The End of the Tether Part 8

At last he would lock up the desk with the decision of unshaken confidence, jump and go out. He would walk swiftly back and forth on that part of the foredeck which was kept clear of the lumber and of the bodies of the native pa.s.sengers. They were a great nuisance, but they were also a source of profit that could not be disdained. He needed every penny of profit the Sofala could make. Little enough it was, in all conscience! The incert.i.tude of chance gave him no concern, since he had somehow arrived at the conviction that, in the course of years, every number was bound to have his winning turn. It was simply a matter of time and of taking as many tickets as he could afford for every drawing. He generally took rather more; all the earnings of the s.h.i.+p went that way, and also the wages he allowed himself as chief engineer.

It was the wages he paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned and at the same time a pa.s.sionate regret. He scowled at the lascars with their deck brooms, at the quartermasters rubbing the bra.s.s rails with greasy rags; he was eager to shake his fist and roar abuse in bad Malay at the poor carpenter--a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over, before the fury of that "devil." But it was when he raised up his eyes to the bridge where one of these sailor frauds was always planted by law in charge of his s.h.i.+p that he felt almost dizzy with rage. He abominated them all; it was an old feud, from the time he first went to sea, an unlicked cub with a great opinion of himself, in the engine-room. The slights that had been put upon him. The persecutions he had suffered at the hands of skippers--of absolute n.o.bodies in a steams.h.i.+p after all. And now that he had risen to be a s.h.i.+powner they were still a plague to him: he had absolutely to pay away precious money to the conceited useless loafers:--As if a fully qualified engineer--who was the owner as well--were not fit to be trusted with the whole charge of a s.h.i.+p. Well!

he made it pretty warm for them; but it was a poor consolation. He had come in time to hate the s.h.i.+p too for the repairs she required, for the coal-bills he had to pay, for the poor beggarly freights she earned.

He would clench his hand as he walked and hit the rail a sudden blow, viciously, as though she could be made to feel pain. And yet he could not do without er; he needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and nail to keep his head above water till the expected flood of fortune came sweeping up and landed him safely on the high sh.o.r.e of his ambition.

It was now to do nothing, nothing whatever, and have plenty of money to do it on. He had tasted of power, the highest form of it his limited experience was aware of--the power of s.h.i.+powning. What a deception!

Vanity of vanities! He wondered at his folly. He had thrown away the substance for the shadow. Of the gratification of wealth he did not know enough to excite his imagination with any visions of luxury. How could he--the child of a drunken boiler-maker--going straight from the workshop into the engine-room of a north-country collier! But the notion of the absolute idleness of wealth he could very well conceive. He reveled in it, to forget his present troubles; he imagined himself walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their gutters well as a boy) with his pockets full of sovereigns. He would buy himself a house; his married sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would render him infinite homage. There would be nothing to think of. His word would be law. He had been out of work for a long time before he won his prize, and he remembered how Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had cringed joyfully before him in the evening, when the news had come.

Poor Charley, though he made his living by ministering to various abject vices, gave credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage. He was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and he reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the cavernous grog-shop downstairs. Ma.s.sy remembered the curious, respectful looks of the "trashy" white men in the place. His heart had swelled within him.

Ma.s.sy had left Charley's infamous den directly he had realized the possibilities open to him, and with his nose in the air. Afterwards the memory of these adulations was a great sadness.

This was the true power of money,--and no trouble with it, nor any thinking required either. He thought with difficulty and felt vividly; to his blunt brain the problems offered by any ordered scheme of life seemed in their cruel toughness to have been put in his way by the obvious malevolence of men. As a s.h.i.+powner everyone had conspired to make him a n.o.body. How could he have been such a fool as to purchase that accursed s.h.i.+p. He had been abominably swindled; there was no end to this swindling; and as the difficulties of his improvident ambition gathered thicker round him, he really came to hate everybody he had ever come in contact with. A temper naturally irritable and an amazing sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had ended by making of life for him a sort of inferno--a place where his lost soul had been given up to the torment of savage brooding.

But he had never hated anyone so much as that old man who had turned up one evening to save him from an utter disaster,--from the conspiracy of the wretched sailors. He seemed to have fallen on board from the sky.

His footsteps echoed on the empty steamer, and the strange deep-toned voice on deck repeating interrogatively the words, "Mr. Ma.s.sy, Mr. Ma.s.sy there?" had been startling like a wonder. And coming up from the depths of the cold engine-room, where he had been pottering dismally with a candle amongst the enormous shadows, thrown on all sides by the skeleton limbs of machinery, Ma.s.sy had been struck dumb by astonishment in the presence of that imposing old man with a beard like a silver plate, towering in the dusk rendered lurid by the expiring flames of sunset.

"Want to see me on business? What business? I am doing no business.

Can't you see that this s.h.i.+p is laid up?" Ma.s.sy had turned at bay before the pursuing irony of his disaster. Afterwards he could not believe his ears. What was that old fellow getting at? Things don't happen that way.

It was a dream. He would presently wake up and find the man vanished like a shape of mist. The gravity, the dignity, the firm and courteous tone of that athletic old stranger impressed Ma.s.sy. He was almost afraid. But it was no dream. Five hundred pounds are no dream. At once he became suspicious. What did it mean? Of course it was an offer to catch hold of for dear life. But what could there be behind?

Before they had parted, after appointing a meeting in a solicitor's office early on the morrow, Ma.s.sy was asking himself, What is his motive? He spent the night in hammering out the clauses of the agreement--a unique instrument of its sort whose tenor got bruited abroad somehow and became the talk and wonder of the port.

Ma.s.sy's object had been to secure for himself as many ways as possible of getting rid of his partner without being called upon at once to pay back his share. Captain Whalley's efforts were directed to making the money secure. Was it not Ivy's money--a part of her fortune whose only other a.s.set was the time-defying body of her old father? Sure of his forbearance in the strength of his love for her, he accepted, with stately serenity, Ma.s.sy's stupidly cunning paragraphs against his incompetence, his dishonesty, his drunkenness, for the sake of other stringent stipulations. At the end of three years he was at liberty to withdraw from the partners.h.i.+p, taking his money with him. Provision was made for forming a fund to pay him off. But if he left the Sofala before the term, from whatever cause (barring death), Ma.s.sy was to have a whole year for paying. "Illness?" the lawyer had suggested: a young man fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business, who was rather amused.

Ma.s.sy began to whine unctuously, "How could he be expected? . . ."

"Let that go," Captain Whalley had said with a superb confidence in his body. "Acts of G.o.d," he added. In the midst of life we are in death, but he trusted his Maker with a still greater fearlessness--his Maker who knew his thoughts, his human affections, and his motives. His Creator knew what use he was making of his health--how much he wanted it . . .

"I trust my first illness will be my last. I've never been ill that I can remember," he had remarked. "Let it go."

But at this early stage he had already awakened Ma.s.sy's hostility by refusing to make it six hundred instead of five. "I cannot do that," was all he had said, simply, but with so much decision that Ma.s.sy desisted at once from pressing the point, but had thought to himself, "Can't! Old curmudgeon. _Won't_ He must have lots of money, but he would like to get hold of a soft berth and the sixth part of my profits for nothing if he only could."

And during these years Ma.s.sy's dislike grew under the restraint of something resembling fear. The simplicity of that man appeared dangerous. Of late he had changed, however, had appeared less formidable and with a lessened vigor of life, as though he had received a secret wound. But still he remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness, and rect.i.tude. And when Ma.s.sy learned that he meant to leave him at the end of the time, to leave him confronted with the problem of boilers, his dislike blazed up secretly into hate.

It had made him so clear-eyed that for a long time now Mr. Sterne could have told him nothing he did not know. He had much ado in trying to terrorize that mean sneak into silence; he wanted to deal alone with the situation; and--incredible as it might have appeared to Mr. Sterne--he had not yet given up the desire and the hope of inducing that hated old man to stay. Why! there was nothing else to do, unless he were to abandon his chances of fortune. But now, suddenly, since the crossing of the bar at Batu Beru things seemed to be coming rapidly to a point. It disquieted him so much that the study of the winning numbers failed to soothe his agitation: and the twilight in the cabin deepened, very somber.

He put the list away, muttering once more, "Oh, no, my boy, you don't.

Not if I know it." He did not mean the blinking, eavesdropping humbug to force his action. He took his head again into his hands; his immobility confined in the darkness of this shut-up little place seemed to make him a thing apart infinitely removed from the stir and the sounds of the deck.

He heard them: the pa.s.sengers were beginning to jabber excitedly; somebody dragged a heavy box past his door. He heard Captain Whalley's voice above--

"Stations, Mr. Sterne." And the answer from somewhere on deck forward--

"Ay, ay, sir."

"We shall moor head up stream this time; the ebb has made."

"Head up stream, sir."

"You will see to it, Mr. Sterne."

The answer was covered by the autocratic clang on the engine-room gong. The propeller went on beating slowly: one, two, three; one, two, three--with pauses as if hesitating on the turn. The gong clanged time after time, and the water churned this way and that by the blades was making a great noisy commotion alongside. Mr. Ma.s.sy did not move. A sh.o.r.e-light on the other bank, a quarter of a mile across the river, drifted, no bigger than a tiny star, pa.s.sing slowly athwart the circle of the port. Voices from Mr. Van Wyk's jetty answered the hails from the s.h.i.+p; ropes were thrown and missed and thrown again; the swaying flame of a torch carried in a large sampan coming to fetch away in state the Rajah from down the coast cast a sudden ruddy glare into his cabin, over his very person. Mr. Ma.s.sy did not move. After a few last ponderous turns the engines stopped, and the prolonged clanging of the gong signified that the captain had done with them. A great number of boats and canoes of all sizes boarded the off-side of the Sofala. Then after a time the tumult of splas.h.i.+ng, of cries, of shuffling feet, of packages dropped with a thump, the noise of the native pa.s.sengers going away, subsided slowly. On the sh.o.r.e, a voice, cultivated, slightly authoritative, spoke very close alongside--

"Brought any mail for me this time?"

"Yes, Mr. Van Wyk." This was from Sterne, answering over the rail in a tone of respectful cordiality. "Shall I bring it up to you?"

But the voice asked again--

"Where's the captain?"

"Still on the bridge, I believe. He hasn't left his chair. Shall I . . ."

The voice interrupted negligently.

"I will come on board."

"Mr. Van Wyk," Sterne suddenly broke out with an eager effort, "will you do me the favor . . ."

The mate walked away quickly towards the gangway. A silence fell. Mr.

Ma.s.sy in the dark did not move.

He did not move even when he heard slow shuffling footsteps pa.s.s his cabin lazily. He contented himself to bellow out through the closed door--

"You--Jack!"

The footsteps came back without haste; the door handle rattled, and the second engineer appeared in the opening, shadowy in the sheen of the skylight at his back, with his face apparently as black as the rest of his figure.

"We have been very long coming up this time," Mr. Ma.s.sy growled, without changing his att.i.tude.

"What do you expect with half the boiler tubes plugged up for leaks."

The second defended himself loquaciously.

"None of your lip," said Ma.s.sy.

"None of your rotten boilers--I say," retorted his faithful subordinate without animation, huskily. "Go down there and carry a head of steam on them yourself--if you dare. I don't."

"You aren't worth your salt then," Ma.s.sy said. The other made a faint noise which resembled a laugh but might have been a snarl.

"Better go slow than stop the s.h.i.+p altogether," he admonished his admired superior. Mr. Ma.s.sy moved at last. He turned in his chair, and grinding his teeth--

"Dam' you and the s.h.i.+p! I wish she were at the bottom of the sea. Then you would have to starve."

The trusty second engineer closed the door gently.

Ma.s.sy listened. Instead of pa.s.sing on to the bathroom where he should have gone to clean himself, the second entered his cabin, which was next door. Mr. Ma.s.sy jumped up and waited. Suddenly he heard the lock snap in there. He rushed out and gave a violent kick to the door.

"I believe you are locking yourself up to get drunk," he shouted.

A m.u.f.fled answer came after a while.

"My own time."