The pronounced, argumentative tone caused Mr. Van Wyk to raise his head and look at him steadily. Captain Whalley was gazing fixedly with a rapt expression, as though he had seen his Creator’s favorable decree written in mysterious characters on the wall. He kept perfectly motionless for a few seconds, then got his vast bulk on to his feet so impetuously that Mr. Van Wyk was startled.
He struck first a heavy blow on his inflated chest: and, throwing out horizontally a big arm that remained steady, extended in the air like the limb of a tree on a windless day—
“Not a pain or an ache there. Can you see this shake in the least?”
His voice was low, in an awing, confident contrast with the headlong emphasis of his movements. He sat down abruptly.
“This isn’t to boast of it, you know. I am nothing,” he said in his effortless strong voice, that seemed to come out as naturally as a river flows. He picked up the stump of the cigar he had laid aside, and added peacefully, with a slight nod, “As it happens, my life is necessary; it isn’t my own, it isn’t—God knows.”
He did not say much for the rest of the evening, but several times Mr. Van Wyk detected a faint smile of assurance flitting under the heavy mustache.
Later on Captain Whalley would now and then consent to dine “at the house.” He could even be induced to drink a glass of wine. “Don’t think I am afraid of it, my good sir,” he explained. “There was a very good reason why I should give it up.”
On another occasion, leaning back at ease, he remarked, “You have treated me most—most humanely, my dear Mr. Van Wyk, from the very first.”
“You’ll admit there was some merit,” Mr. Van Wyk hinted slyly. “An associate of that excellent Massy. … Well, well, my dear captain, I won’t say a word against him.”
“It would be no use your saying anything against him,” Captain Whalley affirmed a little moodily. “As I’ve told you before, my life—my work, is necessary, not for myself alone. I can’t choose” … He paused, turned the glass before him right round. … “I have an only child—a daughter.”
The ample downward sweep of his arm over the table seemed to suggest a small girl at a vast distance. “I hope to see her once more before I die. Meantime it’s enough to know that she has me sound and solid, thank God. You can’t understand how one feels. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh; the very image of my poor wife. Well, she …”
Again he paused, then pronounced stoically the words, “She has a hard struggle.”
And his head fell on his breast, his eyebrows remained knitted, as by an effort of meditation. But generally his mind seemed steeped in the serenity of boundless trust in a higher power. Mr. Van Wyk wondered sometimes how much of it was due to the splendid vitality of the man, to the bodily vigor which seems to impart something of its force to the soul. But he had learned to like him very much.
XIII
This was the reason why Mr. Sterne’s confidential communication, delivered hurriedly on the shore alongside the dark silent ship, had disturbed his equanimity. It was the most incomprehensible and unexpected thing that could happen; and the perturbation of his spirit was so great that, forgetting all about his letters, he ran rapidly up the bridge ladder.
The portable table was being put together for dinner to the left of the wheel by two pig-tailed “boys,” who as usual snarled at each other over the job, while another, a doleful, burly, very yellow Chinaman, resembling Mr. Massy, waited apathetically with the cloth over his arm and a pile of thick dinner-plates against his chest. A common cabin lamp with its globe missing, brought up from below, had been hooked to the wooden framework of the awning; the side-screens had been lowered all round; Captain Whalley filling the depths of the wicker-chair seemed to sit benumbed in a canvas tent crudely lighted, and used for the storing of nautical objects; a shabby steering-wheel, a battered brass binnacle on a stout mahogany stand, two dingy life-buoys, an old cork fender lying in a corner, dilapidated deck-lockers with loops of thin rope instead of doorhandles.
He shook off the appearance of numbness to return Mr. Van Wyk’s unusually brisk greeting, but relapsed directly afterwards. To accept a pressing invitation to dinner “up at the house” cost him another very visible physical effort. Mr. Van Wyk, perplexed, folded his arms, and leaning back against the rail, with his little, black, shiny feet well out, examined him covertly.
“I’ve noticed of late that you are not quite yourself, old friend.”
He put an affectionate gentleness into the last two words. The real intimacy of their intercourse had never been so vividly expressed before.
“Tut, tut, tut!”
The wicker-chair creaked heavily.
“Irritable,” commented Mr. Van Wyk to himself; and aloud, “I’ll expect to see you in half an hour, then,” he said negligently, moving off.
“In half an hour,” Captain Whalley’s rigid silvery head repeated behind him as if out of a trance.
Amidships, below, two voices, close against the engine-room, could be heard answering each other—one angry and slow, the other alert.
“I tell you the beast has locked himself in to get drunk.”
“Can’t help it now, Mr. Massy. After all, a man has a right to shut himself up in his cabin in his own time.”
“Not to get drunk.”
“I heard him swear that the worry with the boilers was enough to drive any man to drink,” Sterne said maliciously.
Massy hissed out something about bursting the door in. Mr. Van Wyk, to avoid them, crossed in the dark to the other side of the deserted deck. The planking of the little wharf rattled faintly under his hasty feet.
“Mr. Van Wyk! Mr. Van Wyk!”
He walked on: somebody was running on the path. “You’ve forgotten to get your mail.”
Sterne, holding a
