The Rescue | Page 8

his craft. What passed in such moments
of thoughtful solitude through the mind of that child of generations of

fishermen from the coast of Devon, who like most of his class was dead
to the subtle voices, and blind to the mysterious aspects of the
world--the man ready for the obvious, no matter how startling, how
terrible or menacing, yet defenceless as a child before the shadowy
impulses of his own heart; what could have been the thoughts of such a
man, when once surrendered to a dreamy mood, it is difficult to say.
No doubt he, like most of us, would be uplifted at times by the
awakened lyrism of his heart into regions charming, empty, and
dangerous. But also, like most of us, he was unaware of his barren
journeys above the interesting cares of this earth. Yet from these, no
doubt absurd and wasted moments, there remained on the man's daily
life a tinge as that of a glowing and serene half-light. It softened the
outlines of his rugged nature; and these moments kept close the bond
between him and his brig.
He was aware that his little vessel could give him something not to be
had from anybody or anything in the world; something specially his
own. The dependence of that solid man of bone and muscle on that
obedient thing of wood and iron, acquired from that feeling the
mysterious dignity of love. She--the craft--had all the qualities of a
living thing: speed, obedience, trustworthiness, endurance, beauty,
capacity to do and to suffer--all but life. He--the man--was the inspirer
of that thing that to him seemed the most perfect of its kind. His will
was its will, his thought was its impulse, his breath was the breath of its
existence. He felt all this confusedly, without ever shaping this feeling
into the soundless formulas of thought. To him she was unique and
dear, this brig of three hundred and fourteen tons register--a kingdom!
And now, bareheaded and burly, he walked the deck of his kingdom
with a regular stride. He stepped out from the hip, swinging his arms
with the free motion of a man starting out for a fifteen-mile walk into
open country; yet at every twelfth stride he had to turn about sharply
and pace back the distance to the taffrail.
Shaw, with his hands stuck in his waistband, had hooked himself with
both elbows to the rail, and gazed apparently at the deck between his
feet. In reality he was contemplating a little house with a tiny front

garden, lost in a maze of riverside streets in the east end of London.
The circumstance that he had not, as yet, been able to make the
acquaintance of his son--now aged eighteen months--worried him
slightly, and was the cause of that flight of his fancy into the murky
atmosphere of his home. But it was a placid flight followed by a quick
return. In less than two minutes he was back in the brig. "All there," as
his saying was. He was proud of being always "all there."
He was abrupt in manner and grumpy in speech with the seamen. To
his successive captains, he was outwardly as deferential as he knew
how, and as a rule inwardly hostile--so very few seemed to him of the
"all there" kind. Of Lingard, with whom he had only been a short
time--having been picked up in Madras Roads out of a home ship,
which he had to leave after a thumping row with the master--he
generally approved, although he recognized with regret that this man,
like most others, had some absurd fads; he defined them as
"bottom-upwards notions."
He was a man--as there were many--of no particular value to anybody
but himself, and of no account but as the chief mate of the brig, and the
only white man on board of her besides the captain. He felt himself
immeasurably superior to the Malay seamen whom he had to handle,
and treated them with lofty toleration, notwithstanding his opinion that
at a pinch those chaps would be found emphatically "not there."
As soon as his mind came back from his home leave, he detached
himself from the rail and, walking forward, stood by the break of the
poop, looking along the port side of the main deck. Lingard on his own
side stopped in his walk and also gazed absentmindedly before him. In
the waist of the brig, in the narrow spars that were lashed on each side
of the hatchway, he could see a group of men squatting in a circle
around a wooden tray piled up with rice, which stood on the just swept
deck. The dark-faced, soft-eyed silent men, squatting on their hams, fed
decorously with an earnestness that did not exclude reserve.
Of