 Typhoon, Chapter 1. Captain McWurr of the steamer Nan Shan had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind. It presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity. It had no pronounced characteristics whatever. It was simply ordinary, irresponsible, and unruffled. The only thing his aspect might have been said to suggest at times was bashfulness because he would sit in business offices ashore, sunburn and smiling faintly with downcast eyes. When he raised them they were perceived to be direct in their glance and of blue color. His hair was fair and extremely fine, clasping from temple to temple the bald dome of his skull in a clamp as a fluffy silk. The air of his face, on the contrary, carotene flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip. While no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed when he moved his head over the surface of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bit round-shouldered and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked a shade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is due to the differences of latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a complete suit of a brownish hue, and clumsy black boots. These harbor-togs gave to a thick figure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silver watch chain looped his waistcoat, and he never left his ship for the shore without clutching in his powerful hairy fist and elegant umbrella of the very best quality but generally unrolled. Young Jukes, the chief mate, attending to his commander to the gangway, would sometimes venture to say with the greatest gentleness, allow me, sir, and possessing himself of the umbrella deferentially, would elevate the ferrule, shake the folds, twirl a neat furrow in a jiffy, and hand it back, going through the performance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon Routt, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight, would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. Oh, aye, the blessed gamp, thank ye, Jukes, thank ye, would mutter Captain McWurr hardily without looking up. Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself, and from the very same cause he was not at the least conceited. It is your unimaginative superior who was touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please, but every ship Captain McWurr commanded was to floating abode of harmony and peace. It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer, with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whipsaw in the way of tools, yet the interesting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side. It was impossible, in Captain McWurr's case, for instance, to understand what under heaven could have induced that perfectly satisfactory son of a petty grocer in Belfast to run away to the sea. And yet he had done that very thing at the age of fifteen. It was enough, when you thought it over, to give the idea of an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals and in undreamt of directions. His father never really forgave him for this undutiful stupidity. He could have got on without him, he used to say later on, but there's the business. And he and only son, too. His mother wept very much after his disappearance. As it had never occurred to him to leave word behind, he was mourned over for dead till, after eight months, his first letter arrived from Talquano. It was short and contained the statement. We had very fine weather on our passage out. But evidently, in the writer's mind, the only important intelligence was to the effect that his captain had, on the very day of writing, entered him regularly on the ship's articles as ordinary seamen. "'Because I can do the work,' he explained. The mother again wept copiously, while the remark, toms and ass, expressed the emotions of the father. He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chafing, which, to the end of his life, he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pittingly as if upon a half-witted person. McWher's visits to his home were necessarily rare, and in the course of years he dispatched other letters to his parents, informing them of his successive promotions and of his movements upon the vast earth. In these missives could be found sentences like this. The heat here is very great, or, on Christmas Day at 4 p.m., we fell in with some icebergs. The old people ultimately became acquainted with the good many names of ships and with the names of the skippers who commanded them, with the names of scots and English ship owners, with the names of seas, oceans, straits, promenatories, with outlandish names of lumber-ports, of rice-ports, of cotton-ports, with the names of islands, with the names of their son's young woman. She was called Lucy. It did not suggest itself to him to mention whether he thought the name pretty. And then they died. The great day of McWher's marriage came in due course, following shortly upon the great day when he got his first command. All these events had taken place many years before the morning when, in the chart room of the steamer, Nan Shan, he stood confronted by the fall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall, taking into account the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year and the ship's position on the terrestrial globe, was of a nature ominously prophetic. But the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inward disturbance. Humans were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door. That's a fall and no mistake, he thought, there must be some uncommonly dirty weather knocking about. The Nan Shan was on her way from the southward to the treaty port of Fuchiao with some cargo in her lower holds and 200 Chinese cullies returning to their village homes in the province of Fuchian after a few years of work in various tropical colonies. The morning was fine, the oily sea heaved without a sparkle, and there was a queer white misty patch in the sky like a halo of the sun. The four-deck, packed with China men, was full of somber clothing, yellow faces and pigtails sprinkled over with many good naked shoulders for there was no wind and the heat was close. The cullies lounged, talk smoked, or stared over the rail. Some drawing water over the side sluiced each other, a few slept on hatches, while several small parties of six sat on their heels, surrounding iron trays with plates of rice and tiny tea cups, and every single celestial of them was carrying with him all he had in the world a wooden chest with a ringing lock and brass on the corners, containing the savings of his labors, some clothes of ceremony, sticks of incense, a little opium maybe, bits of nameless rubbish of conventional value, and a small horde of silver dollars, toiled for in coal lighters, one in gambling houses or in petty trading, grubbed out of earth, sweated out in mines, on railway lines in deadly jungle under heavy burdens, amassed patiently, guarded with care, cherished fiercely. A crosswell had set in from the direction of Formosa Channel about ten o'clock, without disturbing these passengers much, because the Nan Shan, with her flat bottom, rolling chocks on bilges and great breadth of beam, had the reputation of an exceptionally steady ship in a seaway. Mr. Jukes, in moments of expansion on shore, would proclaim loudly that the old girl was as good as she was pretty. It would never have occurred to Captain McWher to express his favorable opinion so loud, or in terms so fanciful. She was a good ship, undoubtedly, and not old either. She had been built in Dumbarton less than three years before, to the order of a firm of merchants in Siam. Monsieur's sig and son. When she lay afloat, finished in every detail, and ready to take up the work of her life, the builders contemplated her with pride. Sig has asked us for a reliable skipper to take her out, remarked one of the partners, and the other, after reflecting for a while, said, I think McWher is ashore just at present. Is he? Then wire him at once. He's the very man, declared the senior, without a moment's hesitation. Next morning McWher stood before them, unperturbed, having traveled from London by the Midnight Express after a sudden, but undenmonstrative parting with his wife. She was the daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days. We had better be going together over the ship, Captain, said the senior partner, and the three men started to view the perfections of the nanchand from stem to stern, and from her kielson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts. Captain McWher had begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on the end of a steam windlass, embodying all the latest improvements. My uncle wrote of you favorably, by yesterday's mail, to our good friends, Monsieur's sig, you know, and no doubt they'll continue you out there in command, said the junior partner. You'll be able to boast of being in charge of the handiest boat of her size on the coast of China, Captain, he added. Have you, thank ye, mumble vaguely, McWher, to whom the view of a distant eventuality could appeal no more than the beauty of a wide landscape to a pure-blind tourist. And his eyes happening at the moment to be at rest upon the lock of the cabin door, he walked up to it, full of purpose, and began to rattle the handle vigorously. While he observed in his low, earnest voice, you can't trust the workmen nowadays, a brand new lock, and it won't act at all. Stuck fast, see? See? As soon as they found themselves alone in their office across the yard, you praised that fellow up to sig. What is it you see in him, asked the nephew, with faint contempt? I admit he has nothing of your fancy skipper about him, if that's what you mean, said the elder man, curtly. Is the foreman of the joiners of the Nan Shan outside? Come in, Bates! How is it that you let Tate's people put us off with the defective lock on that cabin door? The captain could see directly he set eye on it. Have it replaced it once. The little straws, Bates, the little straws. The lock was replaced accordingly, and a few days afterwards, the Nan Shan steamed out to the east, without McWher having offered any further remark as to her fittings, or having been heard to utter a single word hinting at pride in his ship, gratitude for his appointment, or satisfaction at his prospects. So the temperament neither loquacious nor taciturned, 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. Sig liked the man a few words, and won that, you could be sure would not try to improve upon his instructions. McWher, 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, Mr. Sig 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 McWher. 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 McWher 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 color drawing with the real thing at the flagstaff, the stern. When next Jukes 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 the flag. Is it there, mumble Jukes falling on his knees before a decklocker and jerking there from viciously a spare led line? Nope, 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 the line with trembling hands. That's all right, Captain McWere 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, Bosun. Don't forget to wet it thoroughly and turned with immense resolution towards his commander. But Captain McWere 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 Nanshan's deck looked towards the bridge, then he sighed and with sudden resignation, it would certainly be a damn 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 Saul, Old Saul, 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, scotily 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 tail 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 Nanshan's friction winches. All of them were hard at work, snatching slings of cargo high up to the end of Long Derek's, only as it seemed to let them rip down recklessly by the run. The cargo chains groaned in the gins, clinking on comings, rattled over the side, and the whole ship quivered with their long gray flanks, smoking in the 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 McWherr, back from the shore, crossed the deck, umbrella in hand, escorted by a mournful, self-possessed Chinamen, walking behind in paper-sold silk shoes and who also carried an umbrella. The master of the Nanshan, speaking just audibly and gazing at his boots as his manner was, remarked that it would be necessary to call at Fuqiao this trip and desired Mr. Rout to have steam up tomorrow afternoon at one o'clock sharp. He pushed back his hat to wipe his forehead, observing at the same time that he hated going ashore anyhow. While overtopping him, Mr. Rout, without daining a word, smoked austerely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand. Then Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward, tween deck clear of cargo. 200 Coolies were going to be put down there. The Bun-Hin Company were sending that lot home. 25 bags of rice would be coming off in a sandpan directly for stores. All seven years men they were, said Captain McWerre, with a camp for wood-chest to every man. The carpenter should be set to work nailing three-inch battens along the deck below, fore and aft, to keep these boxes from shifting in a seaway. Jukes had better look to it at once. Do you hear, Jukes? This Chinaman here was coming with his ship as far as Fuqiao, a sort of interpreter he would be. Bun-Hin's clerk he was and wanted to have a look at the space. Jukes had better take him forward. Did you hear, Jukes? Jukes took care to punctuate these instructions in proper places with the obligatory, yes, sir, ejaculated without enthusiasm. His brusque, come along, John. Make look see. Set the Chinaman in motion at his heels. Want you look see? All same look see can do, said Jukes. Who having no talent for foreign languages mangled a very pigeon English cruelly? He pointed at the open hatch. Catchy number one PC place to sleep in, eh? He was gruff as became his racial superiority, but not unfriendly. The Chinaman, gazing sad and speechless into the darkness of the hatchway, seemed to stand at the head of a yawning grave. No catchy rain down there, savvy, pointed out Jukes. Suppose all ye same fine weather, one PC coolly man come topside, he pursued, warming up imaginatively. Make so, foo, he expanded his chest and blew out his cheeks. Savie, John, breathe fresh air, good eh? Washing him PC pants, chow-chow, topside. See, John? With his mouth in hands, he made exuberant motions of eating rice and washing clothes. And the Chinaman, who concealed his distrust of this pantomime under a collected demeanor tinged by a gentle and refined melancholy, glanced out of his almond eyes from Jukes to the hatch and back again. Very good, he murmured, in a disconsolate undertone, and hastened smoothly along the decks, dodging obstacles in his course. He disappeared, ducking low under a sling of ten dirty gunny bags full of some costly merchandise, and exhaling a repulsive smell. Captain McWher, meantime, had gone on the bridge and into the chart room, where a letter commenced two days before away determination. These long letters began with the words, my darling wife, and the steward, between the scrubbing of the floors and the dusting of chronometer boxes, snatched at every opportunity to read them. They interested him much more than they possibly could the woman for whose eye they were intended, and this for the reason that they related in minute detail each successive trip of the Nanshan. Her master, faithful to facts which alone his consciousness reflected, would set them down with pains taking care upon many pages. The house in a northern suburb to which these pages were addressed had a bit of a garden before the bell windows, a deep porch of good appearance, colored glass with imitation-led frame in the front door. He paid five and 40 pounds a year for it and did not think the rent too high, because Mrs. McWher, a pretentious person with a scraggly neck in a disdainful manner, was admittedly ladylike and in the neighborhood considered as quite superior. The only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good. Under the same roof there dwelt also a daughter called Lydia and a son Tom. These two were but slightly acquainted with their father. Mainly they knew him as a rare but privileged visitor, who of an evening smoked his pipe in the dining room and slept in the house. The lanky girl, upon the whole, was rather ashamed of him. The boy was frankly and utterly indifferent. In a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way manly boys have. And Captain McWher wrote home from the coast of China 12 times every year, desiring quaintly to be remembered to the children and subscribing himself your loving husband, as calmly as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn out things and of a faded meaning. The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of everyday eloquent facts, such as islands, sandbanks, reefs, swift and changeable currents, tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a semen in a clear and definite language. Their speech appealed to Captain McWher's sense of reality so forcibly that he had given up his state room below and practically lived all his days on the bridge of his ship, often having his meals sent up and sleeping at night in the chart room. And he indicted there his home letters. Each of them, without exception, contained the phrase, the weather has been very fine this trip, or some other form of a statement to that effect. And this statement, too, in its wonderful persistence, was of the same perfect accuracy as all the others they contained. Mr. Rout likewise wrote letters. Only no one on board knew exactly how chatty he could be, pen and hand, because the chief engineer had enough imagination to keep his desk locked. His wife relished his style greatly. They were a childless couple, and Mrs. Rout, a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of 40, shared with Mr. Rout's toothless and venerable mother a little cottage near Teddington, she would run over her correspondence at breakfast with lively eyes and scream out interesting passages in a joyous voice at the deaf old lady, prefacing each extract by the warning shout, Solomon says! She had the trick of firing off Solomon's utterances also upon strangers, astonishing them easily by the unfamiliar text and the unexpectedly jocular vein of these quotations. On the day the new curate called for the first time at the cottage, she found occasion to remark, as Solomon says, the engineers that go down to the sea and ships behold the wonders of sailor nature, when a change in the visitor's countness made her stop and stare. Solomon, oh, Mrs. Rout, stuttered the young man, very red in the face. I must say I don't. He's my husband, she announced in a great shout, throwing herself back in the chair, perceiving the joke she laughed in moderately with a handkerchief to her eyes, while she sat wearing a forth smile and from his inexperience of jolly women, fully persuaded that she must be deplorably insane. They were excellent friends afterwards, for absolving her from irrelevant intention, he came to think she was a very worthy person indeed, and he learned in time to receive without flinching other scraps of Solomon's wisdom. For my part, Solomon was reported by his wife to his said once, give me the dullest ass for a skipper before a rogue. There is a way to take a fool, but a rogue is smart and slippery. This was an airy generalization drawn from the particular case of Captain McWhor's honesty, which in itself had the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay. On the other hand, Mr. Jukes, unable to generalize, unmarried, and unengaged, was in the habit of opening his heart after another fashion to an old chum and former shipmate, actually serving as second officer on board an Atlantic liner. First of all, he would insist upon the advantages of the Eastern trade, hinting at its superiority to the Western Ocean Service. He extolled the sky, the seas, the ships, and the easy life of the Far East. The Nanshan, he affirmed, was second to none as a sea boat. We have no brass-bound uniforms, but then, we are like brothers here, he wrote. We all mess together and live like fighting cocks. All the chaps of the black squad are as decent as they make that kind, and old Saul, the chief, is a dry stick. We are good friends. As to our old man, you could not find a quieter skipper. Sometimes you would think he hadn't sensed enough to see anything wrong, and yet it isn't that, can't be. He has been in command for a good few years now. He doesn't do anything actually foolish, and he gets his ship along all right without worrying anybody. I believe he has brains enough to enjoy kicking up a row. I don't take advantage of him, I would scorn it. Outside the routine of duty, he doesn't seem to understand more than half of what you tell him. We get a laugh out of this at times, but it is dull too to be with a man like this in the long run. Old Saul says he hasn't much conversation. Conversation, oh Lord, he never talks. The other day, I had been yarning under the bridge with one of the engineers, and he must have heard us. When I came up to take my watch, he steps out of the chart room and has a good look all around, peeps over at the side lights, glances at the compass, squints up at the stars, that's his regular performance. Buy and buy, he says. Was that you talking just now on the Port Alleyway? Yes, sir. With the third engineer? Yes, sir. He walks off to Starbird and sits under the Dodger on a little camp stool of his, and for half an hour perhaps, he makes no sound, except that I heard him sneeze once. Then, after a while, I hear him getting up over there and he strolls across to Port where I was. I can't understand what you can find to talk about, says he. Two solid hours, I'm not blaming you. I see people ashore, at it all day long, and then in the evening they sit down and keep at it over the drinks. Must be saying the same things over and over again. I can't understand. Did you ever hear anything like that? And he was so patient about it. It made me quite sorry for him, but he is exasperating too, sometimes. Of course, one would not do anything to vex him, even if it were worthwhile, but it isn't. He's so jolly innocent that if you were to put your thumb to your nose and wave your fingers at him, he would only wonder gravely to himself what got into you. He told me once quite simply that he found it very difficult to make out what made people always act so clearly. He's too dense to trouble about and that's the truth. Thus wrote Mr. Jukes to his chum in the western ocean trade, out of the fullness of his heart and the liveliness of his fancy. He had expressed his honest opinion. It was not worthwhile trying to impress a man of that sort. If the world had been full of such men, life would have probably appeared to Jukes an un-entertaining and unprofitable business. He was not alone in his opinion. The sea itself, as if sharing Mr. Jukes' good-natured forbearance, had never put itself out to startle the silent man who seldom looked up and wandered innocently over the waters with the only visible purpose of getting food, raiment, and house room for three people ashore. Dirty weather he had known, of course. He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way, felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole, he had been justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never been given a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that passes exhausted, but never appeased, the wrath and fury of the passionate sea. He knew it existed. As we know that crime and abominations exist, he had heard of it as a peaceable citizen in a town hears of battles, famines, and floods, and yet knows nothing of what these things mean, though. Indeed, he may have been mixed up in a street row, have gone without his dinner once, or had been soaked to the skin in a shower. Captain McWherr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea. End of chapter one. Chapter two of Typhoon. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Karen Savage, Waco, Texas, May 2007. Typhoon by Joseph Conrad, chapter two. Observing the steady fall of the barometer, Captain McWherr thought there's some dirty weather knocking about. This is precisely what he thought. He had had an experience of moderately dirty weather. The term dirty has applied to the weather implying only moderate discomfort to the semen. Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension. The wisdom of his county had pronounced by means of an act of parliament that before he could be considered as fit to take charge of a ship, he should be able to answer certain simple questions on the subject of circular storms, such as hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and apparently he had answered them, since he was now in command of the Nanshan in the China seas during the season of typhoons. But if he had answered, he remembered nothing of it. He was, however, conscious of being made uncomfortable by the clammy heat. He came out on the bridge and found no relief to his oppression. The air seemed thick. He gasped like a fish and began to believe himself greatly out of sorts. The Nanshan was plowing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of grey silk. The sun, pale and without rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinaman were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched yellow faces were like the faces of bilious invalids. Stephen McWher noticed two of them especially, stretched out on their backs below the bridge. As soon as they had closed their eyes, they seemed dead. Three others, however, were quarrelling barbarously away forward, and one big fellow, half naked with herculean shoulders, was hanging limply over a winch. Another sitting on the deck, his knees up, and his head drooping sideways in a girlish attitude, was plaiting his pigtail with infinite languor depicted in his whole person and in the very movement of his fingers. The smoke struggled with difficulty out of the funnel, and instead of streaming away, spread itself out like an infernal sort of cloud, smelling of sulphur and reigning soot all over the decks. What the devil are you doing there, Mr. Dukes? asked Captain McWher. This unusual form of address, though mumbled rather than spoken, caused the body of Mr. Dukes to start as though it had been prodded under the fifth rib. He had had a low bench brought on the bridge, and sitting on it, with a length of rope curled about his feet and a piece of canvas stretched over his knees, was pushing a sail-needle vigorously. He looked up, and his surprise gave to his eyes an expression of innocence and candour. I'm only roping some of that new set of bangs we made last trip for whipping up coals," he remonstrated gently. We shall want them for the next coaling, sir. What became of the others? Why, worn out, of course, sir. Captain McWher, after glaring down irresolutely at his chief mate, disclosed the gloomy and cynical conviction that more than half of them had been lost overboard, if only the truth was known, and retired to the other end of the bridge. Dukes, exasperated by this unprovoked attack, broke the needle at the second stitch, and dropping his work, got up and cursed the heat in a violent undertone. The propeller thumped. The three Chinaman forward had given up squabbling very suddenly, and the one who had been plaiting his tail clasped his legs and stared jujectedly over his knees. The lurid sunshine cast faint and sickly shadows. The swell ran higher and swifter every moment, and the ship lurched heavily in the smooth, deep hollows of the sea. "'I wonder where that beastly swell comes from,' said Dukes, aloud, recovering himself after a stagger. "'Northeast,' grunted the little McWher from his side of the bridge, there's some dirty weather knocking about, go and look at the glass. When Dukes came out of the charter-room, the cast of his countenance had changed to thoughtfulness and concern. He caught hold of the bridge rail and stared ahead. The temperature in the engine-room had gone up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. Irritated voices were ascending through the sky-light, and through the fiddle of the stoke-hold in a harsh and resonant uproar, mingled with angry clangs and scrapes of metal, as if men with limbs of iron and throats of bronze had been quarrelling down there. The second engineer was falling foul of the stokers for letting the steam go down. He was a man with arms like a blacksmith, and generally feared. But that afternoon the stokers were answering him back recklessly, and slammed the furnace doors with the fury of despair. Then the noise ceased suddenly, and the second engineer appeared, emerging out of the stoke-hold, streaked with grime and soaking wet like a chimney-sweep coming out of a well. As soon as his head was clear of the fiddle, he began to scold Dukes for not trimming properly the stoke-hold ventilators, and in answer Dukes made with his hands deprecatory soothing signs, meaning, no wind, can't be helped, you can see for yourself. But the other wouldn't hear reason, his teeth flashed angrily in his dirty face. He didn't mind, he said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there, blank his soul. But did the condemned sailors think you could keep steam up in the Godforsaken bolus simply by knocking the blanked stokers about? No, by George. You had to get some draught, too. May he be everlasting blanked for a swab-headed deckhand, if you didn't. And the chief, too, rampaging before the steam-gauge and carrying on like a lunatic up and down the engine room ever since noon. What did Dukes think he was stuck up there for, if he couldn't get one of his decayed, good-for-nothing deck-cripples to turn the ventilators to the wind? The relations of the engine room and the deck of the nang-shan were, as is known, of a brotherly nature. Therefore Dukes leaned over and begged the other in restrained tone not to make a disgusting ass of himself. The skipper was on the other side of the bridge. But the second declared mutinously that he didn't care a rap who was on the other side of the bridge, and Dukes, passing in a flash from lofty disapproval into a state of exaltation, invited him in unflattering terms to come up and twist the beastly things to please himself, and catch such wind as the donkey of his sort could find. The second rushed up into the fray. He flung himself at the port ventilator as though he meant to tear it out bodily and toss it overboard. All he did was move the cow round a few inches with an enormous expenditure of force, and seemed spent in the effort. He leaned against the back of the wheel-house, and Dukes walked up to him. Oh, Heavens! ejaculated the engineer in a feeble voice. He lifted his eyes to the sky, and then let his glassy stare descend to meet the horizon that, tilting up to an angle of forty degrees, seemed to hang on a slant for a while and settle down slowly. Heavens! Phew! What's up, anyhow? Dukes, straddling his long legs like a pair of compasses, put on an air of superiority. We're going to catch it this time, he said, the barometer is tumbling down like anything, Harry. It was you trying to kick up that silly round. The word barometer seemed to revive the second engineer's mad animosity. Collecting afresh all his energies, he directed Dukes in a low and bootle tone to shove the unmentionable instrument down his gory throat. Who cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam, the steam that was going down, and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog's life for him. He didn't care at Tinker's Curse how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he muttered darkly. I'll faint them, and dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the unnatural daylight, and dropped into the dark hole with a whoop. When Dukes turned, his eyes fell upon the rounded back and the big red ears of Captain McWerr who had come across. He did not look at his chief officer, but said at once, That's a very violent man, that second engineer. Jolly good second, anyhow, grunted Dukes. They can't keep up steam, he added rapidly, and made a grab at the rail against the coming lurch. Captain McWerr, unprepared, took a run and brought himself up with a jerk by an awning stanchion. A profane man, he said obscenately, if this goes on I'll have to get rid of him the first chance. It's the heat, said Dukes, the weather's awful, it would make a saint swear. Even up here I feel exactly as if I had my head tied up in a woollen blanket. Captain McWerr looked up. Do you mean to say, Mr. Dukes, you ever had your head tied up in a blanket? What was that for? It's a manner of speaking, sir, said Dukes stolidly. Some of you fellows do go on. What's that about saints swearing? I wish you wouldn't talk so wild. What sort of saint would that be that would swear? No more saint than yourself, I expect. And what's a blanket got to do with it, or the weather, either? The heat does not make me swear, does it? It's filthy bad temper, that's what it is. And what's the good of your talking like this? Thus Captain McWerr expostulated against the use of images and speech, and at the end electrified Dukes by a contemptuous snot, followed by words of passion and resentment. Damn! I'd fire him out of the ship if he don't look out. And Dukes, incorrigible, thought, goodness me, somebody's put a new inside to my old man. Here's temper, if you like. Of course it's the weather. What else? It would make an angel quarrelsome, let alone a saint. All the Chinaman on deck appeared at their last gasp. At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter, and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. A dense bank of cloud became visible to the northward. It had a sinister dark olive tint that lay low and motionless upon the sea, resembling a solid obstacle in the path of the ship. She went floundering towards it like an exhausted creature driven to its death. The coppery twilight retired slowly, and the darkness brought out overhead a swarm of unsteady big stars that, as if blown upon, flickered exceedingly, and seemed to hang very near the earth. At eight o'clock Dukes went into the chart room to write up the ship's log. He copied neatly out of the rough book The Number of Miles, The Course of the Ship, and in the column for wind scrawled the world calm, from top to bottom of the eight hours since noon. It was exasperated by the continuous monotonous rolling of the ship. The heavy ink-stand would slide away in a manner that suggested perverse intelligence in dodging the pen. Having ridden in the large space under the head of remarks, heat very oppressive, he stuck the end of the pen holder in his teeth, pipe fashion, and mopped his face carefully. Ship rolling heavily in a high cross swell, he began again, and commented to himself, heavily as no word for it. He wrote, Sunset threatening, with a low bank of clouds to north and east, sky clear overhead. Sprawling over the table with a rested pen, he glanced out of the door, and in that frame of his vision he saw all the stars flying upwards between the teakwood jams on a black sky. The whole lot took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a blackness flecked with white flashes, for the sea was as black as the sky, and speckled with foam afar. The stars that had flown to the roll came back on the return swing of the ship, rushing downwards in their glittering multitude, not of fiery points, but enlarged to tiny discs brilliant with a clear wet sheen. Dukes watched the flying big stars for a moment, and then wrote, 8 p.m., swell increasing, ship laboring and taking water on her decks, batten down the coolies for the night, barometer still falling. He paused and thought to himself, perhaps nothing whatever will come of it, and then he closed resolutely his entries. Every appearance of a typhoon coming on. On going out he had to stand aside, and Captain McWherr strode over the doorstep without saying a word or making a sign. "'Shut the door, Mr. Dukes, will you?' he cried from within. Dukes turned back to do so, muttering ironically. Afraid to catch cold, I suppose. It was his watch below, but he yearned for communion with his kind, and he remarked cheerily to the second mate. Doesn't look so bad after all, does it? The second mate was marching to and fro on the bridge, tripping down with small steps one moment, and the next climbing with difficulty the shifting slope of the deck. At the sound of Dukes' voice he stood still, facing forward, but made no reply. "'Hello, that's a heavy one,' said Dukes, swaying to meet the long roll till his lowered hand touched the planks. This time the second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly nature. He was an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face. He had been shipped in a hurry in Shanghai. That trip, when the second officer, brought from home, had delayed the ship three hours in port by contriving—in some manner Captain McGuire could never understand—to fall overboard into an empty coal-lighter lying alongside, and had to be sent ashore to the hospital with concussion of the brain in a broken limb or two. Dukes was not discouraged by the unsympathetic sound. "'The Chinaman must be having a lovely time of it down there,' he said. "'It's lucky for them. The old girl has the easiest role of any ship I've ever been in.' "'There, now.' "'This one wasn't so bad.' "'You wait,' snarled the second mate. With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin, pinched lips, he always looked as though he were raging inwardly. And he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. All his time off-duty he spent in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still in there that he was supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had disappeared. But the man who came in to wake him for his watch on deck would invariably find him with his eyes wide open, flat on his back in the bunk and glaring irritably from a soiled pillow. He never wrote any letters—did not seem to hope for news from anywhere—and though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house. He was one of those men who were picked up at need in the ports of the world. They are competent enough, appear hopelessly hard up, show no evidence of any sort of vice, and carry about them all the signs of manifest failure. They come aboard on an emergency, care for no ship afloat, live in their own atmosphere of casual connection amongst their shipmates, who know nothing of them, and make up their minds to leave at inconvenient times. They clear out with no words of leave-taking in some godforsaken port other men would fear to be stranded in, and go ashore in company of a shabby sea-chest cordied like a treasure-box with an air of shaking the ship's dust off their feet. "'You wait,' he repeated, balanced in great swings with his back to juke's motionless and implacable. "'Do you mean to say we're going to catch it hot?' asked juke's with boyish interest. "'Say?' I say nothing. "'You don't catch me, with a mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning, as if juke's question had been a trap cleverly detected. "'Oh, no. None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it,' he mumbled to himself. Juke's reflected rapidly that this second mate was a mean little beast, and in his heart he wished poor Jack Allen had never smashed himself up in the coal-lighter. The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth. The starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel. "'Whatever there might be about,' said juke's, we are steaming straight into it. "'You've said it,' caught up the second mate, always with his back to juke's. "'You've said it, mind, not I. "'Oh, go to Jericho,' said juke's frankly, and the other admitted a triumphant little chuckle. "'You've said it,' he repeated. "'And what of that?' "'I've known some real good men get into trouble with their skippers for saying a damn sight less,' answered the second mate feverishly. "'Oh, no, you don't catch me.' "'You seem ducidly anxious not to give yourself away,' said juke's, completely soured by such absurdity. "'I wouldn't be afraid to say what I think. "'Aye, to me. That's no great trick. I am nobody, and well I know it.' The ship, after a pause of comparative steadiness, started upon a series of roles, one worse than the other, and for a time juke's, preserving his equilibrium, was too busy to open his mouth. As soon as the violent swinging had quieted down somewhat, he said, "'This is a bit too much of a good thing. Whether anything is coming or not, I think she ought to be put head onto that swell. The old man has just gone in to lie down. Hang me if I don't speak to him.'" But when he opened the door of the chart-room, he saw his captain reading a book. Captain McGuire was not lying down. He was standing up, with one hand grasping the edge of the bookshelf, and the other holding open before his face a thick volume. The lamp wriggled in the jimbals. The loosened books toppled from side to side on the shelf. The long barometer swung in jerky circles. The table altered its slant every moment. In the midst of all this stir and movement, Captain McGuire, holding on, showed his eyes above the upper edge, and asked, "'What's the matter?' "'Swell getting worse, sir. Notice that in here,' muttered Captain McGuire. "'Anything wrong?' Juke's, inwardly disconcerted by the seriousness of the eyes looking at him over the top of the book, produced an embarrassed grin. "'Rolling like old boots,' he said sheepishly. "'I, very heavy, very heavy. What do you want?' "'At this, Juke's lost his footing, and began to flounder. I was thinking of our passengers,' he said, in the manner of a man clutching at a straw. "'Passengers?' wondered the captain gravely. "'What passengers?' "'Why, the Chinaman, sir,' explained Juke's, very sick of this conversation. "'The Chinaman? Why don't you speak plainly? Couldn't tell what you meant.' Never heard a lot of coolly spoken of as passengers before. Passengers indeed. What's come to you?' Captain McGuire, closing the book on his forefinger, lowered his arm and looked completely mystified. "'Why are you thinking of the Chinaman, Mr. Juke's?' he inquired. "'Juke's took a plunge, like a man driven to it. She's rolling her decks full of water, sir. Thought you might put her head on, perhaps, for a while. Till this goes down a bit, very soon, I daresay. Head to the eastward. I never knew a ship roll like this.' He held on in the doorway, and Captain McGuire, feeling his grip on the shelf inadequate, made up his mind to let go in a hurry, and fell heavily on the couch. "'Head to the eastward,' he said, struggling to sit up. That's more than four points off her course. "'Yes, sir, fifty degrees. Would just bring her head far enough round to meet this?' Captain McGuire was now sitting up. He had not dropped the book, and he had not lost his place. To the eastward,' he repeated, with dawning astonishment, "'To the—' "'Where do you think we're bound to? You want me to haul a full-powered steamship, four points off her course, to make the Chinaman comfortable? Now I've heard more than enough of mad things done in the world, but this! If I didn't know you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor. Steer four points off, and what afterwards? Steer four points over the other way, I suppose, to make the course good. What put it into your head that I would start to tack a steamer as if she were a sailing ship?' "'Dolly good thing she isn't,' threw in Jukes with bitter readiness. She would have rolled every blessed stick out of her this afternoon. "'I—' "'And you would just have had to stand and see them go,' said Captain McGuire, showing a certain animation. "'It's a dead calm, isn't it?' "'It is, sir. But there's something out of the common coming, for sure.' "'Maybe.' "'I suppose you have a notion I should be getting out of the way of that dirt,' said Captain McGuire, speaking with the utmost simplicity of manner and tone, and fixing the oil-cloth on the floor with a heavy stare. Thus he noticed neither Jukes' discomforture, nor the mixture of vexation and astonish respect on his face. "'Now, here's this book,' he continued, with deliberation, slapping his thigh with a closed volume. "'I've been reading the chapter on the storms there.' This was true. He had been reading the chapter on the storms. When he had entered the chart-room it was with no intention of taking the book down. Some influence in the air—the same influence, probably, that caused the steward to bring without orders the Captain's sea-boots and oil-skin coat up to the chart-room—had, as it were, guided his hand to the shelf. And without taking the time to sit down, he had waded with a conscious effort into the terminology of the subject. He lost himself amongst advancing semicircles, left and right-hand quadrants, the curves of the tracks, the probable wearing of the centre, the shifts of the wind, and the readings of the barometer. He tried to bring all these things into a definite relation to himself, and ended by becoming contemptuously angry with such a lot of words, and with so much advice, all headwork and supposition, without a glimmer of certitude. It's the damnedest thing, Jukes, he said. If a fellow was to believe all that's in there, he would be running most of his time all over the sea, trying to get behind the weather. Again he slapped his leg with the book, and Jukes opened his mouth, but said nothing. Running to get behind the weather—do you understand that, Mr. Jukes? It's the maddest thing, ejaculated Captain McGuire, with pauses, gazing at the floor profoundly. You would think an old woman had been writing this. It passes me. If that thing means anything useful, then it means that I should at once alter the course away, away to the devil somewhere, and come booming down on Foo Chow from the northward at the tail of this dirty weather that's supposed to be knocking about in our way, from the north. Do you understand, Mr. Jukes, three hundred extra miles to the distance and a pretty cobalt to show? I couldn't bring myself to do that if every word in there was gospel truth, Mr. Jukes. Don't you expect me? Captain Jukes, silent, marvelled at this display of feeling and locustity. But the truth is, that you don't know if the fellow is right anyhow. How can you tell what Gail is made of till you get to it? He isn't aboard here, is he? Very well. Here he says that the centre of them things bears eight points off the wind. But we haven't got any wind, for all the barometer is falling. Where's his centre now? We will get the wind presently, mumble Jukes. Let it come, then, said Captain McGuire, with dignified indignation. It's only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you don't find everything in books. All these rules for dodging breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes, seem to me the maddest thing when you come to look at it sensibly. He raised his eyes, saw Jukes, gazing at him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his meaning. About his queer is your extraordinary notion of dodging the ship head to sea, for I don't know how long to make the Chinam uncomfortable. Whereas all we've got to do is take them to Fuqiao, being time to get there before noon on Friday. If the weather delays me, very well. There's your log-book to talk straight about the weather. But suppose I went swinging off my course and came in two days late, and they asked me where have you been all that time, Captain? What could I say to that? Went around dodging the bad weather, I would say. It must have been damn bad, they would say. Don't know, I would have to say. I've dodged clear of it. See that, Jukes? I have been thinking it all out this afternoon. He looked up again in his unseeing, unimaginative way. No one had ever heard him say so much at one time. Jukes, with his arms open in the doorway, was like a man invited to behold a miracle. Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance. A gale is a gale, Mr. Jukes, resumed the Captain, and a full-powered steamship has got to face it. There's just so much dirty weather knocking about the world, and the proper thing is to go through it with none of what old Captain Wilson of the Milita calls storm strategy. The other day ashore I heard him hold forth about it to a lot of shipmasters who came in and sat at a table next to mine. It seemed to me the greatest nonsense. He was telling them how he outmaneuvered, I think he said, a terrific gale, so that it never came nearer than fifty miles to him—a neat piece of headwork, he called it. How he knew there was a terrific gale fifty miles off beats me altogether. It was like listening to a crazy man. I would have thought Captain Wilson was old enough to know better. Captain McGuire ceased for a moment, then said, "'It's your watch below, Mr. Jukes.'" Jukes came to himself with a start. "'Yes, sir.' "'Leave orders to call me at the slightest change,' said the Captain. He reached up to put the book away, and tucked his legs upon the couch. Shut the door so that it won't fly open, will you? I can't stand a doorbanging. They've put a lot of rubbishy locks into this ship, I must say." Captain McGuire closed his eyes. He did so to rest himself. He was tired, and he experienced that state of mental vacuity which comes at the end of an exhaustive discussion that has liberated some belief matured in the course of meditative years. He had indeed been making his confession of faith, had he only known it, and its effect was to make Jukes and the other side of the door stand scratching his head for a good while. Captain McGuire opened his eyes. He thought he must have been asleep. What was that loud noise? Wind? Why had he not been caught? The lamp wriggled in its jimbals. The barometer swung in circles. The table altered its slant every moment. A pair of limp sea-boots with collapsed tops went sliding past the couch. He put out his hand instantly and captured one. Jukes' face appeared in a crack of the door, only his face, very red, with staring eyes. The flame of the lamp leaped, a piece of paper flew up, a rush of air enveloped Captain McGuire. Beginning to draw on the boot, he directed an expectant gaze at Jukes' swollen, excited features. "'Come on, like this,' shouted Jukes, five minutes ago, all of a sudden. The head disappeared with a bang, and a heavy splash and patter of drops swept past the closed doors if a pailful of melted lead had been flung against the house. A whistling could be heard now upon the deep vibrating noise outside. The stuffy chart-room seemed as full of draughts as a shed. Captain McGuire collared the other sea-boot on its violent passage along the floor. It was not flustered, but he could not find it once the opening for inserting his foot. The shoes he had flung off were scurrying from end to end of the cabin, gambling playfully over each other like puppies. As soon as he stood up he kicked at them viciously, but without effect. He threw himself into the attitude of a lunging-fencer to reach after his oil-skin coat, and afterwards he staggered all over the confined space while he jerked himself into it. Very grave, straddling his legs far apart, and stretching his neck, he started to tie deliberately the strings of his cell-wester under his chin, with thick fingers that trembled slightly. He went through all the movements of a woman putting on her bonnet before a glass with a strained, listening attention, as though he had expected every moment to hear the shout of his name in the confused clamour that had suddenly beset his ship. Its increase filled his ears while he was getting ready to go out and confront whatever it might mean. It was tumultuous and very loud, made up of the rush of the wind, the crashes of the sea, with that prolonged deep vibration of the air, like the roll of an immense and remote drum beating the charge of the gale. He stood for a moment in the light of the lamp, thick, clumsy and shapeless in his panoply of combat, vigilant and red-faced. There's a lot of weight in this, he muttered. As soon as he attempted to open the door, the wind courted. Clinging to the handle, he was dragged out over the door-stip, and at once found himself engaged with the wind in a sort of personal scuffle whose object was the shutting of that door. At the last moment a tongue of air scurried in and licked out the flame of the lamp. Ahead of the ship he perceived a great darkness lying upon a multitude of white flashes. On the starboard beam a few amazing stars drooped dim and fitful above an immense waste of broken seas, as if seen through a mad drift of smoke. On the bridge a knot of men, indistinct and toiling, were making great efforts in the light of the wheel-house windows that shone mistily on their heads and backs. Suddenly darkness closed upon one pane, then on another. The voices of the lost group reached him after the manner of men's voices in a gale. In shreds and fragments a forlorn shouting snatched past the ear. All at once Duke appeared at his side yelling, with his head down, watch, put in wheel-house shutters, glass, afraid, blow in. Dukes heard his commander upbraiding, this, come, anything, warning, call me. He tried to explain with the uproar pressing on his lips. Light air remained, bridge, sudden, north-east, could turn, thought, you sure, here. They had gained the shelter of the weathercloth and could converse with raised voices as people quarrel. I got the hands along to cover up all the ventilators. Good job I had remained on deck. I didn't think you would be asleep, and so— What did you say, sir? What? Nothing! cried Captain McGuire. I said, all right. By all the powers we've got it this time, observed Dukes in a howl. You haven't altered her course, inquired Captain McGuire, straining his voice. No, sir, certainly not. Wind came out right ahead, and here comes the head-sea. A plunge of the ship ended in a shock as if she had landed her forefoot upon something solid. After a moment of stillness a lofty flight of sprays drove hard with the wind upon their faces. Keep her at it as long as we can!" shouted Captain McGuire. Before Dukes had squeezed the salt water out of his eyes all the stars had disappeared. CHAPTER III Jukes was as ready a man as any half-dozen young mates that may be caught by casting a net upon the waters. And though he had been somewhat taken aback by the startling viciousness of the first squall, he had pulled himself together on the instant, had called out the hands, and had rushed them along to secure such openings about the deck as had not been already batten down earlier in the evening. Shouting in his fresh stentorian voice, jump boys and bare a hand, he led in the work telling himself a while that he had just expected this. But at the same time he was growing aware that this was rather more than he had expected. From the first stir of the air felt on his cheek the gale seemed to take upon itself the accumulated impetus of an avalanche. Heavy sprays enveloped the nanchand from stem to stern, and instantly in the midst of her regular rolling she began to jerk and plunge as though she had gone mad with fright. Jukes thought this is no joke. While he was exchanging explanatory yells with his captain, a sudden lowering of the darkness came upon the night, falling before their vision like something palpable. It was as if the masked lights of the world had been turned down. Jukes was uncritically glad to have his captain at hand. It relieved him as though that man had, by simply coming on deck, taken most of the gale's weight upon his shoulders. Such is the prestige, the privilege, and the burden of command. Captain Mecquere could expect no relief of that sort from any one on earth. Such is the loneliness of command. He was trying to see, with that watchful manner of a seaman, who stares into the wind's eye, as if into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the hidden intention and guess the aim and force of the thrust. The strong wind swept at him out of a vast obscurity. He felt under his feet the uneasiness of his ship, and he could not even discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it were not so, and very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man's helplessness. To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine. Jukes, at his elbow, made himself heard, yelling cheerily in the gusts. We must have got the worst of it at once, sir. A faint burst of lightning quivered all around, as if flashed into a cavern, into a black and secret chamber of the sea, with a floor of foaming crests. It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black figures of men cut on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in the act of budding. The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last. It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship, with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind. It isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche overtake a man, incidentally, as it were, without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seems to rout his very spirit out of him. Duke was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself, whirled, a great distance through the air. Everything disappeared, even for a moment his power of thinking. But his hand had found one of the rail-stations. His distress was by no means alleviated by an inclination to disbelieve the reality of this experience. Though young, he had seen some bad weather, and had never doubted his ability to imagine the worst. But this was so much beyond his powers of fancy, that it appeared incompatible with the existence of any ship whatever. He would have been incredulous about himself in the same way, perhaps, had he not been so harassed by the necessity of exerting a wrestling effort against a force trying to tear him away from his hold. Moreover the conviction of not being utterly destroyed returned to him through the sensations of being half-drowned, bestially shaking, and partly choked. It seemed to him he remained there precariously alone, with a stanchion for a long, long time. The rain poured on him, flowed, drove in sheets. He breathed in gasps, and sometimes the water he swallowed was fresh and sometimes it was salt. For the most part he kept his eyes shut tight, as if suspecting his sight might be destroyed in the immense flurry of the elements. When he ventured to blink hastily he derived some moral support from the green gleam of the starboard light shining feebly upon the flight of rain and sprays. He was actually looking at it when its rays fell upon the up-rearing sea which put it out. He saw the head of the wave topple over, adding the might of its crash to the tremendous uproar raging around him, and almost at the same instant the stanchion was wrenched away from his embracing arms. After a crushing thump on his back he found himself suddenly afloat and borne upwards. His first irresistible notion was that the whole China Sea had climbed on the bridge. Then more sanely he concluded himself gone overboard. All the time he was being tossed, flung and rolled in great volumes of water. He kept on repeating mentally, with the utmost precipitation, the words my God, my God, my God, my God. All at once in a revolt of misery and despair he formed the crazy resolution to get out of that, and he began to thresh about with his arms and legs. But as soon as he commenced his wretched struggles he discovered that he had become somehow mixed up with a face, an oil-skin coat, somebody's boots. He clawed ferociously all these things in turn, lost them and found them again, lost them once more, and finally was himself caught in the firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He returned the embrace closely round a thick, solid body. He had found his captain. They tumbled over and over, tightening their hug. Finally the water let them down with a brutal bang, and stranded against the side of the wheel-house. Out of breath and bruised they were left to stagger up in the wind and hold on where they could. Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as though he had escaped some unparalleled outage directed at his feelings. It weakened his faith in himself. He started shouting aimlessly to the man he could feel near him in that fiendish blackness. Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir? Till his temples seemed ready to burst, and he heard an answerer voice as if crying far away, as if screaming to him fretfully from a great distance, the one word, yes. Other seas swept again over the bridge. He received them defencelessly, right over his bare head, with both his hands engaged in holding. The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling helplessness. She pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. When she rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted back by such a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a club man reels before he collapses. Fagale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship, as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact, that seemed to lift her, clean out of the water, and keep her up for an instant, with only a quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things coolly. The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nanshan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide beyond both rails into the night. And on this dazzling sheet spread under the blackness of the clouds, and emitting a bluish glow, Captain Macquire could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks, black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his ship, her middle structure covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate, the closed wheel-house where a man was steering shut up with the fear of being swept overboard, together with the whole thing in one great crash. Her middle structure was like a half-tide rock, a wash upon a coast. It was like an outlying rock, with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating round, like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people cling before they let go. Only it rose, it sank, it rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should have miraculously struck a drift from a coast and gone walloping upon the sea. The nanchand was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury. Tricells torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridges swept clean, weathercloths burst, rails twisted, light screens smashed, and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave. It was only later, when upon the white flash of another high sea hurling itself at mid-ships, Jukes had a vision of two pairs of davits, leaping black and empty out of the solid blackness, with one overhauled, fall-flying, and an iron-bound block capering in the air, that he became aware of what had happened, within about three yards of his back. He poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, �Our boats are going now, sir!� And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness and the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale. Again he heard a man's voice, the frail and indomitable sound, that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when Heaven's fall and justice is gone. Again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far. �All right.� He thought he had not managed to make himself understood. �Our boats! I say boats! The boats are too gone!� The same voice, within a foot of him, and yet so remote, yelled sensibly. �Can't be helped!� Captain McWherr had never turned his face, but Jukes caught some more words on the wind. �What can expect, when hammering through such bound to leave something behind, stands to reason?� Catchfully Jukes listened for more. No more came. This was all Captain McWherr had to say, and Jukes could picture to himself rather than see the broad squat back before him. An impenetrable obscurity pressed down upon the ghostly glimmers of the sea. A dull conviction seized upon Jukes that there was nothing to be done. If the steering-gear did not give way, if the immense volumes of water did not burst the deck in or smash one of the hatches, if the engines did not give up, if way could be kept on the ship against this terrific wind, and she did not bury herself in one of these awful seas of those white crests alone, topping high over her bows, he could now and then get a sickening glimpse. Then there was a chance of her coming out of it. Something within him seemed to turn over, bringing uppermost the feeling that the Nanshan was lost. She's done for, he said to himself, with a surprising mental agitation, as though he had discovered an unexpected meaning in this thought. One of these things was bound to happen. Nothing could be prevented now, and nothing could be remedied. The men on board did not count, and the ship could not last. This weather was too impossible. Jukes felt an arm thrown heavily over his shoulders, and to this overture he responded with great intelligence, by catching hold of his captain round the waist. They stood, clasped thus in the blind night, bracing each other against the wind, cheek to cheek, and lip to ear, in the manner of two hulks lashed, stemmed to stern together. And Jukes heard the voice of his commander, hardly any louder than before, but nearer as though, starting to march a thwart, the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness, like the serene glow of a halo. "'Do you know where the hands got to?' it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from Jukes instantly.' Jukes didn't know. They were all on the bridge when the real force of the hurricane struck the ship. They had no idea where they had crawled to. Under the circumstances they were nowhere, for all the use that could be made of them. Somehow the captains wished to know distressed Jukes. "'Want the hands, sir?' he cried apprehensively. "'To know,' asserted Captain Rick, were, "'hold hard,' they held hard. An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the wind, absolutely steadied the ship. She rocked only, quick and light, like a child's cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere as it seemed streamed furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth. It suffocated them, and with eyes shut they tightened their grasp. What, from the magnitude of the shock, might have been a column of water running upright in the dark, butted against the ship, broke short, and fell on her bridge, crushingly from on high, with a dead burying weight. A flying fragment of that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them in one swirl from their feet over their heads, filling violently their ears, mouths, and nostrils with salt water. It knocked out their legs, wrenched in haste at their arms, seized away swiftly under their chins, and opening their eyes they saw the piled-up masses of foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like the fragments of a ship. She had given way, as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the tremendous blow. And all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush, from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob. Hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leapt upon. Captain McQuirr and Jukes kept hold of each other, deafened by the noise, gagged by the wind, and the great physical chew-malt, beating upon their bodies, brought, like an unbridled display of passion, a profound trouble to their souls. One of those wild and appalling shrieks that are heard at times, passing mysteriously overhead in the steady roar of a hurricane, swooped as if borne on wings upon the ship, and Jukes tried to out-scream it. "'Will she live through this?' the cry was wrenched out of his breast, and it was as unintentional as the birth of a thought in the head, and he heard nothing of it himself. It all became extinct at once, thought, intention, effort, and of his cry the inaudible vibration added to the tempest waves of the air. He expected nothing from it, nothing at all, for indeed what answer could be made. But after a while he heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear. The dwarf sound unconquered in the giant chew-malt. She may. It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize than a whisper, and presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean. "'Let's hope so,' it cried, small, lonely, and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of hope or fear, and it flickered into disconnected words. Ship! This! Never! Anyhow! For the best!' Jukes gave it up. Then as if it had come suddenly upon the one thing fitted to withstand the power of a storm, it seemed to gain force and firmness for the last broken shouts. Keep on hammering, builders, good men! And chance it, engines, route, good men! Captain McQuer removed his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and thereby ceased to exist for his mate so dark it was. Jukes, after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go limp all over. The gnawing of profound discomfort existed side by side with an incredible disposition to some nullance, as though he had been buffeted and worried into drowsiness. The wind would get hold of his head and try to shake it off his shoulders. His clothes, full of water, were as heavy as lead, cold and dripping like an armour of melting ice. He shivered. It lasted a long time. And with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting himself sink slowly into the depth of bodily misery. His mind became concentrated upon himself in an aimless idle way, and when something pushed lightly at the back of his knees, he nearly, as the saying is, jumped out of his skin. In the start forward he bumped the back of Captain McQuer, who didn't move, and then a hand gripped his thigh. A lull had come, a menacing lull of the wind. The holding of a stormy breath. And he felt himself pod all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes recognized his hands so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of man. The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours against the wind, and had found the chief mate's legs with the top of his head. Immediately he crouched and began to explore Jukes' person upwards with prudent, apologetic touches, as became an inferior. He was an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape. His strength was immense, and in his great lumpy paws bulging like brown boxing-gloves on the end of furry forearms the heaviest objects were handled like playthings. Part from the grizzled pelt on his chest, the menacing demeanor and the hoarse voice, he had none of the classical attributes of his raiding. His good nature almost amounted to imbecility. The men did what they liked with him, and he had not an ounce of initiative in his character, which was easygoing and talkative. For these reasons Jukes disliked him. But Captain McQuaire, to Jukes' scornful disgust, seemed to regard him as a first-rate petty officer. He pulled himself up by Jukes' coat, taking that liberty with the greatest moderation, and only so far as it was forced upon him by the hurricane. "'What is it, Boson, what is it?' Jukes shelled impatiently. What could that fraud of a Boson want on the bridge?' The typhoon had got on Jukes' nerves. The husky bellowings of the other, though unintelligible, seemed to suggest a state of lively satisfaction. There could be no mistake. The old fool was pleased with something. The boatswain's other hand had found some other body. For in a changed tone he began to inquire. "'Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?' The wind strangled his howls. "'Yes,' cried Captain McQuaire. End of Chapter 3.