Section 7

Mr. Burns sighed, glanced at me inquisitively, as much as to say, “Aren’t you going yet?” and then turned his thoughts from his new captain back to the old, who, being dead, had no authority, was not in any- body’s way, and was much easier to deal with.
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Mr. Burns dealt with him at some length. He was a peculiar man—of about sixty-five—iron grey, hard- faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go be- low, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours—till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.
It came to this, that Mr. Burns mustered his
courage one day and remonstrated earnestly with the captain. Neither he nor the second mate could get a wink of sleep in their watches below for the noise. And how could they be expected to keep awake whi on duty? he pleaded. The answer of that stern man was that if he and the second mate didn’t like the noise, they were welcome to pack up their traps and walk over the side. When this alternative was offered the ship happened to be 600 miles from the nearest land.
Mr. Burns at this point looked at me with an air of curiosity. I began to think that my predecessor was a remarkably peculiar old man.
But I had to hear stranger things yet. It came out that this stern, grim, wind-tanned, rough, sea-salted, taciturn sailor of sixty-five was not only an artist, but a lover as well. In Haiphong, when they got there after a course of most unprofitable peregrinations (during which the ship was nearly lost twice), he got himself, in Mr. Burns’ own words, “mixed up” with some woman. Mr. Burns had had no personal knowl- edge of that affair, but positive evidence of it existed in the shape of a photograph taken in Haiphong. Mr. Burns found it in one of the drawers in the captain’s room.
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In due course I, too, saw that amazing human docu- ment (I even threw it overboard later). There he sat ‘with his hands reposing on his knees, bald, squat, grey, bristly, recalling a wild boar somehow; and by his side towered an awful, mature, white female with rapacious
nostrils and a cheaply ill-omened stare in her enormous
eyes. She was disguised in some semi-oriental, vulgar, fancy costume. She resembled a low-class medium or one of those women who tell fortunes by cards for half- a-crown. And yet she was striking. A professional sorceress from the slums. It was incomprehensible. There was something awful in the thought that she was the last reflection of the world of passion for the fierce soul which seemed to look at one out of the sardonically savage face of that old seaman. However, I noticed that she was holding some musical instrument— guitar or mandoline—in her hand. Perhaps that was: the secret of her sortilege.
For Mr. Burns that photograph explained why the unloaded ship was kept sweltering at anchor for three weeks in a pestilential hot harbour without air. They lay there and gasped. The captain, appearing now and then on short visits, mumbled to Mr. Burns unlikely tales about some letters he was waiting for.
Suddenly, after vanishing for a week, he came on board in the middle of the night and took the ship out to sea with the first break of dawn. Daylight showed him looking wild and ill. The mere getting clear of the land took two days, and somehow or other they bumped slightly on a reef. However, no leak developed, and the captain, growling “no matter,” informed Mr. Burns that he had made up his mind to take the ship to Hong-Kong and dry-dock her there.
At this Mr. Burns was plunged into despair. For indeed, to beat up to Hong-Kong against a fierce mov-
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soon, with a ship not sufficiently ballasted and with fier supply of water not completed, was an insane project.
But the captain growled peremptorily, “Stick her at it,” and Mr. Burns, dismayed and enraged, stuck her at it, and kept her at it, blowing away sails, straining the spars, exhausting the crew—nearly maddened by the absolute conviction that the attempt was impossible and was bound to end in some catastrophe.
Meantime the captain, shut up in his cabin and wedged in a corner of his settee against the crazy bounding of the ship, played the violm—or, at any rate, made continuous noise on it.
When he appeared on deck he would not speak and not always answer when spoken to. It was obvious that he was ill in some mysterious manner, and begin- ning to break up.
_ As the days went by the sounds of the violin þe- came less and less loud, till at last only a feeble scratch- ing would meet Mr. Burns’ ear as he stood in the saloon listening outside the door of the captain’s state-room.
One afternoon in perfect desperation he burst into that room and made such a scene, tearing his hair and shouting such horrid imprecations that he cowed the contemptuous spirit of the sick man. The water- tanks were low, they had not gained 50 miles in a fort- night. She would never reach Hong-Kong.
It was like fighting desperately towards destruction for the ship and the men. This was evident without argument. Mr. Burns, losing all restraint, put his face close to his captain’s and fairly yelled: ‘You, sir, are going out of the world. But I can’t wait till you are dead before I put the helm up. You must do it your- self. You must do it now!”
The man on the couch snarled in contempt: “So I am going out of the world—am I?”
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“Yes, sir—you haven’t many days left in it,” said ay Burns calming down. “One can see it by your ace.”
“My face, eh? . . . Well, put the helm up and be damned to you.”
Burns flew on deck, got the ship before the wind, then came down again, composed but resolute.
“Tve shaped a course for Pulo Condor, sir,” he said. “When we make it, if you are still with us, you'll tell me into what port you wish me to take the ship and [ll do it.”
The old man gave him a look of savage spite, and said these atrocious words in deadly, slow tones:
“If I had my wish, neither the ship nor any of you would ever reach a port. And I hope you won’t.”
Mr. Burns was profoundly shocked. I believe he was positively frightened at the time. It seems, however, that he managed to produce such an effective laugh that it was the old man’s turn to be frightened. He shrank within himself and turned his back on him.
“ And his head was not gone then,” Mr. Burns assured me excitedly. “He meant every word of it.”
Such was practically the late captain’s last speech. No connected sentence passed his lips afterwards. That night he used the last of his strength to throw his fiddle over the side. No one had actually seen him in the act, but after his death Mr. Burns couldn’t find the thing anywhere. The empty case was very much in evidence, but the fiddle was clearly not in the ship. And where else could it have gone to but overboard?
“Threw his violin overboard!” I exclaimed.
“He did,” cried Mr. Burns excitedly. ‘‘And it’s my belief he would have tried to take the ship down with him if it had been in human power. He never meant her to see home again. Hewouldn’t write to hisowners,
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he never wrote to his old wife either—he wasn’t going to. He had made up his mind to cut adrift from every- thing. That’s what it was. He didn’t care for busi- ness, or freights, or for making a passage—or anything. He meant to have gone wandering about the world till he lost her with all hands.”
Mr. Burns looked like a man who had escaped great danger. For a little he would have exclaimed: “If it hadn’t been for me!?” And the transparent innocence of his indignant eyes was underlined quaintly by the arrogant pair of moustaches which he proceeded to twist, and as if extend, horizontally.
I might have smiled if I had not been busy with my own sensations, which were not those of Mr. Burns. I was already the man in command. My sensations could not be like those of any other man on board. In that community I stood, like a king in his country, in a class all by myself. I mean an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state. I was brought there to rule by an agency as remote from the people and as inscrut- able almost to them as the Grace of God.
And like a member of a dynasty, feeling a semi- mystical bond with the dead, I was profoundly shocked by my immediate predecessor.
That man had been in all essentials but his age just such another man as myself. Yet the end of his life was a complete act of treason, the betrayal of a tradition which seemed to me as imperative as any guide on earth could be. It appeared that even at sea a man could be- come the victim of evil spirits. I felt on my face the breath of unknown powers that shape our destinies.
Not to let the silence last too long I asked Mr. Burns if he had written to his captain’s wife. He shook his head. He had written to nobody.
In a moment he became sombre. He never thought
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oi writing. It took him all his time to watch in- cessantly the loading of the ship by a rascally Chinese stevedore. In this Mr. Burns gave me the first glimpse of the real chief mate’s soul which dwelt uneasily in his body.
He mused, then hastened on with gloomy force.
“Yes! The captain died as near noon as possible. I looked through his papers in the afternoon. I read the service over him at sunset and then I stuck the ship’s head north and brought her in here. I—brought -—her—in.”
He struck the table with his fist.
“She would hardly have come in by herself,” I ob- served. “But why didn’t you make for Singapore in- stead?”
His eyes wavered. “The nearest port,” he muttered sullenly.
I had framed the question in perfect innocence, but this answer (the difference in distance was insignificant) and his manner offered me a clue to the simple truth. He took the ship to a port where he expected to be con-' firmed in his temporary command from lack of a qualified master to put over his head. Whereas Singa- pore, he surmised justly, would be full of qualified men.
But his naive reasoning forgot to take into account the telegraph cable reposing on the bottom of the very Gulf up which he had turned that ship which he im- agined himself to have saved from destruction. Hence the bitter flavour of our interview. I tasted it more and more distinctly—and it was less and less to my taste.
“Look here, Mr. Burns,” I began, very firmly. “You may as well understand that I did not run after this command. It was pushed in my way. Ive accepted it. I am here to take the ship home first of
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all, and you may be sure that I shall see to it that every one of you on board here does his duty to that end. This is all I have to say—for the present.”
He was on his feet by this time, but instead of taking his dismissal he remained with trembling, indignant lips, and looking at me hard as though, really, after this, there was nothing for me to do in common decency but to vanish from his outraged sight. Like all very simple emotional states this was moving. I felt sorry for him—almost sympathetic, till (seeing that I did not vanish) he spoke in a tone of forced restraint.
“Tf I hadn’t a wife and a child at home you may be sure, sir, I would have asked you to let me go the very minute you came on board.”
I answered him with a matter-of-course calmness as though some remote third person were in question.
“And I, Mr. Burns, would not have let you go. You have signed the ship’s articles as chief officer, and till they are terminated at the final port of discharge I shall expect you to attend to your duty and give me the benefit of your experience to the best of your ability.”
Stony incredulity lingered in his eyes; but it broke down before my friendly attitude. With a slight up- ward toss of his arms (I got to know that gesture well afterwards) he bolted out of the cabin.
We might have saved ourselves that little passage of harmless sparring. Before many days had elapsed it was Mr. Burns who was pleading with me anxiously not to leave him behind; while I could only return him but doubtful answers. The whole thing took on a somewhat tragic complexion.
And this horrible problem was only an extraneous episode, a mere complication in the general problem of how to get that ship—which was mine with her ap- purtenances and her men, with her body and her spirit
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now slumbering in that pestilential river—how to get her out to sea.
Mr. Burns, while still acting captain, had hastened to sign a charter-party which in an ideal world without guile would kave been an excellent document. Directly Iran my eye over it I foresaw trouble ahead unless the people of the other part were quite exceptionally fair-minded and open to argument.
Mr. Burns, to whom I imparted my fears, chose to take great umbrage at them. He looked at me with that usual incredulous stare, and said bitterly:
“I suppose, sir, you want to make out I’ve acted like a fool?”
I told him, with my systematic kindliness which always seemed to augment his surprise, that I did not want to make out anything. I would leave that to the future.
And, sure enough, the future brought in a lot of trouble. There were days when I used to remember Captain Giles with nothing short of abhorrence. His confounded acuteness had let me in for this job; while his prophecy that I “would have my hands full” coming true, made it appear as if done on purpose to play an evil joke on my young innocence.
Yes. I had my hands full of complications which were most valuable as “experience.” People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in that connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions.
I must say I was losing mine rapidly. But on these instructive complications I must not enlarge more than to say that they could all be résuméd in the one word: Delay.
A mankind which has invented the proverb, “Time
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is money,” will understand my vexation. The word “Delay” entered the secret chamber of my brain, re- sounded there Jike a tolling bell which maddens the ear, affected all my senses, took on a black colouring, a bitter taste, a deadly meaning.
“I am really sorry to see you worried like this. In- deed, I am
It was the only humane speech I used to hear at that time. And it came from a doctor, appropriately enough.
A doctor is humane by definition. But that man was so in reality. His speech was not professional. I was not ill. But other people were, and that was the reason of his visiting the ship.
He was the doctor of our Legation and, of course, of the Consulate too. He looked after the ship’s health, which generally was poor, and trembling, as it were, on the verge of a break-up. Yes. The men ailed. And thus time was not only money, but life as well.
I had never seen such a steady ship’s company. As the doctor remarked to me: “You seem to have a most respectable lot of seamen.” Not only were they consistently sober, but they did not even want to go ashore. Care was taken to expose them as little as possible to the sun. They were employed on light work under the awnings. And the humane doctor commended me.
“Your arrangements appear to me to be very judi- cious, my dear Captain.”
It is difficult to express how much that pronounce- ment comforted me. The doctor’s round full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the perfection of a dignified amenity. He was the only human being in the world who seemed to take the slightest interest in me. He would generally sit in the cabin for half- an-hour or so at every visit.
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I said to him one day:
“T suppose the only thing now is to take care of them as you are doing, till I can get the ship to sea?”
He inclined his head, shutting his eyes under the large spectacles, and murmured:
“The sea . . . undoubtedly.”
The first member of the crew fairly knocked over was the steward—the first man to whom I had spoken on board. He was taken ashore (with choleraic symp- toms) and died there at the end of a week. Then, while I was still under the startling impression of this first home-thrust of the climate, Mr. Burns gave up and went to bed in a raging fever without saying a word to anybody.