"You here?" he muttered, heavily.
The second mate had found his way into the wheelhouse some time before.
He had fixed himself in a corner with his knees up, a fist pressed against each temple; and this att.i.tude suggested rage, sorrow, resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated unforgiveness. He said mournfully and defiantly, "Well, it"s my watch below now: ain"t it?"
The steam gear clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman"s eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compa.s.s card behind the binnacle gla.s.s had been meat. G.o.d knows how long he had been left there to steer, as if forgotten by all his shipmates. The bells had not been struck; there had been no reliefs; the ship"s routine had gone down wind; but he was trying to keep her head north-north-east. The rudder might have been gone for all he knew, the fires out, the engines broken down, the ship ready to roll over like a corpse. He was anxious not to get muddled and lose control of her head, because the compa.s.s-card swung far both ways, wriggling on the pivot, and sometimes seemed to whirl right round. He suffered from mental stress. He was horribly afraid, also, of the wheelhouse going. Mountains of water kept on tumbling against it. When the ship took one of her desperate dives the corners of his lips twitched.
Captain MacWhirr looked up at the wheelhouse clock. Screwed to the bulk-head, it had a white face on which the black hands appeared to stand quite still. It was half-past one in the morning.
"Another day," he muttered to himself.
The second mate heard him, and lifting his head as one grieving amongst ruins, "You won"t see it break," he exclaimed. His wrists and his knees could be seen to shake violently. "No, by G.o.d! You won"t. . . ."
He took his face again between his fists.
The body of the helmsman had moved slightly, but his head didn"t budge on his neck,--like a stone head fixed to look one way from a column.
During a roll that all but took his booted legs from under him, and in the very stagger to save himself, Captain MacWhirr said austerely, "Don"t you pay any attention to what that man says." And then, with an indefinable change of tone, very grave, he added, "He isn"t on duty."
The sailor said nothing.
The hurricane boomed, shaking the little place, which seemed air-tight; and the light of the binnacle flickered all the time.
"You haven"t been relieved," Captain MacWhirr went on, looking down. "I want you to stick to the helm, though, as long as you can. You"ve got the hang of her. Another man coming here might make a mess of it.
Wouldn"t do. No child"s play. And the hands are probably busy with a job down below. . . . Think you can?"
The steering-gear leaped into an abrupt short clatter, stopped smouldering like an ember; and the still man, with a motionless gaze, burst out, as if all the pa.s.sion in him had gone into his lips: "By Heavens, sir! I can steer for ever if n.o.body talks to me."
"Oh! aye! All right. . . ." The Captain lifted his eyes for the first time to the man, ". . . Hackett."
And he seemed to dismiss this matter from his mind. He stooped to the engine-room speaking-tube, blew in, and bent his head. Mr. Rout below answered, and at once Captain MacWhirr put his lips to the mouthpiece.
With the uproar of the gale around him he applied alternately his lips and his ear, and the engineer"s voice mounted to him, harsh and as if out of the heat of an engagement. One of the stokers was disabled, the others had given in, the second engineer and the donkey-man were firing-up. The third engineer was standing by the steam-valve. The engines were being tended by hand. How was it above?
"Bad enough. It mostly rests with you," said Captain MacWhirr. Was the mate down there yet? No? Well, he would be presently. Would Mr. Rout let him talk through the speaking-tube?--through the deck speaking-tube, because he--the Captain--was going out again on the bridge directly.
There was some trouble amongst the Chinamen. They were fighting, it seemed. Couldn"t allow fighting anyhow. . . .
Mr. Rout had gone away, and Captain MacWhirr could feel against his ear the pulsation of the engines, like the beat of the ship"s heart. Mr.
Rout"s voice down there shouted something distantly. The ship pitched headlong, the pulsation leaped with a hissing tumult, and stopped dead.
Captain MacWhirr"s face was impa.s.sive, and his eyes were fixed aimlessly on the crouching shape of the second mate. Again Mr. Rout"s voice cried out in the depths, and the pulsating beats recommenced, with slow strokes--growing swifter.
Mr. Rout had returned to the tube. "It don"t matter much what they do,"
he said, hastily; and then, with irritation, "She takes these dives as if she never meant to come up again."
"Awful sea," said the Captain"s voice from above.
"Don"t let me drive her under," barked Solomon Rout up the pipe.
"Dark and rain. Can"t see what"s coming," uttered the voice.
"Must--keep--her--moving--enough to steer--and chance it," it went on to state distinctly.
"I am doing as much as I dare."
"We are--getting--smashed up--a good deal up here," proceeded the voice mildly. "Doing--fairly well--though. Of course, if the wheelhouse should go. . . ."
Mr. Rout, bending an attentive ear, muttered peevishly something under his breath.
But the deliberate voice up there became animated to ask: "Jukes turned up yet?" Then, after a short wait, "I wish he would bear a hand. I want him to be done and come up here in case of anything. To look after the ship. I am all alone. The second mate"s lost. . . ."
"What?" shouted Mr. Rout into the engine-room, taking his head away.
Then up the tube he cried, "Gone overboard?" and clapped his ear to.
"Lost his nerve," the voice from above continued in a matter-of-fact tone. "d.a.m.ned awkward circ.u.mstance."
Mr. Rout, listening with bowed neck, opened his eyes wide at this.
However, he heard something like the sounds of a scuffle and broken exclamations coming down to him. He strained his hearing; and all the time Beale, the third engineer, with his arms uplifted, held between the palms of his hands the rim of a little black wheel projecting at the side of a big copper pipe.
He seemed to be poising it above his head, as though it were a correct att.i.tude in some sort of game.
To steady himself, he pressed his shoulder against the white bulkhead, one knee bent, and a sweat-rag tucked in his belt hanging on his hip.
His smooth cheek was begrimed and flushed, and the coal dust on his eyelids, like the black pencilling of a make-up, enhanced the liquid brilliance of the whites, giving to his youthful face something of a feminine, exotic and fascinating aspect. When the ship pitched he would with hasty movements of his hands screw hard at the little wheel.
"Gone crazy," began the Captain"s voice suddenly in the tube. "Rushed at me. . . . Just now. Had to knock him down. . . . This minute. You heard, Mr. Rout?"
"The devil!" muttered Mr. Rout. "Look out, Beale!"
His shout rang out like the blast of a warning trumpet, between the iron walls of the engine-room. Painted white, they rose high into the dusk of the skylight, sloping like a roof; and the whole lofty s.p.a.ce resembled the interior of a monument, divided by floors of iron grating, with lights flickering at different levels, and a ma.s.s of gloom lingering in the middle, within the columnar stir of machinery under the motionless swelling of the cylinders. A loud and wild resonance, made up of all the noises of the hurricane, dwelt in the still warmth of the air. There was in it the smell of hot metal, of oil, and a slight mist of steam. The blows of the sea seemed to traverse it in an unringing, stunning shock, from side to side.
Gleams, like pale long flames, trembled upon the polish of metal; from the flooring below the enormous crank-heads emerged in their turns with a flash of bra.s.s and steel--going over; while the connecting-rods, big-jointed, like skeleton limbs, seemed to thrust them down and pull them up again with an irresistible precision. And deep in the half-light other rods dodged deliberately to and fro, crossheads nodded, discs of metal rubbed smoothly against each other, slow and gentle, in a commingling of shadows and gleams.
Sometimes all those powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr. Rout"s eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face. He was fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers. A short shiny jacket barely covered his loins, and his white wrists protruded far out of the tight sleeves, as though the emergency had added to his stature, had lengthened his limbs, augmented his pallor, hollowed his eyes.
He moved, climbing high up, disappearing low down, with a restless, purposeful industry, and when he stood still, holding the guard-rail in front of the starting-gear, he would keep glancing to the right at the steam-gauge, at the water-gauge, fixed upon the white wall in the light of a swaying lamp. The mouths of two speaking-tubes gaped stupidly at his elbow, and the dial of the engine-room telegraph resembled a clock of large diameter, bearing on its face curt words instead of figures. The grouped letters stood out heavily black, around the pivot-head of the indicator, emphatically symbolic of loud exclamations: AHEAD, ASTERN, SLOW, Half, STAND BY; and the fat black hand pointed downwards to the word FULL, which, thus singled out, captured the eye as a sharp cry secures attention.
The wood-encased bulk of the low-pressure cylinder, frowning portly from above, emitted a faint wheeze at every thrust, and except for that low hiss the engines worked their steel limbs headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness. And all this, the white walls, the moving steel, the floor plates under Solomon Rout"s feet, the floors of iron grating above his head, the dusk and the gleams, uprose and sank continuously, with one accord, upon the harsh wash of the waves against the ship"s side. The whole loftiness of the place, booming hollow to the great voice of the wind, swayed at the top like a tree, would go over bodily, as if borne down this way and that by the tremendous blasts.
"You"ve got to hurry up," shouted Mr. Rout, as soon as he saw Jukes appear in the stokehold doorway.
Jukes" glance was wandering and tipsy; his red face was puffy, as though he had overslept himself. He had had an arduous road, and had travelled over it with immense vivacity, the agitation of his mind corresponding to the exertions of his body. He had rushed up out of the bunker, stumbling in the dark alleyway amongst a lot of bewildered men who, trod upon, asked "What"s up, sir?" in awed mutters all round him;--down the stokehold ladder, missing many iron rungs in his hurry, down into a place deep as a well, black as Tophet, tipping over back and forth like a see-saw. The water in the bilges thundered at each roll, and lumps of coal skipped to and fro, from end to end, rattling like an avalanche of pebbles on a slope of iron.
Somebody in there moaned with pain, and somebody else could be seen crouching over what seemed the p.r.o.ne body of a dead man; a l.u.s.ty voice blasphemed; and the glow under each fire-door was like a pool of flaming blood radiating quietly in a velvety blackness.
A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes" neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.
"Hallo! Plenty of draught now," yelled the second engineer at once, as though he had been all the time looking out for Jukes. The donkeyman, a dapper little chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute transport. They were keeping a full head of steam, and a profound rumbling, as of an empty furniture van trotting over a bridge, made a sustained ba.s.s to all the other noises of the place.
"Blowing off all the time," went on yelling the second. With a sound as of a hundred scoured saucepans, the orifice of a ventilator spat upon his shoulder a sudden gush of salt water, and he volleyed a stream of curses upon all things on earth including his own soul, ripping and raving, and all the time attending to his business. With a sharp clash of metal the ardent pale glare of the fire opened upon his bullet head, showing his spluttering lips, his insolent face, and with another clang closed like the white-hot wink of an iron eye.
"Where"s the blooming ship? Can you tell me? blast my eyes! Under water--or what? It"s coming down here in tons. Are the condemned cowls gone to Hades? Hey? Don"t you know anything--you jolly sailor-man you . . . ?"