"I had to give him a push," explained the Captain.
Jukes gave an impatient sigh.
"It will come very sudden," said Captain MacWhirr, "and from over there, I fancy. G.o.d only knows though. These books are only good to muddle your head and make you jumpy. It will be bad, and there"s an end. If we only can steam her round in time to meet it. . . ."
A minute pa.s.sed. Some of the stars winked rapidly and vanished.
"You left them pretty safe?" began the Captain abruptly, as though the silence were unbearable.
"Are you thinking of the coolies, sir? I rigged lifelines all ways across that "tween-deck."
"Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes."
"I didn"t . . . think you cared to . . . know," said Jukes--the lurching of the ship cut his speech as though somebody had been jerking him around while he talked--"how I got on with . . . that infernal job. We did it. And it may not matter in the end."
"Had to do what"s fair, for all--they are only Chinamen. Give them the same chance with ourselves--hang it all. She isn"t lost yet. Bad enough to be shut up below in a gale--"
"That"s what I thought when you gave me the job, sir," interjected Jukes, moodily.
"--without being battered to pieces," pursued Captain MacWhirr with rising vehemence. "Couldn"t let that go on in my ship, if I knew she hadn"t five minutes to live. Couldn"t bear it, Mr. Jukes."
A hollow echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship--and went out.
"Now for it!" muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Mr. Jukes."
"Here, sir."
The two men were growing indistinct to each other.
"We must trust her to go through it and come out on the other side.
That"s plain and straight. There"s no room for Captain Wilson"s storm-strategy here."
"No, sir."
"She will be smothered and swept again for hours," mumbled the Captain.
"There"s not much left by this time above deck for the sea to take away--unless you or me."
"Both, sir," whispered Jukes, breathlessly.
"You are always meeting trouble half way, Jukes," Captain MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly. "Though it"s a fact that the second mate is no good. D"ye hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left alone if. . . ."
Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all sides, remained silent.
"Don"t you be put out by anything," the Captain continued, mumbling rather fast. "Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it--always facing it--that"s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That"s enough for any man. Keep a cool head."
"Yes, sir," said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.
In the next few seconds the Captain spoke to the engine-room and got an answer.
For some reason Jukes experienced an access of confidence, a sensation that came from outside like a warm breath, and made him feel equal to every demand. The distant muttering of the darkness stole into his ears.
He noted it unmoved, out of that sudden belief in himself, as a man safe in a shirt of mail would watch a point.
The ship laboured without intermission amongst the black hills of water, paying with this hard tumbling the price of her life. She rumbled in her depths, shaking a white plummet of steam into the night, and Jukes" thought skimmed like a bird through the engine-room, where Mr.
Rout--good man--was ready. When the rumbling ceased it seemed to him that there was a pause of every sound, a dead pause in which Captain MacWhirr"s voice rang out startlingly.
"What"s that? A puff of wind?"--it spoke much louder than Jukes had ever heard it before--"On the bow. That"s right. She may come out of it yet."
The mutter of the winds drew near apace. In the forefront could be distinguished a drowsy waking plaint pa.s.sing on, and far off the growth of a multiple clamour, marching and expanding. There was the throb as of many drums in it, a vicious rushing note, and like the chant of a tramping mult.i.tude.
Jukes could no longer see his captain distinctly. The darkness was absolutely piling itself upon the ship. At most he made out movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up.
Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top b.u.t.ton of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words.
Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to declare, in a tone of vexation, as it were: "I wouldn"t like to lose her."
He was spared that annoyance.
VI
On A bright sunshiny day, with the breeze chasing her smoke far ahead, the Nan-Shan came into Fu-chau. Her arrival was at once noticed on sh.o.r.e, and the seamen in harbour said: "Look! Look at that steamer.
What"s that? Siamese--isn"t she? Just look at her!"
She seemed, indeed, to have been used as a running target for the secondary batteries of a cruiser. A hail of minor sh.e.l.ls could not have given her upper works a more broken, torn, and devastated aspect: and she had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world--and indeed with truth, for in her short pa.s.sage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. She was incrusted and gray with salt to the trucks of her masts and to the top of her funnel; as though (as some facetious seaman said) "the crowd on board had fished her out somewhere from the bottom of the sea and brought her in here for salvage." And further, excited by the felicity of his own wit, he offered to give five pounds for her--"as she stands."
Before she had been quite an hour at rest, a meagre little man, with a red-tipped nose and a face cast in an angry mould, landed from a sampan on the quay of the Foreign Concession, and incontinently turned to shake his fist at her.
A tall individual, with legs much too thin for a rotund stomach, and with watery eyes, strolled up and remarked, "Just left her--eh? Quick work."
He wore a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat.
"Hallo! what are you doing here?" asked the ex-second-mate of the Nan-Shan, shaking hands hurriedly.
"Standing by for a job--chance worth taking--got a quiet hint,"
explained the man with the broken hat, in jerky, apathetic wheezes.
The second shook his fist again at the Nan-Shan. "There"s a fellow there that ain"t fit to have the command of a scow," he declared, quivering with pa.s.sion, while the other looked about listlessly.
"Is there?"
But he caught sight on the quay of a heavy seaman"s chest, painted brown under a fringed sailcloth cover, and lashed with new manila line. He eyed it with awakened interest.
"I would talk and raise trouble if it wasn"t for that d.a.m.ned Siamese flag. n.o.body to go to--or I would make it hot for him. The fraud! Told his chief engineer--that"s another fraud for you--I had lost my nerve.
The greatest lot of ignorant fools that ever sailed the seas. No! You can"t think . . ."
"Got your money all right?" inquired his seedy acquaintance suddenly.
"Yes. Paid me off on board," raged the second mate. ""Get your breakfast on sh.o.r.e," says he."