Part 1 (2/2)
Their att.i.tude towards me was unfriendly. Altogether I was not getting on. I would discover at odd times (generally about midnight) that I was totally inexperienced, greatly ignorant of business, and hopelessly unfit for any sort of command; and when the steward had to be taken to the hospital ill with choleraic symptoms I felt bereaved of the only decent person at the after end of the s.h.i.+p. He was fully expected to recover, but in the meantime had to be replaced by some sort of servant.
And on the recommendation of a certain Schomberg, the proprietor of the smaller of the two hotels in the place, I engaged a Chinaman. Schomberg, a brawny, hairy Alsatian, and an awful gossip, a.s.sured me that it was all right. ”First-cla.s.s boy that. Came in the suite of his Excellency Tseng the Commissioner--you know. His Excellency Tseng lodged with me here for three weeks.”
He mouthed the Chinese Excellency at me with great unction, though the specimen of the ”suite” did not seem very promising. At the time, however, I did not know what an untrustworthy humbug Schomberg was. The ”boy” might have been forty or a hundred and forty for all you could tell--one of those Chinamen of the death's-head type of face and completely inscrutable. Before the end of the third day he had revealed himself as a confirmed opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief, and a first-cla.s.s sprinter. When he departed at the top of his speed with thirty-two golden sovereigns of my own hard-earned savings it was the last straw. I had reserved that money in case my difficulties came to the worst. Now it was gone I felt as poor and naked as a fakir. I clung to my s.h.i.+p, for all the bother she caused me, but what I could not bear were the long lonely evenings in her cuddy, where the atmosphere, made smelly by a leaky lamp, was agitated by the snoring of the mate.
That fellow shut himself up in his stuffy cabin punctually at eight, and made gross and revolting noises like a water-logged trump. It was odious not to be able to worry oneself in comfort on board one's own s.h.i.+p.
Everything in this world, I reflected, even the command of a nice little barque, may be made a delusion and a snare for the unwary spirit of pride in man.
From such reflections I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world's iniquities had ever penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the world. But that patriarchal old tub, like some saintly retreat, echoed nothing of it. She was world proof. Her venerable innocence apparently had put a restraint on the roaring l.u.s.ts of the sea. And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank. It may, of course, have been Hermann's skilful seamans.h.i.+p, but to me it looked as if the allied oceans had refrained from smas.h.i.+ng these high bulwarks, uns.h.i.+pping the lumpy rudder, frightening the children, and generally opening this family's eyes out of sheer reticence. It looked like reticence. The ruthless disclosure was in the end left for a man to make; a man strong and elemental enough and driven to unveil some secrets of the sea by the power of a simple and elemental desire.
This, however, occurred much later, and meantime I took sanctuary in that serene old s.h.i.+p early every evening. The only person on board that seemed to be in trouble was little Lena, and in due course I perceived that the health of the rag-doll was more than delicate. This object led a sort of ”in extremis” existence in a wooden box placed against the starboard mooring-bitts, tended and nursed with the greatest sympathy and care by all the children, who greatly enjoyed pulling long faces and moving with hushed footsteps. Only the baby--Nicholas--looked on with a cold, ruffianly leer, as if he had belonged to another tribe altogether.
Lena perpetually sorrowed over the box, and all of them were in deadly earnest. It was wonderful the way these children would work up their compa.s.sion for that bedraggled thing I wouldn't have touched with a pair of tongs. I suppose they were exercising and developing their racial sentimentalism by the means of that dummy. I was only surprised that Mrs. Hermann let Lena cherish and hug that bundle of rags to that extent, it was so disreputably and completely unclean. But Mrs. Hermann would raise her fine womanly eyes from her needlework to look on with amused sympathy, and did not seen to see it, somehow, that this object of affection was a disgrace to the s.h.i.+p's purity. Purity, not cleanliness, is the word. It was pushed so far that I seemed to detect in this too a sentimental excess, as if dirt had been removed in very love. It is impossible to give you an idea of such a meticulous neatness. It was as if every morning that s.h.i.+p had been arduously explored with--with toothbrushes. Her very bowsprit three times a week had its toilette made with a cake of soap and a piece of soft flannel.
Arrayed--I _must_ say arrayed--arrayed artlessly in dazzling white paint as to wood and dark green as to ironwork the simple-minded distribution of these colours evoked the images of simple-minded peace, of arcadian felicity; and the childish comedy of disease and sorrow struck me sometimes as an abominably real blot upon that ideal state.
I enjoyed it greatly, and on my part I brought a little mild excitement into it. Our intimacy arose from the pursuit of that thief. It was in the evening, and Hermann, who, contrary to his habits, had stayed on sh.o.r.e late that day, was extricating himself backwards out of a little gharry on the river bank, opposite his s.h.i.+p, when the hunt pa.s.sed.
Realising the situation as though he had eyes in his shoulder-blades, he joined us with a leap and took the lead. The Chinaman fled silent like a rapid shadow on the dust of an extremely oriental road. I followed. A long way in the rear my mate whooped like a savage. A young moon threw a bashful light on a plain like a monstrous waste ground: the architectural ma.s.s of a Buddhist temple far away projected itself in dead black on the sky. We lost the thief of course; but in my disappointment I had to admire Hermann's presence of mind. The velocity that stodgy man developed in the interests of a complete stranger earned my warm grat.i.tude--there was something truly cordial in his exertions.
He seemed as vexed as myself at our failure, and would hardly listen to my thanks. He said it was ”nothings,” and invited me on the spot to come on board his s.h.i.+p and drink a gla.s.s of beer with him. We poked sceptically for a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, ”Himmel!
Zwei und dreissig Pfund!” He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For a long time we had ceased to hear the mate's whoops and yells.
Then he said to me, ”Everybody has his troubles,” and as we went on remarked that he would never have known anything of mine hadn't he by an extraordinary chance been detained on sh.o.r.e by Captain Falk. He didn't like to stay late ash.o.r.e--he added with a sigh. The something doleful in his tone I put to his sympathy with my misfortune, of course.
On board the Diana Mrs. Hermann's fine eyes expressed much interest and commiseration. We had found the two women sewing face to face under the open skylight in the strong glare of the lamp. Hermann walked in first, starting in the very doorway to pull off his coat, and encouraging me with loud, hospitable e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns: ”Come in! This way! Come in, captain!” At once, coat in hand, he began to tell his wife all about it. Mrs. Hermann put the palms of her plump hands together; I smiled and bowed with a heavy heart: the niece got up from her sewing to bring Hermann's slippers and his embroidered calotte, which he a.s.sumed pontifically, talking (about me) all the time. Billows of white stuff lay between the chairs on the cabin floor; I caught the words ”Zwei und dreissig Pfund” repeated several times, and presently came the beer, which seemed delicious to my throat, parched with running and the emotions of the chase.
I didn't get away till well past midnight, long after the women had retired. Hermann had been trading in the East for three years or more, carrying freights of rice and timber mostly. His s.h.i.+p was well known in all the ports from Vladivostok to Singapore. She was his own property.
The profits had been moderate, but the trade answered well enough while the children were small yet. In another year or so he hoped he would be able to sell the old Diana to a firm in j.a.pan for a fair price. He intended to return home, to Bremen, by mail boat, second cla.s.s, with Mrs. Hermann and the children. He told me all this stolidly, with slow puffs at his pipe. I was sorry when knocking the ashes out he began to rub his eyes. I would have sat with him till morning. What had I to hurry on board my own s.h.i.+p for? To face the broken rifled drawer in my state-room. Ugh! The very thought made me feel unwell.
I became their daily guest, as you know. I think that Mrs. Hermann from the first looked upon me as a romantic person. I did not, of course, tear my hair _coram populo_ over my loss, and she took it for lordly indifference. Afterwards, I daresay, I did tell them some of my adventures--such as they were--and they marvelled greatly at the extent of my experience. Hermann would translate what he thought the most striking pa.s.sages. Getting up on his legs, and as if delivering a lecture on a phenomenon, he addressed himself, with gestures, to the two women, who would let their sewing sink slowly on their laps. Meantime I sat before a gla.s.s of Hermann's beer, trying to look modest. Mrs.
Hermann would glance at me quickly, emit slight ”Ach's!” The girl never made a sound. Never. But she too would sometimes raise her pale eyes to look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance was by no means stupid; it beamed out soft and diffuse as the moon beams upon a landscape--quite differently from the scrutinising inspection of the stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined yourself to appear blurred.
And yet this same glance when turned upon Christian Falk must have been as efficient as the searchlight of a battle-s.h.i.+p.
Falk was the other a.s.siduous visitor on board, but from his behaviour he might have been coming to see the quarter-deck capstan. He certainly used to stare at it a good deal when keeping us company outside the cabin door, with one muscular arm thrown over the back of the chair, and his big shapely legs, in very tight white trousers, extended far out and ending in a pair of black shoes as roomy as punts. On arrival he would shake Hermann's hand with a mutter, bow to the women, and take up his careless and misanthropic att.i.tude by our side. He departed abruptly, with a jump, going through the performance of grunts, handshakes, bow, as if in a panic. Sometimes, with a sort of discreet and convulsive effort, he approached the women and exchanged a few low words with them, half a dozen at most. On these occasions Hermann's usual stare became positively gla.s.sy and Mrs. Hermann's kind countenance would colour up.
The girl herself never turned a hair.
Falk was a Dane or perhaps a Norwegian, I can't tell now. At all events he was a Scandinavian of some sort, and a bloated monopolist to boot.
It is possible he was unacquainted with the word, but he had a clear perception of the thing itself. His tariff of charges for towing s.h.i.+ps in and out was the most brutally inconsiderate doc.u.ment of the sort I had ever seen. He was the commander and owner of the only tug-boat on the river, a very trim white craft of 150 tons or more, as elegantly neat as a yacht, with a round wheel-house rising like a glazed turret high above her sharp bows, and with one slender varnished pole mast forward. I daresay there are yet a few s.h.i.+pmasters afloat who remember Falk and his tug very well. He extracted his pound and a half of flesh from each of us merchant-skippers with an inflexible sort of indifference which made him detested and even feared. Schomberg used to remark: ”I won't talk about the fellow. I don't think he has six drinks from year's end to year's end in my place. But my advice is, gentlemen, don't you have anything to do with him, if you can help it.”
This advice, apart from unavoidable business relations, was easy to follow because Falk intruded upon no one. It seems absurd to compare a tugboat skipper to a centaur: but he reminded me somehow of an engraving in a little book I had as a boy, which represented centaurs at a stream, and there was one, especially in the foreground, prancing bow and arrows in hand, with regular severe features and an immense curled wavy beard, flowing down his breast. Falk's face reminded me of that centaur.
Besides, he was a composite creature. Not a man-horse, it is true, but a man-boat. He lived on board his tug, which was always das.h.i.+ng up and down the river from early morn till dewy eve.
In the last rays of the setting sun, you could pick out far away down the reach his beard borne high up on the white structure, foaming up stream to anchor for the night. There was the white-clad man's body, and the rich brown patch of the hair, and nothing below the waist but the 'thwart-s.h.i.+p white lines of the bridge-screens, that lead the eye to the sharp white lines of the bows cleaving the muddy water of the river.
Separated from his boat to me at least he seemed incomplete. The tug herself without his head and torso on the bridge looked mutilated as it were. But he left her very seldom. All the time I remained in harbour I saw him only twice on sh.o.r.e. On the first occasion it was at my charterers, where he came in misanthropically to get paid for towing out a French barque the day before. The second time I could hardly believe my eyes, for I beheld him reclining under his beard in a cane-bottomed chair in the billiard-room of Schomberg's hotel.
It was very funny to see Schomberg ignoring him pointedly. The artificiality of it contrasted strongly with Falk's natural unconcern.
The big Alsatian talked loudly with his other customers, going from one little table to the other, and pa.s.sing Falk's place of repose with his eyes fixed straight ahead. Falk sat there with an untouched gla.s.s at his elbow. He must have known by sight and name every white man in the room, but he never addressed a word to anybody. He acknowledged my presence by a drop of his eyelids, and that was all. Sprawling there in the chair, he would, now and again, draw the palms of both his hands down his face, giving at the same time a slight, almost imperceptible, shudder.
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