TYPHOON
I
Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, inthe order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of hismind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity;it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary,irresponsive, and unruffled.
The only thing his aspect might have been said to suggest, at times, wasbashfulness; because he would sit, in business offices ashore, sunburntand smiling faintly, with downcast eyes. When he raised them, they wereperceived to be direct in their glance and of blue colour. His hair wasfair and extremely fine, clasping from temple to temple the bald domeof his skull in a clamp as of fluffy silk. The hair of his face, on thecontrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clippedshort to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved,fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over thesurface of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bitround-shouldered, and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked ashade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is dueto the difference of latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a completesuit of a brownish hue, and clumsy black boots. These harbour togs gaveto his thick figure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silverwatch chain looped his waistcoat, and he never left his ship for theshore without clutching in his powerful, hairy fist an elegant umbrellaof the very best quality, but generally unrolled. Young Jukes, the chiefmate, attending his commander to the gangway, would sometimes ventureto say, with the greatest gentleness, "Allow me, sir"--and possessinghimself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferule, shakethe folds, twirl a neat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back; going throughthe performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. SolomonRout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight,would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. "Oh! aye! The blessedgamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr,heartily, without looking up.
Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day,and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very samecause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superiorwho is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every shipCaptain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy asit would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothingexcept a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools. Yet theuninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of thebare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible in CaptainMacWhirr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven couldhave induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer inBelfast to run away to sea. And yet he had done that very thing at theage of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give you theidea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heapof the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, andsetting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivablegoals and in undreamt-of directions.
His father never really forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. "Wecould have got on without him," he used to say later on, "but there'sthe business. And he an only son, too!" His mother wept very much afterhis disappearance. As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind,he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letterarrived from Talcahuano. It was short, and contained the statement:"We had very fine weather on our passage out." But evidently, in thewriter's mind, the only important intelligence was to the effect thathis captain had, on the very day of writing, entered him regularly onthe ship's articles as Ordinary Seaman. "Because I can do the work," heexplained. The mother again wept copiously, while the remark, "Tom's anass," expressed the emotions of the father. He was a corpulent man, witha gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercisedin his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon ahalf-witted person.
MacWhirr's visits to his home were necessarily rare, and in the courseof years he despatched other letters to his parents, informing them ofhis successive promotions and of his movements upon the vast earth. Inthese missives could be found sentences like this: "The heat here isvery great." Or: "On Christmas day at 4 P. M. we fell in with someicebergs." The old people ultimately became acquainted with a goodmany names of ships, and with the names of the skippers who commandedthem--with the names of Scots and English shipowners--with the namesof seas, oceans, straits, promontories--with outlandish names oflumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports--with the names ofislands--with the name of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy.It did not suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the namepretty. And then they died.
The great day of MacWhirr's marriage came in due course, followingshortly upon the great day when he got his first command.
All these events had taken place many years before the morning when, inthe chart-room of the steamer Nan-Shan, he stood confronted by thefall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall--taking intoaccount the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year, andthe ship's position on the terrestrial globe--was of a nature ominouslyprophetic; but the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inwarddisturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discoverthe message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had brought it home to hisvery door. "That's a fall, and no mistake," he thought. "There must besome uncommonly dirty weather knocking about."
The Nan-Shan was on her way from the southward to the treaty port ofFu-chau, with some cargo in her lower holds, and two hundred Chinesecoolies returning to their village homes in the province of Fo-kien,after a few years of work in various tropical colonies. The morning wasfine, the oily sea heaved without a sparkle, and there was a queer whitemisty patch in the sky like a halo of the sun. The fore-deck, packedwith Chinamen, was full of sombre clothing, yellow faces, and pigtails,sprinkled over with a good many naked shoulders, for there was no wind,and the heat was close. The coolies lounged, talked, smoked, or staredover the rail; some, drawing water over the side, sluiced each other;a few slept on hatches, while several small parties of six sat on theirheels surrounding iron trays with plates of rice and tiny teacups; andevery single Celestial of them was carrying with him all he had in theworld--a wooden chest with a ringing lock and brass on the corners,containing the savings of his labours: some clothes of ceremony,sticks of incense, a little opium maybe, bits of nameless rubbish ofconventional value, and a small hoard of silver dollars, toiled for incoal lighters, won in gambling-houses or in petty trading, grubbed outof earth, sweated out in mines, on railway lines, in deadly jungle,under heavy burdens--amassed patiently, guarded with care, cherishedfiercely.
A cross swell had set in from the direction of Formosa Channel about teno'clock, without disturbing these passengers much, because the Nan-Shan,with her flat bottom, rolling chocks on bilges, and great breadth ofbeam, had the reputation of an exceptionally steady ship in a sea-way.Mr. Jukes, in moments of expansion on shore, would proclaim loudlythat the "old girl was as good as she was pretty." It would never haveoccurred to Captain MacWhirr to express his favourable opinion so loudor in terms so fanciful.
She was a good ship, undoubtedly, and not old either. She had been builtin Dumbarton less than three years before, to the order of a firm ofmerchants in Siam--Messrs. Sigg and Son. When she lay afloat, finishedin every detail and ready to take up the work of her life, the builderscontemplated her with pride.
"Sigg has asked us for a reliable skipper to take her out," remarked oneof the partners; and the other, after reflecting for a while, said:"I think MacWhirr is ashore just at present." "Is he? Then wire himat once. He's the very man," declared the senior, without a moment'shesitation.
Next morning MacWhirr stood before them unperturbed, having travelledfrom London by the midnight express after a sudden but undemonstrativeparting with his wife. She was the daughter of a superior couple who hadse
en better days.
"We had better be going together over the ship, Captain," said thesenior partner; and the three men started to view the perfections of theNan-Shan from stem to stern, and from her keelson to the trucks of hertwo stumpy pole-masts.
Captain MacWhirr had begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on theend of a steam windless embodying all the latest improvements.
"My uncle wrote of you favourably by yesterday's mail to our goodfriends--Messrs. Sigg, you know--and doubtless they'll continue you outthere in command," said the junior partner. "You'll be able to boast ofbeing in charge of the handiest boat of her size on the coast of China,Captain," he added.
"Have you? Thank 'ee," mumbled vaguely MacWhirr, to whom the view ofa distant eventuality could appeal no more than the beauty of a widelandscape to a purblind tourist; and his eyes happening at the moment tobe at rest upon the lock of the cabin door, he walked up to it, full ofpurpose, and began to rattle the handle vigorously, while he observed,in his low, earnest voice, "You can't trust the workmen nowadays. Abrand-new lock, and it won't act at all. Stuck fast. See? See?"
As soon as they found themselves alone in their office across the yard:"You praised that fellow up to Sigg. What is it you see in him?" askedthe nephew, with faint contempt.
"I admit he has nothing of your fancy skipper about him, if that's whatyou mean," said the elder man, curtly. "Is the foreman of the joinerson the Nan-Shan outside? . . . Come in, Bates. How is it that you letTait's people put us off with a defective lock on the cabin door? TheCaptain could see directly he set eye on it. Have it replaced at once.The little straws, Bates . . . the little straws. . . ."
The lock was replaced accordingly, and a few days afterwards theNan-Shan steamed out to the East, without MacWhirr having offered anyfurther remark as to her fittings, or having been heard to utter asingle word hinting at pride in his ship, gratitude for his appointment,or satisfaction at his prospects.
With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very littleoccasion to talk. There were matters of duty, of course--directions,orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and thefuture not there yet, the more general actualities of the day requiredno comment--because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelmingprecision.
Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words, and one that "you could be surewould not try to improve upon his instructions." MacWhirr satisfyingthese requirements, was continued in command of the Nan-Shan, andapplied himself to the careful navigation of his ship in the China seas.She had come out on a British register, but after some time Messrs. Siggjudged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag.
At the news of the contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as ifunder a sense of personal affront. He went about grumbling to himself,and uttering short scornful laughs. "Fancy having a ridiculousNoah's Ark elephant in the ensign of one's ship," he said once at theengine-room door. "Dash me if I can stand it: I'll throw up the billet.Don't it make you sick, Mr. Rout?" The chief engineer only cleared histhroat with the air of a man who knows the value of a good billet.
The first morning the new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-ShanJukes stood looking at it bitterly from the bridge. He struggled withhis feelings for a while, and then remarked, "Queer flag for a man tosail under, sir."
"What's the matter with the flag?" inquired Captain MacWhirr. "Seems allright to me." And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have agood look.
"Well, it looks queer to me," burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, andflung off the bridge.
Captain MacWhirr was amazed at these manners. After a while he steppedquietly into the chart-room, and opened his International SignalCode-book at the plate where the flags of all the nations are correctlyfigured in gaudy rows. He ran his finger over them, and when he came toSiam he contemplated with great attention the red field and the whiteelephant. Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought thebook out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawingwith the real thing at the flagstaff astern. When next Jukes, who wascarrying on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness,happened on the bridge, his commander observed:
"There's nothing amiss with that flag."
"Isn't there?" mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-lockerand jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.
"No. I looked up the book. Length twice the breadth and the elephantexactly in the middle. I thought the people ashore would know how tomake the local flag. Stands to reason. You were wrong, Jukes. . . ."
"Well, sir," began Jukes, getting up excitedly, "all I can say--" Hefumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.
"That's all right." Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on alittle canvas folding-stool he greatly affected. "All you have to do isto take care they don't hoist the elephant upside-down before they getquite used to it."
Jukes flung the new lead-line over on the fore-deck with a loud "Hereyou are, bo'ss'en--don't forget to wet it thoroughly," and turned withimmense resolution towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spreadhis elbows on the bridge-rail comfortably.
"Because it would be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress," hewent on. "What do you think? That elephant there, I take it, stands forsomething in the nature of the Union Jack in the flag. . . ."
"Does it!" yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan's deckslooked towards the bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation:"It would certainly be a dam' distressful sight," he said, meekly.
Later in the day he accosted the chief engineer with a confidential,"Here, let me tell you the old man's latest."
Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or FatherRout), from finding himself almost invariably the tallest man on boardevery ship he joined, had acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurelycondescension. His hair was scant and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale,his bony wrists and long scholarly hands were pale, too, as though hehad lived all his life in the shade.
He smiled from on high at Jukes, and went on smoking and glancing aboutquietly, in the manner of a kind uncle lending an ear to the tale of anexcited schoolboy. Then, greatly amused but impassive, he asked:
"And did you throw up the billet?"
"No," cried Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the harshbuzz of the Nan-Shan's friction winches. All of them were hard at work,snatching slings of cargo, high up, to the end of long derricks, only,as it seemed, to let them rip down recklessly by the run. The cargochains groaned in the gins, clinked on coamings, rattled over theside; and the whole ship quivered, with her long gray flanks smoking inwreaths of steam. "No," cried Jukes, "I didn't. What's the good? I mightjust as well fling my resignation at this bulkhead. I don't believe youcan make a man like that understand anything. He simply knocks me over."
At that moment Captain MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the deck,umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed Chinaman,walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes, and who also carried anumbrella.
The master of the Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at hisboots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary to callat Fu-chau this trip, and desired Mr. Rout to have steam up to-morrowafternoon at one o'clock sharp. He pushed back his hat to wipe hisforehead, observing at the same time that he hated going ashoreanyhow; while overtopping him Mr. Rout, without deigning a word, smokedausterely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand.Then Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward'tween-deck clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be putdown there. The Bun Hin Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-fivebags of rice would be coming off in a sampan directly, for stores. Allseven-years'-men they were, said Captain MacWhirr, with a camphor-woodchest to every man. The carpenter should be set to work nailingthree-inch battens along the deck below, fore and aft, to keep theseboxes from shifting in a sea-way. Jukes had better look to it at once."D'ye hear, Jukes?" This chinaman here
was coming with the ship as faras Fu-chau--a sort of interpreter he would be. Bun Hin's clerk hewas, and wanted to have a look at the space. Jukes had better take himforward. "D'ye hear, Jukes?"
Jukes took care to punctuate these instructions in proper places withthe obligatory "Yes, sir," ejaculated without enthusiasm. His brusque"Come along, John; make look see" set the Chinaman in motion at hisheels.
"Wanchee look see, all same look see can do," said Jukes, who having notalent for foreign languages mangled the very pidgin-English cruelly. Hepointed at the open hatch. "Catchee number one piecie place to sleep in.Eh?"
He was gruff, as became his racial superiority, but not unfriendly. TheChinaman, gazing sad and speechless into the darkness of the hatchway,seemed to stand at the head of a yawning grave.
"No catchee rain down there--savee?" pointed out Jukes. "Suppose all'eesame fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside," he pursued,warming up imaginatively. "Make so--Phooooo!" He expanded his chest andblew out his cheeks. "Savee, John? Breathe--fresh air. Good. Eh? Washeehim piecie pants, chow-chow top-side--see, John?"
With his mouth and hands he made exuberant motions of eating rice andwashing clothes; and the Chinaman, who concealed his distrust of thispantomime under a collected demeanour tinged by a gentle and refinedmelancholy, glanced out of his almond eyes from Jukes to the hatch andback again. "Velly good," he murmured, in a disconsolate undertone, andhastened smoothly along the decks, dodging obstacles in his course. Hedisappeared, ducking low under a sling of ten dirty gunny-bags full ofsome costly merchandise and exhaling a repulsive smell.
Captain MacWhirr meantime had gone on the bridge, and into thechart-room, where a letter, commenced two days before, awaitedtermination. These long letters began with the words, "My darling wife,"and the steward, between the scrubbing of the floors and the dustingof chronometer-boxes, snatched at every opportunity to read them. Theyinterested him much more than they possibly could the woman for whoseeye they were intended; and this for the reason that they related inminute detail each successive trip of the Nan-Shan.
Her master, faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness reflected,would set them down with painstaking care upon many pages. The housein a northern suburb to which these pages were addressed had a bit ofgarden before the bow-windows, a deep porch of good appearance,coloured glass with imitation lead frame in the front door. He paidfive-and-forty pounds a year for it, and did not think the rent toohigh, because Mrs. MacWhirr (a pretentious person with a scraggyneck and a disdainful manner) was admittedly ladylike, and in theneighbourhood considered as "quite superior." The only secret of herlife was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come hometo stay for good. Under the same roof there dwelt also a daughter calledLydia and a son, Tom. These two were but slightly acquainted with theirfather. Mainly, they knew him as a rare but privileged visitor, who ofan evening smoked his pipe in the dining-room and slept in the house.The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of him; the boywas frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful,unaffected way manly boys have.
And Captain MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve timesevery year, desiring quaintly to be "remembered to the children," andsubscribing himself "your loving husband," as calmly as if the words solong used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things,and of a faded meaning.
The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full ofevery-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift andchangeable currents--tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seamanin clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to CaptainMacWhirr's sense of realities so forcibly that he had given up hisstate-room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge ofhis ship, often having his meals sent up, and sleeping at night in thechart-room. And he indited there his home letters. Each of them, withoutexception, contained the phrase, "The weather has been very fine thistrip," or some other form of a statement to that effect. And thisstatement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfectaccuracy as all the others they contained.
Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters; only no one on board knew how chatty hecould be pen in hand, because the chief engineer had enough imaginationto keep his desk locked. His wife relished his style greatly. They werea childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman offorty, shared with Mr. Rout's toothless and venerable mother a littlecottage near Teddington. She would run over her correspondence, atbreakfast, with lively eyes, and scream out interesting passages in ajoyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by thewarning shout, "Solomon says!" She had the trick of firing offSolomon's utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by theunfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations.On the day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, shefound occasion to remark, "As Solomon says: 'the engineers that go downto the sea in ships behold the wonders of sailor nature';" when a changein the visitor's countenance made her stop and stare.
"Solomon. . . . Oh! . . . Mrs. Rout," stuttered the young man, very redin the face, "I must say . . . I don't. . . ."
"He's my husband," she announced in a great shout, throwing herselfback in the chair. Perceiving the joke, she laughed immoderately with ahandkerchief to her eyes, while he sat wearing a forced smile, and,from his inexperience of jolly women, fully persuaded that she mustbe deplorably insane. They were excellent friends afterwards; for,absolving her from irreverent intention, he came to think she was avery worthy person indeed; and he learned in time to receive withoutflinching other scraps of Solomon's wisdom.
"For my part," Solomon was reported by his wife to have said once, "giveme the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue. There is a way totake a fool; but a rogue is smart and slippery." This was an airygeneralization drawn from the particular case of Captain MacWhirr'shonesty, which, in itself, had the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay.On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalize, unmarried, andunengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart after another fashionto an old chum and former shipmate, actually serving as second officeron board an Atlantic liner.
First of all he would insist upon the advantages of the Eastern trade,hinting at its superiority to the Western ocean service. He extolledthe sky, the seas, the ships, and the easy life of the Far East. TheNan-Shan, he affirmed, was second to none as a sea-boat.
"We have no brass-bound uniforms, but then we are like brothers here,"he wrote. "We all mess together and live like fighting-cocks. . . . Allthe chaps of the black-squad are as decent as they make that kind, andold Sol, the Chief, is a dry stick. We are good friends. As to our oldman, you could not find a quieter skipper. Sometimes you would think hehadn't sense enough to see anything wrong. And yet it isn't that. Can'tbe. He has been in command for a good few years now. He doesn't doanything actually foolish, and gets his ship along all right withoutworrying anybody. I believe he hasn't brains enough to enjoy kickingup a row. I don't take advantage of him. I would scorn it. Outside theroutine of duty he doesn't seem to understand more than half of what youtell him. We get a laugh out of this at times; but it is dull, too, tobe with a man like this--in the long-run. Old Sol says he hasn't muchconversation. Conversation! O Lord! He never talks. The other day I hadbeen yarning under the bridge with one of the engineers, and he musthave heard us. When I came up to take my watch, he steps out of thechart-room and has a good look all round, peeps over at the sidelights,glances at the compass, squints upward at the stars. That's his regularperformance. By-and-by he says: 'Was that you talking just now in theport alleyway?' 'Yes, sir.' 'With the third engineer?' 'Yes, sir.' Hewalks off to starboard, and sits under the dodger on a little campstoolof his, and for half an hour perhaps he makes no sound, except that Iheard him sneeze once. Then after a while I hear him getting up overthere, and he strolls across to port, where I was. 'I can't understandwhat you can find to talk about,' says he. 'Two solid hours. I am notblaming you. I see people ashore at it all da
y long, and then in theevening they sit down and keep at it over the drinks. Must be saying thesame things over and over again. I can't understand.'
"Did you ever hear anything like that? And he was so patient about it.It made me quite sorry for him. But he is exasperating, too, sometimes.Of course one would not do anything to vex him even if it were worthwhile. But it isn't. He's so jolly innocent that if you were to put yourthumb to your nose and wave your fingers at him he would only wondergravely to himself what got into you. He told me once quite simply thathe found it very difficult to make out what made people always act soqueerly. He's too dense to trouble about, and that's the truth."
Thus wrote Mr. Jukes to his chum in the Western ocean trade, out of thefulness of his heart and the liveliness of his fancy.
He had expressed his honest opinion. It was not worthwhile trying toimpress a man of that sort. If the world had been full of such men, lifewould have probably appeared to Jukes an unentertaining and unprofitablebusiness. He was not alone in his opinion. The sea itself, as if sharingMr. Jukes' good-natured forbearance, had never put itself out to startlethe silent man, who seldom looked up, and wandered innocently overthe waters with the only visible purpose of getting food, raiment,and house-room for three people ashore. Dirty weather he had known, ofcourse. He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way,felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole he hadbeen justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never beengiven a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, thewrath that passes exhausted but never appeased--the wrath and furyof the passionate sea. He knew it existed, as we know that crime andabominations exist; he had heard of it as a peaceable citizen in a townhears of battles, famines, and floods, and yet knows nothing of whatthese things mean--though, indeed, he may have been mixed up in a streetrow, have gone without his dinner once, or been soaked to the skin ina shower. Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans assome men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently intoa placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having beenmade to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror.There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate--or thus disdained bydestiny or by the sea.
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