All the passengers had been packed tidily into the boats and shoved clear of the ship, when Bob sheered alongside again and scrambled back on deck to fetch that girl.
How she had been left behind I can’t make out; anyhow, she had gone completely crazy—wouldn’t leave the ship—held to the rail like grim death.
The wrestling-match could be seen plainly from the boats; but poor Bob was the shortest chief mate in the merchant service, and the woman stood five feet ten in her shoes and was as strong as a horse, I’ve been told.
So it went on, pull devil, pull baker, the wretched girl screaming all the time, and Bob letting out a yell now and then to warn his boat to keep well clear of the ship.
One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection,
“It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.”
The same old chap said that
“At the last we could see that Mr. Stanton had given up hauling at the gal, and just stood by looking at her, watchful like.
We thought afterwards he must’ve been reckoning that, maybe, the rush of water would tear her away from the rail by-and-by and give him a show to save her.
We daren’t come alongside for our life; and after a bit the old ship went down all on a sudden with a lurch to starboard—plop.
The suck in was something awful.
We never saw anything alive or dead come up.”
Poor Bob’s spell of shore-life had been one of the complications of a love affair, I believe.
He fondly hoped he had done with the sea for ever, and made sure he had got hold of all the bliss on earth, but it came to canvassing in the end.
Some cousin of his in Liverpool put up to it.
He used to tell us his experiences in that line.
He made us laugh till we cried, and, not altogether displeased at the effect, undersized and bearded to the waist like a gnome, he would tiptoe amongst us and say,
“It’s all very well for you beggars to laugh, but my immortal soul was shrivelled down to the size of a parched pea after a week of that work.”
I don’t know how Jim’s soul accommodated itself to the new conditions of his life—I was kept too busy in getting him something to do that would keep body and soul together—but I am pretty certain his adventurous fancy was suffering all the pangs of starvation.
It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling.
It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit.
I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry.
He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger’s donkey.
He did it very well. He shut himself in, put his head down, said never a word.
Very well; very well indeed—except for certain fantastic and violent outbreaks, on the deplorable occasions when the irrepressible Patna case cropped up.
Unfortunately that scandal of the Eastern seas would not die out.
And this is the reason why I could never feel I had done with Jim for good.
‘I sat thinking of him after the French lieutenant had left, not, however, in connection with De Jongh’s cool and gloomy backshop, where we had hurriedly shaken hands not very long ago, but as I had seen him years before in the last flickers of the candle, alone with me in the long gallery of the Malabar House, with the chill and the darkness of the night at his back.
The respectable sword of his country’s law was suspended over his head.
To-morrow—or was it to-day? (midnight had slipped by long before we parted)—the marble-faced police magistrate, after distributing fines and terms of imprisonment in the assault-and-battery case, would take up the awful weapon and smite his bowed neck.
Our communion in the night was uncommonly like a last vigil with a condemned man.
He was guilty too.
He was guilty—as I had told myself repeatedly, guilty and done for; nevertheless, I wished to spare him the mere detail of a formal execution.
I don’t pretend to explain the reasons of my desire—I don’t think I could; but if you haven’t got a sort of notion by this time, then I must have been very obscure in my narrative, or you too sleepy to seize upon the sense of my words.
I don’t defend my morality.
There was no morality in the impulse which induced me to lay before him Brierly’s plan of evasion—I may call it—in all its primitive simplicity.
There were the rupees—absolutely ready in my pocket and very much at his service.
Oh! a loan; a loan of course—and if an introduction to a man (in Rangoon) who could put some work in his way . . . Why! with the greatest pleasure.
I had pen, ink, and paper in my room on the first floor And even while I was speaking I was impatient to begin the letter—day, month, year, 2.30 A.M. . . . for the sake of our old friendship I ask you to put some work in the way of Mr. James So-and-so, in whom, &c., &c. . . .
I was even ready to write in that strain about him.
If he had not enlisted my sympathies he had done better for himself—he had gone to the very fount and origin of that sentiment he had reached the secret sensibility of my egoism.
I am concealing nothing from you, because were I to do so my action would appear more unintelligible than any man’s action has the right to be, and—in the second place—to-morrow you will forget my sincerity along with the other lessons of the past.
In this transaction, to speak grossly and precisely, I was the irreproachable man; but the subtle intentions of my immorality were defeated by the moral simplicity of the criminal.
No doubt he was selfish too, but his selfishness had a higher origin, a more lofty aim.
I discovered that, say what I would, he was eager to go through the ceremony of execution, and I didn’t say much, for I felt that in argument his youth would tell against me heavily: he believed where I had already ceased to doubt.
There was something fine in the wildness of his unexpressed, hardly formulated hope.
“Clear out!
Couldn’t think of it,” he said, with a shake of the head.
“I make you an offer for which I neither demand nor expect any sort of gratitude,” I said; “you shall repay the money when convenient, and . . .”
“Awfully good of you,” he muttered without looking up.