From The Four Winds/The Doldrums
THE DOLDRUMS
'The breeze would have savéd him, you know,' said the mate.
Out of a cloudless sky.
Into a sapphire sea.
To the tune of a windless sigh,
That is drawn in the tops'les three,
The sun sinks fast thro' a burning haze
To the heart of the sapphire sea.
Over the shadowed deep.
Topped with an oily swell,
To the hours of the night asleep
In the chime of her muffled bell
The spent ship prays—and her spirit fails,
On the heave of the sullen swell.
••••
Fanning the crimson flare
Lit by the coming dawn,
Thro' the hush in the breathless air
Of the night that is past and gone.
The wind speeds swift to the weary sails.
In a song of the coming morn.
But away from the stifled ship.
Fleeter than any wind.
With a kiss on the twisted lip
Of the face that she leaves behind,
A breath steals forth—and the wind but plays
On a mask that is left behind.
...........
Six bells clanged the dawning of the last hour in the midnight watch. I dropped my cards, for it was the peculiar custom to stop whist just as the bell sounded.
'Time up!' said the Captain regretfully, mopping his brow, 'How do we stand, Jenny?'
His wife's voice—'Eight and three eleven, and four'—rose in a vinegary triumph of addition from across the saloon table, to culminate in an emphatic 'Fifteen points.'
'Good! I rather think that's the best night yet, sir.—Bed, Jenny. Good-night, gentlemen. A hot night, an't it?'
'Good-night, Captain!' Good-night, Mrs Cape! Coming on deck, Jaques?'
'No!' said my partner, 'bed for this child, g'night;' and murmuring a disgusted 'Fifteen points—and the vinegar—and the heat—phew!' he shut his cabin door with a jerk.
I climbed the stern hatchway, and joined the three men lounging against the skylight on the poop. The moon hung hazily between the softly flapping sails of the idling ship. Out of the deadly calm waters a little purposeless heave rocked her ever and anon to this side and that, and the old shellback at the useless wheel whistled softly to himself, as he looked vainly for the ship's wake in the oily tropical ocean.
The Southern Cross dipped afar on the port quarter, and innumerable stars spangled the stilly depths of the dark heavens. The curiously dissonant miaul of the foes' le cat hit the ear, through the sultry stifling air, with a sense of the relieved ridiculous.
'Dosé fallows you know' (he pronounced it 'gnau'), said the mate in his slightly nasal, foreign accent, evidently resuming, 'its very curious you know, dey rraālly haven't anny feelings.'
'Do you mean, they feel no emotions, as we understand the word?' said young Raymond impatiently, his intolerance of human beings so constituted ringing in the high-pitched tones of his clear voice.
'Not a blessed one!' said a third voice from the ship's side, shrill and worn, 'Yellow devils! Yellow devils! they've only one virtue.'
'And that, Doctor?'
'Opium, sirree. They're tolerable, when they're opium drunk.'
The mate looked up sharply, and with his brown, almond-shaped Slav eyes scrutinized keenly the dim figure of the speaker, and his mouth, between the close-trimmed pointed beard and drooping moustaches, took a more than usually cynical and mournful curve.
'You are severe, Doctor,' he said; but the other, without answering, turned away, and leaned over the bulwark wearily.
'Ah! that is bad, you know,' I heard the mate say to himself under his breath.
'Yes,' said the shrill voice presently from the darkness, 'you may have seen 'em and you may talk about 'em, but you don't know them. You've not worked in China Town amongst John Chinaman, as I've worked. I guess you've not seen 'em born, and die, and marry, as I've seen them. Ugh! devils—devils—hog-skinned, slit-eyed devils!'
'It is all tempérrament, you know,' said the mate, 'dosé fallows, you know, they are different all through, it is not a question of degree. A white man will never understand how their minds wōrrk. Will you have a cigarette, Doctor?' He watched the thin face and trembling hand closely, and shook his head, as the Doctor turned back with his lighted cigarette to the ship's side.
'It is bad, you know,' he muttered again to himself. Young Raymond had strolled to the wheel, and was standing talking cheerily to the helmsman; the heat seemed to have no effect on his buoyant spirits. I, stretched on a locker, fanned myself lazily with the mate's cap, and the mate himself sat in his favourite attitude with his hands clasping his knees, his chin sunk on his chest.
Presently the Doctor began to talk again, more to himself than to us.
'What a night!' he said. 'What a ghastly, hellish, stifling night! Look at that oily pond, can't you feel the heat lifting out of it into your face. I used to think nothing could lick the Queensland bush, but, Great Lordy! this is worse, many points worse; there was always a kind of a breeze there and some stir of life, but this flat, oily waste—Oh! for a breath of air. I can't breathe; I tell you, Armand, I can't breathe.' He turned round to the mate fiercely, and threw out his thin hands, as if to thrust from him some suffocating weight. 'What's the good of you seamen,' he laughed a feeble hoarse laugh, 'if you can't fetch some sort of air up out of your hell-doomed oceans?'
'No fear, Doctor, we'll get you some before long annyway, three days flat cālm is a big spell even for the Doldrums. How's her head, my son?' he called to the grey-bearded helmsman.
'Nor-nor West, zurr.'
'Is she doing anny?'
'Noa, zurr, but zims theer's a but of a swell tu th' Sou East, mebbe we 'll 'ave wind 'fore the marnin'.' The Shellback spat on his hand and held it out, then shook his head doubtfully.
'The dawn will bring it,' said the mate, 'you will see.'
'Not to me,' said the Doctor to himself, 'I'm through.'
Young Raymond turned at the sound of the dreary despairing voice.
'What's that?' he said, 'Through! we're all through, we're all kippered to the nines; don't be so beastly egotistical. Doctor, you've got no blooming monopoly.' The sunny ring of his voice through the jaded night was as refreshing as a breeze, but the Doctor only said moodily:
'Yes, my friend, but I guess you weren't fried to start with, there was still some English juice in you; you haven't been spread-eagled on a gridiron for seven years till everything's been sucked out of you,—even sleep.'
'Thank the Lord,' said young Raymond in fervent tones, as he threw his head back, and snuffed at an imaginary breeze, 'I can always sleep.'
'Sleep!' echoed the Doctor shrilly, and his thin scarecrow of a figure writhed against the railing of the bulwark, 'I havn't slept for weeks,—I'm going home, home, I tell you, after seven God-forsaken years, but I'd give it all, and chuck in the rest of my life, for twenty-four hours of natural sleep.'
At the word 'natural' the mate shifted uneasily in his seat, and his foot beat a tatoo incessantly on the deck.
'There will be trouble,' he said softly, 'big trouble, unless we get the wind, you know. Come, my dear fallow,' he went on to the Doctor, 'what is the matter with you to-night, you were not even amuséd with the Wray baby—oh!' he laughed with a sudden unrestrained merriment curious to listen to in that sultry, joyless air, 'that is an interésting little ānimal. Did you see Cotter fill it with plum-duff at dinner, and Mrs Wray opposite laughing all the time, you know, and little Wray looking 'orrifiéd,—ah-ha! and the little ānimal likéd it, you know,' his laughter died out as suddenly, and he gazed at the Doctor with his mournful eyes,—the eyes of a man who has been to the edge of the world many times, and looking over—come back again.
'You are hipped to-night, you are quite dull you know. Tell us a yarn of John Chinaman; he has a most curious individuālity, annyway.'
There was silence a moment, then the spanker boom creaked slightly from pure inaction, as floors creak in houses at the dead of night, and a spark from the mate's cigarette floated straight upwards in the dead air; then came a weird, droning sing-song whisper from the bulwarks.
'Once upon a time,' it said, 'there was a poor devil of a doctor, whose lot it became after many wanderings to minister for his living, in an oven, to the extremities of John Chinaman, whereby he learnt many things,—for instance, that it was good to eat puppy-dog and go unshaven, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, beauty or ugliness, cleanliness or dirt, heaven or hell,—that there was no end to the miseries of the white man, and neither end nor beginning to the miseries of the yellow man. But also,'—the whisper almost died away, 'he learnt one supreme good, '(Greek characters),' that without which man withers—life has no taste, no colour, no scent,—the great, the glorious—My God! O my God!!' The voice from the faintest whisper rose suddenly to a scream. With a spring young Raymond's lithe white-clothed figure was by the Doctor's side, his arm round his neck.
'Steady, dear old boy!' he said.
The meaning of those muttered sayings had suddenly been rendered plain, and the mate stood leaning forward with his long arms half stretched towards the Doctor. The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern.
'Ohé! ' he said, 'Ohé! tck tck'
As for me, I moved swiftly to the wheel, and stood between the group of men and the helmsman, speaking to him at random, in the instinctive dread of what was coming next on the shrill tones that lifted themselves behind me.
'Yes!' said the worn voice, 'look at me!—look at me!—what am I? What have I sunk to? I, who was even as you,—public school—'Varsity—Bart's—What's the use of it all? Look at us, I say, look'—he clutched with one hand the arm thrown about him; and as if answering the hysterical cry, the moonlight streamed from behind the main tops'le, with a cruel suddenness, full on to the two men. It lit up the bright, fresh face and yellow hair of the one,—tall and lithe and radiantly white—and threw into a ghastly relief the other,—long, shrunken and shambling, with his twisted yellow face and sunken hunted eyes, with the little brown streak at the corner of the thin distorted mouth, the lank discoloured hair, the writhing, skeleton hands. He cowered as the light fell upon him, and buried his head like a child on young Raymond's shoulder.
When I turned again, old Carey, the Shellback, was looking steadily at the deck, and, contrary to all orders, spitting vigourously upon it.
'Fact is we'm tu fur tu the East; yu zee, zurr, these y'er ca'ms is all along o' that.'
What answer I made to the soft West-country drawl I know not, because it is bewildering to hear a man's sobs drawn under hard pressure against a linen coat. Then the mate was speaking.
'Come down to your bunk, my dear fallow, it will be all right, you know; I will give you some things to make you sleep.'
'Sleep!' came out of the sobs, as a voice might come out of a grave, on to which the earth was being shovelled, 'My God!—if I could sleep without... Armand, for pity's sake make me sleep—'
'There! there!' young Raymond spoke as to a child.
As swiftly as it had streamed forth, the moonlight hid itself behind a kindly sail, and the three soft footsteps, moving along the deck, slowly died away out of my hearing.
'Might yu 'appen to 'ave zum baccy, zurr, the mate's gone down, yu zee, an' it du be rale 'ot tu-night, that's zartain.'
I gave the understanding Carey out of my pouch, and we smoked in a sympathetic silence.
••••••
I woke with a start; a faint light was showing through the open port hole, and the half-drawn curtain of the bunk wavered unsteadily.
'She's moving,' I thought, feeling with a vast sense of relief the fluttering pulse beginning to beat at last in the wind-logged ship.
'Yes, there's a breeze from the South-East; get up!' Young Raymond was standing by the side of the bunk, his white clothes unchanged, but with a face unknown to me, so grave, drawn, and sunless was it.
'What's wrong?'
'The Doctor!' he said, 'Come!'
We crossed the dark saloon, unswept and ungarnished, just as it had been left the evening before. Raymond silently drew aside the green baize curtain of a cabin on the starboard side. Within it stood the mate, stooping over a figure stretched limply on the lower bunk; he looked up as we came in, and withdrew his hand, with something in it, from under the pillow.
'Look!' he said, holding up a little inlaid box. 'I was afrayd of it; I lookéd for it last night, you know,'—there was a curious note of appeal in his voice,—'but dosé fallows are so cunning, you know.'
I looked at the face lying upturned to the growing light. It was no longer twisted; the eyes stared quietly at the roof of the bunk, the hands were crossed peacefully on the sunken chest. In that face, which had writhed the night before in hunted agony, there remained only the little brown stain at the corner of the mouth to mark it as the same.
'Dead?'
'Quite.' The mate knelt, and reverently drew the lids over the quiet eyes.
Young Raymond was leaning silently apart against the side of the cabin, his head framed in the open port-hole, and his face was ever grey and drawn. I turned from him to the mate.
'How?'
He answered the double question of my glances hurriedly.
'No,—it was an accident, see—' he unscrewed the lid of the little box, and counted the tiny black-brown pills in it. 'Six—seven—āyt—there are manny happy hours, you see; while desé were here, he would not have done it, you know. No, it was an accident,—perrhaps he took one too manny,—but it was the heat, you know, and that'—he laid his hand gently over the dead man's heart. 'Poor fallow! I likéd him greatly.'
There was a long silence in the little cabin; the faint 'lip-lip' of the rising waves against the ship's side seemed very far away somehow, and the measured tramp of the second mate on the poop above sounded in muffled harmony to our thoughts—then six bells rang out clear and full.
'It is Cotter's watch still,' said the mate, 'I am free for an hour yet. We must talk, you know.'
He moved over and shut the door, then seated himself on the side of the dead man's bunk with a reverent callousness, born of an intimate familiarity with many kinds of death.
The ends of the Doctor's dusky crimson sash hanging over the upper bunk quivered slightly, with the faint rolling of the ship, against the mate's smoothly dark head, as he crouched forward with his back hunched, and his bearded chin thrust out. His hands were clasped round one knee, the thin leg below them working incessantly with a quick, nervous movement. All the time he was speaking, he looked straight at young Raymond with his mournful eyes, and the latter, who had never moved from his leaning attitude against the cabin side, gazed abstractedly in front of him from out of a growing halo of flame-coloured light. The ship's cat purring softly was rubbing itself slowly against the white trousered leg.
'Dis thing had to hāppen, you know,' said the mate at last. 'It was written, you see, there'—he raised a hand and pointed to the still face. 'I knew it a long time. I think I knew it when he first came on board at Adelayde; he walkéd down the quay, you know, with that fatiguéd walk he had, poor fallow, and it was written in his eyes—they were quite hunted, you know. I've rrāally been the doctor on the old galley this journey, you know, he wasn't fit for it. Hang it all, I have been doseing the shellbacks, you know, poor devils—ah—ha!' he laughed that sudden spontaneous laugh that must have come from his lips even in death, if an idea had commended itself to his sardonic humour.
'The skipper should never have taken him on board, you know; but the old fallow was in a hole, he had to get off, and he had to have a doctor. The old galley is an invalid ship, you know, and so she has to have a doctor and a cow,—that blessed cow hasn't given anny milk, still she hās four legs, you know—and I am the doctor.' He gnawed at his moustache and muttered some words under his breath.
Then young Raymond spoke for the first time.
'Did you know that?' he said, pointing with a shrinking gesture to the opium box in the mate's hand.
'After Cape Town, I knew it. Guessed it when he came on board, you know, and shut himself into his cabin for two days. I got in once, and then I saw what the trouble was, you know. I lookéd for that'—he held up the box—'but dosé fallows are so cunning. He knew it too, he knew he was going to hand in his checks, you know. He uséd to talk to me, and he often said, "If I get home."' The mate paused. 'Well! that is āll over, it had to hāppen, you know.' His voice and face and the resigned dejection of his whole figure embodied the word 'Kismet'; the threads of the situation, for the moment, had slipped through his fingers. He sat quite quiet, staring mournfully in front of him, but the leg beneath his clasped hands never ceased a second in its nervous movement.
The tramp above, and the 'lip-lip' of the little green waves against the ship's side, were still the only sounds that broke in on the early silence.
'For the sake of his people,' said young Raymond suddenly, taking the little box from the mate's hand.
'Yes, he had an ayged father, you know, a parson in Yorkshire, he was going home to him—after seven years—that is harrd, you know,' the mate said dreamily.
'Well?' said Raymond impatiently, and he put the hand that held the box through the open port-hole.
'No—no—look here,' said the mate, holding out his hand for the box, 'I must tell the skipper, you know,' and he put the box away in his pocket. 'But you will see, it will be āll right, he will leave the whole rācket in my hands; he hates a fuss, you know, that old fallow. Besides, it wasn't rrāally the opium at the end, you know, it was the heat—his hāart was so weakenéd, you see.' He got up and looked earnestly, with narrowed eyes, at the dead man's wasted figure.
'Yes,' he said at last, 'it was a little joke, the breeze would have savéd him, you know, ... but it will be all right,—failure of the hāart from the heat... and then we shall put him over the side; annyway there will be no post-mortem. Nobody will come in here, you see, except the skipper, and the box will be in my pocket,—the wind will take away the smell in time.' There was a faint, sweet, sickly smell as of drugs in the close air of the confined space.
'So be it!' said young Raymond, moving from his station against the cabin wall.
'Let us put him to rest, though; his face haunts me, even when I don't look at it,' and he shuddered; 'the light is too cruel.' Keeping his head averted, he took a handkerchief from a drawer, and covered the dead man's face. The flaming East was sending a shaft of orange light through the open port-hole full upon it, and the effect was not pretty.
'When did he go?' I said, breaking the silence that followed.
'I don't know,' said the mate, 'but it could not have been long before the breeze came, annyway—he was hardly cold, you know.'
Young Raymond faced round to the light with strained eyes.
'I know,' he said suddenly, 'I know, I saw him go, I saw it all. I shall never get it out of my head—never! never!'
The mate looked at him half cynically, half concernedly.
'Hāng it all, my dear fallow,' he said, 'death is not an aymiable joker, when you are not uséd to him, you know; but you musn't let him play with your narves.'
'Nerves!' said young Raymond hoarsely, 'you shall tell me if it is nerves, Armand, for, by George! I should like to know.'
'Well?' said the mate; he had seated himself again in his favourite attitude.
The world seemed suddenly enclosed within the walls of this wooden crib, time was annihilated, everything stood still, there was no longer anything outside—just the cabin—we three—and the dead man. I felt giddy and stifled, but the moment young Raymond began to speak, all that feeling merged in wonder at the intense earnestness in his face and the tones of his voice.
'After we left him, last night,' he said, 'I slung my hammock on the main deck, starboard side, just where the gymnastic bars are rigged by the main mast; it seemed cooler there than on the poop. Cotter came out on watch just after I turned in, so it was about midnight, I suppose. I couldn't get the idea of him out of my head;' he avoided looking at the dead man always, and stared straight in front of him.
'I could see him tossing and twisting in that bunk, and I couldn't get to sleep for ages; I suppose I must have dropped off at last, though, because I didn't hear two bells go. I woke suddenly out of an awfully jolly dream about home and my people. The moon was down, but it wasn't very dark; there was just that light that comes before the dawn, you know. Oh! yes, I could see all right; I could see pretty clearly right to the starboard hatchway leading up to the poop—that was just facing me as my hammock was slung. It was frightfully hot, suffocating—there wasn't a breath of air, not a breath. I lay awake a few minutes, and then I suppose I dozed off again; but though my eyes were shut, I seemed to have the feeling that something was coming towards me. It grew upon me, so that I must have half raised myself in my hammock, because when I woke again I was sitting up. There was something—a figure; it came from under the starboard hatch out of the saloon. I could hardly see it in that horrible, misty, unreal light, but it came slowly along the deck close to the bulwark without making any noise. I don't know why I was in a ghastly funk, but it seemed somehow uncanny—I wasn't properly awake, you see. I waited for it—it seemed hours coming. When it was almost within touch, I saw what—it was—it was—him. His head was bent back and his hands thrown up; he was like a shot bird that's towering for air, you know, but there was no sound, no choke or gasp—I listened for it, but there was none, not even a sigh'—he paused. 'There ought, there must have been a gasp, if it was he,' he muttered to himself; 'he couldn't have stood like that without a sound. Oh! Armand, the face!'
He spoke in short broken sentences, and his hands twisted here and there in the full agony of recollection.
'The eyes were staring open, as they were before you—and nothing moved in it—it was a dead face ... and then it went away again, you know,—I don't know how it went. I shall never get that look out of my head—never!' He drew his hands across his eyes.
'It was far worse than that dead face,' he said solemnly, pointing to the bunk; 'it was the dead face of a living man.'
'Then?' said the mate.
'Then I lay back in my hammock, not more than a minute, I think,—and then I got out and came here, and as I crossed the deck the first of the breeze crossed it too—too late!—he died for want of air, I know he did—just too late, you see.'
'Too late!' echoed the mate softly, nodding his head. 'That is the joke.'
'He was lying here as you found him. I didn't touch him before I came and told you. And, look here! Armand, what have I seen? It scared me.'
An infinite and sombre gentleness was in the look the mate bent to meet the trouble in the young face turned to him, but he only said, 'That is most interésting. You are not to be pitied, you know, you are to be envied; a man does not often see these things, you know.'
'But what did I see? What? I tell you it scared me.'
'I think,' said the mate slowly—'I don't know, of course,—but I think you have seen what very few people have seen. I think there is a time, you know, which comes between life and death. It is perhaps the twilight of the body you know, and the dawning of the soul,—it is that breathless space which these old crāfts of our bodies have to go through, you know, where there is no life, and not yet death,—the Doldrums of our individuālities hanging in the wind.' There was a long silence.
'Thanks,' said young Raymond at last, and the old sunny look seemed to creep back into his face through the haunting shadow of fear cast there by the thing he had seen.
'Thanks, old fellow! The dawning of the soul! I like that.'
He had caught, like a child, at the one idea in the mate's words which appealed to his narrow, sanguine optimism; and only I saw the look of wearily gentle cynicism in the mate's face, and heard his words as he turned away out of the cabin, 'Yes? if there is such a thing, you know.'
So I turned away too from the 'valley of the shadow,' but young Raymond knelt softly by the bunk and drew the handkerchief from the dead man's face. He could bear to look on him now. The breeze stole in and stirred the hair on the two heads close together.
The words came to me at the door.
'You're all right now, old fellow, aren't you? You've gone home.' Then through a choke in the voice, 'but, oh! my God! your luck was hard.'