Part 48

The sun was shining brilliantly. The sky was cloudless save on the horizon, where there were woolly banks. A steady little breeze just kept the sails full, and the short, choppy waves danced and flashed in the sunlight with a suggestiveness of joy and gladness. The captain was not on deck, and I was informed by the second mate, who had the morning watch, that he had not turned out yet. Wishing to propitiate the Spanish lady passenger, I carried a camp stool to where she was sitting, and in the most fascinating manner I was capable of commanding I asked if I could sit beside her. She smiled sweetly, and accorded her gracious permission. We said some commonplace things about the weather; she descanted on the tropical beauties of Cuba, and criticised rather severely the English climate; while as for London, she spoke of it with scorn and much shrugging of shoulders; and to my amusement, although I must admit the truth of some of her strictures, she described it as a grim and grimy city of revolting ugliness, a city without poetry, without music, without sun. A city where the people struggled and cursed and jostled each other for bare existence. A city where the rich disdained to sniff the same air as the poor. A city of gin palaces and churches, of hypocrisy and smug self conceit. A city of leprous sores and devilish wickedness, of hateful shams and heartless indifference, where the poor debtor was regarded as a criminal, and the rich despoiler of the widow and orphan as a saint. A city of moans and groans. A joyless, dark city, where Mammon was the only god that was truly worshipped.

These things, and many more of the same kind, she gave free vent to; and as they seemed to afford her satisfaction and did me no harm, I made no attempt to stop her flow of invective. Nor should I have noted them down here were it not that they to some extent represent the opinions which the majority of foreigners hold with regard to London.

When at last she paused from sheer exhaustion, I embraced the opportunity to turn the trend of conversation by saying:

‘I am afraid, do you know, that I was a little rude to you last night,’ but I hardly expected such a blunt reply as she made.

‘Yes, you were exceedingly rude, and I hate rude men.’

‘I hope you don’t hate me,’ I cried, laughingly.

‘Oh no, not quite. You’re a Londoner, you see.’

This was very severe. I confess I was hardly prepared for it, and I was tempted to say something cutting in reply, but checked myself, bowed, and merely remarked:

‘Which is not my fault. Therefore pity me rather than blame me.’

‘Certainly I do that,’ she replied, with an amusing seriousness. ‘But look here; answer me this. Why should you have been rude last night when I said what I did about the captain?’

‘Madame,’ I said, as I laid my hand on my heart and bowed, ‘believe me I had no intention of being rude; but the fact is, I am a somewhat commonplace, matter-of-fact man, and I have no belief in anything that is said to be due to supernatural causes.’

‘Supernatural or not supernatural,’ she retorted, ‘there are things going on around us which certainly cannot be explained by any known laws.’

‘Possibly, and yet I doubt it,’ I replied, with a sceptical smile.

‘Well, your obtuseness is your own affair,’ she said, with a shrug of her shoulders; ‘but now, look here, Mr. Gibling, permit me to make a little prophecy. Captain Tredegar has something awful on his mind. He sees visions, and will ultimately go mad.’

Her words startled me. For the first time I was inclined to regard her seriously, in one respect at least; that was the ultimate madness of the skipper. That thought had haunted me, but I had tried to put it away. Even to my somewhat dulled perception it had been made evident that a man who could act as Tredegar had acted on the previous night was a victim to some obscure form of mental disease which might ultimately destroy him. Now the lady spoke with such an absence of vagueness, such a cocksureness, that I asked her if she had known the captain long, and if she was acquainted with his past history.

‘Indeed, no,’ she exclaimed. ‘I never saw the man in my life until I joined the ship in Liverpool.’

‘Then why do you speak with such an air of self-conviction?’

‘I speak as I think. I think as I know.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘Well, you are stupid,’ she exclaimed, with a show of exasperation. ‘I know, because I have a sense you don’t possess. You are a soot-sodden Londoner. I was born where the sun shines. I have beliefs, you have not. I believe that men who do evil in this world can be haunted into madness by the disembodied spirits of those they injure. Now you may laugh and sneer as much as you like, sir, but I tell you this: when Captain Tredegar came down to the cabin last night his face clearly indicated that he had been terrified by something not human, and I saw madness written large in his eyes.’

I should be wanting in common honesty if I failed to say that this woman’s remarks, rude as they were to some extent, put certain rambling thoughts of my own into shape, impressed me in a way that a short time previously I should have been ashamed to own to. They set me pondering, and I tried to recall every act, word, look and gesture of the captain’s, with the result that I had to admit there was something strange about him. At that moment Captain Tredegar himself came on deck, with his sextant in his hand, in order to take the noonday sights for the reckoning. His breezy, jovial manner, and smiling bronzed face, seemed to make the conversation about him ridiculous, and tended to confound the prophet who had talked of madness.

He bowed politely to the lady, and chatted to her pleasantly. He greeted me with a cheery ‘Good-morning,’ and expressed a hope that neither of us had been much alarmed by the squall of the previous evening. He said the passage was going to be a splendid one; one of the best he had ever made; and if, as he anticipated we should do, we picked up a good slant of wind when we had made a little more westing, we should reach Cuba several days before the time we were expected.

The mate now came on deck also with his sextant, and he and the captain walked to the break of the poop to take the sights. When he was out of earshot I turned to the lady and said:

‘He doesn’t look much like a man who is given to seeing visions and is doomed to madness, does he?’

‘You cannot see beneath the mask,’ she replied, with another contemptuous curl of her lip, and laying great stress on the ‘you’; and she added somewhat mysteriously, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ repeating the word three times, with a rising inflection on each repetition. Then she turned to her book again, as if she wished me to understand that she had said her say and would say no more. I took the hint, and making a show of stretching my limbs, I rose and began to pace up and down. The subject of the conversation between me and the lady continued to occupy my thoughts against my will and desire, and the more I thought the more like a riddle did the captain appear to me. I was really astonished to find myself taking so much interest in him. A passing interest in one with whom you happen to be a fellow voyager is easily understood. But if Captain Tredegar had been a relative of mine, my own brother, in fact, I could hardly have felt more anxious or more desirous to solve the mystery that seemed to surround him. His appearance that morning, and his appearance and behaviour of the night before, were in such violent contrast that to put it down to the merely varying moods to which we are all liable was not satisfactory enough. What puzzled me more than anything else was his behaviour during the storm. To suppose that he was a coward and lost his nerve in a passing squall was absurd on the face of it. In the very height of the storm he delivered his orders with coolness and judgment, as I could testify, but what did he mean by exclaiming: ‘There it is again! There, out there on the crest of that wave’? Then again, why the appeal to God to pity him? Having perplexed and fretted myself until I felt quite confused, I found myself unable to alter the original opinion I had formed, which was that Captain Tredegar was liable to attacks of mental aberration, and that being so he was not a fitting person to have charge of a valuable vessel and her living freight.

Viewing the matter from this point, I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that it was my bounden duty as an honest man to make representations to his owners as to the skipper’s state of mind; for surely no one would say that a man liable to attacks of temporary mania was the proper person to be in charge of a ship. As I came to this decision I heard the captain call out from the break of the poop:

‘Make eight bells.’

The boatswain struck the hour on the bell, and ‘eight bells’ was roared out by the men about the decks, while from the galley came the smell of duff and pea soup as the cook put out the dinner for those now going off duty. I was recalled to a sense of my surroundings by these little matters, and as the skipper passed me as he was about to descend to work out his sights and prick the chart, he said cheerily: