The Wheel of Fortune, page 15
“‘What was that, Warren?’ he says. ‘Well, sir,’ I says, ‘I don’t rightly know but it felt to me like we hit something.’ He was a bit snappy at that, bein’ a mite nervous, I’d say. ‘And what the devil could we hit?’ he says. ‘There’s no flamin’ rocks hereabouts,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t see nothing.’ ‘Well, sir,’ I says, ‘it’s pretty dark, and whatever it was mightn’t have been visible.’
“He stumps out after that, mutterin’ to ’isself and wonderin’, I fancy, whether he ought to rouse the Old Man and risk gettin’ blown up for ’is pains. But everything seems to be okay, and in the end he just does nothing about it. If you ask me, I’d say it was something floating or half submerged, as it might be, what we just struck a glancing blow. Though I couldn’t say presactly what it was.”
“Well,” said Laratee, “it didn’t hurt us — so why worry?” And that appeared to be the general opinion in the mess; it had not hurt the ship, so there was no need to worry. Probably it was all imagination, anyway; people had strange fancies in the middle watch; they hadn’t rightly got the sleep out of their brains and they had dreams standing up.
But it was no dream that the forward hold had started to take water. They were clear of the Horn now, driving west-north-west in longitude eighty-five degrees, and the pumps were going.
CHAPTER XII
HIS SIGHTLESS SOUL
It was Slewkin who carried the latest news of the feud between Haggard and Stenning. Slewkin was the officers’ steward; a shuffling, sidelong, pallid creature with one shoulder higher than the other and a way of looking furtive even when discharging the most honest of duties. He had a long upper lip which seemed to impede the straightforward passage of his words, so that they were forced to flow out from the side of his mouth, and, crowded thus into so narrow a corner, they tumbled helter-skelter through the gap in a jumbled, nose-to-tail stream that could only with difficulty be sorted into the clauses and sentences of decipherable speech.
Slewkin had a little pantry only a few paces from the captain’s cabin, and from this pantry he was able to observe much that went on in that quarter. Thus it happened that he saw the captain’s door open and Stenning appear in the opening.
“You could tell all right,” Slewkin said, “that there’d bin some pretty sharp words atween him and the Old Man just by the way he was steaming — proper ready to blow up at any moment and as red as a turkey-cock. ‘Cripes!’ I says to meself. ‘Best keep outa his way, Freddie me lad; he don’t look altogether healthy; not be a long chalk.’ So I steps back a bit, where I can keep me eye on him wi’out being seen.
“He’d got half out of the door when he turns back for a last word. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’ve had my opinion and I’d be obliged if you’d put that on record. In my view,’ he says, ‘there’s a whole lot more damage than you think. It’s going to get worse. I think we ought to make for one of the Chilean ports; it isn’t safe to push on for New Zealand.’
“I couldn’t see Captain Haggard, but I could hear what he said; you know the way he talks, just as if he’d got a load of ice in his kisser and was spitting bits of it out. ‘Mr Stenning,’ he says, cutting as you like, ‘when I desire your advice I’ll ask for it. Meanwhile I continue to be in command of this vessel and I refuse to be thrown into a panic by you or anyone else. I am not a child.’
“My stars! You should have seen the mate’s face. I thought for a minute he was going to rush back into the cabin and brain the Old Man; but he didn’t; he takes a hold on his-self and don’t even bang the door behind him — at least not much. I kep’ pretty close inside the pantry as he went past; I hadn’t any sort of wish to stand in his way when he was in that mood. But I heard him stump away, and he was muttering to hisself over and over again, ‘Hell and damnation! Hell and damnation!’ You wouldn’t believe a man could put so much fury into just two words.”
“So Mr Stenning thinks the ship isna’ seaworthy,” said Hamish Mactaggart. “That’s a fine thought to go to bed wi’. If the mate’s worrit there’s surely something to be worrit aboot.”
“P’r’aps you was right about seeing the phantom ship,” said Joe Warren. “Mebbe there is something in it after all. Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s any of you lot what don’t believe now that we did hit something the other night.”
He looked round the mess-room from one to another, but nobody took up the challenge of his words.
“Oh, we hit something right enough,” agreed Wilkes, “but it couldn’t have been much. The Old Man’s right — there’s no need to panic over a bit of a leak; plenty of ships leak and are none the worse for it.”
“All the same,” Warren said, “wouldn’t it be safer to put back into the nearest port to see what’s what, ’stead of hitting out on a four-thousand-mile haul to New Zealand? Wouldn’t it be safer than trusting to luck?”
There appeared to be some agreement with this point of view, and John, watching their faces, yet saying nothing, wondered how quickly the vague uneasiness of these men would have hardened into doubt, and more than doubt, if they had been aware, as he was, of the true state of Haggard’s mind. Supposing they were to be told that that mind was so unbalanced in one particular that the mate had only to suggest a certain course of action for it automatically to be crossed out of the reckoning? Perhaps only two people in the ship knew that the mere fact of Stenning having advised putting into a Chilean port had doomed the ship to carry on her present course, come what might. And her present course was taking her on one of the longest and least frequented of ocean highways.
But it was Connell who had the last word; Connell, who had appeared in the mess-room doorway and now gave his opinion in the sweet, fluting voice that issued so incongruously from between his red-fringed lips.
“Captain Haggard,” Connell said, “ain’t in the habit of trusting to luck.”
But three days later it was apparent to all that the ship’s pumps were not holding their own. The Wheel of Fortune was slightly, but nevertheless perceptibly, down by the head.
“You can feel it at the wheel,” Laratee said. “She don’t answer the helm just like she ought. She’s sluggish.”
John noticed that the men had fallen into the habit of gauging with their eyes the slope of the ship from stern to bows; perhaps trying to reckon how much it had increased since fast they looked. Once he saw the second mate talking earnestly to Mr Stenning and pointing towards number one hatch; but the mate answered with a shrug of the shoulders and turned away.
And still Haggard kept the vessel on her westward way, remaining cold and unmoved, as though oblivious of the fever of controversy that was spreading through the ship like a leaping flame.
“Captain Haggard knows what he’s doing,” Connell said. “You can trust the captain.”
But, of course, John thought, Connell doesn’t know; he doesn’t know. Nor would the bos’n have believed any word spoken against Captain Haggard, for in some strange way Haggard, in his bleak aloofness, had touched a chord of loyalty in Connell’s breast, so that to Connell he was indeed god-like and invulnerable.
But Laratee believed in no god in heaven or on earth, and Laratee, seeing the ever-lowering bows of the Wheel of Fortune, was frightened. And it was from this fear that worse afflictions were to be born, striking at him and at others.
John awoke with the reek of alcohol strong in his nostrils. His luminous watch told him that the time was nearly two, and he wondered what it was that had awakened him at that hour of the morning. The cabin was in darkness, save that a glow of light crept in from the alleyway as the door swung slowly back and forth. There was something wrong in that swinging door, for it ought still to have been closed, as it had been when Laratee and John had turned in.
Then, too, there was the reek; the cabin smelt like a saloon, lull of the harsh tang of spirits. And as John lay there he heard something rolling to and fro on the floor, moving in sympathy with the movement of the ship.
He flicked the light-switch, but there was no answering flood of light, and it came back to his mind that the bulb was burnt out and had not been replaced.
There was a small electric torch on the shelf by his head, a light for emergencies. He picked it up and switched it on, leaning over the edge of his bunk and letting the thin pencil of light wander over the floor. Soon it had encountered the object for which he was searching — an empty brandy bottle, lying on its side and moving erratically as the ship rolled. He leaned farther out and shone his torch on the lower bunk. The blankets were disarranged, and Laratee was not there.
A feeling of uneasiness came over him. Laratee’s absence, the swinging door, the rolling bottle, the nocturnal hour — all these combined to fill him with a sense of trouble. He could not understand it. Ever since Cape Town Laratee had been cold sober; had drunk no liquor at all. Yet all the time he must have had this bottle of brandy stowed away in his locker, and he had resisted the temptation to drink it; perhaps had never even felt temptation. But now some fit had come upon him in the dark hours of the night; some fit that had made him uncork the bottle and drink its contents. For that could be the only explanation of the reek, the empty bottle, and his absence. It was the absence that disquieted John.
Where had Laratee gone? That was the question which nagged him. And what — drunk as he must surely be — might Laratee not do? John remembered the incident in Singapore when drink had clouded Laratee’s brain, and he was apprehensive of what the fellow might even then be doing.
One thing was certain; Laratee had to be found. John slipped from the bunk and thrust his feet into a pair of gum-boots, tucking the legs of his pyjama trousers into them. While doing so he glimpsed the pale outline of a piece of paper lying on the floor. He shone his torch on it and saw that it was the photograph of Frankie, of Laratee’s wife. The sight of that tattered card did not diminish his anxiety.
He put the torch in his pocket and went out into the alley-way, closing the cabin-door behind him. The dimly lighted alleyway was deserted, and John stood there a moment wondering which way to go in search of Laratee. The air was heavy, full of the mingled odours of fresh paint and hot engine-oil. The ship rolled gently, and John swayed to match its movement with the unconscious ease that comes with long -experience. The rolling was scarcely noticed by him, for he was thinking of Laratee; and yet his body moved to that same rhythm of the sea instinctively. Save for the steady beat of the engines and the creak of the vessel, there was silence, a silence that seemed to be accentuated rather than relieved by those other constant sounds that went on without pause or break; and to John that silence appeared strained and foreboding.
He left the doorway and set off down the passage, himself silent on rubber-soled feet and feeling somehow furtive, like those nocturnal creatures that creep out of their holes and burrows when the shadows of evening have lengthened into night. Passing the doorway above the engine-room, he glanced down into that wide, deep well, reached by flights of iron ladders shiny with grease, and saw a man in stained overalls feeding oil to the monster which panted and groaned there in captivity.
The white-faced troglodyte went from point to point, oiling and wiping, unconscious of being watched, heedless of John, busy with his own thoughts, his own tasks. It was all quite normal; the usual routine going on as it went on unceasingly, day and night, for the whole period during which the ship was at sea. The sight should have been reassuring, for it was so obvious that nothing had happened to alarm this man; but, to John’s mind, the fellow was detached, a being apart from the world above decks and, therefore, unaffected by any alarms which might spread their widening circles upon the higher level.
Still uneasy, he continued on his way aft and came out on to the open deck. The night air was cold, and he shivered suddenly partly from the chill and partly from that nervous apprehension of which he could not rid his mind. It was a clear night, the moon almost at the full, and the deck was flooded with that pale, liquid-like radiance which lights so much yet leaves so much in dark obscurity.
John saw the samson’s-posts silhouetted against the sky in clear, strong outlines, and at their feet the wide expanse of canvas stretched across number three hatch. Here there were other noises — the sinister chuckle of water sliding past, the wind singing through the rigging, and the occasional sharp, metallic clang of an insecure pulley-block striking against the derrick from which it was suspended.
Everything seemed normal, everything as it should have been, nothing out of the ordinary. But where was Laratee? That was what John wished to know; and until he did know his mind would not be set at ease.
He climbed the ladder to the boat-deck, but no one was visible from there save the dark shape of the officer on the bridge, striding back and forth, back and forth, along the same narrow strip of deck. John crossed over and slowly descended the ladder on the port side, gazing aft along the deserted, moon-washed deck, the cold air feeling under his pyjama jacket with chilly, probing fingers.
What a fool he was, searching for Laratee out here in the open when all the time the fellow was probably in the warmth of galley or mess-room. That was where to look for him — under cover, some place in the shelter of which he was probably even then stretched out and snoring in a drunken stupor.
John came down the ladder with one hand stretched out behind him on the rail, and as he reached the level of the main-deck his feet slipped from under him and it was only that steadying hand which saved him from falling. Some idiot, he thought, has been spilling oil on the deck. Rubber soles on oily iron are treacherous things to the feet, so with his hand still on the rail he turned at the foot of the ladder and began moving towards the door in the accommodation.
Then he saw the man lying on the deck. He lay with the upper part of his body partly hidden in the space between the midships superstructure and the coaming of number three hatch, and his waist was supported by a steam-pipe which ran along the deck, so that he formed a shallow inverted ‘V.’ It was a strange, unnatural position, and there was something strangely unnatural in the way the man’s feet stretched out behind him, with the toes downward and the soles showing, just as though he had been dragged across the deck and then dropped over the pipe to dry; just as though the person dragging him had become suddenly weary.
John advanced slowly, methodically, his steps following one upon the other as though each movement had to be thought out anew. He had a feeling that this body was no more than a body, lacking in life and warmth and animation; that it was just so much fleshy matter from which the spirit had fled. He had seen dead men in his time, and he was not afraid of death. In itself it was commonplace: the final episode, inevitable, unavoidable. But here was something that was not commonplace, not usual; here surely was the silent witness — indeed, actor — in some drama played out upon a moving stage above a silent, moving sea.
So for a moment John hesitated before advancing again. The question hammering in his brain was: Who can this be? Who out of all this crew, out of all these ship-bound creatures, can this be?
He stooped, and, grasping the man about his middle, lifted him on to the hatch-cover and laid him face-upward on the canvas. And, seeing the condition of that face, he knew that it had not been oil upon the deck, not in oil that his feet had slipped.
The moon shone down upon the face, which gazed sightlessly back. It shone coldly, unfeelingly: and John, seeing whose face this was, felt twin emotions of rage and pity well up inside him.
He turned away from the hatch and stumbled through the accommodation doorway; and as he did so his toe struck against an object lying on the deck. It was a meat-axe, and it had been used.
He went down the alleyway and found the mess-room door open and light shining from it. He went in and found Laratee sitting in a chair at the far end and gazing straight in front of him with a fixed, horrified stare. There was blood on Laratee’s face and on his hands, but it was none of his own, for that had all drained away from his skin as though fearful of the contact with this alien blood, and under the dark smears his cheeks were deadly pale.
Looking down at Laratee, John could see great beads of sweat standing out upon his forehead, and he could feel the moisture on his own brow also, and on the palms of his hands. He felt that he had to dry those hands, and, taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he began wiping them. But they would not be dry. From below came a sound as though the engines had been afflicted with a sudden fit of coughing; then the heavy beat returned once more to normal.
John went on drying his hands.
“You know what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” Laratee muttered; but he did not look up.
“Why did you do it? What made you?”
Something bubbled up in Laratee’s throat; it was the caricature of a laugh; but it appeared to have nothing to do with Laratee; it was like something that had taken refuge inside him and now was free again.
“Why? Why? Why? Because I was mad — drunk — what you like — it’s all one. Oh, God! What difference does it make? It’s done and it can’t be undone — not ever.”
He was sober now; shock had sobered him. But it was too late.
Still John could not understand. “But why him? Why him of all people?”
Laratee thrust out a hand and touched John’s sleeve. There was blood on the hand, and involuntarily John shivered at the touch. Laratee’s eyes were wild, burning deep in the dead pallor of his face above the terrible red smears.
“I couldn’t sleep. I was scared. You know I been scared the way the ship’s going. There was that brandy I’d had since Cape Town, never touching it, never a drop. I thought I’d just have one little drink to make me sleep. After that I had another, and then it took a hold on me like it used to”
