The Wish House and Other Stories (30 page)

‘By and by some more steamers came along, snorting and snifting at the buoys, but never going through, and Dowse says to himself: “Thank goodness I’ve taught them not to come streaking through my water. Ombay Passage is good enough for them and the like of them.” But he didn’t remember how quick that sort of news spreads among the shipping. Every steamer that fetched up by those buoys told another steamer and all the port officers concerned in those seas that there was something wrong with Flores Straits that hadn’t been charted yet. It was block-buoyed for wrecks in the fairway, they said,
and no sort of passage to use. Well, the Dutch, of course they didn’t know anything about it. They thought our Admiralty Survey had been there, and they thought it very queer but neighbourly. You understand us English are always looking up marks and lighting sea-ways all the world over, never asking with your leave or by your leave, seeing that the sea concerns us more than any one else. So the news went to and back from Flores to Bali, and Bali to Probolingo, where the railway is that runs to Batavia. All through the Javva seas everybody got the word to keep clear o’ Flores Straits, and Dowse, he was left alone except for such steamers and small craft as didn’t know. They’d come up and look at the straits like a bull over a gate, but those nodding wreck-buoys scared them away. By and by the Admiralty Survey ship – the
Britomarte
I think she was – lay in Macassar Roads off Fort Rotterdam, alongside of the
Amboina
, a dirty little Dutch gunboat that used to clean there; and the Dutch captain says to our captain, “What’s wrong with Flores Straits?” he says.

‘“Blowed if I know,” says our captain, who’d just come up from the Angelica Shoal.

‘“Then why did you go and buoy it?” says the Dutchman.

‘“Blowed if I have,” says our captain. “That’s your lookout.”

‘“Buoyed it is,” says the Dutch captain, “according to what they tell me; and a whole fleet of wreck-buoys, too.”

‘“Gummy!” says our captain. “It’s a dorg’s life at sea, any way. I must have a look at this. You come along after me as soon as you can;” and down he skimmed that very night, round the heel of Celebes, three days’ steam to Flores Head, and he met a Two-streak liner, very angry, backing out of the head of the strait; and the merchant captain gave our survey ship something of his mind for leaving wrecks uncharted in those narrow waters and wasting his company’s coal.

‘“It’s no fault o’ mine,” says our captain.

“‘I don’t care whose fault it is,” says the merchant captain, who had come aboard to speak to him just at dusk. “The fairway’s choked with wreck enough to knock a hole through a dock-gate. I saw their big ugly masts sticking up just under my forefoot. Lord ha’ mercy on us!” he says, spinning round. “The place is like Regent Street of a hot summer night.”

‘And so it was. They two looked at Flores Straits, and they saw lights one after the other stringing across the fairway. Dowse, he had seen the steamers hanging there before dark, and he said to Challong: “We’ll give ’em something to remember. Get all the skillets and iron pots you can and hang them up alongside o’ the
regular four lights. We must teach ’em to go round by the Ombay Passage, or they’ll be streaking up our water again!” Challong took a header off the lighthouse, got aboard the little leaking prow, with his coir soaked in oil and all the skillets he could muster, and he began to show his lights, four regulation ones and half a dozen new lights hung on that rope which was a little above the water. Then he went to all the spare buoys with all his spare coir, and hung a skillet-flare on every pole that he could get at – about seven poles. So you see, taking one with another, there was the Wurlee Light, four lights on the rope between the three centre fairway wreck-buoys that was hung out as a usual custom, six or eight extry ones that Challong had hung up on the same rope, and seven dancing flares that belonged to seven wreck-buoys – eighteen or twenty lights in all crowded into a mile of seventeen-fathom water, where no tide’d ever let a wreck rest for three weeks, let alone ten or twelve wrecks, as the flares showed.

‘The Admiralty captain, he saw the lights come out one after another, same as the merchant skipper did who was standing at his side, and he said:

‘“There’s been an international cata-strophe here or elseways,” and then he whistled. “I’m going to stand on and off all night till the Dutchman comes,” he says.

‘“I’m off,” says the merchant skipper. “My owners don’t wish for me to watch illuminations. That strait’s choked with wreck, and I shouldn’t wonder if a typhoon hadn’t driven half the junks o’ China there.” With that he went away; but the survey ship, she stayed all night at the head o’ Flores Strait, and the men admired of the lights till the lights was burning out, and then they admired more than ever.

‘A little bit before morning the Dutch gunboat come flustering up, and the two ships stood together watching the lights burn out and out, till there was nothing left ’cept Flores Straits, all green and wet, and a dozen wreck-buoys, and Wurlee Light.

‘Dowse had slept very quiet that night, and got rid of his streaks by means of thinking of the angry steamers outside. Challong was busy, and didn’t come back to his bunk till late. In the grey early morning Dowse looked out to sea, being, as he said, in torment, and saw all the navies of the world riding outside Flores Strait fairway in a half-moon, seven miles from wing to wing, most wonderful to behold. Those were the words he used to me time and again in telling the tale.

‘Then, he says, he heard a gun fired with a most tremenjus explosion, and all them great navies crumbled to little pieces of
clouds, and there was only two ships remaining, and a man-o’-war’s boat rowing to the light, with the oars going sideways instead o’ longways as the morning tides, ebb or flow, would continually run.

“‘What the devil’s wrong with this strait?” says a man in the boat as soon as they was in hailing distance. “Has the whole English Navy sunk here, or what?”

‘“There’s nothing wrong,” says Dowse, sitting on the platform outside the Light, and keeping one eye very watchful on the streakiness of the tide, which he always hated, ‘specially in the mornings. “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. Go round by the Ombay Passage, and don’t cut up my water. You’re making it streaky.” All the time he was saying that he kept on thinking to himself, “Now that’s foolishness – now that’s nothing but foolishness”; and all the time he was holding tight to the edge of the platform in case the streakiness of the tide should carry him away.

‘Somebody answers from the boat, very soft and quiet, “We’re going round by Ombay in a minute, if you’ll just come and speak to our captain and give him his bearings.”

‘Dowse, he felt very highly flattered, and he slipped into the boat, not paying any attention to Challong. But Challong swum along to the ship after the boat. When Dowse was in the boat, he found, so he says, he couldn’t speak to the sailors ’cept to call them “white mice with chains about their neck”, and Lord knows he hadn’t seen or thought o’ white mice since he was a little bit of a boy with them in his handkerchief. So he kept himself quiet, and so they come to the survey ship; and the man in the boat hails the quarter-deck with something that Dowse could not rightly understand, but there was one word he spelt out again and again – m-a-d, mad – and he heard someone behind him saying of it backwards. So he had two words-m-a-d, mad, d-a-m, dam; and he put they two words together as he come on the quarter-deck, and he says to the captain very slowly, “I be damned if I am mad,” but all the time his eye was held like by the coils of rope on the belaying pins, and he followed those ropes up and up with his eye till he was quite lost and comfortable among the rigging, which ran criss-cross, and slopeways, and up and down, and any way but straight along under his feet north and south. The deck-seams, they ran
that
way, and Dowse daresn’t look at them. They was the same as the streaks of the water under the planking of the lighthouse.

‘Then he heard the captain talking to him very kind, and for the life of him he couldn’t tell why; and what he wanted to tell the captain was that Flores Strait was too streaky, like bacon, and the
steamers only made it worse; but all he could do was to keep his eye very careful on the rigging and sing:

‘Then he remembered that was foolishness, and he started off to say about the Ombay Passage, but all he said was: “The captain was a duck – meaning no offence to you, sir – but there was something on his back that I’ve forgotten.

‘He notices the captain turns very red and angry, and he says to himself, “My foolish tongue’s run away with me again. I’ll go forward;” and he went forward, and catched the reflection of himself in the binnacle brasses; and he saw that he was standing there and talking mother-naked in front of all them sailors, and he ran into the fo’c’s’le howling most grievous. He must ha’ gone naked for weeks on the Light, and Challong o’ course never noticed it. Challong was swimmin’ round and round the ship, sayin’ “dam” for to please the men and to be took aboard, because he didn’t know any better.

‘Dowse didn’t tell what happened after this, but seemingly our survey ship lowered two boats and went over to Dowse’s buoys. They took one sounding, and then finding it was all correct they cut the buoys that Dowse and Challong had made, and let the tide carry ’em out through the Loby Toby end of the strait; and the Dutch gunboat, she sent two men ashore to take care o’ the Wurlee Light, and the
Britomarte
, she went away with Dowse, leaving Challong to try to follow them, a-calling “dam – dam” all among the wake of the screw, and half heaving himself out of water and joining his webby-foot hands together. He dropped astern in five minutes, and I suppose he went back to the Wurlee Light. You can’t drown an Orange-Lord, not even in Flores Strait on flood-tide.

‘Dowse come across me when he came to England with the survey ship, after being more than six months in her, and cured of his streaks by working hard and not looking over the side more than he could help. He told me what I’ve told you, sir, and he was very much ashamed of himself; but the trouble on his mind was to know whether he hadn’t sent something or other to the bottom with his buoyings and his lightings and such like. He put it to me many
times, and each time more and more sure he was that something had happened in the straits because of him. I think that distructed him, because I found him up at Fratton one day, in a red jersey, a-praying before the Salvation Army, which had produced him in their papers as a Reformed Pirate. They knew from his mouth that he had committed evil on the deep waters – that was what he told them-and piracy, which no one does now except Chineses, was all they knew of. I says to him: “Dowse, don’t be a fool. Take off that jersey and come along with me.” He says: “Fenwick, I’m a-saving of my soul; for I do believe that I have killed more men in Flores Strait than Trafalgar”. I says: “A man that thought he’d seen all the navies of the earth standing round in a ring to watch his foolish false wreck-buoys” (those was my very words I used) “ain’t fit to have a soul, and if he did he couldn’t kill a louse with it. John Dowse, you was mad then, but you are a damn sight madder now. Take off that there jersey!”

‘He took it off and come along with me, but he never got rid o’ that suspicion that he’d sunk some ships a-cause of his foolishness at Flores Straits; and now he’s a wherryman from Portsmouth to Gosport, where the tides run crossways and you can’t row straight for ten strokes together…So late as all this! Look!’

Fenwick left his chair, passed to the Light, touched something that clicked, and the glare ceased with a suddenness that was pain. Day had come, and the Channel needed St Cecilia no longer. The sea-fog rolled back from the cliffs in trailed wreaths and dragged patches, as the sun rose and made the dead sea alive and splendid. The stillness of the morning held us both silent as we stepped on the balcony. A lark went up from the cliffs behind St Cecilia, and we smelt a smell of cows in the lighthouse pastures below.

Then we were both at liberty to thank the Lord for another day of clean and wholesome life.

H
IS
name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and was full of aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his first name, and he called the marker ‘Bullseye’. Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

That was our first step towards better acquaintance. He would call on me sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories of love and death to the penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man are almost as holy as those of a maiden. Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honourable, but at the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way about the world as befitted a bank-clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed ‘dove’ with ‘love’ and ‘moon’ with ‘June’, and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on, seeing all that he intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already done, and turned to me for applause.