Section 2

No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days. Being now a man without a ship, and hav- ing for a time broken my connection with the sea—be- come, in fact, a mere potential passenger—it would have been more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to ~ stay at an hotel. There it was, too, within a stone’s throw of the Harbour Office, low, but somehow palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim grass plots. I would have felt a passenger indeed in there! T gave it a hostile glance and directed my steps towards the Officers’ Sailors’ Home.
I walked in the sunshine, disregarding it, and m the shade of the big trees on the Esplanade without enjoying it. The heat of the tropical East descended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly clad body, clinging to my rebellious discontent, as if to rob it of its freedom.
The Officers’ Home was a large bungalow with a wide verandah and a curiously suburban-looking little gar- den of bushes and a few trees between it and the street. That institution partook somewhat of the character of a residental club, but with a slightly Governmental flavour about it, because it was administered by the Harbour Office. Its manager was officially styled Chief Steward. He was an unhappy, wizened little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to perfection. But it was obvious that at some time or
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other in his life, in some capacity or other, he had been connected with the sea. Possibly in the comprehensive capacity of a failure.
I should have thought his employment a very easy one, but he used to affirm for some reason or other that his job would be the death of him some day. It was rather mysterious. Perhaps everything naturally was too much trouble for him. He certainly seemed to hate having people in the house. ;
On entering it I thought he must be feeling pleased. Tt was as still as a tomb. I could see no one in the living rooms; and the verandah, too, was empty, except for a man at the far end dozing prone in a long chair. At the noise of my footsteps he opened one horribly ásh-like eye. He was a stranger to me. I retreated from there, and, crossing the dining-room—a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over the centre table—I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: “Chief Steward.”
\The answer to my knock being a vexed and doleful plaint: “Oh, dear! Ob, dear! What is it now?” I went in at once.
It was a strange room to find in the tropics. Twi- light and stuffiness reigned in there. The fellow had hung enormously ample, dusty, cheap lace curtains over his windows, which were shut. Piles of cardboard boxes, such as milliners and dressmakers use in Europe, cumbered the corners; and by some means he had pro- cured for himself the sort of furniture that might have come out of a respectable parlour in the East End of London—a horsehair sofa, arm-chairs of the same. I glimpsed grimy antimacassars scattered over that horrid upholstery, which was awe-inspiring, insomuch | that one could not guess what mysterious accident, need, or fancy had collected it there. Its owner had
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taken off his tunic, and in white trousers and a thin short-sleeved singlet prowled behind the chair-backs nursing his meagre elbows.
An exclamation of dismay escaped him when he heard that I had come for a stay; but he could not deny that there were plenty of vacant rooms.
“Very well. Can you give me the one I had before?”
He emitted a faint moan from behind a pile of card- board boxes on the table, which might have contained gloves or handkerchiefs or neckties. I wonder what the fellow did keepin them? There was a smell of decaying coral, or Oriental dust, of zoological specimens in that den of his. I could only see the top of his head and his unhappy eyes levelled at me over the barrier.
“It’s only for a couple of days,” I said, intending to cheer him up.
“Perhaps you would like to pay in advance?” he suggested eagerly.
“Certainly not!” I burst out directly I could speak. “Never heard of such athing! Thisis the most infernal cheek. .
He had el his head in both hands—a gesture of despair which checked my indignation.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Don’t fly out like this. I am asking everybody.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said bluntly.
“Well, I am going to. And if you gentlemen all agreed to pay in advance I could make Hamilton pay up too. He’s always turning up ashore dead broke, and even when he has some money he won’t settle his bills. I don’t know what to do with him. He swears at me and tells me I can’t chuck a white man out into the street here. So if you only would. . ie
I was amazed. Incredulous too. I Biepected the fellow of gratuitous impertinence. I told him with
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marked emphasis that I would see him and Hamilton hanged first, and requested him to conduct me to my room with no more of his nonsense. He produced then a key from somewhere and led the way out of his lair, _ giving me a vicious sidelong look in passing.
“ Any one I know staying here?” I asked him before he left my room.
He had recovered his usual pained impatient tone, and said that Captain Giles was there, back from a Solo Sea trip. Two other guests were staying also. He paused. And, of course, Hamilton, he added.
“Oh, yes! Hamilton,” I said, and the miserable creature took himself off with a final groan.
His impudence still rankled when I came into the dining-room at tiffin time. He was there on duty over- looking the Chinamen servants. The tiffin was laid on one end only of the long table, and the punkeh was stir- ring the hot air lazily—mostly above a barren waste of polished wood.
We were four around the cloth. The dozing stranger from the chair was one. Both his eyes were partly opened now, but they did not seem to see anything. He was supine. The dignified person next him, with short side whiskers and a carefully scraped chin, was, of course, Hamilton. I have never seen any one so full of dignity for the station in life Providence had been pleased to place him in. I had been told that he re- garded me as a rank outsider. He raised not only his eyes, but his eyebrows as well, at the sound I made pull- ing back my chair. |
Captain Giles was at the head of the table. I ex- changed a few words of greeting with him and sat down on his left. Stout and pale, with a great shiny dome of a bald forehead and prominent brown eyes, he might have been anything but a seaman. You would not
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have been surprised to learn that he was an archi- tect. To me (I know how absurd it is) he looked like a church-warden. He had the appearance of a man from whom you would expect sound advice, moral senti- ments, with perhaps a platitude or two thrown in on occasion, not from a desire to dazzle, but from honest conviction.
Though very well known and appreciated in the shipping world, he had no regular employment. He did not want it. He had his own peculiar position. He was an expert. An expert in—how shall I say it?— in intricate navigation. He was supposed to know more about remote and imperfectly charted parts of the Archipelago than any man living. His brain must have been a perfect warehouse of reefs, positions, bearings, images of headlands, shapes of obscure coasts, aspects of innumerable islands, desert and otherwise. Any ship, for instance, bound on a trip to Palawan or somewhere that way would have Captain Giles on board, either in temporary command or “to assist the master.” It was said that he had a retaining fee from a wealthy firm of Chinese steamship owners, in view of such services. Besides, he was always ready to relieve any man who wished to take a spell ashore for a time. No owner was ever known to object to an arrangement of that sort. For it seemed to be the established opinion at the port that Captain Giles was as good as the best, if not a little better. But in Hamilton’s view he was an “outsider”. I believe that for Hamilton the general- isation “outsider” covered the whole lot of us; though I suppose that he made some distinctions in his mind.
I didn’t try to make conversation with Captain Giles, whom I had not seen more than twice in my life. But, of course, he knew who I was. After a while, in- clining his big shiny head my way, he addressed me
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first in his friendly fashion. He presumed from seeing me there, he said, that I had come ashore for a couple of days’ leave.
He was a low-voiced man. I spoke a little louder, saying that: No—I had left the ship for good.
“A free man for a bit,” was his comment.
“I suppose I may call myself that—since eleven o'clock,” I said.
Hamilton had stopped eating at the sound of our voices. He laid down his knife and fork gently, got up, and muttering something about “this infernal heat cutting one’s appetite,” went out of the room. Almost immediately we heard him leave the house down the verandah steps.
On this Captain Giles remarked easily that the fellow had no doubt gone off to look after my old job. The Chief Steward, who had been leaning against the wall, brought his face of an unhappy goat nearer to the table and addressed us dolefully. His object was to un- burden himself of his eternal grievance against Hamil- ton. The man kept him in hot water with the Harbour Office as to the state of his accounts. He wished to goodness he would get my job, though in truth what would it be? Temporary relief at best.
I said: “You needn’t worry. He won’t get my job. My successor is on board already.”
He was surprised, and I believe his face fell a little at the news. Captain Giles gave a soft laugh. We got up and went out on the verandah, leaving the supine stranger to be dealt with by the Chinamen. The last thing I saw they had put a plate with a slice of pine- apple on it before him and stood back to watch what would happen. But the experiment seemed a failure. He sat insensible.
It was imparted to me in a low voice by Captain
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Giles that this was an officer of some Rajah’s yacht which had come into our port to be dry-docked. Must have been “‘seeing life” last night, he added, wrinkling his nose in an intimate, confidential way which pleased me vastly. For Captain Giles had prestige. He was credited with wonderful adventures and with some mysterious tragedy in his life. And no man had a word to say against him. He continued:
“I remember him first coming ashore here some years ago. Seems only the other day. He was a nice boy. Oh! these nice boys!”
I could not help laughing aloud. He looked startled, then joined in the laugh. “No! No! I didn’t mean that,” he cried. ‘“‘What I meant is that some of them do go soft mighty quick out here.”
Jocularly I suggested the beastly heat as the first cause. But Captain Giles disclosed himself possessed of a deeper philosophy. Things out East were made easy for white men. That was all right. The difficulty was to go on keeping white, and some of these nice boys did not know how. He gave me a searching look, and in a benevolent, heavy-uncle manner asked point blank:
“Why did you throw up your berth?”
I became angry all of a sudden; for you can under- stand how exasperating such a question was to a man who didn’t know. I said to myself that I ought to shut up that moralist; and to him aloud I said with challeng- ing politeness:
“Why . . . P Do you disapprove?” He was too disconcerted to do more than mutter confusedly: “I! . . . In a general way . . 2
and then gave me up. But he retired in good order, under the cover of a heavily humorous remark that he, too, was getting soft, and that this was his time for
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taking his little siesta—when he was on shore. “Very bad habit. Very bad habit.”
The simplicity of the man would have disarmed a touchiness even more youthful than mine. So when next day at tiffin he bent his head towards me and said that he had met my late Captain last evening, adding in an undertone: “He’s very sorry you left. He had never had a mate that suited him so well,” I answered him earnestly, without any affectation, that I certainly hadn’t been so comfortable in any ship or with any commander in all my sea-going days.
“ Weli—then,” he murmured.
“Haven’t you heard, Captain Giles, that I intend te go home?”
“Yes,” he said benevolently. “I have heard that sort of thing so often before.”
“What of that?” I cried. I thought he was the | most dull, unimaginative man I had ever met. I don’t know what more I would have said, but the much- belated Hamilton came in just then and took his usual seat. So I dropped into a mumble.
“Anyhow, you shall see it done this time.”
Hamilton, beautifully shaved, gave Captain Giles a curt nod, but didn’t even condescend to raise his eye- brows at me; and when he spoke it was only to tell the Chief Steward that the food on his plate wasn’t fit to be set before a gentleman. The individual addressed seemed much too unhappy to groan. He only cast his eyes up to the punkah and that was all.
Captain Giles and I got up from the table, and the stranger next to Hamilton followed our example, manceuvring himself to his feet with difficulty. He, poor fellow, not because he was hungry but I verily be- lieve only to recover his self-respect, had tried to put some of that unworthy food into his mouth. But after
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dropping his fork twice and generally making a failure of it, he had sat still with an air of intense mortification combined with a ghastly glazed stare. Both Giles and I had avoided looking his way at table.
On the verandah he stopped short on purpose to ad- dress to us anxiously a long remark which I failed to understand completely. It sounded like some horrible unknown language. But when Captain Giles, after only an instant for reflection, answered him with homely friendliness, “Aye, to be sure. You are right there,” he appeared very much gratified indeed, and went away (pretty straight too) to seek a distant long chair.
“What was he trying to say?” I asked with disgust. _ “I don’t know. Mustn’t be down too much on a fellow. He’s feeling pretty wretched, you may be sure; and to-morrow he’ll feel worse yet.”
Judging by the man’s appearance it seemed im- possible. I wondered what sort of complicated debauch had reduced him to that unspeakable condition. Cap- tain Giles’ benevolence was spoiled by a curious air of complacency which I disliked. I said with a little laugh:
“Well, he will have you to look after him.”
He made a deprecatory gesture, sat down, and took up a paper. I did the same. The papers were old and uninteresting, filled up mostly with dreary stereo- typed descriptions of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee celebrations. Probably we should have quickly fallen into a tropical afternoon doze if it had not been for Hamilton’s voice raised in the dining-room. He was finishing his tiffin there. The big double doors stood wide open permanently, and he could not have had any idea how near to the doorway our chairs were placed. He was heard in a loud, supercilious tone answering some statement ventured by the Chief Steward.
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“I am not going to be rushed into anything. They will be glad enough to get a gentleman I imagine. There is no hurry.”
A loud whispering from the steward succeeded and then again Hamilton was heard with even intenser scorn.
“What? That young ass who fancies himself for having been chief mate with Kent so long? . . . Preposterous.”
Giles and I looked at each other. Kent being the name of my late commander, Captain Giles’ whisper, “He’s talking of you,” seemed to me sheer waste of breath. The Chief Steward must have stuck to his point whatever it was, because Hamilton was heard again more supercilious, if possible, and also very emphatic:
“Rubbish, my good man! One doesn’t compete with a rank outsider like that. There’s plenty of time.”
Then there was pushing of chairs, footsteps in the next room, and plaintive expostulations from the Steward, who was pursuing Hamilton, even out of doors through the main entrance.
“That’s a very insulting sort of man,” remarked Captain Giles—superfluously, I thought. “Very in- sulting. You haven’t offended him in some way, have you?”
“Never spoke to him in my life,” I said grumpily. “Can’t imagine what he means by competing. He has been trying for my job after I left—and didn’t get it. But that isn’t exactly competition.”
Captain Giles balanced. his big benevolent head thoughtfully. “He didn’t get it,” he repeated very slowly. “No, not likely either, with Kent. Kent is no end sorry you left him. He gives you the name of a good seaman too.”