Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  The ship was crowded, packed with passengers from stem to stern. Transportation had been impossible for the four years of hostilities, and with the restoration of peace everyone wanted to travel, not only the usual tourists and pleasure seekers, but businessmen tied up at home for many months by D.O.R.A. regulations, cotton and jute merchants bound for Calcutta and Bhagalpur, Ceylon tea planters and Cawnpore mill owners, together with a large number of Anglo-Indian army officers, many of whom were accompanied by their wives and families.

  From the first night out there was tremendous gaiety on board. This was the beginning of that postwar era when, after the murderous holocaust of the trenches, the years of slaughter, mud, and misery, of anxiety, frustration, and fear, the world suddenly went mad and, like a revivified corpse, embarked on a wild and frantic spree. Lunch and cocktail parties, sweepstakes on the ship’s run, ‘horse racing’ and deck sports of every kind, impromptu concerts and fancy-dress galas – these were but a few of the diversions afforded by these halcyon days and feverish nights. For such junkets the ship’s doctor is always in demand, and although my inclination lay to more meditative ways, I was usually drawn into the festivities.

  Chief among the social promoters – those people who on shipboard excel at ‘getting things up’ – was Miss Jope-Smith, the woman whom I had overheard on the boat deck the morning of our departure and who, with her brother, Ronald, a cavalry subaltern posted to Bengal, sat, unfortunately, at my table in the dining saloon. Madge Jope-Smith was a thrusting person, handsome in a hard sort of way, obviously over thirty, though got up in a dashing style to look younger. She was not only a snob but a bore, an assertive bore, who talked incessantly of her ‘ place’ in Cheltenham, her titled friends, her ‘personal maid’, her horses, dogs, and exploits in the field of fox-hunting – though I suspected that her quarry in the chase, whom, to her infinite chagrin, she had not so far brought to bay, was man. Never at any meal did she fail to inform us of how welcome she would be in the best society of Peshawar and Darjeeling. Arising from the prospect of her sojourn in India, the leitmotif of her conversation, reduced to its elemental note, was the superiority of the English upper classes and the need for impressing this upon the subject native races. She constantly abused the table steward, a nice Parsee boy who was well-meaning but slow, and having scolded him into complete confusion, she would cast her bold glance around the table.

  ‘These people have to be kept down, you know. Don’t you agree, Ronnie?’

  ‘By jove, yes.’ Her brother, quite innocuous, was a dependable echo. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘If you let them get away with it, there’s no knowing what ideas they’d get in their heads.’

  ‘Yes, by Jove. I mean, well, after all … remember how we had to shoot them down in the Mutiny.’

  ‘Exactly. Now I’m a liberal-minded woman. But they’re such a poor lot at best. Not an ounce of stamina. No loyalty. And treacherous, too … Why, I remember Colonel Bentley once told me …’

  We reached Port Said. Everyone went ashore, excitedly, came back loaded with purchases from Simon Artz, with silks, shawls, cigarettes, scent, and jewellery. That night, as the anchor was weighed and we glided past the De Lesseps statue into the snaky waters of the Suez Canal, the orchestra played louder than ever, the dance waxed faster and more furious. The desert reached away on either hand, camels and Bedouin encampments were silhouetted against the purple sunset. Then we were through the Red Sea, past the barren rocks of Aden, and out upon the wide Arabian Sea.

  On the following morning, as I held my consultations in the surgery adjoining my cabin, the serang, Hasan, appeared, bringing with him two of his lascar deck hands. Waiting in the doorway until I bade him enter, he inclined his head in a respectful salaam and addressed me. His voice, as if broken long ago in its conflict with the roar of wind and water, was hoarse, yet it had a steady undertone.

  ‘Doctor Sahib, I fear these men are sick.’

  The seamen certainly did not look well; they complained of general malaise, of intense headache and racking bone pains. They looked frightened, too, as though suspecting something serious to be amiss, rolling the whites of their eyes as I asked them to strip and began my examination. Both were fevered, with thickly furred tongues and that dry skin, burning to the touch, which is nature’s gravest warning. As yet there was no sign of lung involvement. No inflammation of the throat. Nothing abnormal in the abdomen. Instinctively I thought of malaria. And then, to my horror, as I once again took the pulse, my palpitating fingers became aware of a scattering of hard little nodules, exactly like lead shot, under the wrist skin of each man. It was an unmistakable symptom, and immediately, inspecting more closely the areas behind the knees and beneath the armpits, I found in each case a definite papular eruption.

  Young and inexperienced in my profession, I had not learned to control my feelings, nor had I yet acquired that dissimulation which masks the sentence of death with a comforting smile. My expression must have altered visibly, for although the serang said nothing, his lined and battered face assumed a look of deeper gravity. For a moment I looked into his eyes, and even then, while realising that he knew as well as I the nature of the malady before us, I could not but experience, as a kind of shock, the resolution, the intrepid calmness of his gaze. Still he said nothing. When I told him in a low voice to wait in the surgery with the men, he again simply inclined his head.

  Hurriedly, with beating heart, I made my way to the bridge. Captain Hamble was not there, but in the chartroom below. He looked up sharply as I burst in.

  ‘Sir’ – my voice broke – ‘I have to report smallpox on board. Two of the deck hands.’

  I saw his lips draw tightly together. He was a thickset man of fifty-five, with close-cropped hair and sandy, bushy eyebrows, known as a strict disciplinarian, something of a martinet, but also as a just and fair-minded officer. Now his brick-dust complexion assumed a deeper tinge.

  ‘Smallpox.’ He repeated the word under his breath. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite, sir,’ And I added, ‘ We have no lymph in our medical supplies.’

  ‘Would we carry enough for fifteen hundred passengers? Don’t be fool!’

  He bit his lip angrily and, frowning deeply, began to pace up and down the narrow chartroom.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said, drawing up at last and coming close to me, his words unmistakably grim, ‘forget that remark of mine … I was upset and didn’t mean it. Now, listen, you are in charge of the health of the ship. It’s entirely up to you. I can’t give you any of my officers; I’m overloaded and understaffed. But I am going to give you the serang. He understands these fellows. And believe me, he’s the finest man I have. Between you, you’ve got to keep this thing from spreading. And what’s more, don’t let a whisper of it get out, or with this fancy lot we have on board we’ll have a bloody panic, as sure as God’s my Maker.’

  I left the chartroom, realising, with a weakness in my stomach, the desperate responsibility of my position. Gone now was the carefree ease I had enjoyed, reclining in a deck chair reading Pierre Loti and dreaming romantically into the sunset of my own secret desire to write, treating nothing more serious than a cut finger or a case of mild seasickness. Here we were, in the middle of the Arabian Sea, fifteen hundred passengers aboard, no means whatever of vaccinating them, and smallpox … The most deadly contagion in the whole dictionary of disease.

  Back in the surgery one of the lascars was in the grip of a violent rigor. I turned from the shivering man to the serang, whose incalculable eyes remained fixed upon me.

  ‘You know?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, Sahib. I have seen this before.’

  ‘We’ve got to isolate these men … check on the contacts …’ As I spoke, trying to assume a cheerfulness and confidence I did not feel, Hasan quietly acquiesced.

  ‘Yes, Sahib … I shall do what I can to help you.’

  There was no sick bay on board, not an inch of available cabin space. One look at
the crowded forecastle showed the impossibility of segregating the infected men anywhere in the crew’s quarters. Baffled, I looked at the serang, who, undismayed, again turned upon me the full force of his eyes.

  ‘We will make a shelter on the afterdeck, Doctor Sahib. Very cool there. With plenty of fresh air.’

  In the stern of the ship, admirably protected from view by a battery of derricks and donkey engines, he set to work, moving about, squat and noiseles, his powerful head and long pliant arms conveying the same impression of strength and composure that was reflected upon his flattened and misshapen face. Within an hour, he had erected, with silent efficiency, a large canvas shelter, tautly secured, and roped off from the surrounding deck. Mattresses and sheets were then brought up and the two patients comfortably installed.

  Our next step was to muster the crew for a thorough medical inspection. One of the stokers, who complained of fever and headache, showed the prodromal nodules with the beginnings of the typical rash. He was isolated with the other cases.

  ‘And now … who is going to help me attend these men?’

  Hasan glanced at me in surprise.

  ‘Why, naturally it is I.’

  ‘You must be careful. This disease is most contagious.’

  The serang, had he known me better, might perhaps have smiled. As it was, the austerity of his expression did not relax.

  ‘I am not afraid, Doctor Sahib.’

  Together, Hasan and I sponged the patients with permanganate solution, administered to each man a strong antipyretic, hung sheets soaked in disinfectant round the shelter, and set up within this little secret area of quarantine a cooking stove where liquids could be heated and simple meals prepared. Finally, while the passengers were at lunch, we cleared the night watch from the forecastle and, with some sulphur candles which Hasan disinterred from the ship’s stores, thoroughly fumigated the crew’s quarters. With this accomplished, I felt somewhat easier in my mind.

  Next morning, however, brought fresh cause for concern. At the muster which I held at daybreak, I found three fresh cases among the deck hands. The men already segregated were much worse, covered from head to toe by that foul purulent eruption which is the most horrible symptom of the disease. And that same afternoon, four more of the crew sickened. We now had ten cases in our makeshift lazaretto. It was a situation to test the strongest nerves. But the serang, calm and unperturbed, his eyes steadfast beneath the misshapen frontal bones of his dark, cicatrised face, gave me fresh heart. Merely to be beside him made it difficult to despair. In tending the patients he was indefatigable, giving them water, relieving their intolerable skin irritation with the lotion I had made up, cooking for them on the makeshift galley, always on hand when I needed him to help me lift and sponge a semi-conscious man – and all this carried out with complete and contemptuous disregard for his own safety.

  ‘Be careful of yourself,’ I had to beg him. ‘Do not go quite so close.’

  Now, indeed, he showed his strong teeth, stained pink with betel nut, in a sudden, fleeting smile … yet a smile so faint, so transitory and, above all, tinged with such native sadness that it broke only for an instant his deep and natural tranquillity.

  ‘Are you careful of yourself, Doctor Sahib?’

  ‘Indeed I am. Besides, this is my work.’

  ‘Do not worry, Doctor Sahib. I am strong. And it is my work too.’

  By this time, except for emergency calls, I had placed myself more or less in quarantine. At the captain’s suggestion, to allay suspicion, it was given out that I had caught a chill and was indisposed. I ceased to go to the dining saloon, and all my meals were brought on a tray to my cabin. In the evening, as I sat at my solitary dinner, hearing the music of the string band and the sway and shuffle of the dancers on the deck above, it was difficult to restrain a mood of bitterness. In that frenetic whirl, how little they guessed their danger! There came to my mind Barbey d’Aurévilly’s tale of the bal masqué held by the French king at Avignon, whither the court had retired to escape the pestilence prevailing in Paris, and where, at the height of the gaiety, when all unmasked themselves, a gaunt stranger stood revealed in their midst, bearing on his hectic features the fatal stigmata of the Black Death. With equal morbidness I watched my own person for the first sign of the disease, not from fear – oddly, I was so weighed down by responsibility that I had slight concern for myself – but with a queer detachment and the conviction that I would contract the malady; fatally, no doubt, since I had not been vaccinated since I was a child. And in this state of heightening tension I cursed the slowness of the ship, that lack of speed which had previously given me cause for satisfaction.

  Although we were moving full steam ahead, Colombo, the nearest port of call, was still eight days away.

  Twice a day I reported to the captain. His anxiety, without doubt, far exceeded mine, but his years and the habit of command helped him to control it. When he heard what I had to tell him he nodded once or twice, considering me with harassed, irascible eyes, seeming almost to look beyond me to his board of company directors in distant Liverpool. Then, dismissing me, he forced out a word of encouragement:

  ‘Good. You’re doing all right. See you keep it up.’

  But could we keep it up? In the course of the next forty-eight hours first one, then three more of the stokers, who had been suspect overnight, went to join the others on the afterdeck. A total of fourteen now. And one of the earlier victims had lapsed into coma, seemed likely to die at any hour. Under this added load, I could not sleep, and though I spent most of the daylight hours in the lazaretto, even at night I could not keep away from the stern of the ship. And there, where I knew I should find him, watchful and mute under the stars, was the serang.

  How shall I describe the solace which flowed towards me from him as he stood there, in meditation, brooding rather, silhouetted against the taffrail, with his long arms folded on his bare chest, motionless as a statue? A silver whistle, symbol of his office, hung by a lanyard from his muscular neck. The tropic moon, rolling in the velvet sky, brought out the deep lines on his face which, despite its latent energy, had the immobility of carved ebony. When a sick man groaned faintly with the pain of his tormented universe, he would step forward, without sound, to succour him. And then, returning, he would fold his arms, while the ship, an atom detached from earth and lost upon the ocean, surged slowly forward.

  He had no fondness for speech. But despite the silences of our long night vigils I gathered, gradually, some fragments of his history. He was from the Punjab, whence his parents, sturdy and nomadic Pathans, had wandered to southern India. There, like so many in that coastal area, he had, as a boy, taken to a seafaring life. For nearly forty years he had given himself to the oceans of the world, and fifteen of these years had been spent in the Ranaganji. Small wonder he regarded the old ship as his home. Indeed, he had no other, no place on shore, neither family nor friends in the great land mass of India. He had never married. The tackle block which, falling from the masthead, had so frightfully broken and disfigured his features had turned his thoughts from women.

  By religion he was a Muslim, yet there was in him something far beyond the teaching of the sects, a faith inculcated by the purifying eternal wind, the beauty and the desolation of great waters, by waves pounding on grey rocks, on palm-fringed beaches, by blue-white snow upon distant mountain peaks, lush jungles steaming in the tropic sunset, by the united mysteries of a thousand landfalls and departures.

  In all his life he had acquired nothing, neither property nor money – his few possessions, contained in his ship chest, might be worth a few rupees. The thought hurt me, and in an access of mistaken sympathy, I exclaimed:

  ‘Hasan, you are doing so much in this emergency, the company must give you extra pay.’

  His forehead creased perplexedly. He was silent for a long moment, a disconcerting silence broken only by the slow thud of the propeller shaft and the wheezing rattle of the sick. Then he answered:

  ‘Wha
t use is money, Doctor Sahib, to one who has all he needs? I am well enough the way I am.’

  He was unmistakably sincere, completely detached from the usual hope of reward, austerely contemptuous of all personal advantage. Money had no interest for him, he had always despised it. He knew none of those feverish desires with which it is in separably linked. Instead he had courage, self-control, and faith. The men he worked among lived poor and died poor. It had become the habit of his mind to disregard tomorrow.

  Standing with him, in the liquid moonlight, I was stung by a strange pang. Beside his clear simplicity the world’s values suddenly seemed dross. A great party had started in the saloon, brilliantly illuminated by coloured electric globes. The raised voices and bursts of laughter, the popping of champagne corks, the incessant backward drift of jazz intensified in me the feeling that mankind had sacrificed the spirit for the flesh, had become sapped of virtue, dreading any prospect not insulated by ease, by the smug protection that can be bought with gold.

  Indeed, as I viewed my own outlook towards the future, my passionate desire for success and wealth, I was conscious of a secret shame. I turned my back upon the tumult and from the milky white sea beyond, from the sighing emptiness of the night, there came to me the echo of those immortal words: ‘ O ye of little faith! Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Where withal shall we be clothed?’