The Rescue (3 page)

This was the kassab or store-keeper, the holder of a position of dignity
and ease. The kassab was the only one of the crew taking their evening
meal who noticed the presence on deck of their commander. He muttered
something to the tindal who directly cocked his old hat on one
side, which senseless action invested him with an altogether foolish
appearance. The others heard, but went on somnolently feeding with
spidery movements of their lean arms.

The sun was no more than a degree or so above the horizon, and from the
heated surface of the waters a slight low mist began to rise; a mist
thin, invisible to the human eye; yet strong enough to change the sun
into a mere glowing red disc, a disc vertical and hot, rolling down to
the edge of the horizontal and cold-looking disc of the shining sea.
Then the edges touched and the circular expanse of water took on
suddenly a tint, sombre, like a frown; deep, like the brooding
meditation of evil.

The falling sun seemed to be arrested for a moment in his descent by the
sleeping waters, while from it, to the motionless brig, shot out on
the polished and dark surface of the sea a track of light, straight and
shining, resplendent and direct; a path of gold and crimson and purple,
a path that seemed to lead dazzling and terrible from the earth straight
into heaven through the portals of a glorious death. It faded slowly.
The sea vanquished the light. At last only a vestige of the sun
remained, far off, like a red spark floating on the water. It lingered,
and all at once—without warning—went out as if extinguished by a
treacherous hand.

"Gone," cried Lingard, who had watched intently yet missed the last
moment. "Gone! Look at the cabin clock, Shaw!"

"Nearly right, I think, sir. Three minutes past six."

The helmsman struck four bells sharply. Another barefooted seacannie
glided on the far side of the poop to relieve the wheel, and the serang
of the brig came up the ladder to take charge of the deck from Shaw. He
came up to the compass, and stood waiting silently.

"The course is south by east when you get the wind, serang," said Shaw,
distinctly.

"Sou' by eas'," repeated the elderly Malay with grave earnestness.

"Let me know when she begins to steer," added Lingard.

"Ya, Tuan," answered the man, glancing rapidly at the sky. "Wind
coming," he muttered.

"I think so, too," whispered Lingard as if to himself.

The shadows were gathering rapidly round the brig. A mulatto put his
head out of the companion and called out:

"Ready, sir."

"Let's get a mouthful of something to eat, Shaw," said Lingard. "I say,
just take a look around before coming below. It will be dark when we
come up again."

"Certainly, sir," said Shaw, taking up a long glass and putting it to
his eyes. "Blessed thing," he went on in snatches while he worked the
tubes in and out, "I can't—never somehow—Ah! I've got it right at
last!"

He revolved slowly on his heels, keeping the end of the tube on the
sky-line. Then he shut the instrument with a click, and said decisively:

"Nothing in sight, sir."

He followed his captain down below rubbing his hands cheerfully.

For a good while there was no sound on the poop of the brig. Then the
seacannie at the wheel spoke dreamily:

"Did the malim say there was no one on the sea?"

"Yes," grunted the serang without looking at the man behind him.

"Between the islands there was a boat," pronounced the man very softly.

The serang, his hands behind his back, his feet slightly apart, stood
very straight and stiff by the side of the compass stand. His face, now
hardly visible, was as inexpressive as the door of a safe.

"Now, listen to me," insisted the helmsman in a gentle tone.

The man in authority did not budge a hair's breadth. The seacannie bent
down a little from the height of the wheel grating.

"I saw a boat," he murmured with something of the tender obstinacy of
a lover begging for a favour. "I saw a boat, O Haji Wasub! Ya! Haji
Wasub!"

The serang had been twice a pilgrim, and was not insensible to the sound
of his rightful title. There was a grim smile on his face.

"You saw a floating tree, O Sali," he said, ironically.

"I am Sali, and my eyes are better than the bewitched brass thing that
pulls out to a great length," said the pertinacious helmsman. "There was
a boat, just clear of the easternmost island. There was a boat, and
they in her could see the ship on the light of the west—unless they are
blind men lost on the sea. I have seen her. Have you seen her, too, O
Haji Wasub?"

"Am I a fat white man?" snapped the serang. "I was a man of the sea
before you were born, O Sali! The order is to keep silence and mind the
rudder, lest evil befall the ship."

After these words he resumed his rigid aloofness. He stood, his legs
slightly apart, very stiff and straight, a little on one side of the
compass stand. His eyes travelled incessantly from the illuminated card
to the shadowy sails of the brig and back again, while his body was
motionless as if made of wood and built into the ship's frame. Thus,
with a forced and tense watchfulness, Haji Wasub, serang of the brig
Lightning, kept the captain's watch unwearied and wakeful, a slave to
duty.

In half an hour after sunset the darkness had taken complete possession
of earth and heavens. The islands had melted into the night. And on the
smooth water of the Straits, the little brig lying so still, seemed
to sleep profoundly, wrapped up in a scented mantle of star light and
silence.

It was half-past eight o'clock before Lingard came on deck again.
Shaw—now with a coat on—trotted up and down the poop leaving behind
him a smell of tobacco smoke. An irregularly glowing spark seemed to run
by itself in the darkness before the rounded form of his head. Above the
masts of the brig the dome of the clear heaven was full of lights that
flickered, as if some mighty breathings high up there had been swaying
about the flame of the stars. There was no sound along the brig's decks,
and the heavy shadows that lay on it had the aspect, in that silence,
of secret places concealing crouching forms that waited in perfect
stillness for some decisive event. Lingard struck a match to light his
cheroot, and his powerful face with narrowed eyes stood out for a moment
in the night and vanished suddenly. Then two shadowy forms and two red
sparks moved backward and forward on the poop. A larger, but a paler
and oval patch of light from the compass lamps lay on the brasses of
the wheel and on the breast of the Malay standing by the helm. Lingard's
voice, as if unable altogether to master the enormous silence of the
sea, sounded muffled, very calm—without the usual deep ring in it.

"Not much change, Shaw," he said.

"No, sir, not much. I can just see the island—the big one—still in
the same place. It strikes me, sir, that, for calms, this here sea is a
devil of locality."

He cut "locality" in two with an emphatic pause. It was a good word. He
was pleased with himself for thinking of it. He went on again:

"Now—since noon, this big island—"

"Carimata, Shaw," interrupted Lingard.

"Aye, sir; Carimata—I mean. I must say—being a stranger hereabouts—I
haven't got the run of those—"

He was going to say "names" but checked himself and said,
"appellations," instead, sounding every syllable lovingly.

"Having for these last fifteen years," he continued, "sailed regularly
from London in East-Indiamen, I am more at home over there—in the Bay."

He pointed into the night toward the northwest and stared as if he could
see from where he stood that Bay of Bengal where—as he affirmed—he
would be so much more at home.

"You'll soon get used—" muttered Lingard, swinging in his rapid walk
past his mate. Then he turned round, came back, and asked sharply.

"You said there was nothing afloat in sight before dark? Hey?"

"Not that I could see, sir. When I took the deck again at eight, I asked
that serang whether there was anything about; and I understood him to
say there was no more as when I went below at six. This is a lonely sea
at times—ain't it, sir? Now, one would think at this time of the year
the homeward-bounders from China would be pretty thick here."

"Yes," said Lingard, "we have met very few ships since we left Pedra
Branca over the stern. Yes; it has been a lonely sea. But for all that,
Shaw, this sea, if lonely, is not blind. Every island in it is an eye.
And now, since our squadron has left for the China waters—"

He did not finish his sentence. Shaw put his hands in his pockets, and
propped his back against the sky-light, comfortably.

"They say there is going to be a war with China," he said in a gossiping
tone, "and the French are going along with us as they did in the Crimea
five years ago. It seems to me we're getting mighty good friends with
the French. I've not much of an opinion about that. What do you think,
Captain Lingard?"

"I have met their men-of-war in the Pacific," said Lingard, slowly. "The
ships were fine and the fellows in them were civil enough to me—and
very curious about my business," he added with a laugh. "However, I
wasn't there to make war on them. I had a rotten old cutter then, for
trade, Shaw," he went on with animation.

"Had you, sir?" said Shaw without any enthusiasm. "Now give me a big
ship—a ship, I say, that one may—"

"And later on, some years ago," interrupted Lingard, "I chummed with
a French skipper in Ampanam—being the only two white men in the whole
place. He was a good fellow, and free with his red wine. His English
was difficult to understand, but he could sing songs in his own language
about ah-moor—Ah-moor means love, in French—Shaw."

"So it does, sir—so it does. When I was second mate of a Sunderland
barque, in forty-one, in the Mediterranean, I could pay out their lingo
as easy as you would a five-inch warp over a ship's side—"

"Yes, he was a proper man," pursued Lingard, meditatively, as if for
himself only. "You could not find a better fellow for company ashore. He
had an affair with a Bali girl, who one evening threw a red blossom at
him from within a doorway, as we were going together to pay our respects
to the Rajah's nephew. He was a good-looking Frenchman, he was—but the
girl belonged to the Rajah's nephew, and it was a serious matter. The
old Rajah got angry and said the girl must die. I don't think the nephew
cared particularly to have her krissed; but the old fellow made a great
fuss and sent one of his own chief men to see the thing done—and the
girl had enemies—her own relations approved! We could do nothing. Mind,
Shaw, there was absolutely nothing else between them but that unlucky
flower which the Frenchman pinned to his coat—and afterward, when the
girl was dead, wore under his shirt, hung round his neck in a small box.
I suppose he had nothing else to put it into."

"Would those savages kill a woman for that?" asked Shaw, incredulously.

"Aye! They are pretty moral there. That was the first time in my life
I nearly went to war on my own account, Shaw. We couldn't talk those
fellows over. We couldn't bribe them, though the Frenchman offered the
best he had, and I was ready to back him to the last dollar, to the last
rag of cotton, Shaw! No use—they were that blamed respectable. So, says
the Frenchman to me: 'My friend, if they won't take our gunpowder for a
gift let us burn it to give them lead.' I was armed as you see now;
six eight-pounders on the main deck and a long eighteen on the
forecastle—and I wanted to try 'em. You may believe me! However, the
Frenchman had nothing but a few old muskets; and the beggars got to
windward of us by fair words, till one morning a boat's crew from the
Frenchman's ship found the girl lying dead on the beach. That put an end
to our plans. She was out of her trouble anyhow, and no reasonable man
will fight for a dead woman. I was never vengeful, Shaw, and—after
all—she didn't throw that flower at me. But it broke the Frenchman up
altogether. He began to mope, did no business, and shortly afterward
sailed away. I cleared a good many pence out of that trip, I remember."

With these words he seemed to come to the end of his memories of that
trip. Shaw stifled a yawn.

"Women are the cause of a lot of trouble," he said, dispassionately.
"In the Morayshire, I remember, we had once a passenger—an old
gentleman—who was telling us a yarn about them old-time Greeks fighting
for ten years about some woman. The Turks kidnapped her, or something.
Anyway, they fought in Turkey; which I may well believe. Them Greeks and
Turks were always fighting. My father was master's mate on board one of
the three-deckers at the battle of Navarino—and that was when we went
to help those Greeks. But this affair about a woman was long before that
time."

"I should think so," muttered Lingard, hanging over the rail, and
watching the fleeting gleams that passed deep down in the water, along
the ship's bottom.

"Yes. Times are changed. They were unenlightened in those old days. My
grandfather was a preacher and, though my father served in the navy, I
don't hold with war. Sinful the old gentleman called it—and I think so,
too. Unless with Chinamen, or niggers, or such people as must be kept in
order and won't listen to reason; having not sense enough to know
what's good for them, when it's explained to them by their
betters—missionaries, and such like au-tho-ri-ties. But to fight ten
years. And for a woman!"

"I have read the tale in a book," said Lingard, speaking down over the
side as if setting his words gently afloat upon the sea. "I have read
the tale. She was very beautiful."

"That only makes it worse, sir—if anything. You may depend on it she
was no good. Those pagan times will never come back, thank God. Ten
years of murder and unrighteousness! And for a woman! Would anybody do
it now? Would you do it, sir? Would you—"