“Well, why the hell should they?” demanded the tall figure at the door, turning its head over its shoulder. “Why should they? Who would understand ’em if they did? Would you? What they would tell you would be outside your experience and all wrong, of course.”
The chief fingered his napkin ring, stared into vacancy, as if talking to such a man, especially when the man was the ship’s captain, was useless, and he would waste no more time. Lightning glimmered at the ports. The steward upset a plate of fruit. While his eye watched a rolling orange the captain continued: “There’s more sense in some comic songs than in a lot of your deductions from experience. What have you experienced? About enough to warn a nipper against playing with fire.” Then he disappeared in the alleyway. The chief said nothing. With well-disciplined weariness he adjusted his napkin ring to a design in the tablecloth. He then looked at me fixedly—but I gave no sign of partisanship—and finished his coffee.
On deck there was only a vibration, and irrelevant sections of our security that were revealed faintly golden in darkness. Our captain stood by himself, a white wraith at the end of the bridge; and even in his ghostliness I could see he was not in need of further communication from any foolish shipmate. But his cheroot smelled friendly. The young officers and engineers of the deck below were clasping one another luxuriously while waltzing to the gramophone. Some of them had abandoned all the dress they did not want. The mask of a Chinaman appeared in the night near me, detached and bodiless, regarded me for an instant with profound melancholy, and then dissolved. I went below to my own seclusion.
A long voyage is chiefly weather and gossip. It gives a traveler the impression of being irrelevant and aimless. The men keep busy about the ship because there is nothing else to do. A sullen word, the least significant of unfriendly gestures, are noted with the reproach that is fixed on an adverse set of the current; it is so gratuitously alien in its opposition. Travel is delightful in the morning, with a young sun giving the sparkling sense that all is new and for the first time, and that shadows are, after all, but a sport of happy light. By the afternoon that freshness has gone, and one suspects the ship is uselessly rocking without progress, fixed in the clutch of some sleeping but eternal power which has forgotten, or does not know, that men do not live forever. One would then destroy Time, the tyrant, and with his own scythe, if suddenly he turned into an alleyway bearing his damnable glass. And when, after dinner, there is no longer any excuse for staying in the saloon, when it is three bells, and the boys have got tired of giving the gramophone on the hatch jazz stuff to rotate, and you can see the spark by the rail amidships where the chief’s pipe accompanies him while he gazes into the night and contemplates finality and futility—then, then, one has to face the ghosts from other times and of vanished scenes which gather in one’s cabin at that hour, confident that it is their place also, and that the man they know is sure to come. And he comes. Hail, the ghosts of the middle watch! You never signed the articles. You were not seen coming aboard. You never appear on deck. The voyage has nothing to do with you. Only one man knows that you haunt us. But are you the reality, or is the ship?
CHAPTER IX
We are in the Strait of Malacca. I have a fine confused romantic feeling this morning, like that of a child just before the curtain rises on the “Forty Thieves.” My memory is a splendid muddle of the long drama which opened when Vasco da Gama rounded Good Hope, reached Calicut, and found the way to Cathay; and of d’Albuquerque, St. Francis Xavier, Camoens, sultans, massacres, sieges, Drake, Cornelius de Houtman, Sir Stamford Raffles, and the various East India companies, some honorable and some foreign. According to the Malay Annals, Malacca must have been a sleepless city. The Malays themselves, without the expert assistance of the Portuguese, knew how to find amusement. There was the prince who played at Malacca with the son of the prime minister till the prince stabbed his playmate, who had knocked off the royal hat. It was a serious matter in Malacca to knock off a superior hat, or to have a beautiful daughter whom you would not sell to the Sultan. One sultan, finding a rival at the house of his own pretty lady, bestowed a quid of betel on one of his young men. The youngster knew. He krised the rival. The head of the house of the murdered man took a violent interest in this, so the Sultan, in the cause of peace, sent the obedient young assassin to his discontented subordinate chief, naturally expecting a pardon to follow such an act of unnecessary courtesy; but the chief split the murderer’s head with an elephant goad. “The court was thronged with foreign adventurers ... mahouts with Indian names, Afghan bravos, Tamil merchants ready to bribe even the Prime Minister.” Could d’Albuquerque improve on that? Certainly not; though he did his best.
What, then, could I be expected to make of it, with the purple silhouettes of the Dindings a few miles to port against the clearing sky of morning? It is better, with such annals to go upon, to leave the fine confused feeling of high romance where it is, for all the noble muddle of the world is romantic; we have amassed enough to last us to the end. Jarra island was ahead, an inky cone against a wall of thunder. The sea was livid. Our men were busy rigging gear to the derricks; we are nearing port, and I must pack up to-day. Yet those Annals so accorded with that lustrous sea and ominous sky inclosed by the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, as though the scenery were left when the actors departed, that I felt we were only just a little too late for the play, and remained on deck from sunrise to sunset in case a late caravel should pass; but all had gone, and we were alone. When the sun went and my vigil was over, he left with us a glow that was so like day that I thought it might last till he came again. But chiefly that radiance was absorbed in the level apple-green water of soundings that expanded toward Sumatra as far as where a loom of storm was a high cobalt barrier. Ahead of us, toward Malacca, there was a haze, suffused with a light of rose in which the islands were lower embers. After all, sultans and Portuguese adventurers, even with the aid of Camoens, were insignificant beneath the tremendous drama of that sky of the tropics when night invaded day.
Before the next day broke in the Strait of Malacca it looked as though the east was now barred from us by the enormous battalions of tempest. They were camped about the horizon, a sleeping but ghastly host, waiting for day to announce the assault and for the wind to lead them. The sea was stilled, as though appalled by the look of the sky. But no wind came with the sun. The dark impending threat did not break on us. Its smoke and waiting thunder became a purple wall on which the sooty streamers were changed to orange and pearl. Here we were, approaching Singapore.
We might have reached the peaceful end of the sea, or perhaps its tranquil beginning, for that delicate surface might never have been broken by any violence. It was inclosed by a circle of islands, some of them high and solid, with deep reflections in the glass, and others but black tracings of minute trees afloat, growing miraculously upright out of the tenuous horizon. A launch turned a point and projected itself at us. Two black lines diverged from its stem widely over a pallid tide. At its head stood the statue of a Malay in a sarong, holding a boat hook, and the statue became alive as the launch disappeared under our side where a Jacob’s ladder was hanging. And next, a pair of hairy freckled hands appeared at our bulwarks, and pulled up a man in a suit and helmet incredibly white. He had a sandy beard. He looked up at our bridge and nodded to it while brushing his hands together to rid them of our ship’s grit, an act which had the air of a polite visitor’s absent-minded disapproval. He went by a group of us, this pilot, as though he had been meeting us like this every morning for years, and was rather tired of it, these hot days, but hoped we were all right. We came alongside a quay. The Trojan touched land in tentative and friendly way, as though to assure herself that she was really there.