“Jim remained thoughtful. ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What did I care what story they agreed to make up?’ he cried recklessly. ‘They could tell what they jolly well liked. It was their business. I knew the story. Nothing they could make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk, argue—talk, argue. He went on and on and on. Suddenly I felt my legs give way under me. I was sick, tired—tired to death. I let fall the tiller, turned my back on them, and sat down on the foremost thwart. I had enough. They called to me to know if I understood—wasn't it true, every word of it? It was true, by God! after their fashion. I did not turn my head. I heard them palavering together. “The silly ass won't say anything.” “Oh, he understands well enough.” “Let him be; he will be all right.” “What can he do?” What could I do! Weren't we all in the same boat? I tried to be deaf. The smoke had disappeared to the northward. It was a dead calm. They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank too. Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the boat-sail over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They crept under, out of my sight, thank God! I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one hour's sleep since the day I was born. I couldn't see the water for the glitter of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep out, stand up to take a look all round, and get under again. I could hear spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them could sleep. One of them at least. I couldn't! All was light, light, and the boat seemed to be falling through it. Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find myself sitting on a thwart….’
“He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before my chair, one hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent thought-fully, and his right arm at long intervals raised for a gesture that seemed to put out of his way an invisible intruder.
“‘I suppose you think I was going mad,’ he began in a changed tone. ‘And well you may, if you remember I had lost my cap. The sun crept all the way from east to west over my bare head, but that day I could not come to any harm, I suppose. The sun could not make me mad….’ His right arm put aside the idea of madness…. ‘Neither could it kill me….’ Again his arm repulsed a shadow…. ‘That rested with me.’
“‘Did it?’ I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn, and I looked at him with the same sort of feeling I might be fairly conceived to experience had he, after spinning round on his heel, presented an altogether new face.
“‘I didn't get brain fever, I did not drop dead either,’ he went on. ‘I didn't bother myself at all about the sun over my head. I was thinking as coolly as any man that ever sat thinking in the shade. That greasy beast of a skipper poked his big cropped head from under the canvas and screwed his fishy eyes up at me. “Donnerwetter! you will die,” he growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had heard him. He didn't interrupt me. I was thinking just then that I wouldn't.’
“He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance dropped on me in passing. ‘Do you mean to say you had been deliberating with yourself whether you would die?’ I asked in as impenetrable a tone as I could command. He nodded without stopping. ‘Yes, it had come to that as I sat there alone,’ he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary end of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both his hands were thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped short in front of my chair and looked down. ‘Don't you believe it?’ he inquired with tense curiosity. I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.”
XI
“He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being.1 The dim candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for a moment, gleamed and expired. ‘You are an awful good sort to listen like this,’ he said. ‘It does me good. You don't know what it is to me. You don't’… words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light… of heat!… Yes; I had a glimpse of him then,… and it was not the last of that kind…. ‘You don't know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed—make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult—so awfully unfair—so hard to understand.’
“The mists were closing again. I don't know how old I appeared to him—and how much wise? Not half as old as I felt just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be. Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire. There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won't talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete. Hadn't we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling—the feeling that binds a man to a child. He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile. And he had been deliberating upon death—confound him! He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night. What more natural! It was tragic enough and funny enough in all conscience to call aloud for compassion, and in what was I better than the rest of us to refuse him my pity? And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent, and his voice spoke—
“‘I was so lost, you know. It was the sort of thing one does not expect to happen to one. It was not like a fight, for instance.’
“‘It was not,’ I admitted. He appeared changed, as if he had suddenly matured.
“‘One couldn't be sure,’ he muttered.
“‘Ah! You were not sure,’ I said, and was placated by the sound of a faint sigh that passed between us like the flight of a bird in the night.
“‘Well, I wasn't,’ he said courageously. ‘It was something like that wretched story they made up. It was not a lie—but it wasn't truth all the same. It was something…. One knows a downright lie. There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair.’
“‘How much more did you want?’ I asked; but I think I spoke so low that he did not catch what I said. He had advanced his argument as though life had been a network of paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded reasonable.
“‘Suppose I had not—I mean to say, suppose I had stuck to the ship? Well. How much longer? Say a minute—half a minute. Come. In thirty seconds, as it seemed certain then, I would have been overboard; and do you think I would not have laid hold of the first thing that came in my way—oar, life-buoy, grating—anything? Wouldn't you?’
“‘And be saved,’ I interjected.
“‘I would have meant to be,’ he retorted. ‘And that's more than I meant when I'… he shivered as if about to swallow some nauseous drug… ‘jumped,’ he pronounced with a convulsive
effort, whose stress, as if propagated by the waves of the air, made my body stir a little in the chair. He fixed me with lowering eyes. ‘Don't you believe me?’ he cried. ‘I swear!… Confound it! You got me here to talk, and… You must!… You said you would believe.’ ‘Of course I do,’ I protested, in a matter-of-fact tone which produced a calming effect. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Of course I wouldn't have talked to you about all this if you had not been a gentleman. I ought to have known… I am—I am—a gentleman too…’ ‘Yes, yes,’ I said hastily. He was looking me squarely in the face, and withdrew his gaze slowly. ‘Now you understand why I didn't after all… didn't go out in that way. I wasn't going to be frightened at what I had done. And, anyhow, if I had stuck to the ship I would have done my best to be saved. Men have been known to float for hours—in the open sea—and be picked up not much the worse for it. I might have lasted it out better than many others. There's nothing the matter with my heart.’ He withdrew his right fist from his pocket, and the blow he struck on his chest resounded like a muffled detonation in the night.
“‘No,’ I said. He meditated, with his legs slightly apart and his chin sunk. ‘A hair's-breadth,’ he muttered. ‘Not the breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time…’
“‘It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,’ I put in, a little viciously I fear. Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me—me!—of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. ‘And so you cleared out—at once.’
“‘Jumped,’ he corrected me incisively. ‘Jumped—mind!’ he repeated, and I wondered at the evident but obscure intention. ‘Well, yes! Perhaps I could not see then. But I had plenty of time and any amount of light in that boat. And I could think too. Nobody would know, of course, but this did not make it any easier for me. You've got to believe that too. I did not want all this talk…. No… Yes… I won't lie… I wanted it: it is the very thing I wanted—there. Do you think you or anybody could have made me if I… I am—I am not afraid to tell. And I wasn't afraid to think either. I looked it in the face. I wasn't going to run away. At first—at night, if it hadn't been for these fellows I might have… No! by heavens! I was not going to give them that satisfaction. They had done enough. They made up a story, and believed it for all I know. But I knew the truth, and I would live it down—alone, with myself. I wasn't going to give in to such a beastly unfair thing. What did it prove after all? I was confoundedly cut up. Sick of life—to tell you the truth; but what would have been the good to shirk it—in—that way? That was not the way. I believe—I believe it would have—it would have ended—nothing.’
“He had been walking up and down, but with the last word he turned short at me.
“‘What do you believe?’ he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
“‘… Would have ended nothing,’ he muttered over me obstinately, after a little while. ‘No! the proper thing was to face it out—alone before myself—wait for another chance—find out…’”
XII
“All around everything was still as far as the ear could reach. The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. The chill air of the night seemed to lie on my limbs as heavy as a slab of marble.
“‘I see,’ I murmured, more to prove to myself that I could break my state of numbness than for any other reason.
“‘The Avondale picked us up just before sunset,’ he remarked moodily. ‘Steamed right straight for us. We had only to sit and wait.’
“After a long interval, he said, ‘They told their story.’ And again there was that oppressive silence. ‘Then only I knew what it was I had made up my mind to,’ he added.
“‘You said nothing,’ I whispered.
“‘What could I say?’ he asked, in the same low tone…. ‘Shock slight. Stopped the ship. Ascertained the damage. Took measures to get the boats out without creating a panic. As the first boat was lowered ship went down in a squall. Sank like lead…. What could be more clear’… he hung his head… ‘and more awful?’ His lips quivered while he looked straight into my eyes. ‘I had jumped—hadn't I?’ he asked dismayed. ‘That's what I had to live down. The story didn't matter.’… He clasped his hands for an instant, glanced right and left into the gloom: ‘It was like cheating the dead,’ he stammered.
“‘And there were no dead,’ I said.
“He went away from me at this. That is the only way I can describe it. In a moment I saw his back close to the balustrade. He stood there for some time, as if admiring the purity and the peace of the night. Some flowering-shrub in the garden below spread its powerful scent through the damp air. He returned to me with hasty steps.
“‘And that did not matter,’ he said, as stubbornly as you please.
“‘Perhaps not,’ I admitted. I began to have a notion he was too much for me. After all, what did I know?
“‘Dead or not dead, I could not get clear,’ he said. ‘I had to live; hadn't I?’
“‘Well, yes—if you take it in that way,’ I mumbled.
“‘I was glad of course,’ he threw out carelessly, with his mind fixed on something else. ‘The exposure,’ he pronounced slowly, and lifted his head. ‘Do you know what was my first thought when I heard? I was relieved. I was relieved to learn that those shouts—did I tell you I had heard shouts? No? Well, I did. Shouts for help,… blown along with the drizzle. Imagination, I suppose. And yet I can hardly… How stupid…. The others did not. I asked them afterwards. They all said No. No? And I was hearing them even then! I might have known—but I didn't think—I only listened. Very faint screams—day after day. Then that little half-caste chap here came up and spoke to me. “The Patna… French gunboat… towed successfully to Aden… Investigation… Marine Office… Sailors’ Home… arrangements made for your board and lodging!” I walked along with him, and I enjoyed the silence. So there had been no shouting. Imagination. I had to believe him. I could hear nothing any more. I wonder how long I could have stood it. It was getting worse, too… I mean—louder.’
“He fell into thought.
“‘And I had heard nothing! Well—so be it. But the lights! The lights did go! We did not see them. They were not there. If they had been, I would have swam back—I would have gone back and shouted alongside—I would have begged them to take me on board…. I would have had my chance…. You doubt me?… How do you know how I felt?… What right have you to doubt?… I very nearly did it as it was—do you understand?’ His voice fell. ‘There was not a glimmer—not a glimmer,’ he protested mournfully. ‘Don't you understand that if there had been, you would not have seen me here? You see me—and you doubt.’
“I shook my head negatively. This question of the lights being lost sight of when the boat could not have been more than a quarter of a mile from the ship was a matter for much discussion. Jim stuck to it that there was nothing to be seen after the first shower had cleared away; and the others had affirmed the same thing to the officers of the Avondale. Of course people shook their heads and smiled. One old skipper who sat near me in court tickled my ear with his white beard to murmur, ‘Of course they would lie.’ As a matter of fact nobody lied; not even the chief engineer with his story of the mast-head light dropping like a match you throw down. Not consciously, at least. A man with his liver in such a state might very well have seen a floating spark in the corner of his eye when stealing a hurried glance over his shoulder. They had seen no light of any sort though they were well within range, and they could only explain this in one way: the ship had gone down. It was o
bvious and comforting. The foreseen fact coming so swiftly had justified their haste. No wonder they did not cast about for any other explanation. Yet the true one was very simple, and as soon as Brierly suggested it the court ceased to bother about the question. If you remember, the ship had been stopped, and was lying with her head on the course steered through the night, with her stern canted high and her bows brought low down in the water through the filling of the fore-compartment. Being thus out of trim, when the squall struck her a little on the quarter, she swung head to wind as sharply as though she had been at anchor. By this change in her position all her lights were in a very few moments shut off from the boat to leeward. It may very well be that, had they been seen, they would have had the effect of a mute appeal—that their glimmer lost in the darkness of the cloud would have had the mysterious power of the human glance that can awaken the feelings of remorse and pity. It would have said, ‘I am here—still here’… and what more can the eye of the most forsaken of human beings say? But she turned her back on them as if in disdain of their fate: she had swung round, burdened, to glare stubbornly at the new danger of the open sea which she so strangely survived to end her days in a breaking-up yard, as if it had been her recorded fate to die obscurely under the blows of many hammers. What were the various ends their destiny provided for the pilgrims I am unable to say; but the immediate future brought, at about nine o'clock next morning, a French gunboat homeward bound from Réunion.1 The report of her commander was public property. He had swept a little out of his course to ascertain what was the matter with that steamer floating dangerously by the head upon a still and hazy sea. There was an ensign, union down, flying at her main gaff (the serang had the sense to make a signal of distress at daylight); but the cooks were preparing the food in the cooking-boxes forward as usual. The decks were packed as close as a sheep-pen: there were people perched all along the rails, jammed on the bridge in a solid mass; hundreds of eyes stared, and not a sound was heard when the gunboat ranged abreast, as if all that multitude of lips had been sealed by a spell.