XIV

At the saloon mess-table the guardians of the ship were allusive about her welfare. The set of a current had been adverse; she was seven miles astern of her estimated position. The signs in the heavens induced respectful references to the habits of the Arabian Gulf. The glass was briefly indicated; Colet surmised, while taking another piece of toast, that it was not happy in its divination. The high-pressure cylinder had taken to blowing through its packing; it was wheezy. “Man, yon’s a sad waste o’ power.” And one of the deckhands was sick. Fever, very likely, it was suggested.

“Or Rotterdam,” Sinclair baldly hinted.

“Aye, the heat will bring it out,” confirmed Gillespie, with luscious gravity. Then he exhibited some startling instances from the store of a long familiarity with sin. He indulged in illustrative cases with composure and fond irrelevance.

“I’ll see this man,” announced Hale, hastily rising while still the boding symptoms of another exemplary case were unfulfilled. Gillespie shook his paw in appreciative warning over sin.

Colet accompanied the captain on his way to the forecastle, and he noticed, because the master paused to inspect them, that the fore-hatches were laced over with cordage. The master disappeared within the dark aperture of the forecastle. Colet mounted the ladder to its deck. That was a noble outlook at the beginning of the day. It was dry and red-crusted, weather-stained, isolated as a vantage exposed to an immensity of light. It was solitude. It might have been as old as the sea itself, by the look of it. It was hoar with salt.

And the ship’s head was alive. It was massive but buoyant. It seemed to inflate and to mount quickly and easily with enormous intakes of air; then, sighing through its hawsepipes, it declined into the friendly rollers. If you looked overside and down, the cutwater of the ship was deep and plain in the blue transparency, coming along with unvarying confidence like the brown nose of an exploring monster. When the ship’s head plunged over a slope an acre of blinding foam spread around and swept astern, melting and sibilant.

Companies of flying-fish were surprised by that iron nose, and got up. They skittered obliquely over the bright polish of the inclines, and plumped abruptly into smooth slopes which opposed them. A family of four dolphins were there that morning. They were set in the clear glass just before the cutwater. They did not fly from it. Their bodies but revolved leisurely before it. The crescent valves in their heads could be seen sleepily opening and closing when they touched the surface, with the luxury of life in the cool fathoms. One after another idly they rolled belly up; they were merely revolving without progress, yet the fast-pursuing iron nose never reached them. It was always just behind the family, which wove a lazy and gliding dance before the ship. Artfully leading them on, these familiars of the deep?

It was a fair world into which they were being led. It reposed in an eternal radiant tranquillity. The Indian Ocean was as inviting as its name. There were clouds ahead, but they were fast to the skyline; they were as remote as the ghostly mountains and steeps of a land no man would ever reach. This world of the tropics was but an apparition of splendour. It was there by the chance of good fortune. It was seen only by the desiring mind. It was like the import of great music, for which there is no word. If you stood looking at it long enough, the bright dream would draw you out of your body.

The ship’s head fell sideways into a deeper hollow, and Colet returned without warning to an iron deck. He was swung around on his handhold. The rail he struck was hard. Steady! Solid fountains burst loudly through the hawsepipes. There was impetuosity in the lift of the ship’s head. She got out of the smother in a hurry. By the look of it, more was coming. The rollers had seemed to be growing heavier. It was getting wet up there. Colet retreated. When he was mounting the ladder amidships a sharp lurch of the ship left him dangling by his hands. The boyish third officer on the deck above respectfully watched him while his feet sought the ladder again.

“A beam sea setting in, Mr. Colet. Makes her roll.”

It was making her roll. But it was very agreeable. It shook off the weight of the heat. These were the first seas worth the lively name since the voyage began. It was like the real thing to see the decks getting wet, to be caught at a corner by a dollop of rollicking brine. Hullo, Sinclair! Colet mentioned this novelty as they met by the engine-room entrance. He spoke of it lightly, wiping some spray from his eyes. Sinclair showed amusement, but his gaze was elsewhere. They had to steady themselves, in their pause, by gripping the ironwork. The movements of the ship, to Colet’s surprise, were exhilarating. They shifted him from an old centre of thought. The rhythm of the ship’s compensations was the measure of easy and solid courage.

“I don’t know,” mused Colet, “but once, just once, I think I’d like to see all this when it was not play.”

“Play?” exclaimed the sailor. “Play? If anybody else had said that, I’d tell him not to be a fool.”

Colet made a dramatic appeal to the listening and jealous gods to forget his childish indiscretion. It was only his ignorance. It was born of his trust in his company. He reposed in the faith that the Altair was a sound old dear.

Sinclair grinned. “Perhaps you didn’t catch what the old man was mumbling at breakfast?” He poked his companion in the ribs. “You’re coming along, my son. A bit too confident, that’s all. When you’re a sailor, you’ll cross yourself if you hear someone talk as you did.”

“I’m sure of it. What was it the captain said at breakfast?”

“Oh, nothing. He’s a cautious old boy, I think. Wanted me to believe he doesn’t like the look of it. But I can’t smell anything in the wind. Seems all right. I don’t see anything in this.”

It was all right, though the draught which was upset by the rocking of the ship was languid, and the breath of an oven.

Night fell; the day was abolished abruptly. There were brief up-glarings of a desperate sun taken by an insurrection of darkness. He was put down. The authority of day was overturned. The ship alone of all the world below held with startled emphasis the memory of a brightness extinguished. For a few moments there was the pale wraith of a deck, vertiginous in its slant, with its fixtures bleak and exposed; and then the only lights were the stars concentrated low in patch of southern sky. In the south, the stars were the lights of a city without a name where there could be no land. They could see the frenzied glittering of its lamps. For the show of that city behaved only as would an hallucination in a region that was enthralled by the powers of darkness. Now its level was below them, and now it soared towards the meridian.