Chapter Thirty Six.
On the Great Deep.
A flaming sun and a flaming sky; an oily sea, rippled up ever and anon by the skimming rush of a flight of flying-fish; a shark fin or two here and there gliding above the surface. In the far distance a low foreshore with broad palms just distinguishable; and out here, alone on the wide waters, a man in a canoe—fishing.
To be strictly accurate, however, he is not fishing now, though he came out with that intent. He has a line over the side, but seems to be heading out to sea, as though purposing to cross the ocean itself. The line is of native make, likewise the hooks; the canoe ditto, and the paddles. The man is clothed almost entirely with lightly-woven native attire, but otherwise there is nothing of the negro, or even negroid, about the sunburnt face and the thick, dark beard. He is a white man technically, though long exposure to tropical heat in all its changes has rendered him as swarthy as an Arab. The expression of his face is one of profound melancholy, as that of a man condemned to lifelong and hopeless exile. And such, in fact, he is, not through the justice or malevolence of his fellow-man, but through sheer force of circumstances. That distant palm-plumed foreshore is his home, and at the same time his prison. He cannot get away from it.
Now he sends the canoe over the water with each long sweep of his powerful arm—hard and brown and sinewy—regardless of heat or toil, as though the boundless freedom of the liquid plain inspired him with a new life; to those who had made the canoe and its gear the said liquid plain was merely a place where you could catch fish—but they were not imaginative people. Glancing back shoreward an eager then a startled look comes into the man’s face. Between the shore and him, in the far, far distance, are several black specks. You or I could not have seen them; but he can, and, with the sight, he puts the canoe straight out to sea with renewed resolve, intending to remain there until dark; for he knows those tiny distant specks to be other canoes—and that spells foes.
The last time we saw this man was on the occasion of his meeting with another man—a savage—in the lonely silence of the forest after the battle and rout. Then had followed weeks, during which he and the savage had led the lives of hunted beasts, and their narrow escapes from other and hostile bands were many and wonderful. Added to such the perils of the wilderness—of weeks threading the sluggish channels of some great, mysterious river, the gloom and awesome silence of it only broken by the weird blowing of gigantic hippopotami or the splash of ugly crocodiles, the thick foliage reaching over the black, smooth waterway rendering their path as though threading some never-ending cavern—and all in a very cranky canoe, which the native had managed to steal at the risk of both their lives from an unwary village. At last they had gained the coast. For days before they had done so the river seemed to branch off into innumerable deltas, forming islands. Here animal life was plentiful, but of human inhabitants, however barbarous, was no sign. It seemed an utterly wild, unexplored, untrodden region, clean outside any of the known world.
It was a strange companionship that between these two, if only that neither understood a word of the other’s speech—and by no possibility did either seem able to impart it. Sometimes while they were resting Wagram would endeavour to instruct his companion by making drawings on the ground with a bit of stick, but hardly any of them were understood. A tree or an animal or a man was recognised, but all attempt to establish any sequence of ideas by dint of such pictorial instruction proved hopeless. But he himself soon became proficient in the sign language, and the two would talk quite rapidly therein; only the subject-matter must fall within the sphere of the latter’s experience, or he was hopelessly fogged. He was absolutely lacking in imagination.
Often Wagram had found himself wondering as to the other’s motive in sticking to him thus closely. It could hardly be all gratitude; and every attempt to convey that his own restoration to civilisation would result in considerable reward to the other seemed to fail, for on reaching the coast the native had squatted down, as though quite content to spend the rest of his life there. Or, from his barbarous and heathen point of view, the man might have come to regard him as a great magician, and one whose magic was immeasurably greater than that of the only other white man he had ever seen. As to this, he would often beguile the time by singing, a great deal of such being echoes of the choir-loft at Hilversea, and the dusky barbarian would listen, entranced, open-mouthed. It was possible that a belief in his supernatural powers had something to do with this fidelity.
Even as the companionship so had the experience been a strange one. The frequency and variety of peril had inspired in the man thus reft from the peaceful ease of a stately English home, if not a contempt for it, at any rate an indifference to danger. In the matter of food he had long since learned that a native could live in luxury for a month where he would have starved in three days. The whole experience had hardened him into magnificent physical form; but as weeks grew into months, and months multiplied, a great depression grew and deepened upon him. He would already have been given up for dead, when the loss of the Baleka became known, especially on the report of her survivors. Poor Gerard would be in a terrible state of grief, and Haldane and Yvonne—it would be a blow to them, and to others perhaps. And at the thought of Hilversea his depression would take the form of a great bitterness, which it would tax all his robust faith to overcome.