PART TWO
IV
WITH her anchor at the bow and clothed in canvas
to her very trucks, my command seemed to stand
as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and
shadows of polished marble. It was impossible
to distinguish land from water in the enigmatical
tranquillity of the immense forces of the world.
A sudden impatience possessed me.
"Won't she answer the helm at all?" I said
irritably to the man whose strong brown hands
grasping the spokes of the wheel stood out lighted
on the darkness; like a symbol of mankind's claim
to the direction of its own fate.
He answered me.
"Yes, sir. She's coming-to slowly."
"Let her head come up to south."
"Aye, aye, sir."
I paced the poop. There was not a sound but
that of my footsteps, till the man spoke again.
"She is at south now, sir."
I felt a slight tightness of the chest before I gave
out the first course of my first command to the
silent night, heavy with dew and sparkling with
stars. There was a finality in the act commit-
ting me to the endless vigilance of my lonely task.
"Steady her head at that," I said at last. "The
course is south."
"South, sir," echoed the man.
I sent below the second mate and his watch and
remained in charge, walking the deck through the
chill, somnolent hours that precede the dawn.
Slight puffs came and went, and whenever they
were strong enough to wake up the black water the
murmur alongside ran through my very heart in a
delicate crescendo of delight and died away swiftly.
I was bitterly tired. The very stars seemed weary
of waiting for daybreak. It came at last with a
mother-of-pearl sheen at the zenith, such as I had
never seen before in the tropics, unglowing, almost
gray, with a strange reminder of high latitudes.
The voice of the look-out man hailed from for-
ward:
"Land on the port bow, sir."
"All right."
Leaning on the rail I never even raised my eyes.
The motion of the ship was imperceptible. Pres-
ently Ransome brought me the cup of morning
coffee. After I had drunk it I looked ahead, and in
the still streak of very bright pale orange light I
saw the land profiled flatly as if cut out of black
paper and seeming to float on the water as light as
cork. But the rising sun turned it into mere dark
vapour, a doubtful, massive shadow trembling in
the hot glare.
The watch finished washing decks. I went be-
low and stopped at Mr. Burns' door (he could not
bear to have it shut), but hesitated to speak to him
till he moved his eyes. I gave him the news.
"Sighted Cape Liant at daylight. About fifteen
miles."
He moved his lips then, but I heard no sound
till I put my ear down, and caught the peevish
comment: "This is crawling. . . . No luck."
"Better luck than standing still, anyhow," I
pointed out resignedly, and left him to whatever
thoughts or fancies haunted his awful immobility.
Later that morning, when relieved by my second
officer, I threw myself on my couch and for some
three hours or so I really found oblivion. It was so
perfect that on waking up I wondered where I was.
Then came the immense relief of the thought: on
board my ship! At sea! At sea!
Through the port-holes I beheld an unruffled,
sun-smitten horizon. The horizon of a windless
day. But its spaciousness alone was enough to
give me a sense of a fortunate escape, a momentary
exultation of freedom.
I stepped out into the saloon with my heart
lighter than it had been for days. Ransome was at
the sideboard preparing to lay the table for the first
sea dinner of the passage. He turned his head, and
something in his eyes checked my modest elation.
Instinctively I asked: "What is it now?" not ex-
pecting in the least the answer I got. It was given
with that sort of contained serenity which was
characteristic of the man.
"I am afraid we haven't left all sickness behind
us, sir."
"We haven't! What's the matter?"
He told me then that two of our men had been
taken bad with fever in the night. One of them
was burning and the other was shivering, but he
thought that it was pretty much the same thing.
I thought so, too. I felt shocked by the news.
"One burning, the other shivering, you say? No.
We haven't left the sickness behind. Do they look
very ill?"
"Middling bad, sir." Ransome's eyes gazed
steadily into mine. We exchanged smiles. Ran-
some's a little wistful, as usual, mine no doubt grim
enough, to correspond with my secret exasperation.
I asked:
"Was there any wind at all this morning?"
"Can hardly say that, sir. We've moved all the
time though. The land ahead seems a little nearer."
That was it. A little nearer. Whereas if we
had only had a little more wind, only a very little
more, we might, we should, have been abreast of
Liant by this time and increasing our distance from
that contaminated shore. And it was not only the
distance. It seemed to me that a stronger breeze
would have blown away the contamination which
clung to the ship. It obviously did cling to the
ship. Two men. One burning, one shivering. I
felt a distinct reluctance to go and look at them.
What was the good? Poison is poison. Tropical
fever is tropical fever. But that it should have
stretched its claw after us over the sea seemed to
me an extraordinary and unfair license. I could
hardly believe that it could be anything worse than
the last desperate pluck of the evil from which we
were escaping into the clean breath of the sea. If
only that breath had been a little stronger. How-
ever, there was the quinine against the fever. I
went into the spare cabin where the medicine chest
was kept to prepare two doses. I opened it full of
faith as a man opens a miraculous shrine. The
upper part was inhabited by a collection of bottles,
all square-shouldered and as like each other as
peas. Under that orderly array there were two
drawers, stuffed as full of things as one could im-
agine--paper packages, bandages, cardboard boxes
officially labelled. The lower of the two, in one
of its compartments, contained our provision of
quinine.
There were five bottles, all round and all of a
size. One was about a third full. The other four
remained still wrapped up in paper and sealed.
But I did not expect to see an envelope lying on top
of them. A square envelope, belonging, in fact, to
the ship's stationery.
It lay so that I could see it was not closed down,
and on picking it up and turning it over I perceived
that it was addressed to myself. It contained a
half-sheet of notepaper, which I unfolded with a
queer sense of dealing with the uncanny, but with-
out any excitement as people meet and do ex-
traordinary things in a dream.
"My dear Captain," it began, but I ran to the
signature. The writer was the doctor. The date
was that of the day on which, returning from my
visit to Mr. Burns in the hospital, I had found the
excellent doctor waiting for me in the cabin; and
when he told me that he had been putting in
time inspecting the medicine chest for me. How
bizarre! While expecting me to come in at any
moment he had been amusing himself by writing
me a letter, and then as I came in had hastened to
stuff it into the medicine-chest drawer. A rather
incredible proceeding. I turned to the text in
wonder.
In a large, hurried, but legible hand the good,
sympathetic man for some reason, either of kind-
ness or more likely impelled by the irresistible de-
sire to express his opinion, with which he didn't
want to damp my hopes before, was warning me
not to put my trust in the beneficial effects of a
change from land to sea. "I didn't want to add to
your worries by discouraging your hopes," he
wrote. "I am afraid that, medically speaking, the
end of your troubles is not yet." In short, he ex-
pected me to have to fight a probable return of
tropical illness. Fortunately I had a good pro-
vision of quinine. I should put my trust in that,
and administer it steadily, when the ship's health
would certainly improve.
I crumpled up the letter and rammed it into my
pocket. Ransome carried off two big doses to the
men forward. As to myself, I did not go on deck as
yet. I went instead to the door of Mr. Burns'
room, and gave him that news, too.
It was impossible to say the effect it had on him.
At first I thought that he was speechless. His head
lay sunk in the pillow. He moved his lips enough,
however, to assure me that he was getting much
stronger; a statement shockingly untrue on the
face of it.
That afternoon I took my watch as a matter of
course. A great over-heated stillness enveloped
the ship and seemed to hold her motionless in a
flaming ambience composed in two shades of blue.
Faint, hot puffs eddied nervelessly from her sails.
And yet she moved. She must have. For, as the
sun was setting, we had drawn abreast of Cape
Liant and dropped it behind us: an ominous re-
treating shadow in the last gleams of twilight.
In the evening, under the crude glare of his lamp,
Mr. Burns seemed to have come more to the surface
of his bedding. It was as if a depressing hand had
been lifted off him. He answered my few words
by a comparatively long, connected speech. He
asserted himself strongly. If he escaped being
smothered by this stagnant heat, he said, he was
confident that in a very few days he would be able
to come up on deck and help me.
While he was speaking I trembled lest this effort
of energy should leave him lifeless before my eyes.
But I cannot deny that there was something com-
forting in his willingness. I made a suitable
reply, but pointed out to him that the only thing
that could really help us was wind--a fair wind.
He rolled his head impatiently on the pillow.
And it was not comforting in the least to hear him
begin to mutter crazily about the late captain, that
old man buried in latitude 8 d 20', right in our way
--ambushed at the entrance of the Gulf.
"Are you still thinking of your late captain, Mr.
Burns?" I said. "I imagine the dead feel no animos-
ity against the living. They care nothing for them."
"You don't know that one," he breathed out
feebly.
"No. I didn't know him, and he didn't know
me. And so he can't have any grievance against
me, anyway."
"Yes. But there's all the rest of us on board," he
insisted.
I felt the inexpugnable strength of common sense
being insidiously menaced by this gruesome, by
this insane, delusion. And I said:
"You mustn't talk so much. You will tire yourself."
"And there is the ship herself," he persisted in a whisper.
"Now, not a word more," I said, stepping in and
laying my hand on his cool forehead. It proved to
me that this atrocious absurdity was rooted in the
man himself and not in the disease, which, ap-
parently, had emptied him of every power, mental
and physical, except that one fixed idea.
I avoided giving Mr. Burns any opening for con-
versation for the next few days. I merely used to
throw him a hasty, cheery word when passing his
door. I believe that if he had had the strength he
would have called out after me more than once.
But he hadn't the strength. Ransome, however,
observed to me one afternoon that the mate
"seemed to be picking up wonderfully."
"Did he talk any nonsense to you of late?" I
asked casually.
"No, sir." Ransome was startled by the direct
question; but, after a pause, he added equably:
"He told me this morning, sir, that he was sorry he
had to bury our late captain right in the ship's
way, as one may say, out of the Gulf."
"Isn't this nonsense enough for you?" I asked,
looking confidently at the intelligent, quiet face on
which the secret uneasiness in the man's breast
had thrown a transparent veil of care.
Ransome didn't know. He had not given a
thought to the matter. And with a faint smile he
flitted away from me on his never-ending duties,
with his usual guarded activity.
Two more days passed. We had advanced a
little way--a very little way--into the larger space
of the Gulf of Siam. Seizing eagerly upon the
elation of the first command thrown into my lap,
by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy
feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be
paid for in some way. I had held, professionally, a
review of my chances. I was competent enough
for that. At least, I thought so. I had a general
sense of my preparedness which only a man pur-
suing a calling he loves can know. That feeling
seemed to me the most natural thing in the world.
As natural as breathing. I imagined I could not
have lived without it.
I don't know what I expected. Perhaps nothing
else than that special intensity of existence which is
the quintessence of youthful aspirations. What-
ever I expected I did not expect to be beset by
hurricanes. I knew better than that. In the Gulf
of Siam there are no hurricanes. But neither did I
expect to find myself bound hand and foot to the
hopeless extent which was revealed to me as the
days went on.
Not that the evil spell held us always motionless.
Mysterious currents drifted us here and there, with
a stealthy power made manifest only by the chang-
ing vistas of the islands fringing the east shore of
the Gulf. And there were winds, too, fitful and
deceitful. They raised hopes only to dash them
into the bitterest disappointment, promises of
advance ending in lost ground, expiring in sighs,
dying into dumb stillness in which the currents
had it all their own way--their own inimical
way.
The island of Koh-ring, a great, black, up-
heaved ridge amongst a lot of tiny islets, lying
upon the glassy water like a triton amongst min-
nows, seemed to be the centre of the fatal circle. It
seemed impossible to get away from it. Day after
day it remained in sight. More than once, in a
favourable breeze, I would take its bearings in the
fast-ebbing twilight, thinking that it was for the
last time. Vain hope. A night of fitful airs would
undo the gains of temporary favour, and the rising
sun would throw out the black relief of Koh-ring
looking more barren, inhospitable, and grim than ever.
"It's like being bewitched, upon my word," I
said once to Mr. Burns, from my usual position in
the doorway.
He was sitting up in his bed-place. He was
progressing toward the world of living men; if he
could hardly have been said to have rejoined it yet.
He nodded to me his frail and bony head in a
wisely mysterious assent.
"Oh, yes, I know what you mean," I said.
"But you cannot expect me to believe that a dead
man has the power to put out of joint the meteor-
ology of this part of the world. Though indeed
it seems to have gone utterly wrong. The land and
sea breezes have got broken up into small pieces.
We cannot depend upon them for five minutes to-
gether."
"It won't be very long now before I can come up
on deck," muttered Mr. Burns, "and then we shall
see."
Whether he meant this for a promise to grapple
with supernatural evil I couldn't tell. At any rate,
it wasn't the kind of assistance I needed. On the
other hand, I had been living on deck practically
night and day so as to take advantage of every
chance to get my ship a little more to the south-
ward. The mate, I could see, was extremely weak
yet, and not quite rid of his delusion, which to me
appeared but a symptom of his disease. At all
events, the hopefulness of an invalid was not to be
discouraged. I said:
"You will be most welcome there, I am sure, Mr.
Burns. If you go on improving at this rate you'll
be presently one of the healthiest men in the ship."
This pleased him, but his extreme emaciation
converted his self-satisfied smile into a ghastly
exhibition of long teeth under the red moustache.
"Aren't the fellows improving, sir?" he asked
soberly, with an extremely sensible expression of
anxiety on his face.
I answered him only with a vague gesture and
went away from the door. The fact was that
disease played with us capriciously very much as
the winds did. It would go from one man to an-
other with a lighter or heavier touch, which always
left its mark behind, staggering some, knocking
others over for a time, leaving this one, returning
to another, so that all of them had now an invalid-
ish aspect and a hunted, apprehensive look in their
eyes; while Ransome and I, the only two com-
pletely untouched, went amongst them assiduously
distributing quinine. It was a double fight. The
adverse weather held us in front and the disease
pressed on our rear. I must say that the men were
very good. The constant toil of trimming yards
they faced willingly. But all spring was out of
their limbs, and as I looked at them from the poop
I could not keep from my mind the dreadful im-
pression that they were moving in poisoned air.
Down below, in his cabin, Mr. Burns had ad-
vanced so far as not only to be able to sit up, but
even to draw up his legs. Clasping them with
bony arms, like an animated skeleton, he emitted
deep, impatient sighs.
"The great thing to do, sir," he would tell me on
every occasion, when I gave him the chance, "the
great thing is to get the ship past 8 d 20' of latitude.
Once she's past that we're all right."
At first I used only to smile at him, though, God
knows, I had not much heart left for smiles. But
at last I lost my patience.
"Oh, yes. The latitude 8 d 20'. That's where
you buried your late captain, isn't it?" Then with
severity: "Don't you think, Mr. Burns, it's about
time you dropped all that nonsense?"
He rolled at me his deep-sunken eyes in a glance
of invincible obstinacy. But for the rest he only
muttered, just loud enough for me to hear, some-
thing about "Not surprised . . . find . . .
play us some beastly trick yet. . . ."
Such passages as this were not exactly whole-
some for my resolution. The stress of adversity
was beginning to tell on me. At the same time, I
felt a contempt for that obscure weakness of my
soul. I said to myself disdainfully that it should
take much more than that to affect in the smallest
degree my fortitude.
I didn't know then how soon and from what un-
expected direction it would be attacked.
It was the very next day. The sun had risen
clear of the southern shoulder of Koh-ring, which
still hung, like an evil attendant, on our port
quarter. It was intensely hateful to my sight.
During the night we had been heading all round the
compass, trimming the yards again and again, to
what I fear must have been for the most part im-
aginary puffs of air. Then just about sunrise we
got for an hour an inexplicable, steady breeze, right
in our teeth. There was no sense in it. It fitted
neither with the season of the year nor with the
secular experience of seamen as recorded in books,
nor with the aspect of the sky. Only purposeful
malevolence could account for it. It sent us
travelling at a great pace away from our proper
course; and if we had been out on pleasure sailing
bent it would have been a delightful breeze, with
the awakened sparkle of the sea, with the sense of
motion and a feeling of unwonted freshness. Then,
all at once, as if disdaining to carry farther the
sorry jest, it dropped and died out completely in
less than five minutes. The ship's head swung
where it listed; the stilled sea took on the polish of a
steel plate in the calm.
I went below, not because I meant to take some
rest, but simply because I couldn't bear to look at
it just then. The indefatigable Ransome was busy
in the saloon. It had become a regular practice
with him to give me an informal health report in
the morning. He turned away from the sideboard
with his usual pleasant, quiet gaze. No shadow
rested on his intelligent forehead.
"There are a good many of them middling bad
this morning, sir," he said in a calm tone.
"What? All knocked out?"
"Only two actually in their bunks, sir, but--"
"It's the last night that has done for them. We
have had to pull and haul all the blessed time."
"I heard, sir. I had a mind to come out and
help only, you know. . . ."
"Certainly not. You mustn't. . . . The
fellows lie at night about the decks, too. It isn't
good for them."
Ransome assented. But men couldn't be looked
after like children. Moreover, one could hardly
blame them for trying for such coolness and such
air as there was to be found on deck. He himself,
of course, knew better.
He was, indeed, a reasonable man. Yet it
would have been hard to say that the others were
not. The last few days had been for us like the
ordeal of the fiery furnace. One really couldn't
quarrel with their common, imprudent humanity
making the best of the moments of relief, when the
night brought in the illusion of coolness and the
starlight twinkled through the heavy, dew-laden
air. Moreover, most of them were so weakened
that hardly anything could be done without every-
body that could totter mustering on the braces.
No, it was no use remonstrating with them. But I
fully believed that quinine was of very great use
indeed.
I believed in it. I pinned my faith to it. It
would save the men, the ship, break the spell by
its medicinal virtue, make time of no account,
the weather but a passing worry and, like a magic
powder working against mysterious malefices, se-
cure the first passage of my first command against
the evil powers of calms and pestilence. I looked
upon it as more precious than gold, and unlike gold,
of which there ever hardly seems to be enough any-
where, the ship had a sufficient store of it. I went
in to get it with the purpose of weighing out doses.
I stretched my hand with the feeling of a man
reaching for an unfailing panacea, took up a fresh
bottle and unrolled the wrapper, noticing as I did
so that the ends, both top and bottom, had come
unsealed. . . .
But why record all the swift steps of the appal-
ling discovery? You have guessed the truth al-
ready. There was the wrapper, the bottle, and the
white powder inside, some sort of powder! But it
wasn't quinine. One look at it was quite enough.
I remember that at the very moment of picking up
the bottle, before I even dealt with the wrapper, the
weight of the object I had in my hand gave me an
instant premonition. Quinine is as light as feath-
ers; and my nerves must have been exasperated
into an extraordinary sensibility. I let the bottle
smash itself on the floor. The stuff, whatever it
was, felt gritty under the sole of my shoe. I
snatched up the next bottle and then the next.
The weight alone told the tale. One after another
they fell, breaking at my feet, not because I threw
them down in my dismay, but slipping through my
fingers as if this disclosure were too much for my
strength.
It is a fact that the very greatness of a mental
shock helps one to bear up against it by producing
a sort of temporary insensibility. I came out of
the state-room stunned, as if something heavy had
dropped on my head. From the other side of the
saloon, across the table, Ransome, with a duster in
his hand, stared open-mouthed. I don't think that
I looked wild. It is quite possible that I appeared
to be in a hurry because I was instinctively hasten-
ing up on deck. An example this of training be-
come instinct. The difficulties, the dangers, the
problems of a ship at sea must be met on deck.
To this fact, as it were of nature, I responded
instinctively; which may be taken as a proof that
for a moment I must have been robbed of my
reason.
I was certainly off my balance, a prey to im-
pulse, for at the bottom of the stairs I turned and
flung myself at the doorway of Mr. Burns' cabin.
The wildness of his aspect checked my mental dis-
order. He was sitting up in his bunk, his body
looking immensely long, his head drooping a little
sideways, with affected complacency. He flour-
ished, in his trembling hand, on the end of a fore-
arm no thicker than a walking-stick, a shining
pair of scissors which he tried before my very eyes
to jab at his throat.
I was to a certain extent horrified; but it was
rather a secondary sort of effect, not really strong
enough to make me yell at him in some such man-
ner as: "Stop!" . . . "Heavens!" . . .
"What are you doing?"
In reality he was simply overtaxing his returning
strength in a shaky attempt to clip off the thick
growth of his red beard. A large towel was spread
over his lap, and a shower of stiff hairs, like bits of
copper wire, was descending on it at every snip of
the scissors.
He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the
fantasies of mad dreams, one cheek all bushy as if
with a swollen flame, the other denuded and
sunken, with the untouched long moustache on
that side asserting itself, lonely and fierce. And
while he stared thunderstruck, with the gaping
scissors on his fingers, I shouted my discovery at
him fiendishly, in six words, without comment.
