________________________________________________
_ OBSERVING the steady fall of the barometer, Captain MacWhirr
thought, "There's some dirty weather knocking about." This is
precisely what he thought. He had had an experience of moderately
dirty weather -- the term dirty as applied to the weather
implying only moderate discomfort to the seaman. Had he been
informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world
was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of
the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under
the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no
experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply
comprehension. The wisdom of his county had pronounced by means
of an Act of Parliament that before he could be considered as fit
to take charge of a ship he should be able to answer certain
simple questions on the subject of circular storms such as
hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons; and apparently he had answered
them, since he was now in command of the Nan-Shan in the China
seas during the season of typhoons. But if he had answered he
remembered nothing of it. He was, however, conscious of being
made uncomfortable by the clammy heat. He came out on the
bridge, and found no relief to this oppression. The air seemed
thick. He gasped like a fish, and began to believe himself
greatly out of sorts.
The Nan-Shan was ploughing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of
the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating
piece of gray silk. The sun, pale and without rays, poured down
leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen
were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched,
yellow faces were like the faces of bilious invalids. Captain
MacWhirr noticed two of them especially, stretched out on their
backs below the bridge. As soon as they had closed their eyes
they seemed dead. Three others, however, were quarrelling
barbarously away forward; and one big fellow, half naked, with
herculean shoulders, was hanging limply over a winch; another,
sitting on the deck, his knees up and his head drooping sideways
in a girlish attitude, was plaiting his pigtail with infinite
languor depicted in his whole person and in the very movement of
his fingers. The smoke struggled with difficulty out of the
funnel, and instead of streaming away spread itself out like an
infernal sort of cloud, smelling of sulphur and raining soot all
over the decks.
"What the devil are you doing there, Mr. Jukes?" asked Captain
MacWhirr.
This unusual form of address, though mumbled rather than spoken,
caused the body of Mr. Jukes to start as though it had been
prodded under the fifth rib. He had had a low bench brought on
the bridge, and sitting on it, with a length of rope curled about
his feet and a piece of canvas stretched over his knees, was
pushing a sail-needle vigorously. He looked up, and his surprise
gave to his eyes an expression of innocence and candour.
"I am only roping some of that new set of bags we made last trip
for whipping up coals," he remonstrated, gently. "We shall want
them for the next coaling, sir."
"What became of the others?"
"Why, worn out of course, sir."
Captain MacWhirr, after glaring down irresolutely at his chief
mate, disclosed the gloomy and cynical conviction that more than
half of them had been lost overboard, "if only the truth was
known," and retired to the other end of the bridge. Jukes,
exasperated by this unprovoked attack, broke the needle at the
second stitch, and dropping his work got up and cursed the heat
in a violent undertone.
The propeller thumped, the three Chinamen forward had given up
squabbling very suddenly, and the one who had been plaiting his
tail clasped his legs and stared dejectedly over his knees. The
lurid sunshine cast faint and sickly shadows. The swell ran
higher and swifter every moment, and the ship lurched heavily in
the smooth, deep hollows of the sea.
"I wonder where that beastly swell comes from," said Jukes aloud,
recovering himself after a stagger.
"North-east," grunted the literal MacWhirr, from his side of the
bridge. "There's some dirty weather knocking about. Go and look
at the glass."
When Jukes came out of the chart-room, the cast of his
countenance had changed to thoughtfulness and concern. He caught
hold of the bridge-rail and stared ahead.
The temperature in the engine-room had gone up to a hundred and
seventeen degrees. Irritated voices were ascending through the
skylight and through the fiddle of the stokehold in a harsh and
resonant uproar, mingled with angry clangs and scrapes of metal,
as if men with limbs of iron and throats of bronze had been
quarrelling down there. The second engineer was falling foul of
the stokers for letting the steam go down. He was a man with arms
like a blacksmith, and generally feared; but that afternoon the
stokers were answering him back recklessly, and slammed the
furnace
23
doors with the fury of despair. Then the noise ceased suddenly,
and the second engineer appeared, emerging out of the stokehold
streaked with grime and soaking wet like a chimney-sweep coming
out of a well. As soon as his head was clear of the fiddle he
began to scold Jukes for not trimming properly the stokehold
ventilators; and in answer Jukes made with his hands deprecatory
soothing signs meaning: "No wind -- can't be helped -- you can
see for yourself." But the other wouldn't hear reason. His
teeth flashed angrily in his dirty face. He didn't mind, he
said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there,
blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think you could
keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the
blanked stokers about? No, by George! You had to get some
draught, too -- may he be everlastingly blanked for a swab-headed
deck-hand if you didn't! And the chief, too, rampaging before
the steam-gauge and carrying on like a lunatic up and down the
engine-room ever since noon. What did Jukes think he was stuck
up there for, if he couldn't get one of his decayed,
good-for-nothing deck-cripples to turn the ventilators to the
wind?
The relations of the "engine-room" and the "deck" of the Nan-Shan
were, as is known, of a brotherly nature; therefore Jukes leaned
over and begged the other in a restrained tone not to make a
disgusting ass of himself; the skipper was on the other side of
the bridge. But the second declared mutinously that he didn't
care a rap who was on the other side of the bridge, and Jukes,
passing in a flash from lofty disapproval into a state of
exaltation, invited him in unflattering terms to come up and
twist the beastly things to please himself, and catch such wind
as a donkey of his sort could find. The second rushed up to the
fray. He flung himself at the port ventilator as though he meant
to tear it out bodily and toss it overboard. All he did was to
move the cowl round a few inches, with an enormous expenditure of
force, and seemed spent in the effort. He leaned against the
back of the wheelhouse, and Jukes walked up to him.
"Oh, Heavens!" ejaculated the engineer in a feeble voice. He
lifted his eyes to the sky, and then let his glassy stare descend
to meet the horizon that, tilting up to an angle of forty
degrees, seemed to hang on a slant for a while and settled down
slowly. "Heavens! Phew! What's up, anyhow?"
Jukes, straddling his long legs like a pair of compasses, put on
an air of superiority. "We're going to catch it this time," he
said. "The barometer is tumbling down like anything, Harry. And
you trying to kick up that silly row. . . ."
The word "barometer" seemed to revive the second engineer's mad
animosity. Collecting afresh all his energies, he directed Jukes
in a low and brutal tone to shove the unmentionable instrument
down his gory throat. Who cared for his crimson barometer? It
was the steam -- the steam -- that was going down; and what
between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was
worse than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse
how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on
the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he
muttered darkly, "I'll faint them," and dashed off. He stopped
upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the unnatural
daylight, and dropped into the dark hole with a whoop.
When Jukes turned, his eyes fell upon the rounded back and the
big red ears of Captain MacWhirr, who had come across. He did
not look at his chief officer, but said at once, "That's a very
violent man, that second engineer."
"Jolly good second, anyhow," grunted Jukes. "They can't keep up
steam," he added, rapidly, and made a grab at the rail against
the coming lurch.
Captain MacWhirr, unprepared, took a run and brought himself up
with a jerk by an awning stanchion.
"A profane man," he said, obstinately. "If this goes on, I'll
have to get rid of him the first chance."
"It's the heat," said Jukes. "The weather's awful. It would make
a saint swear. Even up here I feel exactly as if I had my head
tied up in a woollen blanket."
Captain MacWhirr looked up. "D'ye mean to say, Mr. Jukes, you
ever had your head tied up in a blanket? What was that for?"
"It's a manner of speaking, sir," said Jukes, stolidly.
"Some of you fellows do go on! What's that about saints
swearing? I wish you wouldn't talk so wild. What sort of saint
would that be that would swear? No more saint than yourself, I
expect. And what's a blanket got to do with it -- or the weather
either. . . . The heat does not make me swear -- does it? It's
filthy bad temper. That's what it is. And what's the good of
your talking like this?"
Thus Captain MacWhirr expostulated against the use of images in
speech, and at the end electrified Jukes by a contemptuous snort,
followed by words of passion and resentment: "Damme! I'll fire
him out of the ship if he don't look out."
And Jukes, incorrigible, thought: "Goodness me! Somebody's put a
new inside to my old man. Here's temper, if you like. Of course
it's the weather; what else? It would make an angel quarrelsome
-- let alone a saint."
All the Chinamen on deck appeared at their last gasp.
At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring
brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since
the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud
became visible to the northward; it had a sinister dark olive
tint, and lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid
obstacle in the path of the ship. She went floundering towards
it like an exhausted creature driven to its death. The coppery
twilight retired slowly, and the darkness brought out overhead a
swarm of unsteady, big stars, that, as if blown upon, flickered
exceedingly and seemed to hang very near the earth. At eight
o'clock Jukes went into the chart-room to write up the ship's
log.
He copies neatly out of the rough-book the number of miles, the
course of the ship, and in the column for "wind" scrawled the
word "calm" from top to bottom of the eight hours since noon. He
was exasperated by the continuous, monotonous rolling of the
ship. The heavy inkstand would slide away in a manner that
suggested perverse intelligence in dodging the pen. Having
written in the large space under the head of "Remarks" "Heat very
oppressive," he stuck the end of the penholder in his teeth, pipe
fashion, and mopped his face carefully.
"Ship rolling heavily in a high cross swell," he began again, and
commented to himself, "Heavily is no word for it." Then he
wrote: "Sunset threatening, with a low bank of clouds to N. and
E. Sky clear overhead."
Sprawling over the table with arrested pen, he glanced out of the
door, and in that frame of his vision he saw all the stars flying
upwards between the teakwood jambs on a black sky. The whole lot
took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a blackness
flecked with white flashes, for the sea was as black as the sky
and speckled with foam afar. The stars that had flown to the
roll came back on the return swing of the ship, rushing downwards
in their glittering multitude, not of fiery points, but enlarged
to tiny discs brilliant with a clear wet sheen.
Jukes watched the flying big stars for a moment, and then wrote:
"8 P.M. Swell increasing. Ship labouring and taking water on
her decks. Battened down the coolies for the night. Barometer
still falling." He paused, and thought to himself, "Perhaps
nothing whatever'll come of it." And then he closed resolutely
his entries: "Every appearance of a typhoon coming on."
On going out he had to stand aside, and Captain MacWhirr strode
over the doorstep without saying a word or making a sign.
"Shut the door, Mr. Jukes, will you?" he cried from within.
Jukes turned back to do so, muttering ironically: "Afraid to
catch cold, I suppose." It was his watch below, but he yearned
for communion with his kind; and he remarked cheerily to the
second mate: "Doesn't look so bad, after all -- does it?"
The second mate was marching to and fro on the bridge, tripping
down with small steps one moment, and the next climbing with
difficulty the shifting slope of the deck. At the sound of
Jukes' voice he stood still, facing forward, but made no reply.
"Hallo! That's a heavy one," said Jukes, swaying to meet the
long roll till his lowered hand touched the planks. This time
the second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly
nature.
He was an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no
hair on his face. He had been shipped in a hurry in Shanghai,
that trip when the second officer brought from home had delayed
the ship three hours in port by contriving (in some manner
Captain MacWhirr could never understand) to fall overboard into
an empty coal-lighter lying alongside, and had to be sent ashore
to the hospital with concussion of the brain and a broken limb or
two.
Jukes was not discouraged by the unsympathetic sound. "The
Chinamen must be having a lovely time of it down there," he said.
"It's lucky for them the old girl has the easiest roll of any
ship I've ever been in. There now! This one wasn't so bad."
"You wait," snarled the second mate.
With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips,
he always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was
concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. All his time off
duty he spent in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still
in there that he was supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had
disappeared; but the man who came in to wake him for his watch on
deck would invariably find him with his eyes wide open, flat on
his back in the bunk, and glaring irritably from a soiled pillow.
He never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from
anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention West
Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in
connection with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house. He
was one of those men who are picked up at need in the ports of
the world. They are competent enough, appear hopelessly hard up,
show no evidence of any sort of vice, and carry about them all
the signs of manifest failure. They come aboard on an emergency,
care for no ship afloat, live in their own atmosphere of casual
connection amongst their shipmates who know nothing of them, and
make up their minds to leave at inconvenient times. They clear
out with no words of leavetaking in some God-forsaken port other
men would fear to be stranded in, and go ashore in company of a
shabby sea-chest, corded like a treasure-box, and with an air of
shaking the ship's dust off their feet.
"You wait," he repeated, balanced in great swings with his back
to Jukes, motionless and implacable.
"Do you mean to say we are going to catch it hot?" asked Jukes
with boyish interest.
"Say? . . . I say nothing. You don't catch me," snapped the
little second mate, with a mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning,
as if Jukes' question had been a trap cleverly detected. "Oh,
no! None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it," he
mumbled to himself.
Jukes reflected rapidly that this second mate was a mean little
beast, and in his heart he wished poor Jack Allen had never
smashed himself up in the coal-lighter. The far-off blackness
ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry
night of the earth -- the starless night of the immensities
beyond the created universe, revealed in its appalling stillness
through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth
is the kernel.
"Whatever there might be about," said Jukes, "we are steaming
straight into it."
"You've said it," caught up the second mate, always with his back
to Jukes. "You've said it, mind -- not I."
"Oh, go to Jericho!" said Jukes, frankly; and the other emitted a
triumphant little chuckle.
"You've said it," he repeated.
"And what of that?"
"I've known some real good men get into trouble with their
skippers for saying a dam' sight less," answered the second mate
feverishly. "Oh, no! You don't catch me."
"You seem deucedly anxious not to give yourself away," said
Jukes, completely soured by such absurdity. "I wouldn't be afraid
to say what I think."
"Aye, to me! That's no great trick. I am nobody, and well I
know it."
The ship, after a pause of comparative steadiness, started upon a
series of rolls, one worse than the other, and for a time Jukes,
preserving his equilibrium, was too busy to open his mouth. As
soon as the violent swinging had quieted down somewhat, he said:
"This is a bit too much of a good thing. Whether anything is
coming or not I think she ought to be put head on to that swell.
The old man is just gone in to lie down. Hang me if I don't speak
to him."
But when he opened the door of the chart-room he saw his captain
reading a book. Captain MacWhirr was not lying down: he was
standing up with one hand grasping the edge of the bookshelf and
the other holding open before his face a thick volume. The lamp
wriggled in the gimbals, the loosened books toppled from side to
side on the shelf, the long barometer swung in jerky circles, the
table altered its slant every moment. In the midst of all this
stir and movement Captain MacWhirr, holding on, showed his eyes
above the upper edge, and asked, "What's the matter?"
"Swell getting worse, sir."
"Noticed that in here," muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Anything
wrong?"
Jukes, inwardly disconcerted by the seriousness of the eyes
looking at him over the top of the book, produced an embarrassed
grin.
"Rolling like old boots," he said, sheepishly.
"Aye! Very heavy -- very heavy. What do you want?"
At this Jukes lost his footing and began to flounder. "I was
thinking of our passengers," he said, in the manner of a man
clutching at a straw.
"Passengers?" wondered the Captain, gravely. "What passengers?"
"Why, the Chinamen, sir," explained Jukes, very sick of this
conversation.
"The Chinamen! Why don't you speak plainly? Couldn't tell what
you meant. Never heard a lot of coolies spoken of as passengers
before. Passengers, indeed! What's come to you?"
Captain MacWhirr, closing the book on his forefinger, lowered his
arm and looked completely mystified. "Why are you thinking of the
Chinamen, Mr. Jukes?" he inquired.
Jukes took a plunge, like a man driven to it. "She's rolling her
decks full of water, sir. Thought you might put her head on
perhaps -- for a while. Till this goes down a bit -- very soon,
I dare say. Head to the eastward. I never knew a ship roll like
this."
He held on in the doorway, and Captain MacWhirr, feeling his grip
on the shelf inadequate, made up his mind to let go in a hurry,
and fell heavily on the couch.
"Head to the eastward?" he said, struggling to sit up. "That's
more than four points off her course."
"Yes, sir. Fifty degrees. . . . Would just bring her head far
enough round to meet this. . . ."
Captain MacWhirr was now sitting up. He had not dropped the
book, and he had not lost his place.
"To the eastward?" he repeated, with dawning astonishment. "To
the . . . Where do you think we are bound to? You want me to
haul a full-powered steamship four points off her course to make
the Chinamen comfortable! Now, I've heard more than enough of
mad things done in the world -- but this. . . . If I didn't know
you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor. Steer four points
off. . . . And what afterwards? Steer four points over the
other way, I suppose, to make the course good. What put it into
your head that I would start to tack a steamer as if she were a
sailing-ship?"
"Jolly good thing she isn't," threw in Jukes, with bitter
readiness. "She would have rolled every blessed stick out of her
this afternoon."
"Aye! And you just would have had to stand and see them go,"
said Captain MacWhirr, showing a certain animation. "It's a dead
calm, isn't it?"
"It is, sir. But there's something out of the common coming, for
sure."
"Maybe. I suppose you have a notion I should be getting out of
the way of that dirt," said Captain MacWhirr, speaking with the
utmost simplicity of manner and tone, and fixing the oilcloth on
the floor with a heavy stare. Thus he noticed neither Jukes'
discomfiture nor the mixture of vexation and astonished respect
on his face.
"Now, here's this book," he continued with deliberation, slapping
his thigh with the closed volume. "I've been reading the chapter
on the storms there."
This was true. He had been reading the chapter on the storms.
When he had entered the chart-room, it was with no intention of
taking the book down. Some influence in the air -- the same
influence, probably, that caused the steward to bring without
orders the Captain's sea-boots and oilskin coat up to the
chart-room -had as it were guided his hand to the shelf; and
without taking the time to sit down he had waded with a conscious
effort into the terminology of the subject. He lost himself
amongst advancing semi-circles, left- and right-hand quadrants,
the curves of the tracks, the probable bearing of the centre, the
shifts of wind and the readings of barometer. He tried to bring
all these things into a definite relation to himself, and ended
by becoming contemptuously angry with such a lot of words, and
with so much advice, all head-work and supposition, without a
glimmer of certitude.
"It's the damnedest thing, Jukes," he said. "If a fellow was to
believe all that's in there, he would be running most of his time
all over the sea trying to get behind the weather."
Again he slapped his leg with the book; and Jukes opened his
mouth, but said nothing.
"Running to get behind the weather! Do you understand that, Mr.
Jukes? It's the maddest thing!" ejaculated Captain MacWhirr,
with pauses, gazing at the floor profoundly. "You would think an
old woman had been writing this. It passes me. If that thing
means anything useful, then it means that I should at once alter
the course away, away to the devil somewhere, and come booming
down on Fu-chau from the northward at the tail of this dirty
weather that's supposed to be knocking about in our way. From
the north! Do you understand, Mr. Jukes? Three hundred extra
miles to the distance, and a pretty coal bill to show. I
couldn't bring myself to do that if every word in there was
gospel truth, Mr. Jukes. Don't you expect me. . . ."
And Jukes, silent, marvelled at this display of feeling and
loquacity.
"But the truth is that you don't know if the fellow is right,
anyhow. How can you tell what a gale is made of till you get it?
He isn't aboard here, is he? Very well. Here he says that the
centre of them things bears eight points off the wind; but we
haven't got any wind, for all the barometer falling. Where's his
centre now?"
"We will get the wind presently," mumbled Jukes.
"Let it come, then," said Captain MacWhirr, with dignified
indignation. "It's only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you
don't find everything in books. All these rules for dodging
breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes, seem to
me the maddest thing, when you come to look at it sensibly."
He raised his eyes, saw Jukes gazing at him dubiously, and tried
to illustrate his meaning.
"About as queer as your extraordinary notion of dodging the ship
head to sea, for I don't know how long, to make the Chinamen
comfortable; whereas all we've got to do is to take them to
Fu-chau, being timed to get there before noon on Friday. If the
weather delays me -- very well. There's your log-book to talk
straight about the weather. But suppose I went swinging off my
course and came in two days late, and they asked me: 'Where have
you been all that time, Captain?' What could I say to that?
'Went around to dodge the bad weather,' I would say. 'It must've
been dam' bad,' they would say. 'Don't know,' I would have to
say; 'I've dodged clear of it.' See that, Jukes? I have been
thinking it all out this afternoon."
He looked up again in his unseeing, unimaginative way. No one
had ever heard him say so much at one time. Jukes, with his arms
open in the doorway, was like a man invited to behold a miracle.
Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while
incredulity was seated in his whole countenance.
"A gale is a gale, Mr. Jukes," resumed the Captain, "and a
full-powered steam-ship has got to face it. There's just so much
dirty weather knocking about the world, and the proper thing is
to go through it with none of what old Captain Wilson of the
Melita calls 'storm strategy.' The other day ashore I heard him
hold forth about it to a lot of shipmasters who came in and sat
at a table next to mine. It seemed to me the greatest nonsense.
He was telling them how he outmanœuvred, I think he said, a
terrific gale, so that it never came nearer than fifty miles to
him. A neat piece of head-work he called it. How he knew there
was a terrific gale fifty miles off beats me altogether. It was
like listening to a crazy man. I would have thought Captain
Wilson was old enough to know better."
Captain MacWhirr ceased for a moment, then said, "It's your watch
below, Mr. Jukes?"
Jukes came to himself with a start. "Yes, sir."
"Leave orders to call me at the slightest change," said the
Captain. He reached up to put the book away, and tucked his legs
upon the couch. "Shut the door so that it don't fly open, will
you? I can't stand a door banging. They've put a lot of
rubbishy locks into this ship, I must say."
Captain MacWhirr closed his eyes.
He did so to rest himself. He was tired, and he experienced that
state of mental vacuity which comes at the end of an exhaustive
discussion that has liberated some belief matured in the course
of meditative years. He had indeed been making his confession of
faith, had he only known it; and its effect was to make Jukes, on
the other side of the door, stand scratching his head for a good
while.
Captain MacWhirr opened his eyes.
He thought he must have been asleep. What was that loud noise?
Wind? Why had he not been called? The lamp wriggled in its
gimbals, the barometer swung in circles, the table altered its
slant every moment; a pair of limp sea-boots with collapsed tops
went sliding past the couch. He put out his hand instantly, and
captured one.
Jukes' face appeared in a crack of the door: only his face, very
red, with staring eyes. The flame of the lamp leaped, a piece of
paper flew up, a rush of air enveloped Captain MacWhirr.
Beginning to draw on the boot, he directed an expectant gaze at
Jukes' swollen, excited features.
"Came on like this," shouted Jukes, "five minutes ago . . . all
of a sudden."
The head disappeared with a bang, and a heavy splash and patter
of drops swept past the closed door as if a pailful of melted
lead had been flung against the house. A whistling could be
heard now upon the deep vibrating noise outside. The stuffy
chart-room seemed as full of draughts as a shed. Captain
MacWhirr collared the other sea-boot on its violent passage along
the floor. He was not flustered, but he could not find at once
the opening for inserting his foot. The shoes he had flung off
were scurrying from end to end of the cabin, gambolling playfully
over each other like puppies. As soon as he stood up he kicked
at them viciously, but without effect.
He threw himself into the attitude of a lunging fencer, to reach
after his oilskin coat; and afterwards he staggered all over the
confined space while he jerked himself into it. Very grave,
straddling his legs far apart, and stretching his neck, he
started to tie deliberately the strings of his sou'-wester under
his chin, with thick fingers that trembled slightly. He went
through all the movements of a woman putting on her bonnet before
a glass, with a strained, listening attention, as though he had
expected every moment to hear the shout of his name in the
confused clamour that had suddenly beset his ship. Its increase
filled his ears while he was getting ready to go out and confront
whatever it might mean. It was tumultuous and very loud -- made
up of the rush of the wind, the crashes of the sea, with that
prolonged deep vibration of the air, like the roll of an immense
and remote drum beating the charge of the gale.
He stood for a moment in the light of the lamp, thick, clumsy,
shapeless in his panoply of combat, vigilant and red-faced.
"There's a lot of weight in this," he muttered.
As soon as he attempted to open the door the wind caught it.
Clinging to the handle, he was dragged out over the doorstep, and
at once found himself engaged with the wind in a sort of personal
scuffle whose object was the shutting of that door. At the last
moment a tongue of air scurried in and licked out the flame of
the lamp.
Ahead of the ship he perceived a great darkness lying upon a
multitude of white flashes; on the starboard beam a few amazing
stars drooped, dim and fitful, above an immense waste of broken
seas, as if seen through a mad drift of smoke.
On the bridge a knot of men, indistinct and toiling, were making
great efforts in the light of the wheelhouse windows that shone
mistily on their heads and backs. Suddenly darkness closed upon
one pane, then on another. The voices of the lost group reached
him after the manner of men's voices in a gale, in shreds and
fragments of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear. All at once
Jukes appeared at his side, yelling, with his head down.
"Watch -- put in -- wheelhouse shutters -- glass -afraid -- blow
in."
Jukes heard his commander upbraiding.
"This -- come -- anything -- warning -- call me."
He tried to explain, with the uproar pressing on his lips.
"Light air -- remained -- bridge -- sudden -- north-east -- could
turn -- thought -- you -- sure -- hear."
They had gained the shelter of the weather-cloth, and could
converse with raised voices, as people quarrel.
"I got the hands along to cover up all the ventilators. Good job
I had remained on deck. I didn't think you would be asleep, and
so . . . What did you say, sir? What?"
"Nothing," cried Captain MacWhirr. "I said -- all right."
"By all the powers! We've got it this time," observed Jukes in a
howl.
"You haven't altered her course?" inquired Captain MacWhirr,
straining his voice.
"No, sir. Certainly not. Wind came out right ahead. And here
comes the head sea."
A plunge of the ship ended in a shock as if she had landed her
forefoot upon something solid. After a moment of stillness a
lofty flight of sprays drove hard with the wind upon their faces.
"Keep her at it as long as we can," shouted Captain MacWhirr.
Before Jukes had squeezed the salt water out of his eyes all the
stars had disappeared. _
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