Gallions Reach (12 page)

It was all right, though the draught which was upset by the rocking of the ship was languid, and the breath of an oven.

Night fell; the day was abolished abruptly. There were brief up-glarings of a desperate sun taken by an insurrection of darkness. He was put down. The authority of day was overturned. The ship alone of all the world below held with startled emphasis the memory of a brightness extinguished. For a few moments there was the pale wraith of a deck, vertiginous in its slant, with its fixtures bleak and exposed; and then the only lights were the stars concentrated low in patch of southern sky. In the south, the stars were the lights of a city without a name where there could be no land. They could see the frenzied glittering of its lamps. For the show of that city behaved only as would an hallucination in a region that was enthralled by the powers of darkness. Now its level was below them, and now it soared towards the meridian.

“Come now, will you?” said the captain.

Colet was glad of a change from that erratic dinner-table, and gestured his readiness. He was to be purser for the evening. He followed the master out of the saloon. As he reached its door the opening uprose, as though to frustrate his intent. He gripped the door-post. Whoa! He waited. The chance came. The deck took a slope the other way, and almost under control Colet shot through. The far side of the alleyway saved him, though harshly.

“She's lively,” said the master. “Here we are.” He steadied Colet into his room.

“I thought monsoons were friendly winds,” Colet joked.

“There is no wind,” he was told. “Not yet. Just a bit of a swell. Sit there. That way you won't feel it so much. There you are, if you would check the manifest for me with the stowage plan.” He stood over Colet, and explained the documents. “I was not about when she was loaded, and we have a number of ports. You can help me here. It'll keep you from noticing her capers.”

It was not easy to ignore her capers. They raised a number of doubts which jolted one's consideration from the job, yet could not be answered. Get on with the job then. Didn't know enough to answer them. He knew about as much as an ant in its hill under a blundering cow; and the astral cow blundering about now had enormous splay hooves. There was a boom, and an answering panic of crocks in the pantry. His consideration of his job was shifted, and he glanced at Hale, to see whether this was serious. The attention of the
captain, however, rapt as at prayer, was devoted to his desk. Hale but cleared his throat, and turned over a sheet as though it were a token of a rosary.

They worked without a word for a time, and then Colet put a question to the master.

“Eh?” said Hale, turning leisurely. “No, that is probably a slip. Make a mark there.”

The master remained, for a spell, thoughtful in that apposition to his amateur purser.

“It's an idea of mine that there's an intention to sell her out East, when we are cleared,” he soliloquised. “Chinese owners, I expect. But don't discuss that outside. It's only a guess since I took her over. I go by this and that.”

“Surely the owners would have told you?” Colet became bright. He was relieved to hear some cool and intelligent human sounds. It was enjoyable to encourage them.

Hale smiled wanly. “A ship's master is not so important as he used to be. Like the rest of the servants, he's on a length of string, and doesn't always know who is pulling it, nor why. But it's no good complaining of the way the world goes.”

His thin hand went over his thin hair. Colet felt stir within him the warmth of a liking for that frail figure. It was insignificant, till its eye met yours. Then you guessed a hidden but constant glim. That man looked as though he had made his humble acceptance, but could not be deceived by the bluff of chance. He met Colet's eye then, and might have guessed that something had quickened in his junior.

“We are apt to make too much of our importance, Colet, when we don't like things, or they don't like us. But, you know, the best we can do is to keep our own doorstep clean. We can always manage that.”

As if to try his faith, his own ship then treated him with indignity. She went over, and Hale, nearer her side, sank low, and was huddled into his chair. Colet overlooked the
master from a higher position. Hale wrestled patiently with the arm of his seat to escape from his ungraceful posture.

“That was a big one. They racket things so.”

The cabin itself was quiet. At times it complained a little, but in undertones. It seemed apart, an illuminated hollow where understandable and well-ordered objects were an assurance of continuity, while all without was dark confusion, besieging it, yet unable to do more than move it, never to disorder it. Its lamps burned steadily. Perhaps it was the master who gave it that air of sanity and composure while anarchy was at its walls. Hale, slight and elderly, with his deliberation which was not unlike weariness, was an augury of grey wisdom and the symbol of conscious control amid the welter of huge and heedless powers. Boom and crash, but the old man took no notice. The portrait of a stout matron, her arm round a little girl, regarded them sedately from a bulkhead. No other ornament was in the cabin, except the faded photograph of a sailing ship over the bunk. Colet's ribs were squeezed, first against one arm of his chair, then the other. That was another distraction; trying to keep still. The deck rose under them, and Colet dizzily wondered how high it intended to go; the grind of the propeller then grew loud in its monody, and even frantic. The cabin trembled. His seat sank under him, and his attention went another way, for the suggestion of empty gulf was sickening, and the propeller moaned in the very deeps. She heaved and tilted. The purser grabbed his escaping papers.

Something avalanched outside, and then continued a noisy career. What was that? Colet again looked at the captain for a sign. There was none. The master sat at his desk, turned from it a little now, scrutinising a document through his uplifted spectacles. His attention was wholly given to that.

Nothing in it. Don't be a fool. Look after your own doorstep. But a more violent lift, a louder explosion of a breaking
sea, would set him calculating, as it began, the probable extent of a movement. How far would this one go? Worse than the last? Sometimes it was. Yet Hale released sheet after sheet, sometimes turning to his desk to make a note; he lit his pipe, and nothing could have been so reassuring as the leisure of its blue smoke. All was well. Colet resumed his clerkship, and half forgot beleaguerment by the unseen in an interval of comparative ease. The seas were lessening?

Certainly. That was only a minor jar; but when Colet would have made the cheerful comment aloud, he saw the captain had lowered his papers, and was listening attentively, as though waiting for another cryptic message from the night, gazing at the foot of the door of his cabin over the top of his glasses. Colet watched him for an interpretation. Hale only relaxed and sighed; and then, seeing that the purser was expectant, he spoke.

“Colet, it occurs to me that somewhere about now makes for me forty years of this. Yes. You see that barque there? She was my first, forty years agone this month. This job, when I'm through, will be my last. I was of half a mind not to take it. I've had my share, I think. But that child,” Hale indicated the portrait, “she's in for her degree now. I thought I ought to make this trip. A little extra for her.”

While he was communing a whispering began in the deck above. It increased to a heavy drumming.

“I thought so,” Hale remarked, his ear cocked. “Rain. But no wind, and this swell. A cyclone in the north-east somewhere.” He added the conclusion indifferently.

There was a knock at the cabin door. A man out of the dark stood there, a barefooted seaman in his dripping oilskins.

“Mr. Sinclair, sir. He wants you on the bridge.”

“Anything wrong, Wilson?”

“I don't know, sir. The steering-gear, I think, sir.”

“I'm coming.”

Hale assembled his papers deftly, stowed them, and opened a cupboard. He hauled out oilskins and sea-boots. He was buttoning the stiff stuff across his throat, his head thrown back.

“Wait here, Colet,” he said. “I thought I heard an unusual thump just now.”

The captain, Colet imagined, was diminished by that armour for the weather. His face, framed by the sou'wester, looked womanish, as though he were in the wrong clothes. Hale glanced at the barometer, gave it a closer inspection on whatever it was it told him, and stumped out.

Colet waited. He continued his work, pausing now and then to listen for evidence. There were fewer noises. The ship itself appeared to be making no sound. The waters were nearer, or louder. Any one would think—had the engines stopped? He opened the door and put his head out. The steward was hurriedly balancing his way along the corridor.

“Anything the matter, steward?”

“Mr. Colet, the rudder's gone.”

The steward departed, chary of words, as though he were on his way to get another rudder. He had no time to talk.

The violent rolling of the ship did not relent. That seemed senseless, when she was crippled. She ought to be let off, now she could not steer. Impossible to think, with that rolling.

Colet, to his great annoyance, found that his knees were shaking. He had not told them to. He did not want them to shake. He damned those quivering members of his body, and would have stiffened them, but that he was flung against a bulkhead, and so brought down some of the master's pipes from a rack. Something to do, anyway. He could recover tobacco pipes while others found a rudder. Better men had to look after the ship for those who attended to pipe-racks, while waiting.

They also serve, who only look after the tobacco pipes. If there was no wind when he first went into that room, something was howling now all right. It was no good waiting for the captain. Hale was not likely to return till—well, he wasn't likely to return. The best thing to do would be to go and find the men at the centre of things, because that cabin had precious little interest now. It was useless to wait there, at that time of night, when for all he knew they soon might be taking to the boats.

He heard a heavy concussion. The cabin shook. The papers on which he had been working fell to the floor. The boats! Colet watched the papers sprawling and scattering. They had lost their meaning. They were just as well where they
were. But there would be no boats for the sea which could make that sound. The cabin reversed, and as it did so a tongue of water shot over the carpet straight for the papers. Colet dived for them and snatched them out of its way. Save the stationery!

He straightened them on the desk. With measured deliberation he sought carefully for the sheet on which he had been working. They were all in a mess, these sheets, but so was everything else. At least the ship's papers could be put in order. No more water seemed to be coming in. That was only a splash. Not foundering yet. He settled the papers into their sequence, and began again on them at the mark. The captain had said wait.

It was the only thing to do, but that lad Casabianca deserved a better poem. It would be easy to wait on a deck diminishing in dissolution if one but knew the reason for it. But this was only an idiot joke, dutifully completing a ship's papers when the mysterious reason was trying to turn the ship over. Now the infernal water was under the desk. Reason! No more reason in it than there was in the hot gas which congealed to a mud ball, on which grew the truth, and crosses and nails for those who dared to mention it. What a joke; and nobody to get a laugh out of it!

Let her roll. He could not stop it. Time for a pipe. Not his affair. Funny, that a man should curse the stars in their courses, when he was beset. Same thing as a rat biting his trap, maybe. Best to call himself lucky. Lucky to have a job to do, if only a job of checking packages of pots and pans, when the heaven itself was cracking. “We are but little children meek.” The tune of this hymn, for some uninvited cause, was running through his head. The movements of the ship kept it going. “Not born in any high estate.” Couldn't very well call this estate puffed up. “What can we do for Jesus' sake?” Well, Jesus, I was checking this ship's manifest when I went down. Sorry it's wet.

What was the time? To his surprise, the clock said it was another morning again. The skipper's cabin was in a sorry state. Somebody was attempting the door, but the slant of the ship held it fast. The door rattled, and then Hale entered. He showed no surprise at finding the purser still busy. He took a towel and wiped his face. “I should drop that now,” he remarked.

Colet told him he had just finished it. Hale looked at the clock, and thanked him. The purser modestly waited for the master to give a word on the business without, but Hale merely balanced himself patiently to the movements of his room, and sought for something in a drawer.

“By the way, Colet, you could turn in here. It would save you the run to your own place.”

But Colet felt a sudden dislike of the suggestion of that isolation.

“Oh, thank you. But I'll make for my own cubby-hole. It'll do me good, to run for it.”

That was all. Not a word about the rudder. And perhaps it would be better not to ask questions. Perhaps rudders were indelicate. By Hale's manner, too, it might be only a rather wet night. It would be nobler to assume the night was merely wet.

Hale led on to the head of the companion to the quarterdeck.

“Can't open the lower door,” he explained. The master stood there, with his hand on the upper door, as though listening for some one who would let them out. “Now,” he muttered, opened it on the instant, and they were both in the night.

The night engulfed them with a roar as though it saw them instantly. Colet was separated from Hale. There was no ship. There was but a pealing and a shouting. The darkness was full of driving water. It was hard to breathe. Hale had gone. Colet forgot which was the head and which the
stern. A burst of spray raked past. Then he felt a grip on his arm, and a warm mouth sought his ear. Hale was saying something but his words were torn away.