Command Part 31

He found the engineer calmly hauling the line out of the forward sounding pipes.

"Is she making anything, Chief?" he asked anxiously.

"Just show a light please, Mister Mate. I got a flashlight here but it's gone out on me. Why, four inches. Nothing much _here_. We'll try the other side, eh?"

They scrambled over the hatch and hastily wiped the rod dry before lowering it into the pipe.

"Hm!" The engineer grunted as he brought the rod into view again.

"_Three feet!_ I reckon she's makin' some water here through that bulkhead, Mister Mate. What say if I try the pumps on her, eh?"

"You do that, will you? I was afraid o' that, Chief. You know the bosun's gone?"

"Is that so? Gee! That's a big smas.h.!.+ The bosun? Tk--tk! I'll get the pump on her."

"Now!" said Mr. Spokesly to himself, "I'm going to see the Old Man." And he sprang up the ladders once more.

Captain Rannie was not to be seen, however. Mr. Spokesly went upon the bridge charged with belligerence. But Captain Rannie was an old hand. He had had an extraordinarily varied experience of exasperated subordinates and Mr. Spokesly's conscientious tantrums worried him not at all.

Especially did he fail to appreciate the significance of his chief officer's anxiety at this moment since from his own point of view this smash in the fog, supposing they did not meet any inquisitive craft for an hour or two, and this was not at all likely--this smash was a piece of singular good fortune. The cruiser would report ramming a small vessel in the fog, and the people in Saloniki, knowing the position of the _Kalkis_, would conclude she was lost with all hands, when she failed to appear at Phyros. It was so perfectly in accordance with his desires that he decided to run down and get one of his own special cigarettes. Now that he was actually in the middle of carrying out the plans of the owner of the _Kalkis_, Captain Rannie suffered from none of the timidity and truculent nervousness which had a.s.sailed him the day before. He had more courage than Mr. Spokesly would ever admit because that gentleman was not aware that his captain was a bad navigator. To the bad navigator every voyage is a miracle.

So he came up jauntily, behind Mr. Spokesly, smoking a special cigarette, and ignoring his chief officer completely until the latter chose to speak. This was another trick he had learned in the course of his career of oblique enthusiasms and carefully cultivated antagonisms.

He had once been savagely "attacked," as he called it, by a sailor simply because he waited for the man to speak before saying a word! He had found that men might growl at being treated "like dogs" but to rowel the human soul it was far better to act as though they did not exist at all. There was a blind primeval ferocity to be engendered by adumbrating, even for a few moments, their non-existence. And now, with everything in his favour, for he had heard the engineer's remarks on the condition of the bilges forward, he was resolved to "maintain his authority," as he phrased it, by "a perfectly justifiable silence."

But it was no use trying to convince Mr. Spokesly that he did not exist.

That gentleman, in the course of the last few minutes, since the collision in fact, had experienced a great accession of vitality. He felt as though not only his own existence but the integrity of the s.h.i.+p as a living whole, her frame, her life, her freight, and the souls clinging to her in the blind white void of the fog, was concentrated in himself. He looked over the side and tried to see if the engineer had succeeded in getting the pump on that bilge. She was down by the head--no doubt of that. And yet there couldn't be any real fracture of that bulkhead, or the fore-hold would have filled by now. Lucky all the caps were well lashed on the ventilators. He looked over the side again.

The fog seemed clearing a little. And the s.h.i.+p was moving faster. The beat of the engines was certainly more rapid. He stared at the ostentatiously turned back of his commander with a sort of exasperated admiration. He was evidently a much more accomplished scoundrel than Mr.

Spokesly had imagined. Here he had extra speed up his sleeve. Why, it might be anything up to thirteen knots. Not that the _Kalkis_ had boilers for that speed. Wow! He was a card!

"I suppose you know the bosun was carried overboard when that s.h.i.+p hit us," Mr. Spokesly remarked in a conversational tone as the captain approached in his stroll.

"And I've no doubt," said Captain Rannie with extreme bitterness to the surrounding air, "that you blame me for not stopping and picking him up."

"You might have stopped, certainly," said his chief officer; "but the point is, if you'd been on your right course you wouldn't have hit anything."

"Oh, indeed! Oh, indeed!" said the captain.

"Yes, oh, indeed. You won't maintain you were on the right course, I suppose."

"I maintain nothing," snapped the captain. "I'll merely trouble you to ask the man at the wheel what course he was making when we were run into by one of those infernal, careless naval officers who think they know everything, like you. And after that I'll merely invite you to mind your own business."

"Mind my own business!" repeated Mr. Spokesly in a daze.

"And I'll mind mine," added the captain after a dramatic pause, and turning on his heel.

"You're like some bally old woman," began Mr. Spokesly, "with your nag, nag, nag. I don't wonder that Maltee mate used to go for you."

"Ask the man at the wheel what course he was steering," repeated the captain distinctly, coming back out of the gloom and wheeling away again.

"I'll be going for you myself before this trip is over," added the mate.

"And then kindly leave the bridge," concluded the captain, reappearing once more, as though emerging suddenly from the wings of a theatre and declaiming a speech in a play. Having declaimed it, however, he retreated with singular precipitancy.

"I must say, I've been with a few commanders in my time," Mr. Spokesly began in a general way. He heard his captain's voice out of the dark opining that he had no doubt every one of those commanders was glad enough to get rid of him. He could easily believe that.

"Perhaps they were," agreed Mr. Spokesly. "Perhaps they were. The point is, even supposing that was the case, they never made me want to throw them over the side."

The voice came out of the darkness again, commenting upon Mr. Spokesly's extreme forbearance.

"Don't drive me too far," he warned.

The voice said all Mr. Spokesly had to do was remove himself and come on the bridge when he was sent for. No driving was intended.

"Ah, you talk very well, captain. I'm only wondering whether you'll talk half so well at the Inquiry."

The voice asked, what inquiry? with a t.i.tter.

"There's always an inquiry, somewhere, sometime," said Mr. Spokesly, dully, wondering what he himself would have to say, for that matter. He heard the voice enunciate with a certain lisping exact.i.tude, "Not yet."

"Oh, no, not yet. When the war's won, let's say," he replied. This seemed such a convenient subst.i.tute for "never," that he was not surprised to get no answer save a sound like "Tchah!"

"The fog's lifting," he remarked absently. It was. He could already see a number of stars above his head through the thinning vapour. "I'll leave you," he added, "must get some sleep. However," he went on, "we'll have another look at the bilges. I got a certificate to lose as well as you--if you've got one."

The captain remained in obscurity, and made no reply.

"I mean, if you haven't had it endorsed, or suspended, or any little thing like that."

There was no answer, and tiring of the sport, Mr. Spokesly picked up the hurricane lamp and went down again to sound the starboard bilge. He was getting very tired physically, now the reaction from the excitement of the collision had set in. He found the sounding-rod, neatly chalked, ready to lower. Very decent party, that engineer, he reflected. Rather disconcerting though in his almost perfect neutrality. The wife and the big family out at Cospicua, which is near Valletta, seemed to be a powerful resolvent of sentimental ideas. For such a man there was nothing of any permanence in the world to compare with a permanent billet. His loyalty was to his job rather than to abstract principles of nationality. Well! The rod showed two feet eight inches. Mr. Spokesly breathed more easily. He had got his pumps going, then. He decided to go aft. Yes, the fog was clearing.

In the stress of the crisis through which he was pa.s.sing, the mysterious and exacerbating strife going on between himself and the captain, Mr.

Spokesly seemed to himself to be separated from Evanthia as by a transparent yet impa.s.sable barrier. The insignificance of such a creature in the face of a material disaster as had been impending appalled him. He saw with abrupt clarity how, if the s.h.i.+p had been mortally hit, and if there had been any manner of struggle to save their lives, she would not have sustained the part of fainting heroine rescued by lion-hearted men, or that of heroic comrade taking her place in the peril beside them. Nothing of the sort. She would have got into the boat and commanded the crew to row away with her at once. She did not know that Plouff was gone, and if he went down and told her, she would not care a flip of her fingers. That, he was surprised to realize, was part of her charm. She was so entirely pagan in her att.i.tude towards men. She was one of those women who were born to be possessed by men, but the men who possess them can possess nothing else. They are the destroyers, not of morals, but of ideals. They render the imagination futile because they possess the powerful arts of the enchantresses, the daughters of Helios. They demand the chast.i.ty of an anchorite and the devotion of a knight of the Grail. While the virtuous and generous bend under the weight of their self-appointed travails, these pa.s.s by in swift palanquins of silk and fine gold, and are adored by the valiant and the wise.

And he was going to marry her.

He slept heavily on the engineer's settee. He had told that obliging person to give him a call at midnight--he wanted to see what the Old Man was up to. The Old Man, however, later gave Mr. Ca.s.sar explicit orders to let the mate sleep--he would remain on duty himself. The chief felt it inc.u.mbent upon him to oblige the captain, and Mr. Spokesly slept on, much disturbed none the less by grotesque and laboured forebodings of his subconscious being, so that he moved restlessly at times, as though some occult power within was striving to rouse him. Indeed, it was the spirit of duty struggling with wearied tissues. It was past three when the former was so far successful as to wrench his eyes open. He started up, stretched, looked at the engineer's clock, and muttered that he must have fallen asleep again. He put on his coat and cap, and taking a hurried glance at the engineer, who was sprawling on his back in his bunk with his mouth open and his fingers clutching the matted growth of black hair on his chest, he hurried out on deck.

The fog was gone, and a high, level canopy of thin clouds gave the night the character of an enormous and perfectly dark chamber. The _Kalkis_ was moving so slowly, Mr. Spokesly could with difficulty keep tally of the beat of the engines. Yet she was moving. He could hear the sough of water, and there was a faint phosph.o.r.escence along the s.h.i.+p's side. And a change in the air, an indefinable modification of temperature and possibly smell, led him to examine the near horizon for the deeper blackness of a high sh.o.r.e. He listened intently, trying to detect the sound of waves on the rocks. He tried to figure out what the position would be now, if they had made the course he suspected. They ought to be under the southern sh.o.r.es of Lesbos by now. But if that were the case the cool breeze coming off sh.o.r.e would be on the port side. He listened, sniffed, and resigned himself pa.s.sively for a moment to the impact of influences so subtle that to one unaccustomed to the sea they might be suspected of supernatural sources. He climbed to the bridge-deck and went over to where the smashed boat hung like a skeleton from the crumpled davit. And he was aware at once of the correctness of his suspicions. But it would not be Lesbos. It was the high land which juts northward and forms the western promontory of the long curving Gulf of Smyrna. He could see it as an intenser and colder projection of the darkness. And then his curiosity centred about the more complex problem of speed. They could not be doing more than a couple of knots. What was the old fraud's game? Waiting for a signal, perhaps. He had evidently got himself and his old s.h.i.+p inside any mines that had been laid between Chios and Lesbos. If there were any. Perhaps he was waiting for daylight.

This was the correct solution. Captain Rannie had crept as close in under Lesbos as he had dared according to the scanty hints he had gotten from Mr. Dainopoulos, who had been informed by a Greek sailor from a captured Bulgarian schooner that there was a safe pa.s.sage insh.o.r.e to the east of Cape Vurkos. The result, however, of clearing the southern coast of Lesbos in safety was to engender a slight recklessness in the captain. For his dangers were practically over. Even if he got run ash.o.r.e later, they could get the cargo out of her. And he had made too much distance east before turning south, so that, in trying to raise a certain point on the western side, he had grown confused. The chart was not large enough. When Mr. Spokesly appeared once more on the bridge, Captain Rannie had rung "Slow" on the telegraph, and was endeavouring to locate some sort of light upon the immense wall of blackness that rose to starboard.

And it could not be a.s.serted that he was sorry to see his chief officer.

That gentleman could not do much now. Captain Rannie, with his binoculars to his eyes, was trembling with excitement. According to the chart he ought to see a red light on his port bow within an hour or two.

There was a good reason for supposing that light was still kept burning even during the war. It could not be seen from the northward and was of prime importance to coasting vessels in the Gulf when making the turn eastward into the great inland estuary at the head of which lay the city. He was creeping along under the high western sh.o.r.e until he felt he could make the turn. It was shallow water away to the eastward, by the salt-works. It was nearly over. He would get the money, in gold, and wait quietly until the war was over, and take a pa.s.sage back to China.

He knew a valley, the Valley of Blue Primroses, a mere fold in a range of enormous mountains, where men dwelt amid scenes of beauty and ineffable peace, where he would live, too, far away from the people of his own race, and far from the detestable rabble of s.h.i.+ps. He had never got on with seamen. Sooner or later, they always attacked him either with violence or invective. He would be revenged on the whole pack of them!

He heard his chief officer behind him and maintained his att.i.tude of close attention. He was trembling. One, two, or perhaps three or four hours and he would know that all was well. He wished he could see better, though. During the fog there had been a curious sense of satisfaction in his heart because he knew that, whatever happened, his defective vision would make no difference. Oh, he could see all right.

But those d.a.m.ned red lights. He was sure there was nothing, yet. That chief officer of his had gone into the chart room. Captain Rannie forgot himself so far as to t.i.tter. Imagine a simple-minded creature like that trying to put _him_ out of countenance! Inquiry! A fine show _he_ would make at the inquiry, with a woman in his cabin, and six months' pay in his pocket! Ho-ho! These smart young men! He hated them. There was only one kind of human being he hated more and that was a young woman. He was perfectly sincere. The Caucasian had come to him to appear like a puffy white fungus, loathsome to come in contact with. Without ever expressing himself, for there was no need, he had conceived a strong predilection for the Oriental. He loved the permanence of the type, the skins like yellow silk, the hair like polished ebony, the eyes, long and narrow, like black satin. He liked to have them on the s.h.i.+p, silent, incurious, efficient, devoid of ambition. He put the gla.s.ses in the little locker by the bridge-rail. There was no light to be seen.

He started towards the chart-room door and found himself confronted by his chief officer. He would have brushed past with his almost feminine petulance had not Mr. Spokesly once again seized his shoulder.