by H. E. Bates
From there he saw Edison arrive with the young French doctor. It struck him at once that he was a surprisingly sober Edison. He did not shout or stagger. His voice was hardly upraised at all as he called to Fat Uncle.
‘Does she go?’
‘No.’
‘I told you she wouldn’t.’
‘I’ll have another go at her when it’s daylight.’
‘She’ll never go,’ Edison said. ‘I tell you. She never was any damn good anyway.’
‘She’ll go like hell when she gets started,’ Fat Uncle said. ‘When,’ Edison said. ‘When.’
He approached the gang-plank that connected the schooner with the jetty. He spoke now with compressed sarcasm.
‘Another thing you forgot,’ he said. ‘It costs money to run that thing. Who’s paying that?’
The boy saw the girl fling up her head, for the second time that day, with a gesture of proud, sharp loathing.
‘So that’s what’s worrying you,’ she said.
‘Gas costs money,’ Edison said. ‘Oil costs money. And it’s a damn long way.’
‘To where?’ she said. ‘Hell?’
The boy heard Edison laughing.
‘A damn long way in that thing,’ he said. ‘Well, who pays? I don’t pay, I tell you that.’
The young doctor, approaching the gang-plank, spoke for the first time.
‘I will pay,’ he said, ‘or rather the Institut will pay. Dr Gregory will see to that.’
‘Suits me.’
‘Now you have to be shamed into it,’ the girl said. ‘Now it’s money.’
‘Don’t goad me,’ Edison said.
‘Goad you? Let your heart goad you,’ she said. ‘If that’s possible.’
‘Get off the boat!’ Edison started shouting. ‘Go on! – the pair of you. Come off her!’ His voice started to raise itself, for the first time in cold fury. ‘She stays where she is!’
He seemed about to spring forward, as if ready to snatch Fat Uncle and the girl from the deck with his own hands, but the young doctor took several strides forward too.
‘It’s imperative that she goes,’ he said. ‘Edison, I tell you it’s absolutely imperative that she goes.’
‘Goes? I tell you she’ll never get beyond the reef—’
‘I will buy the boat,’ the young doctor said. ‘I will give you a cheque on the Banque D’Indo-China as a deposit and we will fix the rest when Dr Gregory comes back. How is that? Will you sell her?’
‘No.’
‘All right. I will hire the boat. I will give you a cheque for that. I will pay for the oil too.’ The doctor spoke with succinct, flat contempt, not raising his voice. ‘I will also pay Uncle to take her. I am even willing to pay you if it will make you happy.’
‘All right!’ Edison started shouting. ‘All right! So you hired yourself a tea-chest! Now what? All you have to do is pull a string and she’s off like a bomb.’
‘She’ll start.’
‘And who’s going to start her?’ Edison said. He lifted thin, jeering hands in the direction of Fat Uncle. ‘That baboon? That bladder? He’s been trying all night!’
‘I am going to start her.’
‘Confident man. Confident man,’ Edison said. ‘All confidence. She’s never been started in six months. Nine months. How do you know she’ll start?’
‘Because,’ the young doctor said. ‘I have faith she will start. And because—’ He was already walking towards the plank, rolling up the long white sleeves of his shirt – ‘I like talking to engines. They’ll start if you talk to them the right way.’
The doctor walked across the plank to the deck of the schooner. Edison retreated a few paces, preparing, it seemed, to go back to the hotel. And then suddenly, as if actually shamed by something the girl had said or as if the thinnest of the doctor’s veiled ironies had at last begun to have their effect, he turned and shouted towards the doctor:
‘She kicks like hell. She kicks back at you.’
‘I’ll manage.’
‘There’s a knack in it. You can stop her kicking if you know the knack.’
‘Thanks. I’ll manage.’
His voice faded as he disappeared into the well of the boat below the little deck-house. For a few moments longer the hurricane lamp remained suspended where it was. Then Fat Uncle took it off its hook, ready to follow the doctor below, and Edison called:
‘Hey, Fat Uncle!’
‘Hullo?’
‘I’ll be back in ten minutes if you want me.’
‘Back?’
‘We’ll need food, won’t we, you fat ape?’ he called. ‘We may be days in that thing. We’ll need a case of bug-killer.’
Edison turned abruptly and walked across the water-front. For a moment longer the hurricane lamp illuminated the deck. Then Fat Uncle took it away.
The girl did not move from her position in the stern of the schooner. In darkness broken only by the occasional passage of a fishing flare across the lagoon behind her she leaned on the wooden rail of the boat, staring ashore. Something about her seemed to brood profoundly, in some way mutinously, with sadness, in the darkness.
What it was the boy had no means of knowing. He crouched for a long time behind the water-melon stall. He saw Edison reappear from the hotel, carrying crates and a second hurricane lamp, and then some time later appear a second time, carrying drums of oil.
All this time the girl did not move from the stern of the schooner, but some hours later the boy heard on the night air a new, thrilling and altogether miraculous sound. It made him start to his feet so suddenly that he cracked his elbow on the corrugated iron of the little stall. He was afraid for a moment that someone from the schooner would hear the sound and come down and find him hiding there, afterwards surrendering him to the Chinaman and the tortures of the pump again. But the girl lifted her head no higher than she might have done if she had heard the sound of a rat exploring a tin-can across the jetty.
He listened to the sound of the schooner engine for a long time. When finally it stopped on the night air and Fat Uncle had taken away the second hurricane lamp and there were no more figures on the schooner he felt he could still hear it, wonderfully beating through the darkness. All his blood was on fire with that sound.
Even when he climbed on board and lay down in the hold, in the bows of the boat, in complete darkness, he still imagined he could hear it, a great pulse marvellously driving his blood, miraculously ready to bear him out to sea.
He dozed off and came to himself some hours later, in the first light of morning, in a world of shaking timbers. The reality of the engine actually running in its confined cradle at the foot of the small companionway no longer struck him as beautiful. He felt his blood begin to blench at the smell of engine-oil. His veins felt white and cold. His impression was that they were filled with whiteness.
After he had been sick two or three times, retching as quietly as he could into a sack, he sat up. The boat progressed in a series of deep fat rolls that were so regular that after a time he let his body go with them without any attempt at resistance. Presently, in this way, he beat the last of his sickness.
He was not afraid. He remembered over and over again some words of Fat Uncle’s: ‘The sea is your friend. There is no need to be afraid of the sea.’ At the same time he experienced occasional short moods of disappointment. The boat seemed to progress neither like the wind nor like a bird. It seemed much more like a thick slow slug crawling its way through waters he could not see.
He longed to go on deck. He began to feel, and then to be sure, that the world on deck would be the world he had imagined: his promised world, the world in which the boat flew on a strong white wind, the world of great fish with mouths like doors, the world of Fat Uncle, the King, and the far, long voyages.
The heat of the day was already rising when he dared at last to crawl on deck. Sun struck him brassily as he lifted his face above the companion-way. At this moment, he feared Fat Uncle. He was sure that Fat Un
cle would strike him.
Instinctively he searched the deck for Fat Uncle and at first saw only Edison, standing at the wheel, looking ahead, his back towards him. Then he saw Fat Uncle lying flat on his belly, face turned sideways across the deck. It astonished the boy very much to see that his lips were grey.
With wide eyes Fat Uncle lay and stared at him. His mouth fell open. A dribble of yellow moisture poured from his lips. He raised himself on one elbow and with the other hand pawed at his face, gropily, as if pulling at invisible cobwebs.
Then like an enormous frog he inflated his chest and face and let out a gigantic croak that brought Edison whipping round from the wheel. The croak became a thinning whimper. The eyes squeezed themselves shut. They remained shut for the space of a quarter of a minute or so. Then suddenly they shot open again and Fat Uncle, with a yell, told himself of the reality of the boy:
‘It is you! It is you! You came up there like a ghost.’
‘For Christ sake,’ Edison said.
The boy stood at the head of the small companion-way, waiting to be struck. It surprised him greatly that no one moved to strike him. It surprised him still more to see that Fat Uncle, the man of the sea, lifting himself to his knees, face grey and sickened, looked as frightened as he felt himself.
‘How in hell did you get here?’ Edison said.
He started trembling and had nothing to answer. His veins ran white again. The sea ran white about the schooner. He felt sick again as he stared at its running whiteness and the faces of the men.
In a third great moment of surprise he saw the girl walking up from the stern of the schooner. He had never remotely expected to see her there. He had expected the world of men to be completed, for some reason, by the young French doctor.
Fat Uncle, as the girl appeared, experienced one of his sudden waves of courage and waved an elephantine fist at the boy. He lurched unsteadily as he threw the blow with vague menace, like a drunk, but the blow missed by a yard.
‘That’s right. Strike him,’ the girl said. ‘Be brave. Strike him.’
‘I ought to throw the little squirt overboard!’ Edison said. ‘Shark-wards.’
‘That’s it. You be brave too,’ she said.
It was Edison now who started yelling. He yelled for Fat Uncle to take the wheel. Then he grabbed the boy by the shirt and yelled into his face:
‘How the hell did you creep in?’ With an open hand he cuffed him first on one side of his face, then the other. He bawled incomprehensibly, narrow face raging. Then he turned on Fat Uncle, yelling: ‘You were supposed to keep him working, you fat baboon, out back there. What in hell were you up to?’
After this, since there was no answer from Fat Uncle, he cuffed the boy about the face again, knocking him from side to side.
‘You are very brave, too,’ the girl said.
‘Shut up and lie down somewhere!’ Edison yelled.
‘You didn’t used to talk to me like that,’ she said.
‘I talk how I like.’
‘Everybody knows.’
‘And another thing – I’m in charge here,’ Edison yelled. ‘I’m skipper. This is my boat.’
‘Come with me. Come this way,’ the girl said and held out her hand to the boy.
The boy followed her to the stern end of the deck. She was preparing food there: bread, with a little rice and scrapings of raw fish and a few red peppers. A half stalk of bananas lay on the deck, together with Edison’s crate of whisky.
‘Why did you come?’ she said.
He did not know why he had come. He stared at the sea’s running whiteness. A snowy wake between himself and a jagged glitter of horizon held him transfixed. He discovered that he could no longer tell why he had come, why he wanted to come or of the great thoughts that had once pounded through him. Most of all the great thoughts had vanished, meaningless or incomprehensible, and would not come back.
‘There’s no need to be afraid of anything,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘Why did you come?’ he said.
She did not answer. She turned her head away, face half-hidden by the huge black mass of her hair. She sat cross-legged as she busied herself with the fish, her big legs and feet bare, her knees golden and shining, her pereu drawn up above them. Her hair, when it fell the full length and she was sitting down, as she was now, was thick and long enough to spread about her like a cloak.
‘Why did you come?’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you were coming.’
‘I came like you did,’ she said. ‘Hiding.’
He sat cross-legged too, staring at her. He remembered how she had leaned against the stern of the schooner, in complete darkness, brooding. Was it possible that she brooded about coming? He watched the whiteness of the sea, the hot, glittering light, running past her dark head. Her splendid, gentle, brooding face was carved against the skyline that ran in the heat of the morning like pure flame.
He started wondering, for some reason, how old she was. She looked, he thought, much older than yesterday: much older than the day he had heard her laughing so loudly in the presence of the two doctors. He could not remember seeing her laugh ever since that time.
He guessed that she would be old. Everybody who was grown-up was old. That was natural. It was only people like himself who were not old and he said now, solemnly:
‘How old are you? I never knew how old you were.’
She actually laughed a little, showing her broad white teeth.
‘As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth,’ she said.
‘So am I.’
‘Sixteen,’ she said. ‘That’s how old I am.’
‘Is that old?’ he said.
‘I sometimes think,’ she said, ‘it’s as old as I ever want to be.’
They went on talking together, sometimes busy with the food, sometimes doing nothing, for most of the morning. The swell across the ocean seemed to lengthen with the heat of the day. The candescent wake of the slugging schooner grew no faster but simply whitened more fiercely, blinding in the perpendicular sun.
Towards twelve o’clock Edison came aft for a few minutes, picked a whisky bottle out of the crate and stood with it in his hand, drinking, staring out to sea. The girl did not speak to him. Edison did not speak to either. A two-day growth of beard seemed to make the long lean face appear more cadaverous in the fierce upward reflection of sea-light. Sweat gave it a thin oily gleam, the naked ball-like head quite shadowless in the ferociously burning glow of noon.
He spoke only once, and then not to the girl. Walking away, pausing half a dozen paces up the deck, he waved the bottle in a starboard direction, out to an ocean apparently empty except for a distant, long-winged sea-bird flying low above the water.
‘Look, boy. See that?’
The boy looked up in time to see, fifty yards away, the explosion of a single rising shark. It sprang from the water like a suddenly discharged torpedo and then vanished instantly, seeming to leave on the hot air an echo that in reality was Edison’s voice, laughing.
‘See you behave, boy,’ Edison said, ‘or that’s where you go.’
He swung away towards the wheel, lifting the bottle to his mouth, indulging his favourite habit of drinking as he walked. From the wheel the boy heard him laugh again, as if perhaps he were repeating the joke to Fat Uncle, who in turn laughed too.
After that the boy sat for some long time quite silent. It was beyond him to know if the threat of Edison were real or if the laughter of Edison was only laughter. He was aware, in a strange way, of a growing expansion of the sea about him. Noon now seemed to impose on it a sombre, heartless enormity. The shark that had sprung suddenly out of the heart of it was an evil vision that was also a threatening voice. The recollection of its moment of furious savagery made him shudder.
There was no way he knew of expressing himself about these things and he simply sat staring at the gentle, brooding face of the girl.
‘When will we arrive?’ he said. ‘Today?’
He wanted very much to arrive. The air was growing thicker and more oppressive every moment and he was glad to see the girl pouring out, into an enamel cup, a drink of water.
Drinking the water, he sat staring, in his long-sighted, solemn fashion, far out to sea. It had occurred to him suddenly that he might see land there. By searching for land he might project himself into a still further world, beyond Edison’s sinister jocularities and the voice of the shark, where no one could threaten him any more.
For the space of a few seconds he actually believed he could see land, in a purplish, uncertain mass, looming from the horizon. He watched this mass for some moments longer without certainty. Then it began to seem to him nebulously, ominously, unlike land.
He spoke to the girl, pointing.
‘Is that where we’re going?’ he said. ‘Is that the land?’
The girl rose on her knees in order to look more easily over the side of the schooner. In this alert, upright posture she let out a sudden gasp of alarm. A moment later she had twisted herself completely to her feet and was running along the deck.
‘Look there! Look there!’ she was shouting. ‘That way! Look there!’
The boy stood motionless, watching the horizon with its ominous flower of darkening cloud, and knew suddenly that it was not the land.
He lay below in the hold, side by side with the girl, in complete darkness, when the storm hit them from the south.
All morning he had been aware of a wind of splendid whiteness on the sea. Now he knew that what hit them was a black wind. It was a wind of solid, driving water. He felt it pounding against the wooden bows of the schooner in an unbroken attack that sent him rolling like a light and helpless barrel across the timbers and then pushed him back again. He yelled in pain as his head cracked on the bulwark and for the first time in his life he could hear no responsive sound of his own voice against the roar of wind and rain.
Somewhere in the middle of this maelstrom of driving sound an object crashed with sickening thunder down the steps of the companion-way. The boy did not know until afterwards that this was Fat Uncle. With a tremendous clang that seemed for a moment like the side of the ship exploding inwardly, the hatch-cover closed behind him, battening three of them down.
