The Sea and the Jungle

by H. M. Tomlinson

Then, almost imperceptibly, the frogs begin their nightlong din. The crickets and cicadas join. Between the varying pitch of their voices come other nocturnes in monotones from creatures unknown to complete the gamut. There are notes so profound, but constant, that they are a mere impression of obscurity to the hearing, as when one peers listening into an abysm in which no bottom is seen, and others are stridulations so attenuated that they shrill beyond reach.

A few frogs begin it. There are ululations, wells of mellow sound bubbling to overflow in the dark, and they multiply and unite till the quality of the sound, subdued and pleasant at first, is quite changed. It becomes monstrous. The night trembles in the powerful beat of a rhythmic clangour. One cannot think of frogs, hearing that metallic din. At one time, soon after it begins, the chorus seems the far hubbub, mingled and levelled by distance, of a multitude of people running and disputing in a place where we who are listening know that no people are. The noise comes nearer and louder till it is palpitating around us. It might be the life of the forest, immobile and silent all day, now released and beating upwards in deafening paroxysms.

Alongside the engine room casing amidships the engineers have fixed an open-air mess-table, with a hurricane lamp in its midst, having but a brief halo of light which hardly distinguishes the pickle jar from the marmalade pot. A haze of mosquitoes quivers round the light. The air is hot and lazy, and the engineers sit about limply in trousers and shirts, the latter open and showing bosoms as various as faces. The men cheer themselves with comical plaints about the heat, the food, the Brazils, and make sudden dabs at bare flesh when the insects bite them. The Chief rallies his boys as would a cheery dad—Sandy, though, is nearly his own age, but still much of a lad, quietly despondent—and the Chief heartily insists on food, like it or lump it. I go forward to the captain’s tea table on the poop deck, where we have two hurricane lamps, and where the figures of us round the table, in that dismal glim, are the thin phantoms of men. The lamps have been lighted only that moment, and as we take our seats, the insects come. Just as sharply as though something derisive and invisible were throwing them at us, big mole crickets bounce into our plates. A cicada, though I was then unaware of his identity, a monstrous fly which looked as large as a rat, and with a head like a lantern, alighted before me on the cloth, and remained still. Picking it up tentatively it sprang a startling police rattle between my finger and thumb, and the other chaps shouted their merriment. The steward places a cup of tea before each of us, and in an interval of the talk the Skipper announces a smell of paraffin in his cup. We experiment with ours, and gravely confirm. The surgeon, bending close to a light with his cup, the deep characteristics of his face strongly accentuated—he seems but a bodiless head in the dark—says he detects globules of fat. The Skipper crudely outlines this horror to the steward, who makes an inaudible reply in German, and disappears down the companion. We get a new and innocent brew.

There is hash for us. There is our familiar the pickled beef. There are saucers of brown onions. There are saucers of jam and of butter. To-night the steward has baked some cakes, and their grateful smell and crisp brown rugged surface, studded with plums, determine in my mind a resolution to eat four of them, if I can get them without open shame. I assert that our Skipper has a counting eye for the special dishes; though you may eat all the hash you want. Damn his hash! The bread is sour. I want cakes.

After tea the pilots get into their hammocks and under their curtains, out of the way of the mosquitoes. We know where they are because of the red ends of their cigarettes. We sit around anywhere, the Skipper, the Chief, the Doctor and the Purser. There is little to be said. We talk of the mosquitoes, in ejaculations, for the little wretches quite easily penetrate linen, and can manage even worsted socks. Occasionally flying insects bump into the tin lamp placed above us on the ice chest. (No; there is no ice.) Thin divergent arrows of light, the fireflies, lace the gloom, and the trees alongside are gemmed with them. We find still less to say to each other, but fear to retire to our heated berths, for as it is just possible to breathe in the open we continue to defy the mosquitoes. The first mate serenades us on his accordion. At last there is no help for it. The steward comes to tell the master that his cot is ready. The “old man” sleeps in a cot draped with netting, and slung from the awning beams on the starboard side. Nightly he turns in there, and unfailingly a rain cloud bursts in the very early morning, pounding on the awning till the cool spray compels him, and he retreats in his pyjamas for shelter, taking his pillow with him. It is for that reason I do not use the cot he made for me, which hangs on the port side; though it is delightful for the afternoon nap.

The Skipper disappears. The Doctor and I go below to the surgery, and from the settee there he removes books, tobacco tins, fishing tackle, phials, india rubber tubing, and small leather cases, making room for us both, and first we have some out of his bottle, and then we try some out of mine. The stuff is always tepid, for the water in the carafe has a temperature of 80 degrees. The perspiration begins a steady permeation as we talk, for now we can talk, and talk, being together, and talking is better than sleep, which at its best is but a fitful doze in the tropics. We fall, as it were, on each other’s necks. Though the Doctor’s breast—I say nothing of mine—is not one which appears to invite the weak tear of a fellow mortal who is harassed by solitude. You might judge it too cold, too hard and unresponsive a support, for that; and I have seen his eye even repellent. He is not elderly, but he is grey, and pallid through too much of the tropics. The lines descending his face show he has been observing things for long, and does not think much of them. When disputing with him, he does not always reply to you; he smiles to himself; a habit which is an annoyance to some people, whose simple minds are suspicious, and who are unaware that the surgeon is sometimes forgetful that his weaker brethren, when they are most heated and disputative with him, then most lack confidence in their case, and need the confirmation of the wit they know is superior. That is no time when one should look at the wall, and smile quietly. The “Capella’s” company feel that the surgeon stands where he overlooks them, and they see, where he stands unassumingly superior, that he looks upon them politely. They do not know he is really sad and forgetful; they think he is amused, but that he prefers to pretend he is well bred. I must confess it is known he has prescience having a certain devilish quality of penetration. There was one of our stokers, and one night he was drunk on stolen gin, and latitudinous, and so attempted a curious answer to the second engineer, who sought him out in the forecastle concerning work. Now the second engineer is a young man who has a number of photographs of himself which display him, clad but in vanity and shorts, back, front, and profile, arms folded tightly to swell his very large muscles. He has really a model figure, and he knows it. The cut over the stoker’s nose was a bad one.

To the surgeon the stoker went, early next morning, actually for a hair of the dog, but with a story that he was then to go on duty, and so would miss his ration of quinine, which is not served till eleven o’clock. The quinine, as you know, is given in gin. The surgeon complimented the man on such proper attention to his health, and willingly gave him the quinine—in water. He also stood at the door of the alleyway to watch the man retained the quinine as far as the engine room entrance.

Eight bells! Presently I also must go and pretend to sleep. The surgeon’s last cheery comment on the cosmic scheme remains but as a wry smile on our faces. We grope in our minds desperately for a topic to keep the talk afloat. There goes one bell!

I arrive at my haunt of cockroaches, where the second mate is already asleep on the upper shelf. The brown light of the oil lamp has its familiar flavour, and the cabin is like an oven. What a prospect for sleep! Raising the mosquito curtain carefully I slip through the opening like an acrobat, hoping to be ahead of the insidious little malaria carriers. A drove of cockroaches scuttles wildly over my warm mattress as I arrive. Striking matches within what the sailor overhead calls my meat safe, I examine my enclosure carefully for mosquitoes, but none seems to be there, though I know very well I shall find at least a dozen, gorged with blood, in the morning. The iron bulkhead which separates my bed from the engine room is, of course, hot to the touch. The air is a passive weight. The old insect bites begin to irritate and burn. I kick the miserable sheet to the foot, and lie on my back without a movement, for I fear I may suffocate in that shut box. My chest seems in bonds, and for long there is no relief, though the body presently grows indifferent to the misery, and the anxiety goes. It is remarkable to what brutality the body will submit, when it knows it must. Yet nothing but a continuous effort of will kept the panic suppressed, and me in that box, till the feeling of anxiety had passed. Thenceforward the sleepless mind, like a petty balloon giddy on a thin but unbreakable thread of thought, would tug at my consciousness, revolving and dodging about, in spite of my resolution to keep it still. If I could only break that thread, I said to myself, turning over again, away it would fly out of sight, and I should forget all this ... all this.... And presently it broke loose, and dwindled into oblivion.

Then I knew nothing more till I saw, fixed where I was in hopeless horror, the baby face of one I dwell much upon, in moments of solitude, and it had fallen wan and thin, and was full of woe unutterable, and its appealing eyes were blind. I woke with a cry, sitting up suddenly, the heart going like a rapid hammer. There was the curtained box about me. The clothes were on the hooks. I could see the black shape of the cabin doorway. By my watch it was four o’clock. The air had cooled, and as I sat waiting for the next thing in the silence the mate snored profoundly overhead. Ah! So that was all right.