Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

Presently as he sat reading at his table, he heard the song of men from the sailing ship anchorage. He went out into his verandah to listen. It had gone strangely still and close, he thought; the roar of the chorus came to him over the water as though it were in the grounds. They were only heaving in, but he concluded that they were getting the anchor.

“That part of it at least is true,” he thought, “she is sailing now: and if he were one of her crew, he must very nearly have lost his passage. Still, those silly devils at the Club would have chosen him for that reason; because he will be gone, out of the way, before the rag is apparent. The whole thing is a rag.”

In the closeness he heard, quite distinctly, the words of a song:

“The charming little girl down Tiger Bay.”

Then the singing stopped and discomfort grew upon him; it was really very close indeed. At the same time the glow on the masts in harbour died suddenly: all the colour became ashen: night seemed to prepare and advance in the one moment; he noticed the flash of the light on Point Manola. “How dark it is,” he thought, “the very instant the sun goes down.”

He shivered on his verandah, not from cold but from uneasiness; he stayed an instant longer, half thinking that he saw something stir among the mita shrubs. He turned his glasses on the spot, but decided that he had been mistaken: there was nothing there. “Yet it looked like a face,” he said; “like the face of a little evil elderly man, such as Mr. Harker described.”

Now that the light was off the day, the place looked forbidding. He saw, for the first time, how easy it would be to creep up to the house unobserved, and how hard it might fare with them if people did creep up, for revenge or lust. “Of course, it is absurd,” he said to himself, “but I will walk round the house before we settle in. I will make sure that that was not a face in the mita shrubs.”

He picked up a stick, in case of snakes, and stepped out into the garden towards the shrubs. The world had already taken the night like a garment: the bats and wood-owls were abroad: the frogs in the marsh were singing: the sparks of fireflies burned and died among the dusk. He thrust into the shrubbery to the place which had made him doubt; he beat all round it with his stick. No one had been there; no one was among the rocks beyond the shrubs, nor on the beach between the arms of the rocks. The place was as deserted as it always was at such a time. The ships’ lights shone out from the anchorage. He heard some men in a fishing boat a mile away. Nothing there told of anything but quiet and of day telling day; no wind, no sea, no tumult: nothing but night at the end of toil. He could see no footprints on the beach.

In the covert on his way round the house he paused to listen. He heard nothing but the noises of the anchorage: a hail, a clanking of something coming to anchor, the hush and hiss of waves on the beach. Listening intently, he heard the noise of the lesser world: the snake moving; the rat roving; the insect’s shrilling. The night seemed all whispering and stealthy; he did not like it. He was glad to see his sister’s lit window in the upper floor, with his sister’s shadow against the blind. “This will not do,” he told himself. “Very likely that ruffian Coghill is watching to see me go round the house. That devil Coghill is always springing his rags: then watching to see how they take. I will work a rag on him before I leave the coast.”

When he had walked through the covert all round the house, finding nothing suspicious, he looked into the ruins of the out-houses, where the Martinez’ slaves had lived in old time. They were plainly given over to the rats and scorpions; there was nothing suspicious there, except that in one of the ruins there was a faint smell of tobacco, as though someone had smoked there during the day. “And who could have smoked there? Who could have, or would have? No one living here.” He could see no cigar-stub, nor cigarette-end, no match, nor sign of smoker; there was nothing there except the memory or ghost of tobacco; it was hardly even a smell, hardly a flavour. By opening his mouth and breathing in, Hilary felt the record of tobacco against his palate. Then, on the wall, he saw a faint luminous streak, which at first he thought to be one of the centipedes which glow with the decay they live in. Looking at it with a light, he saw a match streak. Someone had struck a wax match there, probably during the day, since the phosphorescence still showed. Who could have been there with a wax-match? No native, no one employed about the house. “That limits it,” he said, “to members of the Club, like Coghill.”