Section 9

The watch finished washing decks. I went below and stopped at Mr. Burns’ door (he could not bear to have it shut), but hesitated to speak to him till he moved his eyes. I gave him the news.
“Sighted Cape Liant at daylight. About fifteen miles.”
He moved his lips then, but I heard no sound till I put my ear down, and caught the peevish comment: “ol his asicrawling:.; .°
“Better luck than standing still, anyhow,” I pointed out resignedly, and left him to whatever thoughts or fancies haunted his hopeless prostration.
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Later that morning, when relieved by my second officer, I threw myself on my couch and for some three hours or so I really found oblivion. It was so perfect that on waking up I wondered where I was. Then came the immense relief of the thought: on board my ship! At sea! At sea!
Through the port-holes I beheld an unruffled, sun- smitten horizon. The horizon of a windless day. But its spaciousness alone was enough to give me a sense of a fortunate escape, a momentary exultation of freedom.
I stepped out into the saloon with my heart lighter than it had been for days. Ransome was at the side- board preparing to lay the table for the first sea dinner of the passage. He turned his head, and something in his eyes checked my modest elation.
Instinctively I asked: ‘“‘What is it now?” not ex- pecting in the least the answer I got. It was given with that sort of contained serenity which was characteristic of the man.
“I am afraid we haven’t left all sickness behind us, sir.”
“We haven’t! What’s the matter?”?
He told me then that two of our men had been taken bad with fever in the night. One of them was burning and the other was shivering, but he thought that it was pretty much the same thing. I thought so too. I felt shocked by the news. “One burning, the other shiver- ing, you say? No. We haven’t left the sickness be- hind. Do they look very ill?”
“ Middling bad, sir.” Ransome’s eyes gazed steadily into mine. We exchanged smiles. Ransome’s a little wistful, as usual, mine no doubt grim enough, to corre- spond with my secret exasperation.
I asked:
“Was there any wind at all this morning?”
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“Can hardly say that, sir. We’ve moved all the time though. The land ahead seems a little nearer.”
That was it. A little nearer. Whereas if we had only had a little more wind, only a very little more, we might, we should, have been abreast of Liant by this time and increasing our distance from that contami nated shore. And it was not only the distance. It seemed to me that a stronger breeze would have blown away the infection which clung to the ship. It ob- viously did cling to the ship. Twomen. One burning, one shivering. I felt a distinct reluctance to go and look at them. What was the good? Poison is poison. Tropical fever is tropical fever. But that it should have stretched its claw after us over the sea seemed to me an extraordinary and unfair licence. I could hardly believe that it could be anything worse than the last desperate pluck of the evil from which we were escaping into the clean breath of the sea. If only that breath had been a little stronger. However, there was the quinine against the fever. I went into the spare cabin where the medicine chest was kept to prepare two doses. I opened it full of faith as a man opens a miraculous shrine. The upper part was inhabited by a collection of bottles, all square-shouldered and as like each other as peas. Under that orderly array there were two drawers, stuffed as full of things as one could imagine—paper packages, bandages, cardboard boxes officially labelled. The lower of the two, in one of its compartments, contained our provision of quinine.
There were five bottles, all round and all of a size. One was about a third full. The other four remained still wrapped up in paper and sealed. But I did not expect to see an envelope lying on top of them. A square envelope, belonging, in fact, to the ship’s stationery.
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It lay so that I could see it was not closed down, and on picking it up and turning it over I perceived that it was addressed to myself. It contained a half-sheet of notepaper, which I unfolded with a queer sense of dealing with the uncanny, but without any excitement as people meet and do extraordinary things in a dream.
“My dear Captain,” it began, but I ran to the signature. The writer was the doctor. The date was that of the day on which, returning from my visit to Mr. Burns in the hospital, I had found the excellent doctor waiting for me in the cabin; and when he tcld me that he had been putting in time inspecting the medicine chest for me. How bizarre! While expecting me to come in at any moment he had been amusing himself by writing me a letter, and then as I came in had hastened to stuff it into the medicine chest drawer. A rather incredible proceeding. I turned to the text in wonder.
In a large, hurried, but legible hand the good, sym- pathetic man for some reason, either of kindness or more likely impelled by the irresistible desire to express his opinion, with which he didn’t want to damp my hopes before, was warning me not to put my trust in the beneficial effects of a change from land to sea. “I didn’t want to add to your worries by discouraging your hopes,” he wrote. “I am afraid that, medically speaking, the end of your troubles is not yet.” In short, he expected me to have to fight a probable return of tropical illness. Fortunately I had a good provision of quinine. I should put my trust in that, and ad- minister it steadily, when the ship’s health would cer- tainly improve.
I crumpled up the letter and rammed it into my pocket. Ransome carried off two big doses to the men
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forward. As to myself, I did not go on deck as yet. I went instead to the door of Mr. Burns’ room, and gave him that news too.
It was impossible to say the effect it had on him. At first I thought that he was speechless. His head lay sunk in the pillow. He moved his lips enough, how- ever, to assure me that he was getting much stronger; a statement shockingly untrue on the face of it.
That afternoon I took my watch as a matter of course. A great over-heated stillness enveloped the ship and seemed to hold her motionless in a flaming ambience composed in two shades of blue. Faint, hot puffs eddied nervelessly from her sails. And yet she moved. She must have. For, as the sun was setting, we had drawn abreast of Cape Liant and dropped it behind us: an ominous retreating shadow in the last gleams of twilight.
In the evening, under the crude glare of his lamp, Mr. Burns seemed to have come more to the surface of his bedding. It was as if a depressing hand had been lifted off him. He answered my few words by a com- paratively long, connected speech. He asserted him- self strongly. If he escaped being smothered by this stagnant heat, he said, he was confident that in a very few days he would be able to come up on deck and help me.
While he was speaking I trembled lest this effort of energy should leave him lifeless before my eyes. But I cannot deny that there was something comforting in his willingness. I made a suitable reply, but pointed out to him that the only thing that could really help us was wind—a fair wind.
He rolled his head impatiently on the pillow. And it was not comforting in the least to hear him begin to mutter crazily about the late captain, that old man
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I
buried in latitude 8° 20’, right in our way—ambushed at the entrance of the Gulf. ;
“Are you still thinking of your late captain, Mr. Burns?” I said. “TI imagine the dead feel no animosity against the living. They care nothing for them.”
“You don’t know that one,” he breathed out feebly.
“No. I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me. And so he can’t have any grievance against me, any- way.”
“Yes. But there’s all the rest of us on board,” he insisted.
I felt the inexpugnable strength of common sense being insidiously menaced by this gruesome, by this insane delusion. And I said:
“You mustn’t talk so much. You will tire your- self.”
“And there is the ship herself,” he persisted in a whisper.
“Now, not a word more,” I said, stepping in and laying my hand on his cool forehead. It proved to me that this atrocious absurdity was rooted in the man himself and not in the disease, which, apparently, had emptied him of every power, mental and physical, ex- cept that one fixed idea.
I avoided giving Mr. Burns any opening for conversa- tion for the next few days. I merely used to throw him a hasty, cheery word when passing his door. I believe that if he had had the strength he would have called out after me more than once. But he hadn’t the strength. Ransome, however, observed to me one afternoon that the mate “seemed to be picking up wonderfully.”
“Did he talk any nonsense to you of late?” I asked casually.
“No, sir.” Ransome was startled by the direct question; but, after a pause, he added equably: “He
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told me this morning, sir, that he was sorry he had to bury our late captain right in the ship’s way, as one may say, out of the Gulf.”
“Isn’t this nonsense enough for you?” I asked, looking confidently at the intelligent, quiet face on which the secret uneasiness in the man’s breast had thrown a transparent veil of care.
Ransome didn’t know. He had not given a thought
to the matter. And with a faint smile he flitted away from me on his never-ending duties, with his usual guarded activity. -~ Two more days passed. We had advanced a little .way—a very little way—into the larger space of the ‚Gulf of Siam. Seizing eagerly upon the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be paid for in some way. iI had held, professionally, a review of my chances. I was competent enough for that. At least, I thought' so. I had a general sense of my preparedness which only a man pursuing a calling he loves can know. That feeling seemed to me the most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing. I imagined I could not have lived without it.
I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps nothing else than that special intensity of existence which is the quin- tessence of youthful aspirations. Whatever I expected I did not expect to be beset by hurricanes. I knew better than that. In the Gulf of Siam there are no hurricanes. But neither did I expect to find myself bound hand and foot to the hopeless extent which was revealed to me as the days went on.
Not that the evil spell held us always motionless. Mysterious currents drifted us here and there, with a stealthy power made manifest by the changing vistas of
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the islands fringing the east shore of the Gulf. And there were winds too, fitful and deceitful. They raised hopes only to dash them into the bitterest disappoint- ment, promises of advance ending in lost ground, ex- piring in sighs, dying into dumb stillness in which the currents had it all their own way—their own inimical way.
The Island of Koh-ring, a great, black, upheaved ridge amongst a lot of tiny islets, lying upon the glassy water like a triton amongst minnows, seemed to be the centre of the fatal circle. It seemed impossible to get away from it. Day after day it remained in sight. More than once, in a favourable breeze, I would take its bearing in the fast ebbing twilight, thinking that it was for the last time. Vain hope. A night of fitful airs would undo the gains of temporary favour, and the rising sun would throw out the black relief of Koh-ring, looking more barren, inhospitable, and grim than ever.
“Its like being bewitched, upon my word,” I said once to Mr. Burns, from my usual position in the door- way.
He was sitting up in his bed-place. He was progress- ing towards the world of living men, if he could hardly have been said to have rejoined it yet. He nodded to me his frail and bony head in a wisely mysterious assent.
“Oh, yes, [know what you mean,” I said. “But you cannot expect me to believe that a dead man has the power to put out of joint the meteorology of this part of the world. Though indeed it seems to have gone utterly wrong. ‘The land and sea breezes have got broken up into small pieces. We cannot depend upon them for five minutes together.”
“It won’t be very long now before I can come up on deck,” muttered Mr. Burns, “and then we shall see.”
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Whether he meant this for a promise to grapple with supernatural evil I couldn’t tell. At any rate, it wasn’t the kind of assistance I needed. On the other hand, I had been living on deck practically night and day so as to take advantage of every chance to get my ship a little more to the southward. The mate, I could see, was extremely weak yet, and not quite rid of his delusion, which to me appeared but a symptom of his disease. At all events, the hopefulness of an invalid was not to be discouraged. I said:
“You will be most welcome there, I am sure, Mr. Burns. If you go on improving at this rate you'll be presently one of the healthiest men in the ship.”
This pleased him, but his extreme emaciation con- verted his self-satisfied smile into a ghastly exhibition of long teeth under the red moustache.
““Aren’t the fellows improving, sir?” he asked soberly, with an extremely sensible expression of anxiety on his face.
I answered him only with a vague gesture and went away from the door. The fact was that disease played with us capriciously very much as the winds did. It would go from one man to another with a lighter or heavier touch, which always left its mark behind, stag- gering some, knocking others over for a time, leaving this one, returning to another, so that all of them had now an invalidish aspect and a hunted, apprehensive look in their eyes; while Ransome and I, the only two completely untouched, went amongst them assiduously distributing quinine. It was a double fight. The ad- verse weather held us in front and the disease pressed on our rear. I must say that the men were very good. The constant toil of trimming the yards they faced willingly. But all spring was out of their limbs, and as I looked at them from the poop I could not keep
[i
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from my mind the dreadful impression that they were moving in poisoned air.
Down below, in his cabin, Mr. Burns had advanced so far as not only to be able to sit up, but even to draw up his legs. Clasping them with bony arms, like an animated skeleton, he emitted deep, impatient sighs.
“The great thing to do, sir,” he would tell me on every occasion, when I gave him the chance, “the great thing is to get the ship past 8° 20’ of latitude. Once she’s past that we’re all right.”
At first I used only to smile at him, though, God knows, I had not much heart left for smiles. But at last I lost my patience.
“Oh, yes. The latitude 8° 20’. That’s where you buried your late captain, isn’t it?” Then with severity: “‘ Don’t you think, Mr. Burns, it’s about time you dropped all that nonsense?”
He rolled at me his deep-sunken eyes in a glance of invincible obstinacy. But for the rest, he only mut- tered, just loud enough for me to hear, something about “Not surprised . . . find . . . play us some beastly trick yet E
Such passages as this were not exactly wholesome for my resolution. The stress of adversity was beginning to tell on me. At the same time I felt a contempt for that obscure weakness of my soul. I said to myself disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the smallest degree my fortitude.
I didn’t know then how soon and from what unex- pected direction it would be attacked.
It was the very next day. The sun had risen clear of the southern shoulder of Koh-ring, which still hung, like an evil attendant, on our port quarter. It was in- tensely hateful to my sight. During the night we had
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been heading all round the compass, trimming the yards again and again, to what I fear must have been for the most part imaginary puffs of air. Then just about sun- rise we got for an hour an inexplicable, steady breeze, right in our teeth. There was no sense in it. It fitted neither with the season of the year, nor with the secular experience of seamen as recorded in books, nor with the aspect of the sky. Only purposeful malevolence could account for it. It sent us travelling at a great pace away from our proper course; and if we had been out on pleasure sailing bent it would have been a delightful breeze, with the awakened sparkle of the sea, with the sense of motion and a feeling of unwonted freshness. Then all at once, as if disdaining to carry farther the sorry jest, it dropped and died out completely in less than five minutes. The ship’s head swung where it listed; the stilled sea took on the polish of a steel plate in the calm.