CHAPTER VIA PLAN TO SAVE JAKOUB
AS I have said, I used to keep a careful diary as long as my life contained nothing eventful to record.
As soon as things began to happen to me I naturally ceased to record them. I was too busy experiencing them.
The diary habit, I think, presupposes a certain placidity, both of mind and circumstance.
The days that followed each other now on board theAstartewere placid enough, but the habit was broken, and I have only a rather confused memory of the long journey.
The wind held from the north and nor’-west, steady and moderate, with bright skies, and theAstarte, with the big square sails set, marched steadily over the waters.
One night, as Edmund and I were on the deck before turning in, a great light flashed on our port bow. There was a slight haze, and we could see the great white beam move round across sea and sky like the hand of a vast clock until it struck theAstarte, and seemed to pause for an instant searching and almost blinding us ere it moved away again on its night-long quest.
“That’s Ushant,” said Edmund. “We’ll soon be in the Bay now.”
For days and nights we were borne along on great following seas that seemed to fling us from one to another. Running before it we felt nothing of the wind that hummed continually in the shrouds, and it was as though we were swept down the current of a mighty river.
Each day Edmund marked our position on the chart, and declared happily that we had beaten all records for a vessel of our size.
Home and all my little anxieties about it vanished from my mind. Even the existence of Jakoub ceased to trouble me.
I lived absorbed in the splendour of our motion and in the rising and setting of the sun.
Then the sea became smoother, though the good wind held, as the land came out to meet us.
For whole days, it seems, I watched the dry, greenish-brown foothills of the Portuguese coast, with white farms and villages embedded in the valleys, and the fantastic outline of the higher land behind them.
We passed fleets of sardine-fishers in boats that seemed to be absurdly small to be so far from land, and for a whole day we were among a school of dolphins that raced and played around us.
Until I had seen those creatures I always thought a flock of swifts, screaming round the roofs in the evening, were the highest expression in nature of speed and delirious joy in life. But now I long to be a dolphin when I die. As they tore past us in groups and couples on the surface of the water, now leaping clear, now diving deep in a common impulse, one expected to hear great shouts of laughter from them in their play. Yet I was told there are men who shoot them andleave a useless, bloody carcass wallowing in their vessel’s wake.
One evening it fell almost calm, with a deep-red sunset touching the sea to flashes of rose among its blue, and lighting the coast with a purple and orange glow.
One of the Arabs in the fo’c’sle was singing, or rather chanting, in a high-pitched tenor, and at the end of each sentence his hearers chimed in with a deep chorus of “Kham leila, kha-am yome?” (“How many nights, how many days?”)
There was a strange mysterious melody in the monotonous chant which was afterwards to become so familiar. It fixed the whole strange sunset landscape like a dream picture in my mind.
Jakoub came out cursing them. The weird Oriental music ceased, and hatred of Jakoub sprouted anew in my heart.
During all this time we were a cheery, cordial party in the cabin. Edmund seemed to be continually in high spirits as we got farther south and theAstartecontinued her record-breaking, and every day I found Captain Welfare more likeable as I got to know him better. He had quite stopped apologising to me for things, and had become used to treating me as a man of like passions with himself. He was very interested in the bishop, not having, as he said, met one before.
One day he asked me in strict confidence if I thought his Lordship was really a God-fearing man. I naturally found this a delicate question, and one very difficult to answer.
“I should be very sorry to misrepresent him,” I replied cautiously, “but I should take him to be a man who feels he has no need to fear God. After all, why should he?”
Captain Welfare looked at me with as much horror as though I had said something blasphemous.
“No need to fear God!” he replied. “Well, I don’t know!”
I saw that if fear, craven fear of a petulant and unreasonable Deity were deleted from his religion, there would be nothing left.
For Welfare was a very simple, literal-minded man. He was one of those who meant “fearing God” when he said it. The words did not convey to him their usual meaning of being bored on Sunday; a commoner and, after all, a much less harmful form of superstition.
I was glad he was shocked, because Ju-ju worship makes me angry, and, unlike the bishop, I am not much interested in the theological ideas of primitive people. I never could see that these ideas had any influence on their conduct. So I was relieved to feel that Captain Welfare would probably not want me to talk about religion any more.
In the intervals between eating and sleeping—the main concerns of a passenger on board ship—I made very material progress in Arabic as expounded by Hassan, and, spending thus a good deal of time in the saloon, I noticed that Captain Welfare was very busy in his cabin. He seemed to spend hours a day writing in a number of large strongly-bound commercial books of the type I was accustomed to think of as “ledgers.”
One day he came to me with an air of great satisfaction on his large countenance, as though he were going to give me an unexpected treat.
“I’ve been thinking, sir,” he said, “that now as you’re a partner you ought to have a thorough overhaul of the books. So I’ve got ’em all up todate and summarised, and ready for your inspection, whenever you feel inclined to take an hour or two at them.”
“I’m afraid it would not be the slightest use,” I said, determined to take a firm stand at the beginning. A great disappointment clouded his expression, and I thought of the hours I had seen him spending over his lamentable occupation.
“You see,” I continued, as kindly as I could, “I should not understand them. To me your volumes are simply what Charles Lamb called ‘books that are no books.’ I have sometimes tried to read the balance-sheets published by charities to which I am a subscriber, and I always find that everything that would normally be regarded as an asset is placed on the debit side of the account; while debts and other liabilities are on the credit side, as if they were something to be proud of. I have tried, but I cannot understand this. There is either some perversity in the business mind, or some blind spot in mine, which prevents our ever coming together, as it were. I have definitely abandoned all idea of trying to grasp what seems to me to be rather absurdly called ‘book-keeping.’”
Captain Welfare tried several times to interrupt this long speech; but I was determined to make my position perfectly clear at the start and would not let him.
He looked very disappointed.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t mind admitting that sometimes those fancy ways of accounting lays me over myself. But I’ve got my own method—perfectly clear and—and straightfor’ard. You’ll soon pick it up. Just let me show you the ‘profit and loss’ account.”
He looked so pathetic, so like a child whenone has not time to take an interest in his toy, that I yielded with a sigh and went into his cabin.
He had a great array of large folios. I admired the binding and the smooth thick paper. I praised the neatness of his handwriting and figures, and particularly admired the diagonal lines which he had ruled in red ink across half-blank pages. These guided the eye down to the words “Total” or “Brought forward,” followed by certain pounds, shillings, and pence.
I told him that I had never been able to rule a line with a pen without the ink forming little pools along the ruler, which made blots when you removed it.
I asked him to show me how to do it properly.
But it was no mere manual dexterity of which Captain Welfare was proud. I had to tell him regretfully that his figures conveyed almost nothing to me, although I admitted that they appeared to be based on something more like a rational system than the usual products of professional accountancy.
“Besides,” I said, as a cheering thought struck me, “if I want to I can get an accountant to go through all these books and report on them. I might be able to understand his report.”
“I don’t know,” said Welfare doubtfully, “but what I could explain these books better to you than what I could to one of them professional gentlemen. You see, they want things shown by their own method, which ain’t applicable to our business, as you say yourself. And they want vouchers which you can’t get in our business.”
“Vouchers? Oh no, of course not!”
Whatever vouchers might be, I felt I should greatly dislike them.
“I’m glad you feel yourself we hadn’t ought to produce vouchers. How can you get a receipt from a native what can’t write his own language, let alone any proper one?”
“No, that’s obvious,” I agreed.
“Well, I just wanted you as a partner to feel you had access to everything, and to know you were perfectly satisfied. Now this,” he added, turning up a page in a smaller book, “this is an idea of my own. Just to show you we are running everything on sound business lines. This is the Depreciation Account on theAstarte.”
“Oh!” I said, trying hard to make the monosyllable sound intelligent and interested.
“Yes; every year we write so much off her value. In a few years’ time she’ll be depreciated away to nothing.”
“Oh! I hope not,” I said in alarm at the idea of a few gaunt ribs representing all that was left of the good ship.
“Hope not?” asked Welfare. “But don’t you see that every penny we make out of her then will be pure bunce?”
“Is that what they call ‘scrap price’?” I asked.
I saw at once that I had said the wrong thing.
“Scrap price? Why, we’re not going to sell her!”
“Oh no. Of course not. Yes, of course, it’s a splendid idea. I don’t quite see where the extra money comes from. Wouldn’t it pay better to keep her in repair?”
“Well, I don’t know! Of course, we keep her in repair.”
“That’s all right then. I didn’t quite follow.”
“The point is, she stands at nothing in the books.”
“I see; and sticks at nothing on the sea, eh?”
I laughed at my own pleasantry, and was surprised to see a look of quick suspicion and annoyance on Captain Welfare’s usually genial face.
“Nothing in the way of weather, I mean.”
Captain Welfare closed his books in silence and put them back on their shelf.
“Well, so long as you’re satisfied,” he said.
“Oh, I’m perfectly satisfied.”
“And the books is there for your inspection whenever you’ve a mind.”
“Thank you. But I’m afraid you’ll have to look upon me practically as a sleeping partner.”
“Perhaps it will be as well.”
I had lost count of the lapse of time under the strange nepenthe-like influence that a sailing-ship at sea possesses. If I thought at all of Bates and Mrs. Rattray, of Snape or the bishop, of parish, or pigeons, or the Byzantine Empire, it was as of dead friends remembered, and dim interests of the past.
The thought of anxiety on the part of people at home no longer worried me. I had no worries. I had hardly even anticipation. TheAstartehad become my planet, bearing all I knew of humanity. The ocean had become space, through which my planet ever moved, and measurements of time had ceased to matter, as though we were already in Eternity. I was content to lean for hours on the bulwark looking down at the stream of bubbles for ever forming on the ship’s side, begotten of the sea by the ship’s motion, falling behind us, spinning for a moment on the surface, and expiring in their myriads, countless and insignificant as human lives.
Then one day the horizon was decorated bythe delicate white edges of the still snow-covered Sierras of Spain. I do not know for how many days I watched their delicate aerial loveliness. We came nearer the land, and someone pointed out Trafalgar Bay. But even that one magic word was powerless to move me from the trance that had got possession of my soul.
We passed through the Straits at night, and I awoke in the Mediterranean.
We kept near the southern shore, passing under the savage precipices and gullies of Ceuta. The Rock of Gibraltar I saw only in the distance, standing pointed like a helmet. The wind, still northerly, was now on our beam, and there was less of it, so that our progress, though still steady, was slower than it had been.
For days and days it seemed we hugged the African coast, sometimes so close that we could see the stones and sand on the shingly beach below barren rocky foothills. For the most part the land seemed utterly uninhabited, but occasionally we passed a greener tract, where there were sparse crops and stunted bushes, occasionally a flat-roofed hovel among them, and through Captain Welfare’s telescope I could make out goats and children moving.
It was strange to me to think of the lives of human beings there.
On other days the land would recede quite out of sight as we passed deep bays, and again we passed islets of rock, precipitous and fantastic in form and colour.
So desolate were these places, it seemed as if ours must be the first eyes to see them, impossible to realise that for ages men had known them, charted, mapped and measured them.
The only human incident I can recall in all this time is that Edmund and Welfare quarrelled one night over their game of piquet, and did not speak to each other until after dinner the following evening, when they resumed their play, and each politely insisted that the other had been right. That is one of the beauties of piquet. It can only be rightly conducted in an atmosphere of eighteenth-century courtliness. It is a game for ladies and gentlemen, and soon, alas! will be played no more. I was surprised to find that Welfare played it, and could as soon have pictured him walking a minuet.
I was still dreamily content, and had ceased to have even any curiosity as to our destination; but as we drew nearer to the coast of Egypt I noticed a new preoccupation in Edmund and Welfare. They made long and intimate studies of the chart, and several times I saw them in conversation with Jakoub.
I began to awake with pain to the renewed sense of the responsibilities and anxieties of life. I had forgotten Jakoub, and to remember his existence again brought back to me all the doubt and fear of the future which is the real tragedy of mankind.
I had seen the splendour of the Mediterranean sky, the pageantry of dawn and sunset, of moonrise and the evening star, as they might have appeared to the first man; but now all was tarnished again by human associations. I had to put on life again as one might don a hair-shirt. And I shrank from it.
Edmund began to hold aloof again, and some instinct warned me that Welfare was seeking in his clumsy mind for the easiest way of making some difficult proposition.
I began almost unconsciously to arm myself against him. So I was on the alert when he said to me one afternoon with an elaborate attempt to speak unconcernedly, “You’d like to see something of the desert while you’re out here, I suppose?”
“I should have liked to see Egypt, of course,” I replied, pre-warned, “but I can’t now. I shall simply have to send a cable and get the first boat for Marseilles.”
“To be sure. I know you must be getting home. I shall be very sorry when you leave us, sir.”
“Thank you. I shall be quite as sorry to go. It’s been a delightful trip. I feel as if I had been dreaming. But I’ve woken up to reality now, and I must make up my mind to a certain amount of awkwardness after being so long away and sending no word. I must get home and put things straight.”
“That is so. I quite understand. I was thinking you would actually save time, and see a bit of the country into the bargain, if you landed near the western frontier and went on overland to Alexandria.”
“Is that possible?”
“Quite easy. It would be hot in the desert, of course.”
“I don’t think I should mind the heat.”
“It would be about a day and a half’s camel ride from the place I’m thinking of to the railway, and then only a few hours to Alexandria. It would take us longer by sea, even if the wind holds, and it’s falling lighter. We’ll soon only have the morning and evening breeze to count on.”
I found the idea of a camel ride across the desert rather attractive. It would be an adventure,another instalment of the utterly unexpected, a fitting end to this extraordinary voyage.
“You wouldn’t, of course, be seeing the Pyramids, or the temples that everybody goes to see, but of course you can visit them any time,” Captain Welfare continued, as though impartially weighing the advantages of his own suggestion, “and I don’t fancy many tourists get to see the western desert.”
“I should like it,” I said. “It would be intensely interesting. But how on earth am I to get a camel and a guide? I don’t suppose one can whistle for them like a taxi?”
“No; it’s a pretty lonesome part. But Jakoub will manage all that.”
“Jakoub?” I asked with instant suspicion.
“Yes; Jakoub has got to go that way.”
“Then he can go alone,” I said with sudden emphasis. “I will not go with him.”
“No? I’m afraid that settles it then. It’s a pity too, for I think you would have found it interesting.”
Captain Welfare walked away as though the subject were closed. If for any reason he wanted me to go with Jakoub, this was the cleverest thing I had known him do; for he left me longing to discuss the matter. Indeed, I came to the conclusion that he could not want me to go, for it was difficult to credit him with so much subtlety.
I resumed the question myself at dinner, anxious to know if Edmund had been consulted before the proposal was made to me. Edmund made no attempt to conceal the fact that it was their joint idea.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that Welfare has made it quite clear to you why we want you to go.”
“I understood that it was to be a sort of pleasure trip for me in charge of this malefactor of yours.”
“As a matter of fact, I think you would find the journey interesting, though fatiguing. But that is not the point.”
“My point is that I have no wish to be murdered in a howling wilderness by a man of whom I utterly disapprove.”
“Jakoub may be a murderer for all I know,” Edmund admitted. “I am sure he would become one if it suited his convenience. But you must know that neither Welfare nor I would suggest your going if there was the slightest chance of his murdering you!”
Of course, I did know this perfectly well; but with the babyish perversity that sometimes afflicts quite sensible people, I felt compelled to go on being offended. I was making myself ridiculous, and I knew it, and nothing feeds anger in one’s heart like that. But having once adopted a pose, even a pose one dislikes or is tired of, it requires immense strength of mind to abandon it.
I have known the happiness of families wrecked by this fatuous adhesion to a worn-out, discredited and detested pose.
“I don’t see,” I said, “what is to prevent his murdering me if he wants to. I’m sure he dislikes me as much as I do him.”
“Very likely. But under the circumstances you will be necessary to his own safety. Jakoub has sense enough to control his dislikes.”
“And in what way am I to protect him?”
“You’ll be part of his disguise. He’ll go as your dragoman. It’s the only way to get him safely into Alexandria, and we must have him there for a few days to negotiate this sale.”
“Why can’t you go yourself, or Captain Welfare?”
“I’m wanted to navigate the ship. Welfare couldn’t manage the business, because he can’t talk the lingo. And Jakoub must be got off the ship before they come and look for him.”
“And why should I help the brute to escape? I don’t want him to escape!”
“Mr. Davoren,” said Welfare very solemnly, “Jakoub is a wrong ’un, I admit. A dead wrong ’un. I’ve never disguised my opinion about that. I don’t know what the charges against him may be—not all of them. But I know this, however bad you may think him, if you saw the convict prison at Tourah you wouldn’t want to help get him there. If you saw the poor devils there working in chains in the quarries under the desert sun, you’d know that no man is bad enough for it. I tell you, sir, if a convict’s friends have any money when he’s sent there, they try to bribe a sentry to shoot him. It’s all they can do. Men have prayed their judges to hang them, sooner than be sent there.”
This appeal of Captain Welfare’s impressed me, but I only said, “All the same, I don’t see why I should help him to escape the law. It’s a very unpleasant, a very risky, a very wrong thing for a man in my position to do.”
“But,” said Edmund, “you don’t know anything against him really except what we’ve told you—our suspicions.”
“You forget that you mentioned warrants for his arrest.”
“Aye. We did mention that,” said Welfare; “it’s a pity, but we had to.”
“Captain Welfare, am I to understand thatyou decide beforehand how much of the truth I am to be told?”
“Oh, dear no, sir. You’ve been told practically everything. I only meant that if we had kept it quiet about the warrants you’d maybe have been easier in your mind.”
“There’s no need for us to start disliking each other,” Edmund remarked judicially; “the situation is simply this. Jakoub must go. If you don’t like to go with him he must go alone. In that case he risks his own liberty and our profit. If you choose, you can save both. I quite admit it’s asking a good deal of you. But what you do not know is Egypt and the ways of the Egyptian police and their courts. Jakoub probably does not deserve justice, but he certainly won’t get it from them. He would probably get off scot free simply because he really is a rogue. In the meantime, I don’t see why he should not be serving us.”
“It seems to me that I am now being asked to go practically on behalf of the firm. That is a very different thing from having a sort of pleasure trip arranged for my benefit.”
I spoke thus in loyalty to my pose, of which I was getting sicker every moment. I had made up my mind to go, since I had learned that Jakoub had good reasons for letting me continue to live, and that handing him over to Egyptian justice was apparently patronising a kind of lottery, in which he might draw a ticket entitling him to be tortured to death, or a different-coloured one letting him go free. I wanted to see him decently but quite certainly hanged.
“I’m afraid I’m to blame,” said Captain Welfare. “I hadn’t ought to have put it to you as I did. I was going on to explain how you might give us alla leg-up, all of us as a firm I mean, but if you remember, sir, you rayther cut me short about Jakoub.”
This was a very unnecessary remark of Captain Welfare’s. It merely emphasised the personal side of my present attitude, which I was now anxious to abandon. Edmund’s delicate tact evidently recognised this.
“I am certainly asking you to go on behalf of the firm,” he said. “We must have someone we can trust in charge of Jakoub, whom we cannot trust. And at present there simply isn’t anyone else but you.”
This, of course, settled it, and I had very soon graciously promised to go.
On looking back it seems to me that in every one of these transactions I allowed myself to become as it were committed, without knowing the details, or anything of the possible objections. When these became obvious it was too late for me to withdraw.
I was, in fact, dragged at the heels of Edmund’s fate. That is the only excuse I can offer to those who, knowing the sequel, will judge that I require one.
For myself I require no excuse, for I was not conscious of wrong-doing. But then, I have already tried to explain to the reader something of those terms of pleasant familiarity on which I and my conscience dwelt together. I am sure it should be a function of any true religion to promote this cheery co-partnership, and that if it were only commoner there would be far more agreeable people in the world. I always take at their word those who go about calling themselves “miserable sinners,” and I notice this always seems to disconcert them.
We had been for some time out of sight of land,as the coast of Tripoli had fallen away from us into the great Bay of Sidra, but now, on the morning after our discussion, I saw for the first time the edge of the great Libyan Desert.
We still carried a breeze with us, but inland of us the sea lay becalmed, so smooth it seemed to be some viscous sea like that imagined by the Ancient Mariner, while the miraged atmosphere above it was fluid. The remotest part of this shimmering fluid was threaded by a thin line of broken points of yellow light, like fragments of the moon.
That was the distant coast, the margin of the great desert.