SINCE THERE COULD be no question whatever of hunting any more that day, Svend and I both came down from the crow’s-nest without waiting for Thor Larsen’s permission. I watched the whole process of plugging, inflating and lashing the carcass from close by, Eric white of face but otherwise apparently recovered, photographing it all enthusiastically.
It made me happy to see him so active and alert, and I was taken aback therefore at what suddenly followed.
I had gone up to him, put my arm affectionately round his shoulder saying, “So glad you’re up and about again.” But as I touched his shoulder, I felt his whole body shrink from me. It is extraordinary how eloquent the movements of the human body can be. He was, the movement warned me, though I was not ready yet to read it for myself, profoundly estranged from me. However, there was no chance for self-examination just then, for as, dismayed, I let my arm drop from his shoulder, and before he could reply, I was hastily slapped on the shoulder and the Captain’s loud voice burst in on us.
“Good, my young Boher, very, very good!” He said it loud enough for the whole ship to hear. Then turning to my friend, he remarked: “This boy has best eyes and reflexes, I, Thor Larsen, have ever seen!”
“I know!” Eric remarked with a stab of sarcasm that really hurt. “He’s a regular Pieter Blinkoog. Didn’t you know?”
At that he turned his back on the Captain with a rudeness I had never seen or suspected in him, and which I knew was only possible because he was the ship-owner’s son.
I thought Larsen would explode in the rage that flashed through his quick nature.
“Pieter Blink-oog, sir,” I told him quickly to forestall an explosion, “is the Afrikaans for Peter Bright-Eye. It’s our name up-country for a bird with particularly big, shining and observant eyes.”
That mollified, indeed pleased him. He patted me on the shoulder and laughingly announced for all to hear: “Peter Bright-Eye, so you are, my young Boher, and Peter Bright-Eye of my ship you shall be, not?”
There was no help for it. From that moment it became the only name I was to have in the Kurt Hansen, except that the crew, soon tiring of the full title, contracted it to Peter and finally just to Pete.
Thor Larsen, however, as in everything else, had his own way in the matter. He normally called me Peter but when he was particularly happy he addressed me as Eyes, or at times even as my Eyes.
While all this went on I could not help noticing the change that had come over the Captain’s expression since I had last seen him. His face was now resolved and strangely innocent, as if in killing the two whales he had done a penance laid upon him by the gods themselves and had achieved absolution with Heaven as well as his own conscience. Indeed the look on the Captain’s face was so naked and so brilliant that I was embarrassed by it. So I excused myself to go after Eric who was back astern, hopefully trying to get a photograph in the colourful twilight of our last kill now alongside, still and cold as yellow corrugated marble.
I spoke to him casually, but, without even turning to look at me, he just said: “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Even so I was not prepared to leave him without making a stand for the friendship that I now felt was at stake, though for what reason I could not understand.
I waited for him on deck until he had finished. Then realising I had not eaten or drunk anything since eleven in the morning and feeling suddenly tired as well as very hungry, I went up to him and said: “What about slipping down below and getting Leif to give us some tea and some of that wonderful Norwegian cake I know he’s been baking?”
He stared hardly at me.
“Leif? The cook? Is he already Leif to you?” he remarked with an edge to his voice I had never experienced before: “I must say, you’ve lost no time making yourself at home in this ship.”
He meant to hurt me and succeeded. But suddenly perhaps my mention of food, or just the clumsy irregular way the Kurt Hansen was now moving with two unequal weights of whale lashed to its sides, brought the feeling of sickness back to him. He groaned, stumbled towards the hatch where I had sat with ’Mlangeni in the morning, and sank down on deck to lean against it.
And there he remained all night. Leif, I and even the Captain did all we could to persuade him to come below. He just claimed, with some justification, that the fresh air was best for him and more and more irritably refused to move. All we could do was to make him as comfortable there as possible, Leif bringing up a mass of blankets and pillows for the purpose.
Early in the night a cold breeze came down from the great mountains on land to meet us out over a sea warmed by a cloudless day. The wind was sharp and thin and smelt to me of snow and ice. I made a bed for myself next to Eric in case he should need help. It was as well I did so, for whenever he got up to be sick he would crawl back feebly to his blankets, each time more exhausted. If I hadn’t been there to cover him over, I don’t believe he’d have been capable of doing it for himself.
Truly tired as I now was, I lay beside him for long, wide awake, trying to explain to myself the change in him. I told myself that it was because he was sick. I thought also it could be because he was envious that I had proved myself in a sense to be the hero of the day in the ship while he himself had just been sick below. I could make my peace with all that. After all, perhaps he had brought me to his home with a natural longing also to impress me? But no matter how many questions I asked myself, I began to fear that the day’s events had made him believe that, basically, we could never really agree, and had been held together only by the magnetism of a school hundreds of miles away in the interior. Between this fear and the recurring hope that perhaps it was just because he was sick, I found some uneasy rest beside him.
After his last, most prolonged and violent retching I had to help him back on his hands and knees towards his blankets. Sheer weakness sent him into a deep sleep then. He was still asleep when in an unusually cold dawn we neared -Port Natal, the white lighthouse high on the bluff in the first light like a candle in the sky while it was still dark below on the sea.
As the day spread its wings I noticed my friend’s face was no longer white but flushed. I put a hand on his forehead and was startled to find it hot and dry.
I had seen enough of fever in our malarial bushveld to know he was running a very high temperature. I went to fetch Leif who was already in his galley. He confirmed my fears and, since I was up, we piled my blankets too over my friend.
“Just let him be,” Leif told me, “until he wakes. Then try and persuade him to have something hot to drink. I am afraid he’s caught a very bad chill.”
From that moment on I was so worried that I could not see or think of anything except my sick friend. I had no clear idea how we entered the harbour, an event to which I had looked forward keenly, nor how we dropped the whales at the slipway under the bluff from where they would be hauled for cutting up and rendering in the Company’s factory.
For once I was indifferent even to the Captain’s mood. He would have liked to return to the whaling grounds immediately from the slipway now that his hunter’s instincts were well in command of his person. But Leif, more and more worried by my friend’s condition, persuaded him it was his duty to put the owner’s son ashore as soon as possible.
As a result, I think he would have been insufferable had it not been for two things. Neither in the approaches to the slipway nor in the harbour itself was there a sign of any other unit of the whaling fleet. The Kurt Hansen clearly had been the first to succeed that week, and the taste of such success was like schnapps to our Captain’s system. He laughed with triumph at the sight of both approaches and harbour empty of whaler. Besides, docking now would give him an unexpected excuse to celebrate his success with gin.
Leif and I had agreed that as soon as we docked I would go ashore to telephone to Eric’s father. Permanently estranged from his wife who was often abroad, I knew that there would be now another dimension of feeling added to the normal one between father and son, and that he would take badly any news of his son’s illness. I feared the moment also for another reason. I remembered the subtle contraction in his attitude to me ever since Larsen’s invitation to take his son and me whaling.
Two hours later, as I stood disconsolate on the Kurt Hansen’s bridge watching her manoeuvring expertly towards her berth alongside the main quay, I saw Mr. Watson’s car appear round a corner of the great Royal Mail shed. My pulse quickened. The moment was upon me. My relief when only the chauffeur appeared and saluted smartly was so great that it made me realise how deep in fact was my fear of meeting my host. Still, the mere fact that the car was there at all did not seem a good sign.
I was to find later that Eric’s father had ordered both the staff at the slipway and the harbour signal station to keep a special look-out for the Kurt Hansen and report all her movements to him. When the signal station informed him that the Kurt Hansen was making for the whaling fleet’s berth in the main harbour instead of turning immediately about to resume her hunt in the whaling grounds as all whalers normally did from Mondays to Saturdays, he at first concluded, knowing how poor a sailor his son was, that two nights and a full day whaling had been enough for us, and that Larsen had departed from the rule, to put the two of us ashore. But almost at once all the indefinable mistrust he had of the Kurt Hansen’s captain destroyed so reasonable and obvious a conclusion.
There and then, with the capacity for instant action on which he prided himself, he had reached for his telephone and ordered his car to meet the ship with a message for his son to get in touch with him at once.
But Eric was by then quite incapable of receiving his father’s message, for he was half-delirious with fever. Leif and I had to carry him ashore, wrapped in blankets, and prop him up on pillows in the broad back seat of the huge car. I should perhaps then have taken my host’s message literally and gone at once to telephone to him but it seemed to me more important to get my friend home to bed as fast as possible.
As soon as we had settled him in the car, I begged Leif to fetch our gear while I went to thank and say goodbye to the Captain. I had no doubt in my own mind that the goodbye would be final. I was certain that this was the end of what we had planned as at least a week’s whaling. Full of disappointment, sad at parting with the Kurt Hansen’s crew and Captain, I went back into the small saloon.
Thor Larsen was sitting at the head of the small triangular table. His latest game book was wide open in front of him; a great tantalus of red polished mahogany, holding three crystal ship’s flasks of spirits which I had not seen before, stood sparkling on the centre of the table, and between it and the Captain a tumblerful of schnapps. So still was it in the saloon that I could hear the scraping of the pen as he laboriously entered with great deliberation the time, place and other details of his two latest catches, all except their length and tonnage which were to be reported to him as usual at the weekend by the factory superintendent.
So absorbed was he in his writing—I was to find he was almost entirely self-taught—that he did not hear me enter.
I called out: “Excuse me please, Captain, sir?”
He looked up as if prepared to be annoyed, saw me and at once laid down his pen carefully so that the broad relief nib protruded over the edge and the holder was securely in the fold right in the middle of his leather-bound book.
Smiling at me as he had done that day at tennis barely a week ago, but already almost a prehistoric moment to me, he called me by my new name for the first time as he exclaimed, “Ah! It is you, my Eyes.”
Before I could say anything those intense grey eyes, brimful of satisfaction, looked down at his manual and he added: “That first whale, Eyes, you know, one, biggest I ever see. Everyone at slipway not believing their eyes. I think it is record and earn ship one hellish big bonus, thanks to you.”
I was to learn that the big female was indeed a record for our station at the time: ninety-two feet six inches long and one hundred and forty-three tons in weight.
I flushed and began to thank him but he waved for silence with his broad harpooner’s hand.
“No! I, Thor Larsen, thank you. Now what you say? We put your sick friend ashore, about we turn quick and I take you place I know for to spot bigger whale!”
“That’s just what I’ve come about, sir,” I answered, “I fear this is the end for me.”
I went on to explain how ill Leif and I feared Eric was, told him of his father’s message and of my fears about the future, and my own regret at saying goodbye to the Kurt Hansen.
That made him rise abruptly out of his chair, pick up his tumbler of gin and swallow it without pausing for breath. As he raised it, I saw on the plush cloth behind it, what was apparently a paper-weight. It was a strange ivory-like tooth of sorts, just over two inches high with a band of gold round the base.
My eyes focused on it and remained fixed while he put his hand reassuringly on my shoulder and delivered himself of a statement which was perhaps the most elaborate effort he had made to enter into another human being’s feelings for some time.
“Look you, my Eyes,” he said. “Not to worry about your friend. He too rich to die. He too rich to be left sick for long. He be better soon and then you come back to Kurt Hansen. If not, I come fetch you myself.” He laughed and his grip on my shoulder tightened as he went on to finish what was his idea of a comforting joke. “Not to forget you already in debt! You owe me two big elephants for two whales already. I, Thor Larsen, always must be paid!”
In a measure his rough exhortation did cheer me up and I held out my hand, but my eyes were still looking past him at that strange gold-bound tooth on the plush cloth of his saloon table.
“Ah!” he remarked. “You not my Eyes for nothing. You do well to look and look at that! Do you know what is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s tooth of sperm whale!” he declared, a new excitement immediately showing in his tone. “Here!” He stretched out his long arm, snatched up the tooth and put it in my hand. “Here, you feel that for some tooth, not?”
It must have weighed a good two and a half pounds, was strangely warm as ifit were not dead but still alive. It felt oddly electric between my fingers and made my touch tense with premonition.
I gave it back to him quickly, saying almost with a gasp: “What an amazing thing!”
“You speak true, my Eyes,” he replied not displeased with my answer. “You see, Eyes, the sperm may be not biggest of whales. But he is king of all whales. You not know hunting until you hunted sperm, and I know you will come back to spot sperm whales for me, many, many sperm. So not to worry, Eyes!” He filled his tumbler again with schnapps, raised it so that it gleamed bright in the dim light and, before drinking it down, said: “To our first sperm, Eyes!”
I said goodbye to him then, went up the steep ladder, out across the empty deck and down the gangway to the car, marvelling how the Captain, when one considered the size of his thirst, could be kept from drinking just by hunting whales.
Leif was standing beside the car waiting for me. I think he knew the many conflicting and forbidding things I was feeling, for as he said goodbye he added: “Take care of yourself, Peter, and come to see us again. Don’t worry about your friend. He’ll be all right. Only hurry to get him into a warm bed.”
And hurry we did. Barely half an hour later I had him tucked into his bed at home. He rarely opened his eyes, but when he did so they were hot and red with fever.
I went to the telephone to ring up his father, but when his clipped, matter-of-fact voice answered my call I was not helped by his sharp response.
“Oh, it’s you,” was his unpromising acknowledgement. “Why isn’t my son calling me?”
I began to explain when a loud “Christ!” broke from him and put an end to my explanation.
“Shall I call a doctor, sir, and if so . . .” I began again.
He interrupted, “I can do that for myself. I shall be at home within a quarter of an hour.” He paused. “I look to you and Jack to see that my son is kept in bed as warm as possible until I and the doctor arrive.”
He was there within quarter of an hour accompanied by an old and reputable doctor who brought an air of well-being with him into that large and, for me, forbidding house. Moreover, he endeared himself to me by patting me on the shoulder and saying in a kind tone, “We’ll have your friend well and about in a jiffy, don’t you fret.”
His presence and manner too had a soothing effect on Mr. Watson’s mood, for he looked over his shoulder and said: “I don’t expect you’ve had any elevenses yet. Tell Jack to give you some.”
He was in an even better mood after the doctor’s examination of his son for, as I heard the old physician repeat on the doorstep, the diagnosis was most favourable. “Remember it’s only a chill, my dear fellow. The young run temperatures, high temperatures, quickly for the least of infections. Now if it were you or me . . .” He did not finish the sentence but only laughed and laughing got into his car.
But when he was recalled at midnight even he had an inkling of how wrong he’d been. My friend’s temperature then was close on 105° and he was delirious, tossing and shouting out words many of which were the coarsest of swear words, together with a jumble of feverish sentences and obscenities, which deeply shocked his father as much as they surprised me.
An early morning visit from the old physician produced a confession that he feared there might be complications and that Eric must go to his nursing home as soon as possible. By the evening the news from the nursing home was that two specialists had confirmed that he had double pneumonia.
It was in the days when the dread of pneumonia haunted the Southern African scene of my youth. The present-day drugs had not been discovered. And by now I myself was so afraid that Eric would die that I not only prayed for him on going to bed at night and getting up in the morning but at all sorts of odd moments in the day. I had by then come to accept that, however unwittingly, I had been the cause of it all, for had it not been for me we would never have gone whaling. Had it not been for the fact that it seemed a duty to my old friendship not to go away before I knew what was going to happen to Eric, I believe I would have taken the first train home.
By Saturday morning, however, the doctors were convinced that the climax in my friend’s illness had been reached in the night. If he came through the next twenty-four hours, they predicted, he would begin to mend.
Meanwhile, I had never spent a more miserable time. My host, despite the fact that he was on the whole a fair man, continued to hold me responsible for the plight of his son. Serious for him too was the revelation of his son’s secret mind which had come out of his delirium, which clearly must be the fault of wrong companionship, and for that, although he never actually said so, I sensed that he blamed our school and above all me.
Like all people in Port Natal in those days he had a poor opinion of the Boers of the interior, but he had thought it politic to cultivate a more tolerant attitude towards my people in order to counteract the anti-British and increasingly nationalistic spirit which was flaring up in our midst. But none of this was proof against prejudices conditioned by a history of antagonism of such long-standing between the races, particularly as he was now convinced also that I was a carrier of bad luck. For all this formidable compound of emotions, I was the recipient.
Apart from one dinner together, I had been left to myself in the house in a state of terrible conflict. Mr. Watson rose early, breakfasted on the verandah in front of his room in the morning sun and vanished from the house before I could meet him. He lunched and dined at his club, and I had to sit up late at night in order to waylay him to find out how his son was doing. When I once asked if I could visit Eric in the nursing home, I was told impatiently that he was much too ill for that.
My conflict and anxiety for my friend, my increasing remorse as my host’s attitude daily heightened my own frantic feelings of guilt, were so acute that I had hardly ever thought even of our two great nights and one luminous day in the Kurt Hansen. When I did so, it was all I could do not to burst into tears.
My one source of comfort in those days was the butler, Jack, or Nkomi-dhl’ilale as I called him. No one could have been more attentive, kinder and understanding. I followed him about the house like his shadow. In talking to him in his native tongue, listening to his stories and observing his natural reactions to all that went on around him, I found not only comfort but some honour again in my own natural self.
It was during one of these moments that I discovered ’Mlangeni was his “brother”, as he put it. That meant not “brother” in our narrow European sense but, according to Zulu and Sindakwena usage, a blood member of the same clan. It was he who had helped ’Mlangeni to come to Port Natal and found him work in a whaler. But more of that later. What is of immediate concern was that even my association with Jack put me more in the wrong with my host.
On the afternoon of this Saturday when his son’s illness had reached its climax, I had accompanied the butler during his rest hour to the servants’ quarters, their kayas, at the bottom of the garden. These consisted of a single row of small rooms built in red brick with low walls and a flat roof of galvanised iron sheets. In summer the roof made the rooms as hot as a furnace. That was a matter of indifference to the employer because, like the rest of the European citizens of Port Natal, he assumed that it could never be hot enough for Africans. The fact that the same kind of roof made these small rooms as cold as an ice-box on a winter night was overlooked.
Most of the houses that I knew in Port Natal took care to hide their servants’ kayas by placing them at the bottom of their gardens and screening them from civilised eyes with thick hedges of bougainvillea often supported, as in my host’s large property, by spathodia, jacaranda, flamboyant frangipani and other sub-tropical growths. I am certain now that this was an unconscious defence to prevent odious comparisons between what they allowed themselves in their ample houses and the mean austerity exacted from their servants on the principle that what the eye did not see the heart could not grieve over. But what a different scene Africa would present today had we but had the merest suspicion in those young, young days that heart and mind had eyes of their own which no screen, however thick, could hide.
Yet this custom had its compensations, for it re-created at the bottom of each garden a tiny natural Africa with a nearness to the earth so dear to the native heart of men. Anyway I found it so on this Saturday afternoon and felt much more at home there than in the great house invisible beyond the hedges and great trees above us.
Full of a sense of rare belonging, I was sitting beside the butler in the sun by the door to his room, listening to the conversation between him and half a dozen other servants, the words humming between them as lively and natural as bees in summer, when suddenly a voice rang out: “Jack!”
The single shout was so charged with astonishment and accusation that we all jumped up like thieves caught in their act.
It came, of course, from my host, standing there on the fringe of bougainvillea, his round face still shaking with the force of his call. His servants were so overwhelmed that, instead of acknowledging his presence by the usual “Master”, they instinctively called out their own “Nkosi!” (Chief).
He ignored them for the moment. All his emotion seemed focused on me and the fact that he had found me sitting there happily among his servants.
“And pray,” he said, addressing me pompously. “What is the meaning of your presence here? My son, whom one thought your friend, is seriously ill. One could have assumed that you would have liked to stay near the telephone. But instead—” With an imperious gesture he ordered me back to the house.
I had, he told me a few minutes later, been nothing but a source of trouble since my arrival. He had borne it all because he knew it was unintentional, but what I had done this Saturday afternoon was more than he could ignore. I clearly had been a bad influence on his son and now I had started on his servants, inducing in them a contempt for white authority by gross familiarity.
On top of the anxiety and loneliness I had been suffering all the week, his words made me feel almost uncontrollably guilty, and I was about to break into tears from a mixture of helplessness and unfamiliar emotions of the most violent kind.
Then he made a remark that saved me. “The sooner,” he said, “you get back to your backveld and your own uncivilised people, the better.”
It is extraordinary how one can have courage on behalf of one’s own people and country that one cannot summon in one’s own cause. Anger so flamed in me that it dried my eyes at once.
“You leave my people out of it,” I blurted out. “We may be poor but we’d never have treated a guest as you’ve treated me. I didn’t ask to come and I shall be glad to leave at once.”
I turned about and made for the stairs leading to my room but he called me back with that unfair authority that no young boy can disobey.
“There is no need,” he reproved me, “for such a display of temper. As you say, you were invited here by my son and I’m responsible for you while you are under my roof. You’ll stay here until I have made proper arrangements for your departure. Meanwhile, you leave the servants alone, understand?”
“No, I don’t understand and I shan’t stay!” I retorted and dashed up to my room to pack my bag. But at once I knew it would be impossible for me to leave. The first train to my home, two days and two nights journey away, did not leave until noon on Sunday. What was I to do until then? Where was I to go for the night, for instance? I had no friends and only a few shillings in pocket money, barely enough to buy me the simplest of food on the long journey home.
Suddenly I thought of the Kurt Hansen. It was Saturday and she was due in, like all the rest of the fleet, that evening for the weekend. Why should I not go down to the harbour and ask Thor Larsen to let me spend my last night in Port Natal in his ship? I somehow knew that I could not only take his consent for granted but count on a warm welcome as well.
The thought made me step out on the verandah in front of my room. Port Natal below me lay clear, full to the brim with light and lovely as ever. My eyes found the whalers’ berth without difficulty and I counted twenty-three of them already secured alongside. That left only one missing and to my delight a glance at the silver, blue and gold roadstead revealed it making for the harbour mouth at the speed with which only the Kurt Hansen was capable. That decided me. I hurriedly finished my packing. It took only a moment or two. Then I seized my bag and went down the stairs as quietly and as fast as I could, and slipped out of the front door without anyone seeing me. In a second I was round the bend of the circular drive, well hidden from the house by the beds of gardenias, hibiscus and magnolias that grew at its centre.
Out on the main street I was lucky enough to pick up a tramcar for the harbour almost at once. I boarded it and looked over my shoulder as if I still feared pursuit, but the street between me and the entrance to the great house was empty. When at last I found a seat right in front of the empty top deck of the tram, I was shaking so much with tension that I dropped the change the conductor gave me when I paid my fare, and had to pick it up, scarlet in the face at my nervousness.
The streets were almost empty and the tram passed stop after stop without halt, gathering speed until it seemed to be galloping like a runaway horse. It couldn’t have gone fast enough for me, and it was with great relief that I left it at the main entrance to the docks and, suitcase in hand, made straight for the whaler’s berth.
The Kurt Hansen was just coming alongside. Both Thor Larsen and Gorgeous were plainly visible to me on the bridge, intent as usual on their work. Larsen, I am certain, saw me and recognised me standing there on the quay but made no sign. That didn’t worry me, so much was it in his character to concentrate his whole self on whatever he happened to be doing.
But on deck it was a different story. Almost the whole of the ship’s crew, excited by their weekly reprieve from duty, was there to watch the manoeuvre. Among them I recognised both Leif and ’Mlangeni, side by side. Almost as soon as they saw me ’Mlangeni raised his hand in a royal salute high above his head and grinned. Leif waved too, but in manner both questioning and welcoming. No sooner was the vessel secured alongside than he and ’Mlangeni made their way across the two ships between the Kurt Hansen and the quay.
’Mlangeni just took my bag from me and turned back to the ship.
Leif took me by the arm and said: “Something’s happened, Peter? Does this mean your friend’s all right again?”
Before I could answer I heard the bells in the Kurt Hansen’s engine room ring out their final dismissal of the engineer.
Hard on that came a shout from Thor Larsen that could be heard almost all over the harbour. “Eyes!”
Imperious as this summons was, there was no mistaking its rough welcome and the warmth.
Overwrought, I managed to give Leif an idea of why I was there before we climbed on board the Kurt Hansen. He said nothing except a grave “I see, Peter.” But once on deck, seeing Thor Larsen was still occupied on the bridge, he took my bag from ’Mlangeni and remarked: “Come on. I’ll come down below with you.”
On our way to the saloon entrance I was heartened by the greetings I got from the crew on deck. I had the impression that they were all really rather pleased to see me again.
Once in the saloon, Leif, instead of leaving me there alone as he had done the first time I met him, sat down at the table with me. “I’ll stay with you,” he told me, “until the Captain’s been.”
He said it with a glint of resolution in his tired eyes of which I would not have thought him capable. I was soon to know why.
Meanwhile he changed the subject. “You know, Peter, we too have had a miserable week since you left us,” he told me. “We have not caught a single whale since we put you ashore. The Captain’s been in the blackest of moods and there is not a man in the ship who is not relieved to be free of him for a day or so. The only moment he came to life was when he saw you on the quay . . .” He paused, put his hand on my shoulder and remarked, “And not the Captain alone. Everyone in the ship is convinced you brought us good luck.”
At that moment Larsen’s quick, determined steps rang out on the companion-way and he walked into the saloon, throwing off his thick serge ocean-going jacket as he did so.
“Ah, there you are, Eyes,” he rasped out with great satisfaction. “So you could not wait to come back to spot whales for me! Good! Good!”
As he spoke he made for the great mahogany tantalus where he kept his spirits. But Leif stopped him and began speaking to him urgently in Norwegian.
At first I thought Larsen, interrupted in the process of reaching for a drink, would order Leif back to his galley. I think this might well have happened between Captain and cook in any other ship except a Norwegian one. But there was active in the Kurt Hansen between its unusually autocratic Captain and crew an underlying sense of being members of the same family so characteristic of the units of the whaling fleet. It was this which, in moments of stress, could eliminate privileges of rank.
As Leif spoke, at greater length than I had ever heard him, the Captain’s impatience left him.
When Leif had finished, he just said reluctantly in English: “May be you damn well right.”
Then he turned to look with fierce intentness at me.
“You would like to stay in Kurt Hansen, Eyes? Yes, not?” he asked.
“Yes, please sir,” I replied.
“You would like to come spotting whales again? Not?”
“Yes, sir!”
My relief at the obvious trend of his questions was nearly too much for me. So too was another thought that brought me near to tears and made me add: “If only my friend does not die . . .”
He snarled at that, picked up his ocean-going jacket again, put it on awkwardly and said aloud, “I go to see about all that and every damn thing else.”
As he disappeared up the companion-way Leif said, “I have persuaded him to telephone to Mr. Watson before he starts looking for you; and before our Captain starts celebrating as he will. Don’t worry any more now. You’ll be all right and I promise you, we’ll all be glad to have you with us.”
Reassured as I was by all this, the gravity with which Leif had treated the matter, the way he had stiffened his formidable Captain and forced a line of action which would not have occurred to Larsen on his own, made me realise what a serious thing I had done. It made me think for the first time, too, of its possible consequences for the Captain.
“Oh, Leif,” I exclaimed. “I do hope I haven’t put the Captain in a jam? Won’t he get into trouble with the owners now if he has someone like myself on board of whom their chief representative disapproves?”
Leif smiled, shook his head gently, and told me not to worry. Captains had great powers in their own ship, and were extremely jealous of interference from the outside. Unless they did something which gravely impaired the efficiency of their command, the owners would not dream of interfering. Besides, having whatever guests they liked in their ships was one of the captain’s special privileges. There was not a captain in the fleet who would not feel affronted and threatened if one of their members was dictated to on that point. Besides, he added, Captain Larsen was far too efficient, important and industrious a captain for any sensible owner to want to offend him.
He had hardly finished reassuring me when Thor Larsen reappeared. This time, the moment he entered, Leif excused himself and left—an action which obviously pleased the Captain.
“There, Eyes!” Thor Larsen said with a rough note of triumph in his voice, throwing his jacket down and proceeding at once to haul up his tantalus of spirits on to the table. He unlocked it to get at his decanter of schnapps and poured out a tumblerful of it. “There! What did I tell you!”
He paused to swallow the liquid and fill the glass again, not noticing the anxiety with which I was waiting for him to complete his sentence.
My patience was nearly at an end when at last he concluded, “I told you your friend too rich to die. His father just told me on the telephone he much better this evening. All doctors now certain. So not to worry, Eyes.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I exclaimed. Then, as I saw him about to continue his drinking, I asked: “And what about me, sir? What did he say about me?”
The Captain made a disdainful gesture with his hand, as if that had all along been a foregone conclusion.
“Of course, you to stay.” He paused in a way which suggested this conclusion between him and the owner had not been reached without argument.
“You stay,” he repeated fiercely. “But tomorrow afternoon, Eyes, you go back with me to say goodbye properly, understand, not?”
He glared at me as if he thought I might refuse. I suspect too that he would have liked to refuse on my behalf, had he not possessed for all his scorn of tact a certain deep-sea cunning.
However, much as I disliked the thought, I was too grateful and relieved to think of refusing. I just nodded, which made him grin and say, “You now to go to my cabin and unpack quick. Then come, for us to talk about elephants, not!”
So, the following evening, I accompanied Thor Larsen to the big house on the hill above the harbour. There was no tennis that afternoon, but the news from the hospital was so good that there were as many people assembled for tea and drinks on the lawn as on a normal Sunday. Mr. Watson greeted me smoothly, as if there had never been any quarrel between us, but it was most noticeable how quickly he separated me from Thor Larsen.
Once Larsen, amply supplied with gin, was seated in a comfortable Madeira chair, Eric’s father took me over to another group of people. What bad luck on me and his son, he told them, that our holiday should have taken such an unfortunate turn. Fortunately, his son was much better, out of the wood in fact. But it would be a long time before he would be well enough to be up and about. In fact the doctors had all advised him to see that his son had a long and quiet convalescence. Meanwhile the problem had been what to do with me and the rest of my holiday . . .
He could not have sounded more considerate, thoughtful and selfless as he said all this, convincing everyone there of what a really “good sort” he was. Indeed, perhaps he was a better sort than I could admit to my own hurt self just then. But I saw nothing but hypocrisy in his behaviour, and a terrifying example of the grown-up capacity for pretence and calculation in what they think to be their best interests. Yes, he went on smoothly, his great problem had been to prevent my holiday from being the disaster that his son’s had been. And he had hit on an almost ideal solution. At this he put a warm arm round my shoulder and, not waiting for my answer, hastened to say that I had discovered such a liking for the whaling to which his son had introduced me, with such serious consequences to himself, that he had arranged for me to spend the rest of my vacation in one of their whalers. Hadn’t that been a good idea?
Uncertain how much of this had been pretence, I ventured when saying “Goodbye” to ask if I could see Eric again before he left?
“I’m afraid that by the time you get back to Port again,” he answered very coldly, “we shall be on our way to the Cape to join the mail steamer. But, of course, I’ll explain it all to him.”
It was the last time I was ever to try to see my friend. Indeed, we have not met since. But I was to see his father again, little as I wanted to. That afternoon, as I watched him switch from his cold dismissal of me to a great display of warmth in saying goodbye to his other guests, it all looked too smooth to be real. And I have always felt ashamed of the fact that, so intimidated was I by what had happened and was happening around me that I dared not openly say “goodbye” to Jack as he held the door for the departing guests. I just followed Thor Larsen, spluttering with good spirits, out into the crystal winter’s night and so on to the harbour to begin my first season as a spotter in the Kurt Hansen.