The Rescue Read Online Free

his captain down below rubbing his hands cheerfully.
    For a good while there was no sound on the poop of the brig. Then the
seacannie at the wheel spoke dreamily:
    "Did the malim say there was no one on the sea?"
    "Yes," grunted the serang without looking at the man behind him.
    "Between the islands there was a boat," pronounced the man very softly.
    The serang, his hands behind his back, his feet slightly apart, stood
very straight and stiff by the side of the compass stand. His face, now
hardly visible, was as inexpressive as the door of a safe.
    "Now, listen to me," insisted the helmsman in a gentle tone.
    The man in authority did not budge a hair's breadth. The seacannie bent
down a little from the height of the wheel grating.
    "I saw a boat," he murmured with something of the tender obstinacy of
a lover begging for a favour. "I saw a boat, O Haji Wasub! Ya! Haji
Wasub!"
    The serang had been twice a pilgrim, and was not insensible to the sound
of his rightful title. There was a grim smile on his face.
    "You saw a floating tree, O Sali," he said, ironically.
    "I am Sali, and my eyes are better than the bewitched brass thing that
pulls out to a great length," said the pertinacious helmsman. "There was
a boat, just clear of the easternmost island. There was a boat, and
they in her could see the ship on the light of the west—unless they are
blind men lost on the sea. I have seen her. Have you seen her, too, O
Haji Wasub?"
    "Am I a fat white man?" snapped the serang. "I was a man of the sea
before you were born, O Sali! The order is to keep silence and mind the
rudder, lest evil befall the ship."
    After these words he resumed his rigid aloofness. He stood, his legs
slightly apart, very stiff and straight, a little on one side of the
compass stand. His eyes travelled incessantly from the illuminated card
to the shadowy sails of the brig and back again, while his body was
motionless as if made of wood and built into the ship's frame. Thus,
with a forced and tense watchfulness, Haji Wasub, serang of the brig
Lightning, kept the captain's watch unwearied and wakeful, a slave to
duty.
    In half an hour after sunset the darkness had taken complete possession
of earth and heavens. The islands had melted into the night. And on the
smooth water of the Straits, the little brig lying so still, seemed
to sleep profoundly, wrapped up in a scented mantle of star light and
silence.

II
*
    It was half-past eight o'clock before Lingard came on deck again.
Shaw—now with a coat on—trotted up and down the poop leaving behind
him a smell of tobacco smoke. An irregularly glowing spark seemed to run
by itself in the darkness before the rounded form of his head. Above the
masts of the brig the dome of the clear heaven was full of lights that
flickered, as if some mighty breathings high up there had been swaying
about the flame of the stars. There was no sound along the brig's decks,
and the heavy shadows that lay on it had the aspect, in that silence,
of secret places concealing crouching forms that waited in perfect
stillness for some decisive event. Lingard struck a match to light his
cheroot, and his powerful face with narrowed eyes stood out for a moment
in the night and vanished suddenly. Then two shadowy forms and two red
sparks moved backward and forward on the poop. A larger, but a paler
and oval patch of light from the compass lamps lay on the brasses of
the wheel and on the breast of the Malay standing by the helm. Lingard's
voice, as if unable altogether to master the enormous silence of the
sea, sounded muffled, very calm—without the usual deep ring in it.
    "Not much change, Shaw," he said.
    "No, sir, not much. I can just see the island—the big one—still in
the same place. It strikes me, sir, that, for calms, this here sea is a
devil of locality."
    He cut "locality" in two with an emphatic pause. It was a good word. He
was pleased with himself for thinking of it. He went on again:
    "Now—since noon, this big