IX
On turning to descend Massy perceived the head of
Sterne the mate loitering, with his sly confident smile,
his red mustaches and blinking eyes, at the foot of the
ladder.
Sterne had been a junior in one of the larger shipping
concerns before joining the Sofala. He had thrown up
his berth, he said, "on general principles." The pro-
motion in the employ was very slow, he complained, and
he thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit
in the world. It seemed as though nobody would ever
die or leave the firm; they all stuck fast in their berths
till they got mildewed; he was tired of waiting; and he
feared that when a vacancy did occur the best servants
were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides,
the captain he had to serve under--Captain Provost--
was an unaccountable sort of man, and, he fancied, had
taken a dislike to him for some reason or other. For
doing rather more than his bare duty as likely as not.
When he had done anything wrong he could take a
talking to, like a man; but he expected to be treated
like a man too, and not to be addressed invariably as
though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost
plump and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and
Captain Provost, in a most scornful way, had told him
that he was a perfect officer, and that if he disliked the
way he was being spoken to there was the gangway--
he could take himself off ashore at once. But everybody
knew what sort of man Captain Provost was. It was no
use appealing to the office. Captain Provost had too
much influence in the employ. All the same, they had
to give him a good character. He made bold to say
there was nothing in the world against him, and, as he
had happened to hear that the mate of the Sofala had
been taken to the hospital that morning with a sun-
stroke, he thought there would be no harm in seeing
whether he would not do. . . .
He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-
faced, thin-flanked, throwing out his lean chest; and
had recited his little tale with an open and manly as-
surance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,
his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming mus-
tache; his eyebrows were straight, furry, of a chestnut
color, and the directness of his frank gaze seemed to
tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley
had engaged him temporarily; then, the other man hav-
ing been ordered home by the doctors, he had remained
for the next trip, and then the next. He had now at-
tained permanency, and the performance of his duties
was marked by an air of serious, single-minded appli-
cation. Directly he was spoken to, he began to smile
attentively, with a great deference expressed in his
whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking
which went on all the time something quizzical, as
though he had possessed the secret of some universal
joke cheating all creation and impenetrable to other
mortals.
Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step
by step; when the chief engineer had reached the deck
he swung about, and they found themselves face to face.
Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar, they con-
fronted each other as if there had been something be-
tween them--something else than the bright strip of
sunlight that, falling through the wide lacing of two
awnings, cut crosswise the narrow planking of the deck
and separated their feet as it were a stream; something
profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unex-
pressed understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort
of fear.
At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking
forward his scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the
rest of his face, murmured--
"You've seen? He grazed! You've seen?"
Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow,
fleshy countenance, replied in the same pitch--
"Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been
stuck fast in the mud."
"Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course
a shipowner may say what he jolly well pleases on his
own deck. That's all right; but I beg to . . ."
"Get out of my way!"
The other had a slight start, the impulse of suppressed
indignation perhaps, but held his ground. Massy's
downward glance wandered right and left, as though the
deck all round Sterne had been bestrewn with eggs that
must not be broken, and he had looked irritably for
places where he could set his feet in flight. In the end
he too did not move, though there was plenty of room
to pass on.
"I heard you say up there," went on the mate--"and
a very just remark it was too--that there's always
something wrong. . . ."
"Eavesdropping is what's wrong with YOU, Mr.
Sterne."
"Now, if you would only listen to me for a moment,
Mr. Massy, sir, I could . . ."
"You are a sneak," interrupted Massy in a great
hurry, and even managed to get so far as to repeat, "a
common sneak," before the mate had broken in argu-
mentatively--
"Now, sir, what is it you want? You want . . ."
"I want--I want," stammered Massy, infuriated and
astonished--"I want. How do you know that I want
anything? How dare you? . . . What do you
mean? . . . What are you after--you . . ."
"Promotion." Sterne silenced him with a sort of
candid bravado. The engineer's round soft cheeks quiv-
ered still, but he said quietly enough--
"You are only worrying my head off," and Sterne
met him with a confident little smile.
"A chap in business I know (well up in the world
he is now) used to tell me that this was the proper way.
'Always push on to the front,' he would say. 'Keep
yourself well before your boss. Interfere whenever you
get a chance. Show him what you know. Worry him
into seeing you.' That was his advice. Now I know
no other boss than you here. You are the owner, and
no one else counts for THAT much in my eyes. See, Mr.
Massy? I want to get on. I make no secret of it that
I am one of the sort that means to get on. These are
the men to make use of, sir. You haven't arrived at
the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out--I
dare say."
"Worry your boss in order to get on," mumbled
Massy, as if awestruck by the irreverent originality of
the idea. "I shouldn't wonder if this was just what the
Blue Anchor people kicked you out of the employ for.
Is that what you call getting on? You shall get on in
the same way here if you aren't careful--I can promise
you."
At this Sterne hung his head, thoughtful, perplexed,
winking hard at the deck. All his attempts to enter into
confidential relations with his owner had led of late
to nothing better than these dark threats of dismissal;
and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into
a hesitating silence as though he were not sure that
the proper time for defying it had come. On this occa-
sion he seemed to have lost his tongue for a moment, and
Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with
an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it
by stepping aside. He turned then swiftly, opening
his mouth very wide as if to shout something after the
engineer, but seemed to think better of it.
Always--as he was ready to confess--on the lookout
for an opening to get on, it had become an instinct with
him to watch the conduct of his immediate superiors for
something "that one could lay hold of." It was his
belief that no skipper in the world would keep his com-
mand for a day if only the owners could be "made to
know." This romantic and naive theory had led him
into trouble more than once, but he remained incorrigi-
ble; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that
whenever he joined a ship the intention of ousting his
commander out of the berth and taking his place was
always present at the back of his head, as a matter of
course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours with
the reveries of careful plans and compromising discov-
eries--the dreams of his sleep with images of lucky
turns and favorable accidents. Skippers had been
known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing
could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing
what he's made of. They also would tumble overboard
sometimes: he had heard of one or two such cases.
Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally, he
was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single
one of them would stand the test of careful watching
by a man who "knew what's what" and who kept his
eyes "skinned pretty well" all the time.
After he had gained a permanent footing on board
the Sofala he allowed his perennial hope to rise high.
To begin with, it was a great advantage to have an old
man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the
nature of things was likely to give up the job before
long from one cause or another. Sterne was greatly
chagrined, however, to notice that he did not seem any-
way near being past his work yet. Still, these old men
go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the
owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal
and steadiness. Sterne never for a moment doubted the
obvious nature of his own merits (he was really an ex-
cellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit alone
does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must
have some push in him, and must keep his wits at work
too to help him forward. He made up his mind to
inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done
at all; not indeed estimating the command of the
Sofala as a very great catch, but for the reason that,
out East especially, to make a start is everything, and
one command leads to another.
He began by promising himself to behave with great
circumspection; Massy's somber and fantastic humors
intimidated him as being outside one's usual sea experi-
ence; but he was quite intelligent enough to realize al-
most from the first that he was there in the presence of
an exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagina-
tion penetrated it quickly; the feeling that there was
in it an element which eluded his grasp exasperated his
impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an end,
then another, and he had begun his third before he saw
an opening by which he could step in with any sort of
effect. It had all been very queer and very obscure;
something had been going on near him, as if separated
by a chasm from the common life and the working
routine of the ship, which was exactly like the life and
the routine of any other coasting steamer of that class.
Then one day he made his discovery.
It came to him after all these weeks of watchful ob-
servation and puzzled surmises, suddenly, like the long-
sought solution of a riddle that suggests itself to the
mind in a flash. Not with the same authority, however.
Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remain-
ing thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake
it off with self-contumely, as though it had been the
product of an unhealthy bias towards the Incredible,
the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of--the Mad!
This--the illuminating moment--had occurred the trip
before, on the return passage. They had just left a
place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were
steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive
headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the
rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of
rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun
to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green
and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,
seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow
and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward
cape; and across the wide opening the nearest of a
group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy
yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the
hummocky tops of other islets peeped out motionless
above the water of the channels between, scoured
tumultuously by the breeze.
The usual track of the Sofala both going and return-
ing on every trip led her for a few miles along this reef-
infested region. She followed a broad lane of water,
dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the
earth's crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks
run in disorder upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals.
Some of these fragments of land appeared, indeed, no
bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat, lay
awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts
of stone; several, heavily timbered and round at the
base, emerged in squat domes of deep green foliage that
shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch of cloud
shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally sea-
son. The thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently
over that cluster; it turned then shadowy in its whole
extent; it turned more dark, and as if more still in the
play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals
of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished--dissolving ut-
terly at times in the thick rain--to reappear clear-cut
and black in the stormy light against the gray sheet of
the cloud--scattered on the slaty round table of
the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of
years, unfretted by the strife of the world, there it lay
unchanged as on that day, four hundred years ago,
when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of
a high-pooped caravel.
It was one of these secluded spots that may be found
on the busy sea, as on land you come sometimes upon the
clustered houses of a hamlet untouched by men's rest-
lessness, untouched by their need, by their thought, and
as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted
generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of sea-
fowl, urging their way from all the points of the horizon
to sleep on the outer rocks of the group, unrolled the
converging evolutions of their flight in long somber
streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating
cloud of their wings soared and stooped over the pinna-
cles of the rocks, over the rocks slender like spires, squat
like martello towers; over the pyramidal heaps like fallen
ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders showing like a wall
of stones battered to pieces and scorched by lightning--
with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach.
The noise of their continuous and violent screaming
filled the air.
This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from
Batu Beru; it would meet her on quiet evenings, a piti-
less and savage clamor enfeebled by distance, the
clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for
a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it
especially on board; it was the voice of their ship's un-
erring landfall, ending the steady stretch of a hundred
miles. She had made good her course, she had run her
distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by
one, the points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . .
and the cloud of birds hovered--the restless cloud emit-
ting a strident and cruel uproar, the sound of the fa-
miliar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,
of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a
flaw.
But when the Sofala happened to close with the land
after sunset she would find everything very still there
under the mantle of the night. All would be still, dumb,
almost invisible--but for the blotting out of the low
constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses
of the islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst
the dark spaces of the heaven: and the ship's three lights,
resembling three stars--the red and the green with the
white above--her three lights, like three companion
stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving
course for the passage at the southern end of the group.
Sometimes there were human eyes open to watch them
come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber void; the
eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a
reef. He thought drowsily: "Ha! The fire-ship that
once in every moon goes in and comes out of Pangu
bay." More he did not know of her. And just as he
had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating
the calm water a mile and a half away, the time would
come for the Sofala to alter her course, the lights would
swing off him their triple beam--and disappear.
A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast
tribe of long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove
for their living in this lonely wilderness of islets, lying
like an abandoned outwork of the land at the gates of
the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the
water rested more transparent than crystal under their
crooked and leaky canoes, scooped out of the trunk of
a tree: the forms of the bottom undulated slightly to
the dip of a paddle; and the men seemed to hang in the
air, they seemed to hang inclosed within the fibers of a
dark, sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, un-
steady, pellucid, green air above the shoals.
Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried
up in the sunshine; their lives ran out silently; the
homes where they were born, went to rest, and died--
flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with
a few ragged mats--were hidden out of sight from the
open sea. No glow of their household fires ever kindled
for a seaman a red spark upon the blind night of the
group: and the calms of the coast, the flaming long
calms of the equator, the unbreathing, concentrated
calms like the deep introspection of a passionate nature,
brooded awfully for days and weeks together over the
unchangeable inheritance of their children; till at last
the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole,
till the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thick-
ened, about the legs of lean men with girded loins, wad-
ing thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the shallows. And
it would happen now and then that the Sofala, through
some delay in one of the ports of call, would heave in
sight making for Pangu bay as late as noonday.
Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her
smoke would arise mysteriously from an empty point on
the clear line of sea and sky. The taciturn fishermen
within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards
the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny
beaches, the brown figures of men, women, and children
grubbing in the sand in search of turtles' eggs, would
rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over the eyes, to
watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve
off--and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that
ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the
two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though
she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very
bosom of the earth.
On such days the luminous sea would give no sign of
the dangers lurking on both sides of her path. Every-
thing remained still, crushed by the overwhelming power
of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the sun-
shine,--the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resem-
bling spires, the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of
islets resembling beehives, resembling mole-hills, the
islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the contours of
ivy-clad towers,--would stand reflected together upside
down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony
disposed on the silvered plate-glass of a mirror.
The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the
whole at once in the spume of the windward breakers,
as if in a sudden cloudlike burst of steam; and the clear
water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages. The
provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam
the wide base of the group; the submerged level of
broken waste and refuse left over from the building of
the coast near by, projecting its dangerous spurs, all
awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked
long spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of
froth and stones.
And even nothing more than a brisk breeze--as on
that morning, the voyage before, when the Sofala left
Pangu bay early, and Mr. Sterne's discovery was to
blossom out like a flower of incredible and evil aspect
from the tiny seed of instinctive suspicion,--even such
a breeze had enough strength to tear the placid mask
from the face of the sea. To Sterne, gazing with indif-
ference, it had been like a revelation to behold for the
first time the dangers marked by the hissing livid
patches on the water as distinctly as on the engraved
paper of a chart. It came into his mind that this was
the sort of day most favorable for a stranger attempt-
ing the passage: a clear day, just windy enough for
the sea to break on every ledge, buoying, as it were,
the channel plainly to the sight; whereas during a calm
you had nothing to depend on but the compass and the
practiced judgment of your eye. And yet the suc-
cessive captains of the Sofala had had to take her
through at night more than once. Nowadays you could
not afford to throw away six or seven hours of a
steamer's time. That you couldn't. But then use is
everything, and with proper care . . . The channel
was broad and safe enough; the main point was to hit
upon the entrance correctly in the dark--for if a man
got himself involved in that stretch of broken water
over yonder he would never get out with a whole ship--
if he ever got out at all.
This was Sterne's last train of thought independent
of the great discovery. He had just seen to the secur-
ing of the anchor, and had remained forward idling
away a moment or two. The captain was in charge on
the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away
from his survey of the sea and had leaned his shoulders
against the fish davit.
These, properly speaking, were the very last moments
of ease he was to know on board the Sofala. All the
instants that came after were to be pregnant with pur-
pose and intolerable with perplexity. No more idle,
random thoughts; the discovery would put them on the
rack, till sometimes he wished to goodness he had been
fool enough not to make it at all. And yet, if his
chance to get on rested on the discovery of "something
wrong," he could not have hoped for a greater stroke
of luck.
