Part 21

You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of all hands toward the chief engineer of the _Moung Poh_. Every ship has her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say, and in the curious way of such traditions this had come to center on Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high seas.

I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned, long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity, and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general damnation in which he moved--these were points of pride and almost of affection.

"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third engineer--we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the ports--"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw, an' blistered son of perdition,' he says, 'I'll learn you to 'ide liquor in your bunk. Wine is a knocker,' he says, and stretches me. And with that goes back to his cabin to _prye_ for me! I 'eard 'im groanin' as I come by the dead-light. Oh, he's a 'oly wonder and no mistyke--once he goes to set a bloke right there's nothin' he won't do for 'im!"

Nobody knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady passengers into fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and the man that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire undertook to do both.

* * * * *

You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appetite for life and confident humor--here was a brand to be snatched from the burning: here was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!

And Sutton--at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a jape he was all too apt at.

"Where ha' ye been the day--ashore again? Buyin' gauds an' silk pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o' damnable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like the lilies o' the field!"

This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton--at the start, as I say. He must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being damned with such assurance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so developed the jest.

* * * * *

With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much between himself and the censor, but I chanced to overhear an odd passage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other wrong on some argued matter.

"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."

"What--no Book!"

"I need nane. What for?"

"Why, for me, of course. It's a remedy for all ills, they say.... I'm surprised at your not trying it on."

They made a picture there by the rail in a strong glint of sunlight--the chief, squatted on a bollard like a grim and battered Moses giving the law; Sutton, dapper in fresh ducks, his hands in his pockets, swaying easily to the ship's motion.

Wickwire seemed to reflect. "Aye, it's a grand book, nae doot, but wad ye listen? I been watchin' ye, laddie--I ken ye better than maybe ye think."

"Much obliged, I'm sure," said Sutton pertly.

"Aye, there it is, ye see. Ye never tak' the straight way wi' life. But what I dinna just ken is this: are ye a'thegither past the reach o' good words for remedy? Puttin' aside the false glitter, could ever ye cast the beam from yer eye an' listen how hell gapes for ye?"

"I might," said Sutton. "You haven't a notion how I enjoy hearing about it. You might read to me."

I was startled then to see the depth of yearning in Wickwire's regard, to see his hands knotting and twisting one in the other. However it might be with the mate, it was no play with him; he was wrung with pity as toward an erring son, or toward some younger memory of himself, perhaps--for Sutton had this appeal.

"Suppose I should tell ye now I canna read the heid o' one printed word frae the hurdies o' it?"

The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.

"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case--I could read to you," he cried--"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth--oodles of truth! I'll show you old boy--"

And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over into merriment....

"Where's the chief?"

"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."

"Saved anybody yet?"

"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce. He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"

But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.

For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we were coaling at Calcutta--seven weeks before, you remember--they broke suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a long-drawn lip over his pipe.

"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper. "Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool in his heart! He's young--he's ower young. What he needs is to come to gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod an' a staff to comfort him--an' by this an' that," he breathed through the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we lost Wickwire....

* * * * *

Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.

By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside--there had been one missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah Bridge--and so reached shore.

"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a silence. "Is that how you make it?"

"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.

"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb," said Raff simply-- "or anything like it."

Sutton said nothing.

Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.

* * * * *

Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless, moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with infinite suggestions of dim horrors--

To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on the floor above the street.

There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a gallery, but it had no windows--only a row of shallow cells, so to say, divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned from a niche. He was fat and crass and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!

Perhaps because we were listening!...

"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's that pipe?" A voice to send the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere on earth, or under. "_Not_ the silver one, ye blistered limb--"

Nobody came; nothing stirred among the curtains. Sutton had closed the door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty. And the plaint began again, monotonous, muffled:

"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...

Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as perhaps the imps tend the damned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by. "Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.

He looked up at us then, and it was Chris Wickwire, his very self. He looked and looked and made no sign.

I think I might have been less shocked to see some change, some altered trait to veil the normal image of him. But there was none. He was the same, the same weather-beaten old tinker with the lean, long face and hard-set jaw and the dour eye that could quell a mutinous stokehole at a glance. In the midst of this evil and fantastic luxury he still wore the same old shiny alpaca too, his regular shore-going and Sunday garb, and a ragged bit of ribbon at his throat. Somehow that cut me all up.

"Wickwire!" began Raff again. "Come away out of that. What are y' doin' here?"

No answer; the smoker's concern was for his pipe.

"Chief, d'you hear me? You're needed on board." The captain shook him gently, and then not so gently.

"Drop it. We've come to bring you away. For any sakes quit that devilment, now, will y'!"...

The figure on the couch made a languid effort.

"I'll grant ye--I'll grant ye the siller's weel enough for a change. Aye, it makes a change." He wagged his head at us confidentially. "But the bamboo's the best. It smokes sweet--varra sweet it smokes. An' that unhandy thief of a boy--" He paused to draw lazily at the mouthpiece and loosed a slow gout of vapor. "He's always mislayin' it somewhere--"

Raff cried a round oath and snatched the pipe from him; flung it down. But the chief only sank back among the pillows and closed his eyes, even smiling a little to himself, as one accustomed to the vagaries of phantom guests....

For the last few moments he had forgotten our appointed guide and leader. He had been standing by, a stricken witness, but with a common impulse the captain and I turned on him, and he started from contemplation of his handiwork as if he had pulled a secret wire.

"You brought us here," roared Raff, accusing.

"I--I didn't think he was as bad as this."

"Bad! He's crazy as a coot. What were you going to do about it?"

The flurry of our passage had begun to draw in behind us in a back-lash wave. The house seemed to hum under our feet. A door opened on a gust of muttering voices. Down by the entrance to the gallery a knot of vague shadows had gathered. It occurred to me, and time enough you might suppose, that we were very far from possible aid in a region where visitors are a poor risk. And suddenly, out of space for all I knew, appeared a little noiseless silken apparition of a Chinese who regarded us from twin lenses with a phosphorescent gleam.

It was of a piece with the whole mysterious side of the affair that he should address Sutton a screed in the vernacular and that the mate should answer. I was long past wonder--anything might happen now--and I only noted that our companion could be wheedling and plausible in more than one language. But Raff seemed curiously put out and broke upon their chatter.

"Friend of yours?" he rumbled.

Sutton span around nervously.

"He--he says we've got to go away quick. He says we've no business here."

"Tell him sure thing, soon as we get our friend."

"But he says--he says Chris is his lodger, in a private house, and mustn't be disturbed."

"Oh, he does, hey? Well, we'll give him a chance to explain to the police in another minute!"

"That's no good either."

"Does he figger we can't get no police?"

"'Tisn't that, sir. The police couldn't help."

"Why not?"

"Why, it seems he's breaking no law. There's no bar to private smoking. I've been trying to get around him somehow, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do. He says the white man has a right to stay here, and he has a right to keep him."...

"Keep him! Well, by God!"

"I suppose Chris must have a little money banked somewhere," continued the mate miserably. "Li Chwan'll never let go of him while it lasts."

"And you mean we got to leave him after all--leave the ol' chief to rot where he lays?"

"Unless he wants to--to come away of his own motion," stammered Sutton. "I thought he'd come quite easy when he saw the three of us. But he won't. He doesn't want to--and that's the dreadful fact. And--and--only look at him now!"

* * * * *

His fascinated gaze had coasted back to the face on the cushions. It might have been cut from tan marble, impassive and stern, and we saw what he meant--though perhaps not as vividly as he saw--the wretched incongruous tragedy of such a face in such a setting.

"So this is the end of your grand scheme!" said Captain Raff bitterly.

Well, you see, it came rather rough on a superior young optimist. For the very first time in his life, I suppose, Sutton found himself called to account without a chance either to smile or to sulk, to palter or to play at clever tricks. Whatever his share in the unhappy business had been--and we had never fully fathomed it, you remember--he was facing the result of that folly without the possibility of disguise or excuse or easy escape. Here was actual, physical hell to equal Wickwire's own preaching--the murky depth of it. And here was Wickwire himself, condemned to the dreariest fate ever devised by unamusing devils. And who to blame?...

What he suffered we had a guess even then. Being the sort of chap he was, he fought a very pretty little fight with himself in that moment--which we might have guessed as well. His face was gridironed, studded with sweat, and his hands clenched and opened. He turned here and there, seeking the careless word or the flippant gesture, some relief to an intolerable sense of guilt. But writhe as he liked, his darting glances always painfully returned to the still victim on the charpoy.

The Chinese touched his arm....

"No," he quavered. "No--no, by gum, _no_! It's not the end. Keep off of me!" Like a man who clears himself of a vileness, he slung Li Chwan across the room. "And you--" he cried to us "--hoist the chief up out of that, and lively. There's a way yet if we take the straight of it. Grab him!"

We responded--just as we had hesitated before--to some subtle quality behind the words, and while we were gathering the limp body Sutton himself was laying wide hold on the draperies across the wall. They ripped and swayed, swirled down about him so that he stood waist deep wrestling with figurative monsters until the whole blue screen tore away and revealed the glass partition which closed the end of the gallery. Solid at the base, it was latticed above with small panes, and, taking the straight way with a vengeance, he flung himself literally and bodily against it. The jingling crash brought a howl from the stairhead, but he broke a gap with his bleeding fists, wrenched out the crosspieces.... A spatter of warm rain blew in upon us.

"There's only the street below!" I gasped.

"Out!" was Sutton's crisp order. "Out--and through--and over with you!"

We had no choice; his furious energy drove us. Wickwire hung a dead weight in our arms, but we propped him on the jagged sill and scrambled after, any fashion. Clinging there, we had one last glimpse into the gallery behind us, set like a stage for our benefit.

We saw the little Chinese come on with uplifted knife, spitting and glaring like a wildcat, saw the knobbed, bare shoulders and coppery, brute faces of his crew, saw Sutton turning back. He had no weapon, but he armed himself. He dragged the big green joss from its niche, lamps, incense, and all, twirled it over his head, exultant, transformed with berserk fury, shouting some free battle cry of his own--and met them. Thereafter the place went dark in a babble of shrieks, and we dropped like slugs from a garden wall.

So we brought Chris Wickwire home again--what was left of him....

There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever, unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of the _Moung Poh_ took stock of themselves once more, and of each other and an ill prospect.

Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.

"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself--try the Port Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."

We looked at the shell of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the--the hospital, then?" I asked.

"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.

"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we'll notify no office and no doctor either--not till we sheer have to."...

The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.

"What in Hull t' Halifax are you talkin' about?"

Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small, black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir--"

The captain regarded him, purpling.

"Is this more of your wonderful notions?"

"It's my plan to save Chris Wickwire," returned the mate firmly, "and I'm bound to try it on. Just as it says here. 'Sirs,' it says, 'sirs, I will practice on this drunken man--'"

He held out the shabby octavo and, considering it again with heightened amazement, of a sudden I knew where I had seen it before.

"Why," I cried, "that's the Book you got for the chief. I can tell from the gilt cross on the cover. That's Wickwire's Bible!"

"It is the book I got for the chief," he said slowly, making plain the case against himself, "and it has a cross on the cover. But it's no Bible. Only an old collection of plays I bought to gammon him with. Shakespeare wrote it.

"There was no cover to it either, so I bought an old cover off a hymn book and pasted it over. You can see for yourselves--the cross is upside down." And, in fact, that we might miss nothing he showed us the cover, wrong way with the pages. "I remember the chief, taking lessons from me but having only the cross to go by, d'y'see--the chief used always to hold the book wrong side up. I remember," he added with an odd smile, quite mirthless--"I remember how I laughed. I used to think it funny."

Someway that made the captain froth. Since our invasion of Colootullah he had been increasingly rigid toward the mate, and here he broke out.

"So we've had nothin' but your damn' lyin' tricks from the start! All the time you was readin' to him--"

"Only gammon, sir. I used to experiment on him with choice bits--calling 'em truth and Scripture."

"And now you're after more fool games of the same kind! Can't you look what's come of 'em? Look there!" He pointed to the stark figure.

"I see what's come, sir," said Sutton, and though he was white under his stains he never flinched. "And Wickwire, he saw what _would_ come. He was trying to stop me the night I dropped him into the river--when we quarreled. Because, d'y'see, from fooling with the works of life just to learn how they're made I'd begun fooling with the works of hell. And he had found me out."

"Ah," said Raff, with one of his rare flashes. "_That_ was how you knew the road to Li Chwan's!"

"To Li Chwan's--and--other places. I've been hitting it pretty regular for six months or so. The chief tried to save me, but I wouldn't hearken, and there, as you say--there's the result. It's just as if he'd done it all as a sacrifice, to show me. It's just as if--as if he'd paid for mine with the price of his own immortal soul!"...