Beyond the Rim/Chapter 4

HREE weeks of close contact aboard an eight-ton schooner bring out characteristics and breed intimacies or aversions in swift and unerring fashion. To Chalmers, Tuan Yuck remained a mystery. The man lived absolutely within himself to his own complete satisfaction. He was not unwilling to talk, but his conversation was so pre-eminently born of experience, and so based on selfishness that Chalmers never felt he penetrated the other's screen of self-sufficiency. For Sayers, he felt a growing dislike. The Australian was both slovenly and lazy, and his especial brand of selfishness lacked, somehow, the quality of the Chinaman's.

Sometimes Sayers would show the better streaks of his cosmos. In discussing philosophies with Tuan Yuck, between the three of them, Sayers would show flashes of philosophic brilliancy, born of an education that Chalmers envied, while he wondered at the little permanent result it had against the man's coarser nature. And at times the Australian would bring a zither on deck and invest its strings with a quality that seemed utterly at variance with his character. They had shipped two Hawaiians as crew, a sturdy, good-natured Hercules named Hamaku, and a somewhat stupid, but willing younger man, known only as Tomi, who possessed a high tenor that held qualities many a famous singer would have envied for his higher register.

Some days the wind sulked beneath the horizon, and, after the heat of the day was over, Sayers would play such things as the barcarolle from the “Tales of Hoffmann,” or the sextette from “Lucia,” and then drift into accompaniments for Tomi, singing native meles full of plaintive melody born of coco-palms bending in the trades and surf, crooning lazily to coral reefs.

Then he would discuss the mathematics of harmony with Tuan Yuck, while Chalmers listened with quickening interest as the Chinaman infallibly discounted Occidental methods and accomplishments, and showed the Orient as the very matrix of philosophy and the birthplace of science.

An hour later, Sayers, a bottle of gin before him, would play solitaire until, soddened with liquor, he would stumble to his bunk to sleep away his trick at the wheel, and appear at noon the next day morose and red-eyed until twilight came and his fingers steadied enough to coax a melody from his zither.

With it all, Chalmers's view-point broadened. His vitality, the buoyancy of his youth, and his ardent belief in human impulse and action that were based on real friendliness toward one's fellow man, offset the cynicism of the Chinaman and the more brutal selfishness of the Australian. A sense of responsibility broadened his mental and spiritual shoulders. He was conscious of a link between Tuan Yuck and Sayers that was at variance with his own ideas of fair play, and, almost insensibly, he became the champion of the unknown captain, marooned by Fate, at the mercy of these mercenary rescuers.

His own dreams were those of youth crystallizing to manhood in the crucible of experience. The wide sea spaces, where the horizon seemed the veritable edge of the world, the vagrant clouds drifting across the sky, the starry infinitudes, the touch of the free-roving winds, strengthened the spirit within him.

Chalmers felt that behind the Chinaman's impassive exterior there dwelled absolutely human passions held in check until the owner willed to loose them. The shifting of the brilliant eyes behind the immobile eyelids constantly suggested the pacing of a beast within a cage that might open at any moment.

Meanwhile, as a cook, Tuan Yuck achieved wonders. From a scrawny, sea sick chicken, with a handful of rice and a sprinkling of herbs, he could evolve a curry that, while it wholly satisfied the stomach, seemed, by the sheer savor of the dish, to evoke subtle suggestions of the Orient with all its hidden mysteries of dozing power and knowledge. And yet Chalmers could never lose the thought that, if it suited his purpose, Tuan Yuck would as callously poison the ship's company as he decapitated the chicken that formed the base of his culinary marvel.

He had shaken off the feeling of youth and ignorance with which the Chinaman had first inspired him. Something told him that Tuan Yuck missed the better part of life, had perhaps outlived it in the unknown years of his existence, and he rather pitied than resented him. At the beginning of the trip the Chinaman had produced a chess-board, and challenged both of them, proving them such amateurs before his brilliant, insoluble gambits that they had permanently retired.

Nights, when Sayers shuffled his cards at Canfield and Chalmers wrote up his log and checked his reckonings, Tuan Yuck worked out inscrutable problems on the squares, and at last retired to his cabin, whence the fumes of opium presently came pungently. Chalmers wondered if he sometimes smoked the poppy-seed to escape from his own philosophies.

DAY in, day out, they sailed across the changing ocean without a trail of smoke or the gleam of a sail on the horizon, splitting the angle of the diverging steamer trails that run from Honolulu to Guam, northward, and to the south from Honolulu to Suva and to Apia. Fortune favored them for two weeks with a steady following wind, and then they drifted, a squall sometimes a few miles off, and lifeless, lumpy water all about them, in which dolphins gamboled or chased great schools of flying-fish.

Their way lay through an ocean desert, set only with the scattered isles of Johnston, Jane, San Pedro and Barber, too far off their route for sighting, until they raised the Gilberts and sailed through the group, crossing the Equator and the international date line almost simultaneously as they entered the last quadrangle of their quest.

Chalmers grew daily more certain of some secret understanding between Sayers and Tuan Yuck. The two never seemed to court privacy; there was nothing on which to base his suspicions; but the consciousness deepened that there was something between them in which he had no share. That it in some way was aimed against his own interests or that of the captain, he felt sure, and cautioned himself accordingly.

On the twenty-seventh day the crossing of his Sumner's lines by double observation proved their position to be 171° 47' East, and 4° 30' South. He had checked his nooning and dead reckoning by a stellar altitude record, and was sure of his figures.

“Dawn tomorrow ought to show us Motutabu,” he announced.

Tuan Yuck looked up more quickly than his wont from his chessmen, and Sayers' nervous hands spoiled the stacks of his solitaire layout. Chalmers thought a look passed between them.

“Dawn, eh?” said Sayers. “That's only five hours away. Five hours from”

He checked himself.

“Freedom,” suggested Tuan Yuck. “We've made better time than we hoped. My compliments to you, Mr. Chalmers, on your navigation.”

Chalmers fancied a tinge of irony in the tone, but he accepted the congratulations.

“Let's make a night of it,” said Sayers. “Tuan, I'll match you drink for drink to see who's the better man of the two. Come on, Chalmers, join the tournament.”

“I have to relieve Tomi,” said Chalmers. “I'll be at the wheel till daylight. Better turn in, Sayers. I'll call you if we sight anything.”

“I'll take your wager if you'll match me pipe for pipe,” said Tuan Yuck, producing his silver-stemmed opium holder. “No? Then you to your vice, I to mine. You'll call me, Mr. Chalmers?”

Chalmers went on deck and took the wheel. The wind filled the sails, sheeted well out. Above the main gaff the Southern Cross hung suspended. The slow hiss of the water, as it seethed from stem to stern and broadened to the wake, the low croon of Tomi somewhere in the bows, produced a soothing hypnosis.

The hours seemed short until the sky shivered, turned from violet to gray, then flushed in radiant, tremulous pink to port. The western sky was pale green, and, above the sealine, like an etching, showed the fronds of a cluster of palms, the land rise of Motutabu.