The Story of Dr. Wassell (14 page)

He was already striding away when someone called out: “May I ask a
question, Captain?”

Captain Prass half-turned. “Certainly, but you already know all the facts
that are known to me.”

“Do you think we shall be attacked again?”

It was the question on everyone’s mind. Captain Prass might even have been
thinking about it himself. “Yes, yes, why not?” he snorted, passing through
the doorway.

The doctor went to his men and told them very simply what the Captain had
said, and how the issue had to be decided one way or another immediately. For
once, McGuffey did not have to be searched for; he was there with the others,
a little scared after his experience on the top deck. Wilson was there also,
smoking and leaning weakly against the gunwale; he could walk around a little
now, but only a few paces without tiring. The doctor stated the facts, then
went on: “Now I don’t feel it’s a matter I ought to decide
for
you,
but I’ll tell you this much—whatever
you
decide, I’ll stick with
you. If you say you’d rather go ashore and take
that
sort of chance,
then right, I’ll tag along. Or if you want to take a chance of being bombed
or torpedoed, then that’s okay with me too.” He looked round at them all,
hoping they would approve his attitude. “So that’s how it is, boys—it’s
all up to you, and make up your minds quick.”

He walked away, noting as he did so the air of tension that had risen to
an almost intolerable pitch on board the
Janssens
. Passengers and
crewmen alike, as he glanced at them, seemed dreadfully preoccupied, either
with unspoken thoughts or with whispered arguments between one another. And
at the same time he noticed that the
Janssens
was making a wide turn
towards a little inlet in the shore. He did not like the look of that inlet.
It was shallow and unprotected, and there was nothing beyond the beach but a
few houses and low jungle-covered hills. The
Janssens
would have to
tic up at a ramshackle wooden pier, and he could not imagine any easier
target for either casual or planned attack.

He went back to the men, with a good deal of the prevalent tension working
inside himself, though he hoped he did not show it. He tried to bluff it away
on a nice cheery note. “Well, boys, what’s it to be? Heads we win or tails
the other fellow loses?”

But the men were tense too. Someone turned to Wilson and said: “What do
you
think, sir?”

Wilson answered: “I think the
doctor
ought to decide. He’s the one
who’ll have the trouble of looking after us, whatever we do.”

The doctor nodded: “I know that, but I don’t want to influence you.”

“But if you
had
to decide for yourself, Doc—”

He heard the murmur of the men echoing the point, heard also Wilson’s
sharp comment: “That’s a hell of a fair question.”

The doctor hesitated, then suddenly answered, almost to his own surprise:
“Okay then, I look at it this way. When fishing’s good you better stay where
you are and don’t go upstream. Yes, sir, that’s how
I
feel, and I’d
put my trust in God and Captain Pass and stay on this ship till the cows come
home.” (It was the first time he had ever mentioned God to the men from the
Marblehead
.)

The men eased into sudden smiles; then one after another came their
answers: they would stay; they felt the same; they were glad he felt that way
too.

All at once the doctor saw that Sun was smiling. He cried out, in genuine
excitement: “Why, look at Sun! I said I’d make that feller smile before I was
finished, but what’s he doing it now for, I wonder—he can’t understand
a word of all this.” So he chattered a few sentences rapidly in Chinese, and
Sun answered him, still smiling. Then the doctor told the men: “Well, he says
okay, so I guess that goes for all of us.”

The
Janssens
put in at the little inlet. By that time it was two
o’clock—three hours after the raid. (There had been ample time for the
raiders to have reached their base, wherever it was, and to have given full
information.) The sun was high and the sky cloudless. The water was too
shallow at the pier, so the
Janssens
anchored offshore, while a single
lifeboat transshipped all who wanted to leave in relay trips. There was only
one lifeboat that could be used for this; the others had been riddled with
bullets and were unseaworthy.

It was a slow job, taking off passengers and crewmen in this one boat, for
there were many who wanted to go. They could not be blamed. They were
convinced that the
Janssens
was doomed. Some were women whom the air
attacks had so terrified that nothing—nothing at all—seemed more
unendurable than the prospect of another. There was such an even balancing of
future possibilities, almost all horrible, that it was hard for many to make
a decision at all, and easy for some to change it at the last minute. Dutch
officers on board were evidently under orders to stay with the ship, for none
went ashore; but several sent wives and children, feeling that the slender
chance of life on land was better than the torpedoing or bombing that would
almost certainly befall the
Janssens
at sea. The doctor watched these
tearful separations and wondered whether physical wounds or simple human
misery could be harder to endure.

The
Janssens
stayed four hours in the little harbor. During this
period an air-raid alert sounded from somewhere in the hills behind the
village; all on board then waited tensely under cover for a quarter of an
hour. No planes appeared, and no all-clear was sounded; presently, however,
the various tasks of the occasion were resumed. But a few more passengers
decided to leave as a result of this added scare; those jungle-clad hills
seemed so much safer than the
Janssens
. One could lose oneself up
there while the bombs fell, whereas on the
Janssens
there was nowhere
but the tiny prison of decks, the awful claustrophobia of life on a
slow-moving target.

But there were things to do besides disembarking those who wished it, and
the chance was taken to do them during the enforced delay. Materials were
sought for repairing the riddled lifeboats, food and fresh water were taken
on board, but there was one thing nobody seemed to have in that little
place—a map of the seas and islands from Java southward.

The doctor also did a very simple but necessary domestic thing—he
washed his clothes as well as he could and put them on again when they had
dried sufficiently in the sun. When some of the men found him at the job and
kidded him about it, he answered: “Listen, boys, this isn’t the first time
I’ve done the family wash.” (And it was true, for sometimes back in his early
medical days in Arkansas he had helped hardworking women with their housework
when he had called on them as patients. All of which had been unhelpful to
his reputation as a doctor, though it had won him the good will of many
persons whose good will could not help him.) But he joined in the men’s
amusement when he put on his clothes again and found they had considerably
shrunk. It was a good thing to have something to laugh about during those
strange tense moments.

Those who stayed on hoard watched the crawl of the sun across the sky, and
the crawl of the moments on their watch faces, watched also the long low line
of hills whence planes might come at any one of those moments. But to the
doctor, as he waited and washed, and then laughed a little, there seemed a
new note in his own personal tension, and that was a deep unspoken
companionship with the men who now waited with him. He felt closer to them
than ever before, and sensed that they also, behind their jokes and kidding,
were feeling closer to him. It was a curious, warm, satisfying emotion, to
which anxiety added a tang.

During that long wait and while a second air-raid alert was sounding,
Wilson said jocularly: “Well, Doc, are you still sure we’re doing the right
thing?”

“I’ll tell you that when we get to Australia,” answered the doctor, in the
same mood.

“I notice you say
when
, and not
if
.”

The doctor smiled. “I hadn’t noticed. But I’m glad I did say it. Maybe
it’s a good omen.” He added: “And there’s another thing. One of these days
our boys’ll get back to Java, and I’d sure like to be with ‘em. Yes, sir, I
would indeed…”

But there seemed no good omen in the moon that rose as the
Janssens
put out of the little harbor. It was a full moon, in a perfect sky, and to
the doctor and his seven men it looked the biggest moon they had ever seen.
It shone strong and yellow over land and water, marking the hills and the
village and the receding beaches almost more clearly than daylight, for then
there had been a touch of heat haze above the jungle. But now every line was
etched black and clear, and every surface had a pale sheen especially the
cleared decks of a ship as she rode out to sea. And there was not a breath of
wind, or more than a ripple stirring, save where the
Janssens’s
wake
laid a gleaming comet’s tail behind her.

Everyone said, fatalistically: “They’ll find us—they can’t help
finding us. We haven’t a dog’s chance.”

But everyone added: “All the same, though, I wouldn’t be back on land
where those others are.”

For the people on the
Janssens
were now a different
crowd—they were the hardened gamblers who double their stakes when the
timid ones are out of the game.

The
Janssens
was different also. To begin with, there was room oh
her and the men from the
Marblehead
could have moved into cabins if
they had wished. But they were not keen. The cabins were small and stuffy,
and the bunks smaller than the mattresses; whereas the decks were cool and
wide and accessible. Now that repairs had been made, everyone could be
assigned a place in the lifeboats, and to the men from the
Marblehead
one of the advantages of sleeping on deck was that their own lifeboat was
only a few paces away. They thought these few paces might be important.

The doctor, however, who had spent the previous night on a chair in the
smoke room, accepted the offer of a cabin within easy reach of his men; he
would have to share it with two others, one of them a Dutch padre, he was
told, but he said: “Sure, I don’t mind that—I’ve known a good many
padres in my time.”

As the moon rose higher and brighter, the fact that the
Janssens
was no longer crowded made it seem almost empty. Sonic of the men from the
Marblehead
who could walk actually circumnavigated the whole deck, and
in the dining saloon it was now possible to sit down at a table instead of
being served cafeteria-wise. But the food was late in coining and, for once,
badly cooked. The doctor ate a little himself and saw that his men had
enough, then he settled them comfortably on their mattresses and advised them
to go early to sleep. He was glad to note that all seemed better physically,
and he thought that in an emergency he could probably get them into a
lifeboat in time.

But planes, of course, would not give one any time. Everyone knew that,
and small knots of people stood about on deck after dinner watching the sky
and the horizon. They did not all admit that they were doing this; they said
it was such a beautiful night, so cool and fresh and moonlit, it was a pity
to go inside. But the fact was, they did not want to go inside. And almost
all of them, without comment, had put on life jackets.

The doctor noticed that the girl missionary, McGuffey’s friend, was among
those who had stayed with the ship, and he told her he was glad.

The doctor also noticed that both the newspaper correspondent and the
Dutch boy who was studying to be a naval officer had stayed on the ship, and
to each of them also he said he was glad.

Towards ten o’clock a Dutch officer went around amongst the passengers
with word that Captain Prass would again like to meet them all in the smoke
room immediately. When the doctor got there he found the Captain scowling
down from the platform on which, in happier days, a small orchestra had
functioned. He spoke a few sentences in Dutch that sounded ferocious enough;
then he switched to his hard-clipped English and began what was evidently
both a translation and an amplification. He declared that the
Janssens
was now heading due south, out to sea, and would reach Australia within ten
days—barring unforeseen events. At that he glared as if defying them to
occur. And he added, with a special glare to the doctor: “I am glad that the
wounded American sailors are with us. They show courage. But courage is not
enough. We must pull one another together.” (The doctor thought he probably
meant “pull ourselves together.”) “We must work. We are not numerous enough
for this ship unless all take a hand. For that reason you must consider
yourselves under my orders—passengers and crew alike—no ranks, no
exceptions. I shall set watches and duties for all. And the women must work
too—we need cooks and helpers in the galley. You understand?” He
concentrated himself into a final glare that seemed to convulse his whole
body, then shouted as he marched out: “Some of you begin by clearing up this
room. Never in all my life at sea have I permitted such a state of affairs on
board a ship!” And he pointed with a swift backward fling to the litter of
blood and cigarette butts and broken beer bottles that lay on the floor under
the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina.

When he had gone everyone felt much better, not only because he had gone,
but because he had talked to them like that. It had been tonic, electric,
dynamic. The doctor turned to his neighbor, a tall, broad-shouldered Dutchman
whom he had not met before, and said cheerfully: “Well, what about it,
brother? Shall we set the example?”

The man agreed, so during the next hour, while the
Janssens
rolled
gently over the waves, the doctor and this Dutchman fell to with mops and
pails and brooms, and by midnight they had the smoke room almost
spick-and-span, except for a stain that would not come out of part of the
floor. The two men had not talked much, chiefly because they had been too
busy, but now it seemed natural for the doctor to invite the man to his cabin
for a nightcap. “You see,” he added gleefully, “I’ve got a bottle of Scotch
somewhere in my bag…”