Dick’s mind was rather deeply affected by the arrest of Ao Ling: and neither the Captain nor Mr. MacDonald had really relieved him. Like most white young men, he had not really looked on the Chinese as human until he had touched one. In consequence, the shock of that touch had been much greater than it would have been in the case of another white man. If he had been grappling with a white man, he would have known what to expect, in the way of feel: whereas the feel of Ao Ling took him quite by surprise.
Moreover, Ao Ling was the first man he had ever knocked out: he was not prepared for what a satisfying pleasure that can be.
But it is the curious mood that succeeded this satisfactory instant which puzzles me. Why should he have found the feel of Ao Ling, as he carried him to the hospital, so curiously reminiscent of the feel of Sukie, as he carried her to the sofa? Was it just because they were much the same weight, and both had smooth skins?
Whatever the reason, he could not get the man’s fate out of his mind, he kept going over it, again and again: was inordinately concerned about it. It fell to his lot to accompany the Captain and the doctor on their inspection, the next morning. His heart beat rather wildly, at the thought of seeing Ao Ling face to face. What would a man who is going to be executed look like? Surely he would not look like other men: certain death must surely set its seal beforehand on a face. And what would Ao Ling feel, when he saw the man who had seized him? Who had set his wheels, as it were, on the track that ran straight down to death?
Ao Ling was sitting on the bed, when they came in: his elbows on his knees, his manacled hands supporting his chin. His straight black hair stood forward from his forehead. Only the flat nose, the habitually parted lips, really showed. But he looked up: saw Dick’s curiously inquisitive gaze fastened on him. He had in fact no memory at all of whose sudden blow had felled him. He stared back, in surprise.
Dick stared as if his eyes were gimlets. But he could make nothing of the Chinaman’s expression. Stare, stare.—But how could those two young men see beyond each other’s eyes? They were both the same age; and in some ways, very similar. But their upbringings had been very different.
Now their prospects for the future, it seemed, were rather different also.
Later in the morning, as Dick was trying to get some order among the possessions in his room, he was seized with a complete change of mood: a feeling of dramatic pride, like what he felt when he was oiling in the forward latrine. It is not every young man who has overcome a notorious Chinese bandit with his bare hands—knocked him out, handcuffed him, and carried him bodily to prison. For that, after all, is what he had done, when you put it into plain words without any trimmings (so why add the trimmings?).
It was a pity, in a way, that he had no souvenir of it. The Colonel has a tiger-skin on the hall floor: you trip over the thing, and he launches easily into the story of how he shot it. It is a pity that when you arrest a murderer there are no horns or anything you can keep, to get the story started (I am sure it would stimulate our police in making arrests if they knew that the judge, when it was all over, would send them, suitably mounted, the “mask”).
And yet it was curious, if Ao Ling really was a bandit and a murderer, that his face did not look more fiendish. Of course, villains can cover their wickedness with a look of the utmost benevolence: but not, surely, for ever. At the moment of arrest —that, according to Dick’s reading-matter, was when the innocent look should have dropped, a look of baffled and fiendish cruelty should have contorted the man’s features. But instead of that Dick could not, for the life of him, remember any other look than one of silly surprise.
Dick sought out Dr. Frangcon, and questioned him. Was Ao Ling really a bandit? The doctor knew Chinamen better than anyone else on board.
Dr. Frangcon listened seriously and rather sadly.
“How can I tell?” he said. “Also, it is not my job—and it is not your job. He certainly came on board with false papers. That alone makes it our duty to arrest him and hand him over to the police. What else he has done is their business, not ours.”
That sounded logical. But an illogical voice in Dick insisted on urging still, that if you give over a man to be shot dead you have at least a measure of responsibility in the matter.
He found himself suddenly remembering the little girl laid out flat on the trolley.
Captain Abraham left his own vessel in charge of his Chief Officer: as long as any of his sixteen men remained on board the “Archimedes,” he intended to stay there with them. He could trust them, up to a point: they had behaved with great patience up to now. But it would not take more than a spark, he knew, to start a fight. And when men in the condition of the “Archimedes’s” men fight, they fight to kill and without thought of fair play.
Captain Abraham observed the condition of the “Archimedes’s” men very carefully: it was part of his job, and he would probably be expected to furnish, in the strictest confidence, a report on them. Captain Edwardes, he thought, did not seem very greatly affected, now the incident of the boarding-party was over. He seemed worried, increasingly worried: not like a man bowled over by anything past, but rather like a man with an anxious ordeal ahead of him. Captain Abraham guessed easily what that was. The Enquiry which would presently take place into his every minutest action and motive throughout the whole storm was not a thing which any master would look forward to. Captain Abraham had been a witness at many such Enquiries. He knew what a tendency there is for the experts, with all the facts before them, with wisdom after the event, to declare unjustly but in all honesty that a man has acted wrongly. Nothing is harder than to bear in mind, when conducting such an Enquiry, only the knowledge that was available to the Master at each time his decisions had to be made: to rule out completely from the reckoning indications which came to light even, it may be, only a few minutes later.
That Captain Edwardes was fortunate in his officers, and especially in Mr. Buxton and Mr. Rabb, Abraham also decided. They were a sound pair, those two: unemotional and efficient. Men on whom you could well rely. Of the two, it was Rabb who showed least signs of wear and tear. And yet there was something very odd about him. He carried out all his duties with meticulous efficiency; but he seemed to avoid his fellow-officers: he seemed to have a grievance against them. Captain Abraham wondered what it was.
When they all gathered in the saloon for lunch, Captain Abraham continued his observation: but you would not have guessed it by his manner. He was telling stories. And not stories of storms at sea, either.
Mr. MacDonald’s chair of course was empty. But only the two captains and the doctor and Mr. Soutar knew that he was missing. They gave it out that he had had a breakdown, and had been transferred to the “Patricia.” For it never entered their heads that he had fallen overboard: they thought he had jumped. And once jumping begins it is likely to go on. Best keep it quiet for the present.
Captain Abraham’s stories merged from one into another: but nobody listened much.
Things were nearly back to normal, now. Already the carpenters had replaced the missing table, and Deck and Engine-room were sorted out again. The Chief Steward presided in his pantry; and two yellow waiters, in clean jackets, ceremoniously served the dishes.
A ships’s saloon is never a very talkative place, but this one was more silent than usual: that is probably the only difference you would have noticed: and Captain Abraham’s stories went on and on.
Presently he ran out of stories, with no-one to cap them: so for want of anything better to say he began to describe Belize (none of them had ever seen the place, not even Edwardes).
“Ha’n’t you put in there before, Captain? No? Well, it’s not a bad berth, in the dry season. It’s no Shanghai, mind you: it’s a quiet little place. But it’s a purty sight, as you come into harbour—that is, if you like old-fashioned places, same as me: peepin’ out of the palms and oleanders, with the mountains dim and hazy in the distance, and the sea dotted with little cays and islands like ... like ...”
His voice tailed away: he could not think what they were like, except cays and islands: and nobody seemed to care.
—That was an idea, Dick thought: suppose he was to let the Chinaman loose, when they reached Belize? The man would not have a very good chance, perhaps; but he might get away. At the least he would have a run for his money. At the thought of stealing to the cell quietly in the night, and letting the man go, a feeling of pleasurable warmth suffused Dick’s body: the thought of Ao Ling’s unspoken gratitude. Of meeting him, perhaps years later, in some desperate fracas in Central China, when all seemed lost: of Ao Ling recognising him, and saving his life in turn (for a Chinaman never forgets).
“It’s a swampy sort of ground,” Captain Abraham went on inexorably: “most of the houses stand on mahogany pillars. They’re all wood of course, I mean the houses, you know; with jalousies: they stand up on short mahogany masts. Time was, when the mahogany trade was flourishing, it was a rich little port—for mahogany’s what they chiefly produce there. Niggers cut it, up in the forests, where no white man can live, and float it down the river in rafts. But I hear tell now mahogany’s gone out of fashion, or something. The trade isn’t a tenth of what it was. Terrible poverty. It’s the niggers themselves comes floating down the river now, more than the timber. That’s a funny thing! Some bright young spark over in Europe says, ‘No more heavy old mahogany for me,’ meaning no harm: but what’s the result? Sure as houses, presently down the river they come, those niggers, floating dead!
“Now, I like a nice bit of mahogany, myself, to eat my dinner off.”
Dick imagined the Chinaman slipping away quietly in the night; and then next day the hue and cry. Emaciated negroes with their tom-toms, hunting him for the blood-money. The Chinaman splashing desperately through swamps: lashed at by snakes: tripped by creepers: plunging ever deeper into the jungle: and all the time the police inexorably closing in ... it was just as enthralling a picture as the other one.
“—Belize is the capital, you know. Got a hospital there. And a gaol and barracks on the north side, across the river from Government House.”
Suddenly one of the engineers pushed back his chair, and dropped his dark head in his hands.
“She’s sinking! I know she’s sinking!” he cried out in a loud voice.
There was a frightful hush, broken only by his sobs. Then Soutar and the Third took him, one by each arm, and led him away, with Dr. Frangcon following.
“—The only brick buildings on the South Bank, so far as I am aware,” Captain Abraham went on in a slightly louder voice, “are St. John’s Church, and the Wesley Chapel. There’re a number of them on the North Bank, of course.”
But then his eye caught the apprentices’ table, and again he faltered and stopped. All three apprentices were silently crying—the tears pouring down their faces. Not one of them seemed to notice he was doing it himself, for each kept pointing at the other two—asking people to look at their condition, and do something for them. Each one seemed to think he was all right himself.
When Mr. Buxton saw this, he suddenly burst into tears too.
Just then Dr. Frangcon came back, and dosed everyone with bromide—well or ill. Everyone in the room.
But what had riveted Captain Abraham’s attention had not been the tears of Bennett, or Phillips: it was the third boy. For he was wearing Captain Abraham’s own gold watch.
Captain Abraham clapped his hand to his waist-coat pocket. He had never, till that moment, noticed it was gone.
Night fell: and those who were not on watch retired, with a second dose of bromide, to their bunks.
Captain Edwardes undressed fully for the first time, and got into pyjamas: lit a pipe and rolled into his bunk. The ship was still listed, of course: lucky the lower side of the bed was against the wall, or he could never have stayed in it.
As Captain Abraham had guessed, he was mortally worried about the future. But in a way, it was not so much himself he was worried about as the Owners. He did hope they would not make fools of themselves. A very good feeling had been built up, these last twenty years, between the Office and the Fleet: he hoped they would not jeopardise that. If the Enquiry found, on good and sufficient grounds, that he had been deficient in seamanship —well, let them sack him. But let them do it quickly: the other officers would respect that. On the other hand, if the Enquiry found that he was not seriously at fault, let them say so, and re-instate him at once. No shilly-shallying. No setting him to coasting for six months, on the pretence that it was for the good of his health, while they made up their minds. Better sack him unjustly than that.
Captain Edwardes knew very well the sort of verdict that an excess of justice might lead them into. They might fine him for running his ship into danger, and give him a gold watch for getting her out again. Well, perhaps that was what he deserved. But it would not look well—not to the rest of the Fleet: not to the World.
A presentation gold watch. He could imagine the scene. He would have to make a speech. Captain Edwardes’s Welsh blood tingled with pleasure at the thought of making a speech, before all those big-wigs. But at the moment he could only think of one thing to say:
“Gentlemen,” he imagined himself saying, as he held up the trophy: “My Lord Mayor and Gentlemen! This watch will be to me a perpetual memento of the wrath of Heaven.”
Through the door of his state-room, he heard the sound of a stealthy movement in the cabin beyond. Someone was in there who had no business to be! Edwardes lay still and quiet, listening with all his ears.
There was a rustling of papers: then a glass fell to the floor. He drew up his muscles, ready to spring out of bed suddenly. There was a soft plop onto the floor—and Thomas poked his inquisitive little snout in through the door, asking if he might come in. He looked no thinner than usual but ruffled; his coat staring, as if he really did want someone to care for him.
Captain Edwardes reached out an arm, and took the little creature up into his bed, and fondled him.
Rabb. That was a ticklish business. If he told the whole truth in his report, it was the street for Rabb. The man was an efficient and popular officer; a clean-living man. He had broken down in the storm, that was true. But that was bad luck. A man has no right to have to face such a storm as that. He might have gone through his whole career without ever a fault, if he had not been so unlucky as to have to face that storm. The odds were heavily against his ever having, in his career, to face such a storm again. Perhaps, too, if he had been in his own ship, with his own prescribed duty to do, just that slight enhancement of his responsibility might have held him together.
An efficient officer: broken through one piece of bad luck.
Captain Edwardes toyed with the idea of saying nothing whatever about Rabb, in his report ... but in his heart of hearts he knew he could not do it.
Soutar, now Acting-Chief, turned in also for a long night: for in his new capacity he was excused watch-keeping. And there was little enough in the engine-room to do. Already most of the mess was cleared up. There was no very real damage done down there—lucky, really, the engines had been stopped before anything had smashed.
Soutar turned off the light, and went to sleep. But he did not sleep for long. He heard someone calling him: and then saw Mr. MacDonald’s eyes glaring into his.
“In the Next Worrld Man casts Reason, Mr. Soutar, as I tau’d ye!” he said. That must be true: for his face was wholly and voluntarily mad: and in place of his grey moustache he wore the long black moustachios of the traditional mandarin.
Soutar gave a strangled shout: sat up, and turned on the light. MacDonald was gone: but Soutar felt no inclination to sleep again. He sat up, and began to read a book. It was by Ethel M. Dell.
Mr. Rabb, before turning in, took a manicure set, and with the little clippers began to pare the cuticle round his nails. He could never cut the nails themselves, because they were always too close bitten. But he was in the habit of paring the cuticle, and polishing the backs of the nails themselves with a little pad. A gentleman is known by his hands.
His mind was quite made up. Captain and Mate had conspired against him. Ever since he had disapproved of their dancing, at Norfolk, he had known by small indications that they meant to do him down. The Wicked are like that: they will never face a Christian openly, they do him down behind his back.
This was their chance. Because, in that awful storm he had used a little discretion, had refused to walk into the traps they had laid to kill him, they would send in a report on him that would get him sacked. Actually they had been just as frightened as he was: for instance, hadn’t he seen Captain Edwardes himself in a panic in the wheel-house, when he thought the Bridge was going? But if he reported that, on his bare word who would believe him?
The orders David gave Bathsheba’s husband were nothing to the orders they had kept on giving him! If he had obeyed one of these orders he would have been a dead man—which was what they wanted, of course. Well, instead he was a live one. But they had him, just the same.
He might write to the Chairman and explain the plot, perhaps: but it was hardly likely his word would count for much against both of theirs.
Well, he was not going to give them the chance. At Belize he would leave the ship. But he would not join the “Descartes.” They couldn’t touch him then! And he would not be long out of a job. There were companies who would jump at the chance of securing a man who had served in the famous Sage Line.
Dick Watchett also could not sleep. His face felt hot, and his brain lively. He was thinking over the scene at lunch that day. That engineer had broken down. The boys had broken down. He had even seen Mr. Buxton crying! Mr. Buxton! While he himself had felt not the slightest inclination to break down. He was stronger than them.
This surprised him: but it gave him immense confidence for the future. He had gone into the storm a boy: he was now a man. A sailor, a hard case. He had faced, for the first time in his life, the prolonged danger of death: and it had not broken him, he had got used to it. Frankly, he did not care now what further dangers he faced.
As for that Chinaman, how odd that he had been so concerned about him! Let him die. There are plenty of Chinamen in the world: one less makes no odds. Yes, it was better that he should die: it rounded the story off more satisfactorily. On the other hand, if he helped him escape at Belize, helped him slip through the Captain’s fingers—well, there was something of a thrill in that ...
Dick imagined himself meeting Sukie: what she would think of him now. He would not tell her his adventures, of course: someone else would have already done that. Probably it would be in the papers, and she would devour every paragraph, and then some shipmate would meet her and tell her about the Chinese bandit: how Dick had downed him with his bare hands, and how presently the man had been executed for his awful crimes ... or, some shipmate would tell her about the young Chinaman, how Dick had arrested him at the Captain’s orders, and then, knowing him innocent, had dared everything to help him escape ... well, it was hard yet to make up his mind which.
But all the time, as he imagined Sukie—a chastened, adoring Sukie—fawning round his heroic person, there was something in his mind growing more insistent, like a trickle of cold water down the neck. Suddenly it burst out into the light of discovery: all this was very little use to him, because he was no longer in love with Sukie at all! After all, she was only a High-school kid—and he was a grown man. A skinny little bit at that, with no more brains in her head than a pigeon! What use was her homage to him?
And so the man, Dick Watchett, the hard case, turned over placidly to go to sleep: yet conscious all the while that something had left him which he regretted.
But it has to be like that. A man cannot stretch the gamut of his emotions, he can only shift it. If you reach out at one end, to cover the emotion of danger of death, till you can cope with that comfortably, you can’t expect to keep a delicate sensitiveness the other end too. Just like there are baritones, tenors, trebles: but no one can sing the whole length of the piano. It was as if Dick’s voice had broken now. He had some fine new manly notes. But the old top-notes were gone.
Not, perhaps, for good: the shift had been artificial. In time, security might restore him to his natural range. And time, too, might blunt the edge of his re-awakened belief in God: the edge of which was at present uncomfortably sharp. But I will say no more of Dick Watchett: perhaps I have already said too much, about one who after all was a very normal young man.
Only one man on the whole ship was at this time already sound asleep: and that was Ao Ling. There was no light in his prison, so he fell asleep soon after sunset: and lay there, on his side, on the hospital cot, his handcuffed hands between his knees.
He was surprised to find a Fukienese girl on the cot beside him. He raised himself on one elbow, to embrace her: but the fine hair on her face and hands warned him that she was but a fox in human shape.
Moreover, he saw to his horror that she was in labour: the pains came on her at that moment. Deeply embarrassed, he would have left the cot; but he found that he could not rise. So he rolled over, turned his face away from her.
Then a voice said “Look!”
The room was filled with a red light, and a peculiar smell: and a ball of white flesh was rolling on the floor like a wheel. Ao Ling leant over the side of the cot (for the fox-girl had now vanished) with his knife in his hand; and as it passed he slashed it open. A small manikin emerged, surrounded in a halo of red light. It was Captain Edwardes, in a pair of silk Chinese trousers, from which flashed dazzling rays of gold light. He strutted up and down, growing bigger all the time.
In the deep silence something was singing: and Ao Ling turned his head just in time to see a black-bearded porpoise, dangling on a fishing-line, singing like mad. Then the line tautened, whizzing it up into the sky.
Ao Ling looked up, and saw above him an immense figure riding on a black unicorn: a figure with a green face and fluffy crimson hair, and a cyclops-eye from which flashed a pure white beam. He held in his hand a fishing-rod: and on the line the father-porpoise still dangled, still singing.
Round them the sea roared and heaved: but out of it rose a single tree. Its leaves were of white jade. Its trunk was about as thick round as a man could clasp; and up the middle ran a transparent tube of pale yellow. The foliage was dense, and tinkled when a leaf fell. But now it was lightning-riven: and caught in the cleft was a blue-faced bat-winged duke, hollering in agony with his enormous monkey-mouth and hammering incessantly on the drums which were hung about him.
Captain Edwardes by now had grown a beard like the porpoise’s. But he drew a dart from his belt and flung it at the figure on the unicorn. It snatched the yelling demon from the tree, and yelling also vanished in the clouds.
A great mouth rose out of the water, as wide and as deep as a well, against which the waves could be heard splashing. Captain Edwardes drew another dart from his waist and flung it at the mouth: and with a blasty breath that drove the ship sideways through the water it too vanished.
But the sea, where was the sea? No longer any water, only the seething of innumerable dragons. How welcome they were! Each had a fifth foot growing from his navel, and no black beards under their long snouts. They flailed with their shaggy legs and lashed their hairy tails.
Then one dragon, in a fine armour of golden-glowing scales, flung itself onto the ship, and crawled up the sloping deck. As it moved the deck was depressed with its weight, like a tent-roof when a cat walks upon it. Its forehead projected over its blazing eyes: its ears were small and thick: its tongue was long, and its teeth were sharp.
But Captain Edwardes drew from his trousers thousands of balls of fire, which flew from his hands and struck it, so that it lay cowering down. Then the Captain straddled over it, cruelly tearing off its scales one by one, so that it cried in agony, shrinking all the time smaller and smaller, and at last weeping with the hopeless, shuddering sobs of a despairing child.
The voice was his own infantile voice, weeping to him out of the far years of the past.
They were in the open sea, now, heading for the Gulf of Honduras; more than a hundred miles from any land. Ahead lay the small black silhouette of the “Patricia,” her smoke seen only as a black blank in the myriad of stars, three vertical lights at her mast-head. Between, the tow-rope dipped occasionally in the water; then lifted, dripping trickling phosphorescent drops along its whole length.
Next came the jagged bows of the “Archimedes,” still tip-tilted over to one side. Right up in the peak the look-out stood, occasionally shifting his position from side to side. Presently he came aft a little, and rang six bells: the only bells ever tolled over the grave of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, once a chief engineer.
FINIS