With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk. There were matters of duty, of course—directions, orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required no comment—because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision.
Old Mr. Sigg liked a man of few words, and one that “you could be sure would not try to improve upon his instructions.” MacWhirr satisfying these requirements, was continued in command of the Nan-Shan, and applied himself to the careful navigation of his ship in the China seas. She had come out on a British register, but after some time Messrs. Sigg judged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag.
At the news of the contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as if under a sense of personal affront. He went about grumbling to himself, and uttering short scornful laughs. “Fancy having a ridiculous Noah’s Ark elephant in the ensign of one’s ship,” he said once at the engine-room door. “Dash me if I can stand it: I’ll throw up the billet. Don’t it make you sick, Mr. Rout?” The chief engineer only cleared his throat with the air of a man who knows the value of a good billet.
The first morning the new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-Shan Jukes stood looking at it bitterly from the bridge. He struggled with his feelings for a while, and then remarked, “Queer flag for a man to sail under, sir.”
“What’s the matter with the flag?” inquired Captain MacWhirr. “Seems all right to me.” And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have a good look.
“Well, it looks queer to me,” burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, and flung off the bridge.
Captain MacWhirr was amazed at these manners. After a while he stepped quietly into the chart-room, and opened his International Signal Code-book at the plate where the flags of all the nations are correctly figured in gaudy rows. He ran his finger over them, and when he came to Siam he contemplated with great attention the red field and the white elephant. Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought the book out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawing with the real thing at the flagstaff astern. When next Jukes, who was carrying on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness, happened on the bridge, his commander observed:
“There’s nothing amiss with that flag.”
“Isn’t there?” mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-locker and jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.
“No. I looked up the book. Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle. I thought the people ashore would know how to make the local flag. Stands to reason. You were wrong, Jukes. …”
“Well, sir,” began Jukes, getting up excitedly, “all I can say—” He fumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.
“That’s all right.” Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a little canvas folding-stool he greatly affected. “All you have to do is to take care they don’t hoist the elephant upside-down before they get quite used to it.”
Jukes flung the new lead-line over on the foredeck with a loud “Here you are, bo’ss’en—don’t forget to wet it thoroughly,” and turned with immense resolution towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spread his elbows on the bridge-rail comfortably.
“Because it would be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress,” he went on. “What do you think? That elephant there, I take it, stands for something in the nature of the Union Jack in the flag. …”
“Does it!” yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan’s decks looked towards the bridge. Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation: “It would certainly be a dam’ distressful sight,” he said, meekly.
Later in the day he accosted the chief engineer with a confidential, “Here, let me tell you the old man’s latest.”
Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout), from finding himself almost invariably the tallest man on board every ship he joined, had acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurely condescension. His hair was scant and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale, his bony wrists and long scholarly hands were pale, too, as though he had lived all his life in the shade.
He smiled from on high at Jukes, and went on smoking and glancing about quietly, in the manner of a kind uncle lending an ear to the tale of an excited schoolboy. Then, greatly amused but impassive, he asked:
“And did you throw up the billet?”
“No,” cried Jukes, raising a weary, discouraged voice above the harsh buzz of the Nan-Shan’s friction winches. All of them were hard at work, snatching slings of cargo, high up, to the end of long derricks, only, as it seemed, to let them rip down recklessly by the run. The cargo chains groaned in the gins, clinked on coamings, rattled over the side; and the whole ship quivered, with her long gray flanks smoking in wreaths of steam. “No,” cried Jukes, “I didn’t. What’s the good? I might just as well fling my resignation at this bulkhead. I don’t believe you can make a man like that understand anything. He simply knocks me over.”
At that moment Captain MacWhirr, back from the shore, crossed the deck, umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed Chinaman, walking behind in paper-soled silk shoes, and who also carried an umbrella.
The master of the Nan-Shan, speaking just audibly and gazing at his boots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary to call at Fu-chau this trip, and desired Mr. Rout to have steam up
