e
bulkhead commented upon them all with an extraordinary and ingenious
venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they had all offended him in
some way, and in return he had found them all out. He muttered darkly;
he laughed sardonically; he crushed them one after another; but of his
chief, Massy, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration. Clever
scoundrel! Don't meet the likes of him every day. Just look at him. Ha!
Great! Ship of his own. Wouldn't catch _him_ going wrong. No fear--the
beast! And Massy, after listening with a gratified smile to these
artless tributes to his greatness, would begin to shout, thumping at the
bulkhead with both fists--

"Shut up, you lunatic! Won't you let me go to sleep, you fool!"

But a half smile of pride lingered on his lips; outside the solitary
lascar told off for night duty in harbor, perhaps a youth fresh from
a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck
listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping
with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who
pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes,--beings with weird
intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by
inscrutable motives.

VIII

For a while after his second's answering hoot Massy hung over the
engine-room gloomily. Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred
pounds, had kept his command for three years, might have been suspected
of never having seen that coast before. He seemed unable to put down his
glasses, as though they had been glued under his contracted eyebrows.
This settled frown gave to his face an air of invincible and just
severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration
poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at
the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose
blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust.

From time to time, still holding up his glasses, he raised his other
hand to wipe his streaming face. The drops rolled down his cheeks, fell
like rain upon the white hairs of his beard, and brusquely, as if guided
by an uncontrollable and anxious impulse, his arm reached out to the
stand of the engine-room telegraph.

The gong clanged down below. The balanced vibration of the dead-slow
speed ceased together with every sound and tremor in the ship, as if the
great stillness that reigned upon the coast