Command Part 18

Spokesly's heart sank.

"Come here!" he shouted, beckoning.

"What's the matter, Mister?" said the ap.r.o.ned one, climbing up the abominable ladder with its stairs of iron rods. Mr. Spokesly's heart rose again.

"You English?" he asked.

"Sure, I'm a French Canadian," retorted the other. "What's the matter?

Are you the new mate?"

"Yes," said Mr. Spokesly. "I'm the new mate. Are you the bosun?"

"Sure I am," said the other indignantly. "What did you think I was? The cook?"

"Now, now, cut it out," warned the new mate. "I've had all I can stand just for the present. How many men have you got?"

"Three. How many did you think I got? Thirty?"

"Bosun, if you want it, you can have it, but I tell you straight you got to help me get this ship clean."

"Sure I will. What did you think I was doin'?"

"Send a man along with a bucket of soft soap and water," said Mr.

Spokesly hastily. "I'll go round with you later."

"Where's that other mate?" asked the bosun, rather mystified.

"Over the side," said Mr. Spokesly, pointing.

"You seen the captinne yet?" the bosun pursued.

"Plenty, plenty. Send a man along."

Mr. Spokesly turned and to his intense astonishment found Captain Rannie in the saloon.

"Why, where were you all the time?" he asked.

"In my cabin," said Captain Rannie, staring at the floor nervously. "I must say you make noise enough when you join a ship."

"Well, Captain, I'll argue all you want later. Where's the medicine chest?"

"In my cabin."

"Then you'll have to give me the run of it to stop this bleeding. Got any friars' balsam?"

"I--I--I'll see. I'll see." Captain Rannie objected to be approached directly. He was already beginning to wonder, after listening to the very emphatic remarks of his new chief officer through the bulkhead of his cabin, if he had not made a mistake in demanding a change. Very unsettling, a change. He went downstairs again and unlocked his door. It had three locks, Mr. Spokesly observed in some surprise. After opening the door, Captain Rannie stepped through and quickly drew a heavy blue curtain across.

"I'll bring it out to you," he said from within.

Mr. Spokesly dragged the curtain back and stepped in himself. He was indignant at this extraordinary treatment. He was astounded, however, to see Captain Rannie shrink away towards the settee, holding up his arms.

"Don't you dare to touch me!" he shrieked in a very low key. "Don't you...."

Mr. Spokesly suddenly caught sight of himself in the gla.s.s across the room. He was not a very rea.s.suring spectacle. His face was dirty and blood-smeared, and his collar was torn away from his throat. He closed the door.

"Captain," he said, "we'd better have an understanding right at the start. I'm going to be mate o' this ship for six months."

"You think you are," whispered the captain, slowly approaching a cabinet on the wall. "You only think you are."

"Well, I been paid for it anyway," said Mr. Spokesly, examining his wounded hand. "So we'll take it for granted. Now if you back me up, I'll back you up. Why didn't you come out and help me when that stiff started to make trouble?"

Captain Rannie absolutely ignored this question. He was in a corner, and like some animals in similar plight, he might almost be said to have feigned death. He stood stock still looking into his medicine chest, his back to Mr. Spokesly, his high shoulders raised higher. He was in a corner, for he had been betrayed already into the demonstration of nervous fear. It was the knowledge of his horror of the slightest physical contact with others that Mr. Spiteri had been unable to resist.

"He's nearly bit my thumb through," went on Mr. Spokesly, walking over to the wash-bowl. The ship shook as the winch hurled the slings into the air. Down below a worn pump was knocking its heart out in a succession of hacking coughs.

Captain Rannie, the flask of friars' balsam in his hand, turned slowly from the cabinet and moved cautiously to the table. He set it down, went back, and drew out a roll of bandage. He was beginning to recover his normal state of mind. Everything so far had taken the form in his view of violating the privacy of the commander. Everything! Here was this man, not five minutes on the ship, actually forcing his way into the captain's room. Captain Rannie had never heard of such a thing in his life. It loomed before him with the grimness of an irrevocable disaster.

He had always had that last resource in his encounters with Spiteri--he could go into his room, lock all three locks, draw the heavy blue curtain, and remain in a mysterious seclusion for as long as he liked.

Now--he almost shuddered with anguish--here was this new chief officer--a perfect stranger--didn't know him from Adam--washing his wounds absolutely in the sacred wash-bowl, standing in not over clean shoes on the very piece of matting on which he himself, the master of the vessel, stood while shaving and making stern faces at himself in the gla.s.s as he rehea.r.s.ed imaginary scenes with the rabble outside. In a few moments Mr. Spokesly's eyes, grown accustomed to the sombre twilight of the blue curtains of the scuttles, would be wandering round the cabin, noting things Captain Rannie showed to no one. No one. He grew fierce as he thought of his outraged privacy. He must get this man out of the room quickly. He slopped friars' balsam on some cotton wool, and fixing his pale, exasperated gaze upon Mr. Spokesly's thumb, began to bind it up.

Mr. Spokesly felt an urgent need for a smoke. He reached out and drew a cigarette from a box on the table and Captain Rannie's head bent lower as he flushed with a renewed sense of outrage. Nothing sacred! Without the slightest hint of a request.

"We may have a pa.s.senger, I hear," said the oblivious Mr. Spokesly as he managed to get the cigarette alight.

"Oh, dear me, no!" retorted Captain Rannie, with a sort of despairing chuckle. "Quite impossible, quite. I shouldn't dream of allowing anything of the sort."

"Not if the boss wanted it?"

"Oh, no doubt, in that case, the master of the vessel would be the last to hear of it." He returned to the cabinet to cut some plaster. Captain Rannie had not a bedside manner. His method of affixing the plaster made his patient grunt. Gazing over the upraised arm of the captain, Mr.

Spokesly suddenly fixed his eyes with attention on the pictures round the bunk. They were pictures of people who were, so to say, the ant.i.thesis of his new commander, pugilists and wrestlers and dancers, men and women of exaggerated physical development. Some of them were so stark in their emphasis on the muscles that they resembled anatomical diagrams. There were photographs, too, of sculptures--sharp, white, and beautiful against black velvet backgrounds; boys wrestling, girls dancing, a naked youth striving with a leopard. And on a hook near the door was a set of those elastic cords and pulleys whereby athletic prowess is developed. Mr. Spokesly suddenly lost his belligerent mood.

He had encountered something he did not quite understand. He turned as the captain finished and his eye fell on shelves packed with books. And outside the winch groaned and squeaked, down below the pump thumped and bucketed.

"I'll go," said Mr. Spokesly. "I must find the bosun...." And he went out, eager to go at the job and get rid of this dreadful grime on the unhappy old ship. As he went the captain stood in front of the medicine chest swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and covered his eyes with his hand. He was trembling violently.

For he was a man who was at war with the world. He was so preoccupied with this tremendous conflict that the disturbance in Europe scarcely sounded in his ears. He was a man without faith and without desire of hope. In the years behind him lay the wreckage of honour, when he had gone out east to the China Coast and never gone back. Revenge, he had called it, and called it still, for unascertained and undefined injuries. Since then he had had freedom. He had hugged the thought of the woman, who had imagined herself so clever at blinding him, working in poverty to keep herself and her brat. Her brat, ha--ha! Away out there in China, a thousand miles up an immense river, in the home river-port of his country ship, he said ha--ha! and fell to improving himself. Driven to devise a mode of existence both unsocial and unintellectual, he had stumbled upon strange things in human life. He acc.u.mulated vast stocks of scandal about humanity, and delved into repositories of knowledge which most men avoid and forget. Those and the pipe, which led him into another life altogether, the life of irresponsible dreams, wherein a man's mind, released from the body yet retaining the desires of the body, ranges forth into twilights of oblivion, clutching here and there at strange seductive shapes and thrilling to voices not heard before. Captain Rannie, out there, was much happier than many men who hold their souls in leash and render their accounts exactly. He sailed up and down his great river, a mystery to the Chinamen of the crew, a joke among the Europeans. It did not become apparent to him or anybody else that anything was happening to him. Nothing was happening to him save that the lacquer and varnish and ornament of his conventional upbringing in England were nearly all gone, and underneath there was nothing save himself, a timid, sensitive, sensual, quarrelsome creature with a disposition that seemed to rational people to have gone rancid with the heat. They bore with him because he was used to the work, and he was a warm man in silver dollars, too, they said. But the country-ships began to go home. The colossal freights out of England could not be resisted. Captain Rannie was ordered to take his ship home. Home! He funked horribly but he funked losing his job still more, and he took her home as far as Port Said, with a cargo of tobacco from Sumatra. But farther he would not go. He made himself ill, an easy trick with a well-stocked medicine chest, and no one suspected a man would be striving to avoid reaching England. It was generally just the other way round. He went to the hospital until the ship was gone and then became convalescent, moping about Port Said in his yellow pongee suits and enormous panama hat, smoking innumerable cigarettes and discovering among other things a new world of gigantic phantoms.

It was not difficult, he found, to discover the dealers in drugs and he set out, as a buyer of tobacco. But although his first trip to Saloniki and back to Alexandria was successful and enormously profitable, he became aware that he was being uncomfortably shadowed, and he left again in an Italian steamer. It was here he encountered Mr. Dainopoulos, bound home from a business trip to Egypt; where he had been buying up cheap the stocks of ship-chandlers who had been caught by the sudden withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles for service in the north. Mr.

Dainopoulos had bought a small ship and now needed a commander.

So far, one might say, Captain Rannie had simply lived the life of many of his condition, Englishmen who had grown soft and flaccid during their long exiles and who now crept furtively along in the shadow of war, neither very honest nor very crooked, ign.o.ble and negligible. But as he sat there now behind his locked door and heavy curtain, shading his eyes with his hand, he faced the immediate future with dread. The sight of Mr. Spokesly, bandaged and plastered, hurrying out to get on with the work, made him see with painful clearness where he himself had fallen and how problematic was the task ahead. He would not tackle a job like this again, he told himself. Never again. He would get away out East again with what he had already made and resume the old, safe, easy river-life, receiving his stacks of "reading matter" from London, reading until his brain was soft and soggy with foolish dreams. It was the best life he knew and he longed to get back to it. After this voyage. How he hated all this! When he came back into the world of urgent men after one of his long periods of stupor, he was horrified at the necessity of living at all, and sometimes contemplated suicide. Now he was afraid, not so much of any punishment which might befall him as of the destruction of his way of life, the harsh secular interferences, the spying out of his useless secrets and his long-hid dishonour. It was his very life now, this carefully contrived oblivion in which he lay like an insect in a coc.o.o.n. It was beyond his power to desire a return to England. The very thought made him tremble. One of the secrets he guarded with such hysterical care was his loathing of women. Men thought him a rake, _a viveur--ha-ha_! That was what he wanted them to think. He could not bear any intimacy at all. This new chief officer--that was the disturbing element in his reverie--must be given to understand there could be no intimacy, none whatever.

He listened to the sounds of scrubbing outside, vigorous thumps and kicks as the mops went to and fro. There were voices, too, the ingenuous bawlings of that bosun, offensively active. An unwarrantable intrusion!

Quite unnecessary, all this waste of soap and soda. Captain Rannie began to revive: the white tabloid he had swallowed as the door closed behind Mr. Spokesly was getting its work in. He felt better. He would go ash.o.r.e and explain to Mr. Dainopoulos that this sort of thing could not go on.

He examined himself in the gla.s.s with stern attention. His gray hair, parted just off the middle, was touched with a brush. Good. He was ready. He lit a cigarette. He unlocked the door and went out.

Up on deck Captain Rannie was immediately aware of a novel state of affairs. It was so long since he had experienced the sensation he could scarcely identify it. There was someone in charge. The old accommodation-ladder, untouched since the time of Spiteri's advent, was down and the teak steps hastily scrubbed. Made fast to the grating was his boat, washed and with a red and yellow flag on the stern-seat. Mr.

Spokesly in a pair of the bosun's rubber boots and with his coat off, came up, blowing a whistle. A young Norwegian came clattering up the ladder from the fore-deck.

"Go and wash your face," said Mr. Spokesly. "And take the cap'en ash.o.r.e."

Captain Rannie, as he sat with the tiller in his hand and watched the young Norwegian pulling with all his might, felt extraordinarily proud.