumped back with commendable activity.
"Who are you? Where do you spring from?" asked Lingard, in
startled surprise.
From a safe distance the boy pointed toward a cargo lighter
moored to the quay.
"Been hiding there, have you?" said Lingard. "Well, what do you
want? Speak out, confound you. You did not come here to scare
me to death, for fun, did you?"
The boy tried to explain in imperfect English, but very soon
Lingard interrupted him.
"I see," he exclaimed, "you ran away from the big ship that
sailed this morning. Well, why don't you go to your countrymen
here?"
"Ship gone only a little way--to Sourabaya. Make me go back to
the ship," explained the boy.
"Best thing for you," affirmed Lingard with conviction.
"No," retorted the boy; "me want stop here; not want go home.
Get money here; home no good."
"This beats all my going a-fishing," commented the astonished
Lingard. "It's money you want? Well! well! And you were not
afraid to run away, you bag of bones, you!"
The boy intimated that he was frightened of nothing but of being
sent back to the ship. Lingard looked at him in meditative
silence.
"Come closer," he said at last. He took the boy by the chin, and
turning up his face gave him a searching look. "How old are
you?"
"Seventeen."
"There's not much of you for seventeen. Are you hungry?"
"A little."
"Will you come with me, in that brig there?"
The boy moved without a word towards the boat and scrambled into
the bows.
"Knows his place," muttered Lingard to himself as he stepped
heavily into the stern sheets and took up the yoke lines. "Give
way there."
The Malay boat crew lay back together, and the gig sprang away
from the quay heading towards the brig's riding light.
Such was the beginning of Willems' career.
Lingard learned in half an hour all that there was of Willems'
commonplace story. Father outdoor clerk of some ship-broker in
Rotterdam; mother dead. The boy quick in learning, but idle in
school. The straitened circumstances in the house filled with
small brothers and sisters, sufficiently clothed and fed but
otherwise running wild, while the disconsolate widower tramped
about all day in a shabby overcoat and imperfect boots on the
muddy quays, and in the evening piloted wearily the
half-intoxicated foreign skippers amongst the places of cheap
delights, returning home late, sick with too much smoking and
drinking--for company's sake--with these men, who expected such
attentions in the way of business. Then the offer of the
good-natured captain of Kosmopoliet IV., who was pleased to do
something for the patient and obliging fellow; young Willems'
great joy, his still greater disappointment with the sea that
looked so charming from afar, but proved so hard and exacting on
closer acquaintance--and then this running away by a sudden
impulse. The boy was hopelessly at variance with the spirit of
the sea. He had an instinctive contempt for the honest
simplicity of that work which led to nothing he cared for.
Lingard soon found this out. He offered to send him home in an
English ship, but the boy begged hard to be permitted to remain.
He wrote a beautiful hand, became soon perfect in English, was
quick at figures; and Lingard made him useful in that way. As he
grew older his trading instincts developed themselves
astonishingly, and Lingard left him often to trade in one island
or another while he, himself, made an intermediate trip to some
out-of-the-way place. On Willems expressing a wish to that
effect, Lingard let him enter Hudig's service. He felt a little
sore at that abandonment because he had attached himself, in a
way, to his protege. Still he was proud of him, and spoke up for
him loyally. At first it was, "Smart boy that--never make a
seaman though." Then when Willems was helping in the trading he
referred to him as "that clever young fellow." Later when
Willems became the confidential agent of Hudig, employed in many
a delicate affair, the simple-hearted old seaman would point an
admiring finger at his back and whisper to whoever stood near at
the moment, "Long-headed chap that; deuced long-headed chap.
Look at him. Confidential man of old Hudig. I picked him up in
a ditch, you may say, like a starved cat. Skin and bone. 'Pon my
word I did. And now he knows more than I do about island
trading. Fact. I am not joking. More than I do," he would
repeat, seriously, with innocent pride in his honest eyes.
From the safe elevation of his commercial successes Willems
patronized Lingard. He had a liking for his benefactor, not
unmixed with some disdain for the crude directness of the old
fellow's methods of conduct. There were, however, certain sides
of Lingard's character for which Willems felt a qualified
respect. The talkative seaman knew how to be silent on certain
matters that to Willems were very interesting. Besides, Lingard
was rich, and that in itself was enough to compel Willems'
unwilling admiration. In his confidential chats with Hudig,
Willems generally alluded to the benevolent Englishman as the
"lucky old fool" in a very distinct tone of vexation; Hudig would
grunt an unqualified assent, and then the two would look at each
other in a sudden immobility of pupils fixed by a stare of
unexpressed thought.
"You can't find out where he gets all that india-rubber, hey
Willems?" Hudig would ask at last, turning away and bending over
the papers on his desk.
"No, Mr. Hudig. Not yet. But I am trying," was Willems'
invariable reply, delivered with a ring of regretful deprecation.
"Try! Always try! You may try! You think yourself clever
perhaps," rumbled on Hudig, without looking up. "I have been
trading with him twenty--thirty years now. The old fox. And I
have tried. Bah!"
He stretched out a short, podgy leg and contemplated the bare
instep and the grass slipper hanging by the toes. "You can't
make him drunk?" he would add, after a pause of stertorous
breathing.
"No, Mr. Hudig, I can't really," protested Willems, earnestly.
"Well, don't try. I know him. Don't try," advised the master,
and, bending again over his desk, his staring bloodshot eyes
close to the paper, he would go on tracing laboriously with his
thick fingers the slim unsteady letters of his correspondence,
while Willems waited respectfully for his further good pleasure
before asking, with great deference--
"Any orders, Mr. Hudig?"
"Hm! yes. Go to Bun-Hin yourself and see the dollars of that
payment counted and packed, and have them put on board the
mail-boat for Ternate. She's due here this afternoon."
"Yes, Mr. Hudig."
"And, look here. If the boat is late, leave the case in
Bun-Hin's godown till to-morrow. Seal it up. Eight seals as
usual. Don't take it away till the boat is here."
"No, Mr. Hudig."
"And don't forget about these opium cases. It's for to-night.
Use my own boatmen. Transship them from the Caroline to the Arab
barque," went on the master in his hoarse undertone. "And don't
you come to me with another story of a case dropped overboard
like last time," he added, with sudden ferocity, looking up at
his confidential clerk.
"No, Mr. Hudig. I will take care."
"That's all. Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make
the punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his
body," finished up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk
handkerchief nearly as big as a counterpane.
Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the
little green door through which he passed to the warehouse.
Hudig, pen in hand, listened to him bullying the punkah boy with
profane violence, born of unbounded zeal for the master's
comfort, before he returned to his writing amid the rustling of
papers fluttering in the wind sent down by the punkah that waved
in wide sweeps above his head.
Willems would nod familiarly to Mr. Vinck, who had his desk close
to the little door of the private office, and march down the
warehouse with an important air. Mr. Vinck--extreme dislike
lurking in every wrinkle of his gentlemanly countenance--would
follow with his eyes the white figure flitting in the gloom
amongst the piles of bales and cases till it passed out through
the big archway into the glare of the street.
