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-CHAPTER 5
'Oh yes. I attended the inquiry,' he would say, 'and
to this day I haven't left off wondering why I went.
I am willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede
to me that each of us has a familiar devil as well.
I want you to own up, because I don't like to feel exceptional in any way, and I know
I have him--the devil, I mean. I haven't seen him, of course, but I go
upon circumstantial evidence.
He is there right enough, and, being malicious, he lets me in for that kind of
thing. What kind of thing, you ask?
Why, the inquiry thing, the yellow-dog thing--you wouldn't think a mangy, native
tyke would be allowed to trip up people in the verandah of a magistrate's court, would
you?--the kind of thing that by devious,
unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with
hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the
sight of me for their infernal confidences;
as though, forsooth, I had no confidences to make to myself, as though--God help me!-
-I didn't have enough confidential information about myself to harrow my own
soul till the end of my appointed time.
And what I have done to be thus favoured I want to know.
I declare I am as full of my own concerns as the next man, and I have as much memory
as the average pilgrim in this valley, so you see I am not particularly fit to be a
receptacle of confessions.
Then why? Can't tell--unless it be to make time pass
away after dinner.
Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these
men here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous occupation.
They wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves, "Hang exertion.
Let that Marlow talk." 'Talk?
So be it.
And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above
the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness
and starlight that would make the best of
us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights,
watching every precious minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage
yet to go out decently in the end--but not
so sure of it after all--and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch
elbows with right and left.
Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-
dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of
strife to be forgotten before the end is
told--before the end is told--even if there happens to be any end to it.
'My eyes met his for the first time at that inquiry.
You must know that everybody connected in any way with the sea was there, because the
affair had been notorious for days, ever since that mysterious cable message came
from Aden to start us all cackling.
I say mysterious, because it was so in a sense though it contained a naked fact,
about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be.
The whole waterside talked of nothing else.
First thing in the morning as I was dressing in my state-room, I would hear
through the bulkhead my Parsee Dubash jabbering about the Patna with the steward,
while he drank a cup of tea, by favour, in the pantry.
No sooner on shore I would meet some acquaintance, and the first remark would
be, "Did you ever hear of anything to beat this?" and according to his kind the man
would smile cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two.
Complete strangers would accost each other familiarly, just for the sake of easing
their minds on the subject: every confounded loafer in the town came in for a
harvest of drinks over this affair: you
heard of it in the harbour office, at every ship-broker's, at your agent's, from
whites, from natives, from half-castes, from the very boatmen squatting half naked
on the stone steps as you went up--by Jove!
There was some indignation, not a few jokes, and no end of discussions as to what
had become of them, you know.
This went on for a couple of weeks or more, and the opinion that whatever was
mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic as well, began to prevail, when
one fine morning, as I was standing in the
shade by the steps of the harbour office, I perceived four men walking towards me
along the quay.
I wondered for a while where that *** lot had sprung from, and suddenly, I may say,
I shouted to myself, "Here they are!"
'There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and one much larger
of girth than any living man has a right to be, just landed with a good breakfast
inside of them from an outward-bound Dale
Line steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise.
There could be no mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna at the first
glance: the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt clear round that good
old earth of ours.
Moreover, nine months or so before, I had come across him in Samarang.
His steamer was loading in the Roads, and he was abusing the tyrannical institutions
of the German empire, and soaking himself in beer all day long and day after day in
De Jongh's back-shop, till De Jongh, who
charged a guilder for every bottle without as much as the quiver of an eyelid, would
beckon me aside, and, with his little leathery face all puckered up, declare
confidentially, "Business is business, but this man, captain, he make me very sick.
Tfui!" 'I was looking at him from the shade.
He was hurrying on a little in advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his
bulk in a startling way. He made me think of a trained baby elephant
walking on hind-legs.
He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled sleeping-suit, bright green and
deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet,
and somebody's cast-off pith hat, very
dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of
his big head.
You understand a man like that hasn't the ghost of a chance when it comes to
borrowing clothes. Very well.
On he came in hot haste, without a look right or left, passed within three feet of
me, and in the innocence of his heart went on pelting upstairs into the harbour office
to make his deposition, or report, or whatever you like to call it.
'It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to the principal shipping-
master.
Archie Ruthvel had just come in, and, as his story goes, was about to begin his
arduous day by giving a dressing-down to his chief clerk.
Some of you might have known him--an obliging little Portuguese half-caste with
a miserably skinny neck, and always on the hop to get something from the shipmasters
in the way of eatables--a piece of salt
pork, a bag of biscuits, a few potatoes, or what not.
One voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live sheep out of the remnant of my sea-
stock: not that I wanted him to do anything for me--he couldn't, you know--but because
his childlike belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched my heart.
It was so strong as to be almost beautiful. The race--the two races rather--and the
climate ...
However, never mind. I know where I have a friend for life.
'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture--on official morality, I
suppose--when he heard a kind of subdued commotion at his back, and turning his head
he saw, in his own words, something round
and enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred- weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in striped
flannelette, up-ended in the middle of the large floor space in the office.
He declares he was so taken aback that for quite an appreciable time he did not
realise the thing was alive, and sat still wondering for what purpose and by what
means that object had been transported in front of his desk.
The archway from the ante-room was crowded with punkah-pullers, sweepers, police
peons, the coxswain and crew of the harbour steam-launch, all craning their necks and
almost climbing on each other's backs.
Quite a riot.
By that time the fellow had managed to tug and jerk his hat clear of his head, and
advanced with slight bows at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that
for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition wanted.
It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid, and little by little it
dawned upon Archie that this was a development of the Patna case.
He says that as soon as he understood who it was before him he felt quite unwell--
Archie is so sympathetic and easily upset-- but pulled himself together and shouted
"Stop!
I can't listen to you. You must go to the Master Attendant.
I can't possibly listen to you. Captain Elliot is the man you want to see.
This way, this way."
He jumped up, ran round that long counter, pulled, shoved: the other let him,
surprised but obedient at first, and only at the door of the private office some sort
of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like a frightened bullock.
"Look here! what's up? Let go!
Look here!"
Archie flung open the door without knocking.
"The master of the Patna, sir," he shouts. "Go in, captain."
He saw the old man lift his head from some writing so sharp that his nose-nippers fell
off, banged the door to, and fled to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for
his signature: but he says the row that
burst out in there was so awful that he couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to
remember the spelling of his own name. Archie's the most sensitive shipping-master
in the two hemispheres.
He declares he felt as though he had thrown a man to a hungry lion.
No doubt the noise was great.
I heard it down below, and I have every reason to believe it was heard clear across
the Esplanade as far as the band-stand.
Old father Elliot had a great stock of words and could shout--and didn't mind who
he shouted at either. He would have shouted at the Viceroy
himself.
As he used to tell me: "I am as high as I can get; my pension is safe.
I've a few pounds laid by, and if they don't like my notions of duty I would just
as soon go home as not.
I am an old man, and I have always spoken my mind.
All I care for now is to see my girls married before I die."
He was a little crazy on that point.
His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him amazingly, and on
the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their matrimonial prospects the office
would read it in his eye and tremble,
because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast.
However, that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to carry
on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and--ah! ejected him again.
'Thus in a very few moments I saw his monstrous bulk descend in haste and stand
still on the outer steps.
He had stopped close to me for the purpose of profound meditation: his large purple
cheeks quivered. He was biting his thumb, and after a while
noticed me with a sidelong vexed look.
The other three chaps that had landed with him made a little group waiting at some
distance.
There was a sallow-faced, mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long
individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick,
with drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility.
The third was an upstanding, broad- shouldered youth, with his hands in his
pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together
earnestly.
He stared across the empty Esplanade.
A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group,
and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the
critical examination of his toes.
The young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into
the sunshine. This was my first view of Jim.
He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look.
There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the
sun ever shone on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a little more too,
I was as angry as though I had detected him
trying to get something out of me by false pretences.
He had no business to look so sound.
I thought to myself--well, if this sort can go wrong like that...and I felt as though I
could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer mortification, as I once saw the
skipper of an Italian barque do because his
duffer of a mate got into a mess with his anchors when making a flying moor in a
roadstead full of ships.
I asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much at ease--is he silly? is he
callous? He seemed ready to start whistling a tune.
And note, I did not care a rap about the behaviour of the other two.
Their persons somehow fitted the tale that was public property, and was going to be
the subject of an official inquiry.
"That old mad rogue upstairs called me a hound," said the captain of the Patna.
I can't tell whether he recognised me--I rather think he did; but at any rate our
glances met.
He glared--I smiled; hound was the very mildest epithet that had reached me through
the open window. "Did he?"
I said from some strange inability to hold my tongue.
He nodded, bit his thumb again, swore under his breath: then lifting his head and
looking at me with sullen and passionate impudence--"Bah! the Pacific is big, my
friendt.
You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I know where there's plenty room for a man
like me: I am well aguaindt in Apia, in Honolulu, in ..."
He paused reflectively, while without effort I could depict to myself the sort of
people he was "aguaindt" with in those places.
I won't make a secret of it that I had been "aguaindt" with not a few of that sort
myself.
There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any
company.
I've known such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long face over
my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral--moral--what
shall I say?--posture, or from some other
equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing
than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your
table without any real necessity--from
habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate
reasons.
'"You Englishmen are all rogues," went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin
Australian.
I really don't recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was
defiled by being the nest of that precious bird.
"What are you to shout?
Eh? You tell me?
You no better than other people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me."
His thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of pillars; it trembled
from head to foot.
"That's what you English always make--make a tam' fuss--for any little thing, because
I was not born in your tam' country. Take away my certificate.
Take it.
I don't want the certificate. A man like me don't want your verfluchte
certificate. I shpit on it."
He spat.
"I vill an Amerigan citizen begome," he cried, fretting and fuming and shuffling
his feet as if to free his ankles from some invisible and mysterious grasp that would
not let him get away from that spot.
He made himself so warm that the top of his bullet head positively smoked.
Nothing mysterious prevented me from going away: curiosity is the most obvious of
sentiments, and it held me there to see the effect of a full information upon that
young fellow who, hands in pockets, and
turning his back upon the sidewalk, gazed across the grass-plots of the Esplanade at
the yellow portico of the Malabar Hotel with the air of a man about to go for a
walk as soon as his friend is ready.
That's how he looked, and it was odious.
I waited to see him overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through,
squirming like an impaled beetle--and I was half afraid to see it too--if you
understand what I mean.
Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a
more than criminal weakness.
The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense;
it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world
you suspect a deadly snake in every bush--
from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully
scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is
safe.
We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which
we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive--survive the condemnation, survive
the halter, by Jove!
And there are things--they look small enough sometimes too--by which some of us
are totally and completely undone. I watched the youngster there.
I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place;
he was one of us.
He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever
or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the
instinct of courage.
I don't mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of courage.
I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in the face--a
readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose--a power of
resistance, don't you see, ungracious if
you like, but priceless--an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and
inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men--backed
by a faith invulnerable to the strength of
facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas.
Hang ideas!
They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a
little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few
simple notions you must cling to if you
want to live decently and would like to die easy!
'This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so typical of that
good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind
that is not disturbed by the vagaries of
intelligence and the perversions of--of nerves, let us say.
He was the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of
the deck--figuratively and professionally speaking.
I say I would, and I ought to know.
Haven't I turned out youngsters enough in my time, for the service of the Red Rag, to
the craft of the sea, to the craft whose whole secret could be expressed in one
short sentence, and yet must be driven
afresh every day into young heads till it becomes the component part of every waking
thought--till it is present in every dream of their young sleep!
The sea has been good to me, but when I remember all these boys that passed through
my hands, some grown up now and some drowned by this time, but all good stuff
for the sea, I don't think I have done badly by it either.
Were I to go home to-morrow, I bet that before two days passed over my head some
sunburnt young chief mate would overtake me at some dock gateway or other, and a fresh
deep voice speaking above my hat would ask: "Don't you remember me, sir?
Why! little So-and-so. Such and such a ship.
It was my first voyage."
And I would remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back of this
chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the quay, very quiet but too
upset to wave their handkerchiefs at the
ship that glides out gently between the pier-heads; or perhaps some decent middle-
aged father who had come early with his boy to see him off, and stays all the morning,
because he is interested in the windlass
apparently, and stays too long, and has got to scramble ashore at last with no time at
all to say good-bye.
The mud pilot on the poop sings out to me in a drawl, "Hold her with the check line
for a moment, Mister Mate. There's a gentleman wants to get
ashore....Up with you, sir.
Nearly got carried off to Talcahuano, didn't you?
Now's your time; easy does it....All right. Slack away again forward there."
The tugs, smoking like the pit of perdition, get hold and churn the old river
into fury; the gentleman ashore is dusting his knees--the benevolent steward has shied
his umbrella after him.
All very proper.
He has offered his bit of sacrifice to the sea, and now he may go home pretending he
thinks nothing of it; and the little willing victim shall be very sea-sick
before next morning.
By-and-by, when he has learned all the little mysteries and the one great secret
of the craft, he shall be fit to live or die as the sea may decree; and the man who
had taken a hand in this fool game, in
which the sea wins every toss, will be pleased to have his back slapped by a heavy
young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy voice: "Do you remember me, sir?
The little So-and-so."
'I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at least you had gone the
right way to work.
I have been thus slapped, and I have winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have
glowed all day long and gone to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that
hearty thump.
Don't I remember the little So-and-so's! I tell you I ought to know the right kind
of looks.
I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single
glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes-- and, by Jove! it wouldn't have been safe.
There are depths of horror in that thought.
He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some infernal alloy in his
metal. How much?
The least thing--the least drop of something rare and accursed; the least
drop!--but he made you--standing there with his don't-care-hang air--he made you wonder
whether perchance he were nothing more rare than brass.
'I couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for
the honour of the craft.
The other two no-account chaps spotted their captain, and began to move slowly
towards us.
They chatted together as they strolled, and I did not care any more than if they had
not been visible to the naked eye. They grinned at each other--might have been
exchanging jokes, for all I know.
I saw that with one of them it was a case of a broken arm; and as to the long
individual with grey moustaches he was the chief engineer, and in various ways a
pretty notorious personality.
They were nobodies. They approached.
The skipper gazed in an inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen
to an unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious action of an unknown
poison.
He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting, opened his mouth with an
extraordinary, sneering contortion of his puffed face--to speak to them, I suppose--
and then a thought seemed to strike him.
His thick, purplish lips came together without a sound, he went off in a resolute
waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the door-handle with such a blind brutality
of impatience that I expected to see the
whole concern overturned on its side, pony and all.
The driver, shaken out of his meditation over the sole of his foot, displayed at
once all the signs of intense terror, and held with both hands, looking round from
his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his conveyance.
The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the crimson nape of that
lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs, the immense heaving of that dingy,
striped green-and-orange back, the whole
burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's sense of probability
with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of those grotesque and distinct visions
that scare and fascinate one in a fever.
He disappeared.
I half expected the roof to split in two, the little box on wheels to burst open in
the manner of a ripe cotton-pod--but it only sank with a click of flattened
springs, and suddenly one venetian blind rattled down.
His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the small opening; his head hung out, distended
and tossing like a captive balloon, perspiring, furious, spluttering.
He reached for the gharry-wallah with vicious flourishes of a fist as dumpy and
red as a lump of raw meat. He roared at him to be off, to go on.
Where?
Into the Pacific, perhaps. The driver lashed; the pony snorted, reared
once, and darted off at a gallop. Where?
To Apia?
To Honolulu? He had 6000 miles of tropical belt to
disport himself in, and I did not hear the precise address.
A snorting pony snatched him into "Ewigkeit" in the twinkling of an eye, and
I never saw him again; and, what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever had a
glimpse of him after he departed from my
knowledge sitting inside a ramshackle little gharry that fled round the corner in
a white smother of dust.
He departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly enough it looked as
though he had taken that gharry with him, for never again did I come across a sorrel
pony with a slit ear and a lackadaisical Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot.
The Pacific is indeed big; but whether he found a place for a display of his talents
in it or not, the fact remains he had flown into space like a witch on a broomstick.
The little chap with his arm in a sling started to run after the carriage,
bleating, "Captain! I say, Captain!
I sa-a-ay!"--but after a few steps stopped short, hung his head, and walked back
slowly. At the sharp rattle of the wheels the young
fellow spun round where he stood.
He made no other movement, no gesture, no sign, and remained facing in the new
direction after the gharry had swung out of sight.
'All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to
interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Next moment the half-caste clerk, sent by Archie to look a little after the poor
castaways of the Patna, came upon the scene.
He ran out eager and bareheaded, looking right and left, and very full of his
mission.
It was doomed to be a failure as far as the principal person was concerned, but he
approached the others with fussy importance, and, almost immediately, found
himself involved in a violent altercation
with the chap that carried his arm in a sling, and who turned out to be extremely
anxious for a row. He wasn't going to be ordered about--"not
he, b'gosh."
He wouldn't be terrified with a pack of lies by a cocky half-bred little quill-
driver.
He was not going to be bullied by "no object of that sort," if the story were
true "ever so"! He bawled his wish, his desire, his
determination to go to bed.
"If you weren't a God-forsaken Portuguee," I heard him yell, "you would know that the
hospital is the right place for me."
He pushed the fist of his sound arm under the other's nose; a crowd began to collect;
the half-caste, flustered, but doing his best to appear dignified, tried to explain
his intentions.
I went away without waiting to see the end.
'But it so happened that I had a man in the hospital at the time, and going there to
see about him the day before the opening of the Inquiry, I saw in the white men's ward
that little chap tossing on his back, with his arm in splints, and quite light-headed.
To my great surprise the other one, the long individual with drooping white
moustache, had also found his way there.
I remembered I had seen him slinking away during the quarrel, in a half prance, half
shuffle, and trying very hard not to look scared.
He was no stranger to the port, it seems, and in his distress was able to make tracks
straight for Mariani's billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar.
That unspeakable vagabond, Mariani, who had known the man and had ministered to his
vices in one or two other places, kissed the ground, in a manner of speaking, before
him, and shut him up with a supply of
bottles in an upstairs room of his infamous hovel.
It appears he was under some hazy apprehension as to his personal safety, and
wished to be concealed.
However, Mariani told me a long time after (when he came on board one day to dun my
steward for the price of some cigars) that he would have done more for him without
asking any questions, from gratitude for
some unholy favour received very many years ago--as far as I could make out.
He thumped twice his brawny chest, rolled enormous black-and-white eyes glistening
with tears: "Antonio never forget--Antonio never forget!"
What was the precise nature of the immoral obligation I never learned, but be it what
it may, he had every facility given him to remain under lock and key, with a chair, a
table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter
of fallen plaster on the floor, in an irrational state of funk, and keeping up
his *** with such tonics as Mariani dispensed.
This lasted till the evening of the third day, when, after letting out a few horrible
screams, he found himself compelled to seek safety in flight from a legion of
centipedes.
He burst the door open, made one leap for dear life down the crazy little stairway,
landed bodily on Mariani's stomach, picked himself up, and bolted like a rabbit into
the streets.
The police plucked him off a garbage-heap in the early morning.
At first he had a notion they were carrying him off to be hanged, and fought for
liberty like a hero, but when I sat down by his bed he had been very quiet for two
days.
His lean bronzed head, with white moustaches, looked fine and calm on the
pillow, like the head of a war-worn soldier with a child-like soul, had it not been for
a hint of spectral alarm that lurked in the
blank glitter of his glance, resembling a nondescript form of a terror crouching
silently behind a pane of glass.
He was so extremely calm, that I began to indulge in the eccentric hope of hearing
something explanatory of the famous affair from his point of view.
Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which,
after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held
together by a community of inglorious toil
and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct, I can't explain.
You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I
wished to find something.
Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and
redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.
I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible--for the laying of what is the
most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist,
secret and gnawing like a worm, and more
chilling than the certitude of death--the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a
fixed standard of conduct.
It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics
and good little quiet villainies; it's the true shadow of calamity.
Did I believe in a miracle? and why did I desire it so ardently?
Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that
young fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a touch of
personal concern to the thoughts suggested
by the knowledge of his weakness--made it a thing of mystery and terror--like a hint of
a destructive fate ready for us all whose youth--in its day--had resembled his youth?
I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying.
I was, and no mistake, looking for a miracle.
The only thing that at this distance of time strikes me as miraculous is the extent
of my imbecility.
I positively hoped to obtain from that battered and shady invalid some exorcism
against the ghost of doubt.
I must have been pretty desperate too, for, without loss of time, after a few
indifferent and friendly sentences which he answered with languid readiness, just as
any decent sick man would do, I produced
the word Patna wrapped up in a delicate question as in a wisp of floss silk.
I was delicate selfishly; I did not want to startle him; I had no solicitude for him;
I was not furious with him and sorry for him: his experience was of no importance, his
redemption would have had no point for me.
He had grown old in minor iniquities, and could no longer inspire aversion or pity.
He repeated Patna? interrogatively, seemed to make a short effort of memory, and said:
"Quite right.
I am an old stager out here. I saw her go down."
I made ready to vent my indignation at such a stupid lie, when he added smoothly, "She
was full of reptiles."
'This made me pause. What did he mean?
The unsteady phantom of terror behind his glassy eyes seemed to stand still and look
into mine wistfully.
"They turned me out of my bunk in the middle watch to look at her sinking," he
pursued in a reflective tone. His voice sounded alarmingly strong all at
once.
I was sorry for my folly.
There was no snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in the
perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a long row of empty iron
bedsteads an accident case from some ship
in the Roads sat up brown and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the forehead.
Suddenly my interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like a tentacle and clawed my
shoulder.
"Only my eyes were good enough to see. I am famous for my eyesight.
That's why they called me, I expect.
None of them was quick enough to see her go, but they saw that she was gone right
enough, and sang out together--like this."...A wolfish howl searched the very
recesses of my soul.
"Oh! make 'im dry up," whined the accident case irritably.
"You don't believe me, I suppose," went on the other, with an air of ineffable
conceit.
"I tell you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf.
Look under the bed." 'Of course I stooped instantly.
I defy anybody not to have done so.
"What can you see?" he asked. "Nothing," I said, feeling awfully ashamed
of myself. He scrutinised my face with wild and
withering contempt.
"Just so," he said, "but if I were to look I could see--there's no eyes like mine, I
tell you."
Again he clawed, pulling at me downwards in his eagerness to relieve himself by a
confidential communication. "Millions of pink toads.
There's no eyes like mine.
Millions of pink toads. It's worse than seeing a ship sink.
I could look at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all day long.
Why don't they give me back my pipe?
I would get a smoke while I watched these toads.
The ship was full of them. They've got to be watched, you know."
He winked facetiously.
The perspiration dripped on him off my head, my drill coat clung to my wet back:
the afternoon breeze swept impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff folds of
curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling
on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor
all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow.
The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in
an old barn at home.
"Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from afar the accident case
in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering
call down a tunnel.
The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly.
"The ship was full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.," he
whispered with extreme rapidity.
"All pink. All pink--as big as mastiffs, with an eye
on the top of the head and claws all round their ugly mouths.
Ough!
Ough!"
Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks disclosed under the flat coverlet the outlines of
meagre and agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after something in the
air; his body trembled tensely like a
released harp-string; and while I looked down, the spectral horror in him broke
through his glassy gaze.
Instantly his face of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines, became
decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable
caution and of desperate fear.
He restrained a cry--"Ssh! what are they doing now down there?" he asked, pointing
to the floor with fantastic precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne
upon my mind in a lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness.
"They are all asleep," I answered, watching him narrowly.
That was it.
That's what he wanted to hear; these were the exact words that could calm him.
He drew a long breath. "Ssh!
Quiet, steady.
I am an old stager out here. I know them brutes.
Bash in the head of the first that stirs. There's too many of them, and she won't
swim more than ten minutes."
He panted again. "Hurry up," he yelled suddenly, and went on
in a steady scream: "They are all awake-- millions of them.
They are trampling on me!
Wait! Oh, wait!
I'll smash them in heaps like flies. Wait for me!
H-e-elp!" An interminable and sustained howl
completed my discomfiture.
I saw in the distance the accident case raise deplorably both his hands to his
bandaged head; a dresser, aproned to the chin showed himself in the vista of the
ward, as if seen in the small end of a telescope.
I confessed myself fairly routed, and without more ado, stepping out through one
of the long windows, escaped into the outside gallery.
The howl pursued me like a vengeance.
I turned into a deserted landing, and suddenly all became very still and quiet
around me, and I descended the bare and shiny staircase in a silence that enabled
me to compose my distracted thoughts.
Down below I met one of the resident surgeons who was crossing the courtyard and
stopped me. "Been to see your man, Captain?
I think we may let him go to-morrow.
These fools have no notion of taking care of themselves, though.
I say, we've got the chief engineer of that pilgrim ship here.
A curious case.
D.T.'s of the worst kind. He has been drinking hard in that Greek's
or Italian's grog-shop for three days. What can you expect?
Four bottles of that kind of brandy a day, I am told.
Wonderful, if true. Sheeted with boiler-iron inside I should
think.
The head, ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious part is there's some sort
of method in his raving. I am trying to find out.
Most unusual--that thread of logic in such a delirium.
Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn't.
Good old tradition's at a discount nowadays.
Eh! His--er--visions are batrachian.
Ha! ha!
No, seriously, I never remember being so interested in a case of jim-jams before.
He ought to be dead, don't you know, after such a festive experiment.
Oh! he is a tough object.
Four-and-twenty years of the tropics too. You ought really to take a peep at him.
Noble-looking old ***. Most extraordinary man I ever met--
medically, of course.
Won't you?" 'I have been all along exhibiting the usual
polite signs of interest, but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of want of
time, and shook hands in a hurry.
"I say," he cried after me; "he can't attend that inquiry.
Is his evidence material, you think?" '"Not in the least," I called back from the
gateway.'