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Updated: May 23, 2025
The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars, too, seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow. Captain MacWhirr had gone into the chart-room. There was no light there; but he could feel the disorder of that place where he used to live tidily.
He thought he had not managed to make himself understood. "Our boats I say boats the boats, sir! Two gone!" The same voice, within a foot of him and yet so remote, yelled sensibly, "Can't be helped." Captain MacWhirr had never turned his face, but Jukes caught some more words on the wind. "What can expect when hammering through such Bound to leave something behind stands to reason."
I thought the people ashore would know how to make the local flag. Stands to reason. You were wrong, Jukes. . . ." "Well, sir," began Jukes, getting up excitedly, "all I can say " He fumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands. "That's all right." Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a little canvas folding-stool he greatly affected.
Solomon Rout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the skylight, would turn away his head in order to hide a smile. "Oh! aye! The blessed gamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank 'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr, heartily, without looking up.
Thus Captain MacWhirr expostulated against the use of images in speech, and at the end electrified Jukes by a contemptuous snort, followed by words of passion and resentment: "Damme! I'll fire him out of the ship if he don't look out." And Jukes, incorrigible, thought: "Goodness me! Somebody's put a new inside to my old man. Here's temper, if you like. Of course it's the weather; what else?
"You are always meeting trouble half way, Jukes," Captain MacWhirr remonstrated quaintly. "Though it's a fact that the second mate is no good. D'ye hear, Mr. Jukes? You would be left alone if. . . ." Captain MacWhirr interrupted himself, and Jukes, glancing on all sides, remained silent. "Don't you be put out by anything," the Captain continued, mumbling rather fast. "Keep her facing it.
"We had better be going together over the ship, Captain," said the senior partner; and the three men started to view the perfections of the Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and from her keelson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts. Captain MacWhirr had begun by taking off his coat, which he hung on the end of a steam windless embodying all the latest improvements.
MacWhirr satisfying these requirements, was continued in command of the Nan-Shan, and applied himself to the careful navigation of his ship in the China seas. She had come out on a British register, but after some time Messrs. Sigg judged it expedient to transfer her to the Siamese flag. At the news of the contemplated transfer Jukes grew restless, as if under a sense of personal affront.
A hollow echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship and went out. "Now for it!" muttered Captain MacWhirr. "Mr. Jukes." "Here, sir." The two men were growing indistinct to each other.
I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place. What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation.
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