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DELILAH

DELILAH is a selection of The Discoverers

Other selections are:

LOCOS: An Author at the Mercy of His Characters, by Felipe Alfau

VILLAGE CHRONICLE by James McConnaughey

TO MY FATHER by Charles Wertenbaker

PRELUDE TO "ICAROS" by John Williams Andrews

WHEN NIGHT DESCENDS by Edgar Calmer

THE LAST ROMANTIC by William Orton

BUCKSKIN BREECHES by Phil Stong

A MIGHTY FORTRESS by LeGrand Cannon, Jr.

I ASKED NO OTHER THING by Cora Jarrett

THE FIRST REBEL by Neil H. Swanson

THE ANOINTED by Clyde Brion Davis

RUSH TO THE SUN by William Brown Meloney

MONDAY GO TO MEETING by Kenneth Payson Kempton

THE GREAT HORSE by Helene Magaret

BOUNDARY AGAINST NIGHT by Edmund Gilligan

IN PRAISE OF LIFE by Walter Schoenstedt

SEEK-NO-FURTHER by Constance Robertson

CONCERNING THE YOUNG by Willard Maas

THE LAND IS LARGE by Emerson Waldman

THE TREE OF LIBERTY by Elizabeth Page

SONS WITHOUT ANGER by Stanley Young

THE RED KITE by Lloyd Frankenberg

NO BIRDS SING by Leslie Edgley

THE CABALLERO by Harold Courlander

DELILAH

By Marcus Goodrich

With Decorations by Eark Winslow

FARRAR & RINEHART

INCORPORATED

NEW YORK TORONTO

The poem appearing on the opposite page is "Epitaph on an Army of Mer- cenaries" from Last Poems by A. E. Housman, and is reprinted by permis- sion of Henry Holt and Company, Publishers.

COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY MARCUS GOODRICH

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

These, in the day when heaven was falling. The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoidders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

—A. E. HOUSMAN

This volume contains the first of two sepa- rate novels concerning its subject. Neverthe- less, the two books are assured an added general continuity by the author's having planted some seeds in the pages of the first novel that will be seen to burgeon in those of the second now in preparation.

Delilah is a work of fiction, in the writing of which no character was designed to bear resemblance to any actual person, living or dead.

CHAPTER I

ONE

She was very slim and light. She was always tense, often atremble, and never failed to give the impression of being a mass of almost terrible power wrapped in a thin and fragile blue-grey skin. The materials that went into the making of her complete being were more curious and varied than those that went to compose her creator, Man, — for Man, himself, formed part of her bowels, heart and nerve centres. She ate great quan- tities of hunked black food, and vented streams of grey debris. Through her coiled veins pumped vaporous, superheated blood at terrific pressure. She inhaled noisily and violently through four huge nostrils, sent her hot breath pouring out through four handsome mouths and sweated delicate, evanescent, white mist. Her function in existence was to carry blasting destruc- tion at high speed to floating islands of men ; and her intended destiny, at the opposite pole from that of the male bee, was to die in this act of impregnating her enemy with death. It was, perhaps, for this reason that she carried her distinctly feminine bow, which was high and very sharp, with graceful arrogance and some slight vindictiveness, after the manner of a perfectly controlled martyr selected for spectacular and aristocratic sac- rifice. Her name was Delilah.

The suave, glistening Sulu Sea parted before Delilah's sharp bow and slid under her flat stern with great but smooth rapidity. It was only in her wake, where was left a white commotion, that there was betrayed the adequate evidence of the effort of her progress. A few feet above the cause of this foam- ing propulsion — two whirling typhoons of metal — an old Irish monk sat on the edge of a camp cot and gazed intently forward

3

4 DELILAH

along the destroyer's narrow steel deck at what was taking place amidships. He seemed unmindful of the sweat that exuded from his tonsure and leaked down the white fringes of his hair and over his big hands, in which he was resting his head. He seemed unmindful of the very sun, itself, which so fiercely inflamed the universe with white glare that it was diffi- cult to look at the opal circle of the sea and impossible to look for long into the sky. Yet he was sitting in the full blaze of it, because even the quarter-deck awnings had been furled as possible hindrances to the attainment of maximum speed.

The ship, too, seen from one of the small islands she occa- sionally passed, must have appeared insensible to the limitless conflagration, a compact creature skimming easily along the water, naked to the sun and docile bearer of the few visible people ensconced along her thin length.

Deep inside of her, however, the Engineer Officer, who was also the Executive Officer, was thinking that she was a skidding shelf of hell. Stripped to the waist, he was standing Machinist Mate's watch in the Starboard Engine-room. He was used to this sort of thing only in theory and in the pleas- antly inauthentic reputation he enjoyed amongst the lounges and bungalows ashore. "Fitzpatrick," said the Service people who gave parties in Manila and Zamboanga, "is one Engineer Officer who really gets acquainted with his enemies. If he had to, he could stand a watch shoulder to shoulder with his Machinist's Mates . . . Most promising youngster the Academy

has turned out in a long time" But now, in the midst of

just such an emergency, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick (Junior Grade) was not shoulder to shoulder with anybody. He was alone with what he was wont to refer to importantly as "my starboard engine," a thing that suddenly had turned out to be chaos of scorching oil jets, hissing steam tentacles, pounding verticals of steel, and wet heat that brought him almost to the fainting point. The oil-splashed floor plates and gratings made even standing precarious, and a slight movement of the ship often sent him careening threateningly towards the maze of flashing, metallic pandemonium beneath the three cylinders. As he per- formed the dangerous ritual of feeling bearings for excess

DELILAH 5

heat, he said to himself: "This business is more dangerous than sticking banderillas in a Muros bull . . . poor old Hemple, who does this all the time ... he ought to be rated Chief . . ." Lieutenant Fitzpatrick groped gingerly with his right hand for a bearing the size of his neck. It was necessary first to syn- chronize his hand with the up and down movement of the bearing, which was moving so fast that he barely could distin- guish its location. Finally he caught up with it and reassured himself that it was not running too hot. ". . . This certainly is risky business . . . next month I'll manage to give Hemple his Chief's rating . . . the 'Old Man' will kick . . . there are already more Chiefs than the complement calls for ... do something for that new man, the Oiler, too . . . soon as I can." He looked up longingly at the brilliant blue oblong of the open hatchway. Privately, he did not think that they would get there in time.

The Machinist's Mate and the Oiler for whom Lieutenant Fitzpatrick was substituting were in the fire-rooms exigently shovelling coal into the flaming areas beneath Delilah's sensitive boilers: and so was everyone else except Ensign Snell, who, like Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, was standing the watch of two men in the other engine-room ; Ensign Woodbridge, who was acting as helmsman; the Captain, who had succeeded himself on the bridge as Navigator and Watch Officer ever since eight o'clock in the morning ; and the elderly monk, who was sitting medita- tively on the camp cot — where the Executive Officer had urged him to nap — turning over in his mind how best he could help speed on this craft that was rushing him along to what might prove his destruction.

On the galleons of old, the highest part of the hull was astern in the form of a gallant, elevated deck called the poop. Delilah had one of these rearing decks, but it formed part of her high, sharp bow. This forecastle deck extended sternward for about one-fifth of the length of the ship, then fell sharply away like a steel cliff down to the destroyer's main deck, which was a

6 DELILAH

convex strip of thin steel twenty-one feet wide stretching back for two hundred and fifty feet to the low, flat, rounded stern. Almost on the edge of the cliff formed by the break of the forecastle deck, was a thick steel conning-tower. It contained on its inside an auxiliary steering wheel. On its roof were mounted the regular steering wheel and a three-inch gun ; and this conning-tower roof was Delilah's only equivalent of a navigating bridge. Also, the squat tower shouldered, in appear- ance, a bold but graceful mast much after the manner that a soldier shoulders a rifle with fixed bayonet. The Captain invariably referred to this mast, as well as to the one which was similarly shouldered by the After Conning-tower, as a "signal stick." Squeezed into the space between the foremast and the conning-tower was the "Radio Shack" into which fitted comfortably one man and his apparatus.

Down the narrow convexity of the main deck — it really was like the back of a thin whale — stretched in single file the external structures indispensable to Delilah's purposes and func- tions. First came the short, formidable, stream-lined Smoke- stack Number One, leaning backward toward the stern as if unable to meet upright the strain of Delilah's fierce, forward leaps. Back of the stack, side by side, came the two capacious nostrils of the big blowers that sucked a heavy pressure of air down into the Forward Fire-room. Between these was the air-tight little hatch that provided the only access to this fire- room. Next came Smokestack Number Two, precisely similar to the first and succeeding stacks, and after that the rectangular hatch of the Starboard Engine-room, echeloned to port of which was the hatch of the Port Engine-room. It was not mere coincidence that Lieutenant Fitzpatrick was sending his longing glances staggering up towards the fresh, blue mirage framed in the Starboard Engine-room Hatchway, while Ensign Snell was glancing up as desirously at that framed in the Port ; for as Fitzpatrick was senior to, and took precedence over Snell, so the starboard engine took precedence over, and set the pace for the port engine.

Mounted between, and swinging over the two engine-room hatches, Torpedo-tube Number One — which was about as long

DELILAH 7

as the ship was wide — marked the middle of the destroyer, and, like a lengthy, grey womb, ever harboured one of the polished steel seeds consecrated to her deadly fertility.

Following the torpedo-tube and the engine-room hatches, after a longer interval than any of those between the other stacks, was Smokestack Number Three, followed by the After Fire-room blowers and fire-room hatch. Behind these came Smokestack Number Four, then the square, iron box of the galley or kitchen. Abaft of this galley was a sizeable space centred by a Hotchkiss Rapid-fire Six-pounder, which overshadowed the hatch of the Chief Petty Officers' sleeping compartment. Forming the after limit of the space was the After Conning- tower ; and this marked the border line where manual labour and implicit obedience ended and intellectual effort and supreme authority began : For the After Conning- tower, besides mounting on its top another three-inch gun, enclosed within its exclusive, steel walls the sacred hatchway down to the officers' Wardroom, and, with its whole, conical bulk, shielded from the forward, vulgar seven-eighths of the ship the gentle after eighth. This miniature quarter-deck be- tween the After Conning-tower and the stern was shaded, ordinarily, by a smart, well-cut awning ; and its steel deck area was handsomely covered with red shellac. In its centre was a spruce, little skylight, fitted with lace curtains that delicately filtered down into the Wardroom the melange of light that diffused through the white awning and reflected up from the red deck. It was the only part of the destroyer's exterior, with the exception of the bridge, that could be kept anywhere near clean; and it was there that, on ancient fighting ships, stood the altar of the gods.

Four more six-pounders, like grey claws, projected from either edge of the ship's long body: a pair on the main deck at the break of the forecastle, which partially protected them in battle, and the other pair on the main deck just forward of Stack Number Three.

And all this, Delilah's top side, was fenced in from bow to stern by a railing formed of four bronze cables arranged one above the other at twelve-inch intervals. The narrow,

8 DELILAH

bulging deck of the craft provided such insecure footing that without the railing there was proven danger of people tumbling over the side. Even with the railing, men sometimes went over, — through the interstices.

The monk on the starboard side of the quarter-deck had been for thirty-five years in the multitudinous islands that stretch from the Malay Peninsula to the Kamchatka Peninsula, and he had been used, exploited or persecuted in so many of the crises that had splattered these brilliant archipelagoes with blood that his body and soul seemed to have assimilated certain aspects of them. People who encountered him even superficially were prone to imagine that "if he had lived in the Middle Ages he would have been a saint." Yet, as Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had observed to the Captain that morning after the monk had boarded Delilah alongside the Zamboanga dock, "The old boy seems to have too much of a sense of humour to make a good saint.',

"I don't know," the Captain had answered, "he evidently hasn't enough of it to make him unimportant."

The monk's arrival had been preceded by urgent, emergency orders to get Delilah under way immediately he boarded her and proceed at the utmost speed possible to Isla-Sulu, one of a cluster of coral islands that lay at the southern limit of the Sulu Sea. On this small island the Moros had risen. Some of the dozen or so white and Chinese traders on it were dead or wounded. Survivors were besieged. The order surprisingly fur- ther instructed the Captain to land the old holy man on the island, and under no circumstances to send ashore a Landing Party unless the monk called upon him to do so or failed to communicate with Delilah within an hour after landing. The Captain had been ruffled by this order.

"Well, if they want to kill off a priest or two, I suppose it's none of my business."

Even Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, who had an emotional leaning towards confidence in the monk, had not been able to help

DELILAH 9

feeling uncertain about one or two aspects of the affair. As he had hurried about preparing to get Delilah under way, he had told himself that "it was a very curious idea . . . paradoxical . . . this trying to pacify a bunch of Mohammedan fanatics by dumping a Catholic monk on them ... as if he were a damn barrel of oil on a rough sea . . . And what the devil would happen to the people who were besieged during the hour the Landing Party held back ... if the Father failed to straighten things out?"

Shortly after Delilah had steamed westward through the Straits of Basilan, it had become clear to Lieutenant Fitzpatrick that his short-handed fire-room gangs could neither meet the demands made upon them nor even survive in the fierce heat developed in the ship by the sun and the four boilers. The Cap- tain, still worrying in a minor key over having to do with the monk, had dismissed what Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had consid- ered a formidable difficulty with swift efficiency, not appearing to dispel wholly from his mind its preoccupation.

"Put all hands below, Mr. Fitzpatrick, in short shifts. You and Mr. Snell stand the engine-room watches; that is, if you think Snell can handle it. Mr. Woodbridge and I will take the bridge." His pleasant, ugly face had set amiably as it often did when he was dealing with younger men whom he liked. "We have to get there, you know."

The crew's astonishment at the radical rearrangement of its duties, as well as its uneasiness at having the monk on board, had given way as soon as it was miserably immersed in the black and fiery struggle to drive Delilah along at a steady twenty knots, a cruising speed that no longer was the easy matter it had been for her some sixteen years before when she and the century were born : But the Captain had peered back over the bridge railing once or twice, and had been relieved to find that apparently the monk was sleeping soundly back there, his lanky frame stretched out passively on the cot Lieutenant Fitz- patrick had had rigged for him.

About three o'clock in the afternoon the monk had sat up in a manner that seemed to indicate that he had not been asleep at all. Now, two hours later, some complication in what he was

10 DELILAH

gazing at forward made him get to his feet. As he balanced him- self against the starboard railing, with his worn, black galoshes showing up drably against the shining red deck, and with the edges of his dark robe flapping slightly about the hairy angu- larity of his spread, bare legs, he appeared a rather terrible and thrilling figure; and his blue eyes, intense with a sort of aggres- sive sweetness, contained as much violence as the scene upon which they were fixed.

A thin man, named Poe, under normal routine the Chief Electrician, was being hauled up through the After Fire- room Hatchway, black with coal dust and stricken with heat. He was sobbing raspingly in rhythm with the pulsing engines.

It is probable that the early torpedo-boat destroyer, which is practically all raw engine and boilers, was not designed with a view to Sulu Sea operations in the hot season. Even in cold weather, with fire under all four of Delilah's boilers and the engines running under maximum steam pressure, it was neces- sary to wear thick wooden sandals in order to tread the burning expanses of deck over the fire- and engine-rooms. This also was more economical, because it took longer to char away the wooden sandals than it did leather shoes, and the sandals could be sawed out of any thick board as fast as they were needed. Now, even though shod with the thick wood, the men waiting to relieve those below in the fire-rooms climbed off the scorching deck onto every shelf and corner that would hold them. A num- ber even perched on the bronze cables of the railing, a thing normally not permitted because it stretched the cables.

An Ordinary Seaman, a young Texan named Warrington, with nothing on his body but a thin, sleeveless undershirt, dungaree trousers and a pair of wooden sandals, was crouching on the torpedo-tube base, two feet above the deck, waiting for his turn below. He, too, was staring at Poe's agonized face. Three men dragged the Chief Electrician off the After Fire-room Hatch rim, where he had collapsed, and hung him on the rail- ing. Another, who was playing a vigorous stream of salt water

DELILAH 11

on the deck in an attempt to keep the heat down, turned the nozzle on the fainting electrician to revive him. He screamed as the column of cold sea water broke against him. From Poe, the Texan's glance slid down the iron perspective of the deck and encountered the formidable figure of the monk. The asso- ciation called up in his memory a story of Inquisitional torment . . . the men hung on the bronze wires like black, rotting victims of some ancient torture rack . . . soon he'd have to tackle it again . . . the hour wasn't nearly up, but the other gang seemed to be passing out for good . . . fifteen minutes up . . . fifteen minutes down . . . for an hour . . . then try to rest . . . for an hour . . . like this ... on an incandescent deck . . . fifteen minutes up . . . fifteen minutes down . . .

As a matter of fact, in this heat very few were able to stick out the full fifteen minutes below, and only the most rugged of the "black gang," the regular coal heavers, were expected to. When a man was on the verge of collapse, he crawled up the ladder and those above hauled him through the hatch onto the deck. Then the man whose turn it was next climbed down in his place. There was no question of anyone being a quitter : the crew knew instinctively and at once when a man was all in, and every one realized that they knew, so there was no shame about giving up and no thought of giving up while there was still strength enough to shovel. Some stuck it out eight minutes, some nine, some ten, some twelve and some thirteen minutes; even Rene, the bulky Chief Machinist's Mate in charge of the resting gang to which Warrington belonged, had stayed the full fifteen minutes only twice.

"Stand by, you guys !" yelled Rene.

His gang had been seriously reduced by the necessary trans- fer of two members to the other gang as replacements for four men who had suffered permanent collapse ; and in the resulting rearrangement of pairs to work below, which now took place, Warrington, the Ordinary Seaman, found himself linked with the one thing in his hated surroundings that he hated most, a thing that infected his consciousness with an unrelaxing dread of terrific power coupled with devastating irresponsibility. This thing was O'Connel. Warrington and O'Connel, the Water-

12 DELILAH

Tender, were the antitheses of each other in everything; even in the quality of their indubitable honesties : the boy's honesty was like that of an old steel blade, and the man's like that of the sea. One was seventeen, the other thirty- four. The Texan, who was born in a high, blue room pervaded by the scent of magnolia blossoms, fortified himself with poetry and hunted out his strength from the tunnels of his soul; while the Irishman, who was born in a canal barge, fortified himself with whiskey and sucked up his strength from the magnificent stretches of his great body. The one steered his aggressiveness against the uni- verse and its enemy; the other shattered the faces of every one in the Squadron who was as big as he was. For the youth, this environment was a valley of repellent futility down which he had fled blindly from an intolerable situation in his home ; for the man, it was a high place vivid with significant life. The Texan was ever on the verge of annihilating the Irishman on the level of significance; and it always seemed as if O'Connel were about to rend Warrington bone from bone. Both looked life squarely in the face, but they saw there different things.

6

O'Connel was heavyweight champion of the Squadron, and he was too tough to serve on anything but the black boats. He had been in the Navy twelve years, and his service was a record of turbulence. For much of it, he had been deprived of advance- ment and pay and slammed in the brig; but for some of it he had gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor and a reputation for being a "hard tgg,J in the face of things that were likely to smash him as well as in situations where he was the one able to do the smashing. It was for this reason that people looked upon him as a wild man rather than as a bully. It is probable that the function of introspection was but primitively a part of his mental operations, and his test for human authen- ticity seemed to be a formula involving physical force, elemental simplicity and "guts."

In 1907, when he first went to destroyers, the thing had occurred that gained him the Congressional Medal. A cylinder

DELILAH 13

head blew off at sea while O'Connel and three others were in an engine-room making emergency repairs on the engine. The splattering steel and steam killed one man outright and wounded the other two. The right side of O'Connel's head was crushed in. Nevertheless, he seized the Engineer Officer, who was one of those knocked out, and dragged him up out of the lethal cubicle onto the deck. Then realizing that the scalding steam was intimidating the Rescue Party that had gathered to extricate the men remaining below, he flung himself angrily into the midst of the fat, white death billowing out of the hatchway, and tumbled back down into the engine-room. Those on deck could hear his wild and private curses spouting up with the steam. A moment later, in rapid succession, the limp bodies of the other two men shot up through the steaming hatchway as if they had been hunks of lava flung skyward by the violence of an erupting crater

When O'Connel had made his raging leap down the hatch- way, his intention had been to make his way to the steam manifold and shut of! all the steam making its way from the boilers to the engine. But in landing on the steel floor plates he had broken his left leg. It would have taken him so long a time, he had felt, to crawl first to the manifold, hoist himself up and turn off the steam, cracked up as he was, that the lungs of the men he was trying to save would surely have been burnt out by the steam. So he had heaved the men up first ; and then afterwards, though the boiled flesh had been peeling from his hairy legs and arms, and his cracked head had assumed some- thing like one of those grotesque shapes usually seen but in the distorting mirrors of a penny arcade, he had rolled and clawed his way to the manifold and shut off the steam. When the rescuers reached him, his slowly relaxing, blood-spattered body was doubled over his broken leg ; but his big hands were fiercely gripping a polished engine stanchion after the manner of a wrestler holding to the limb of an opponent, and he was enun- ciating, more as if in realization than as if in supplication, "Peace, you son of a bitch, peace . . . peace . . . peace . . ."

With his bronze medal on his breast and a silver plate in his skull, he had lain for a long time in hospital bunks and champed

14 DELILAH

restlessly in places good for his lungs. But he finally went back to destroyers seemingly cured of everything but a curious, ele- mental rage at something too far beyond the horizon of his consciousness to assume definite objectivity. When he raised hell, the men said : "You see, he's got a silver plate in his head."

The Irishman hit the floor plates first and stood with his fists on his hips watching the Texan descend the ladder. Through his back the boy felt the wild, blue gaze plunging hostilely at him, and his heavy prescience that this was to be a significant encounter seemed to suffer instant confirmation. He helped the two worn-out men they were relieving up the ladder, slowly lit the taper of his bunker lamp, glanced a little helplessly from the great, iron visage of the boiler that formed the forward wall of the cave in which he found himself to that which formed the after wall, and then, almost shutting his eyes, crawled through the low door into the port coal bunker.

For some seconds O'Connel stared at the bunker hole, where the dim gleams from the Texan's paraffin torch flickered. Finally he stamped over and looked through into the bunker, which, like that on the starboard side of the ship, was a crevice only a little more than two feet wide, but extending the height and depth of the ship. It served the double purpose of carrying fuel and providing a protective belt of coal for the engines and boilers, — the only armour of any sort that stood between these and an enemy's shells. In the depths of this narrow, towering frame, O'Connel saw the Texan leaning for a preparatory instant on the handle of his shovel as if it were a crutch. His eyes, across which there was a sweeping smear of coal dust, were gazing at the deep darkness just above the level of his head, and the squirming light glowed uncertainly amongst the curls of his dull blond hair.

The Irishman lunged back to one of the firebox doors under the after boiler, flung it open and shot in a shovelful of coal from the heap on the floor plates. As he was withdrawing the shovel from before the flaming door, some arresting pattern

DELILAH 15

formed on the stream of consciousness rushing through his great, battered head. He grinned, and the red gush of brilliance from the firebox flashed and shone on the long row of his upper teeth, which were all gold. The sweat pouring down his face was curiously diverted into two deep channels that formed in the flesh on either side of his thick, flat nose as he grinned, and his hair, stiff with coal, seemed to bristle uncannily. His grin burst into a delighted, braying laugh. He banged the shovel on the floor plates with fierce zest as a man might bang out his delight with a spoon on some cabaret table.

The mad banging and laughing penetrated into the bunker and startled the boy. Hanging the bunker lamp to a hook on the bulkhead, he crawled back to the low hole that served for door and peered out into the fire-room. For about as long as O'Connel had stared in at him, he was held by the lurid apparition before the flaming furnace ; then he went back in where the coal began and commenced getting it down. After a few shovelfuls, he paused to readjust his grip . . . He was holding the shovel too tight . . . but then if he held it looser the sweat made it slip . . . the heat seemed to be getting him already . . . he'd have to get the coal out fast . . . felt like the air pressure was bursting in his ears . . . blowers turning up too much . . . O'Connel used a lot of coal . . . too much coal they said . . . but the officers weren't watching the smoke on this run . . . deadly hot . . . He moved down to the door and shovelled through it onto the fire-room floor plates the coal he had knocked down. The infranatural laughter bit at him again. His breath stopped for an instant.

8

The interior of the coal bunker was so narrow that he could maintain himself at any depth in it by the centrifugal pressure of his legs : But now he had shovelled his way to the bottom again, and somewhat farther away from the entrance into the fire-room. He'd fed O'Connel a lot of coal . . . this was about the end ... as far as he was concerned . . . coal was as hard as rock . . . wasn't the coal, after all, but the steel side of the

16 DELILAH

ship . . . this would never do . . . couldn't make the shovel go where he wanted it to. In a spurt of irritation he drove the shovel into the lumpy implacability before him. The force of the movement threw him forward into the coal, a section of which, jarred loose, caved in upon him. For a time he lay there in the hot, primordial smother, relaxed, at rest, losing consciousness, much as a snow-beaten man surrenders to the lethal peace of a deep drift. The uninterrupted noises that in the first moments of his recumbency had seemed to have a soothing, lullaby effect upon him, slowly began to wear through their disguises : the malevolent, high-pitched purr of the sea as it slid viciously along the thin skin of the ship, and the pounding struggle of the propellers as they tore and twisted at its waters . . . He began to think or dream or remember : "The sea . . . the sea . . . the unutterably horrible sea ... an infinite, biological solution in which coiled and gasped monsters and living slime beside which the images of man's diseased obsessions and insane fears become delicate symmetries ... a festering, amorphous mass pouring over the areas of the earth, licking and pounding in insentient fury at the few rocks up which man has fled ... a distraught gesture of Creation" . . . Slowly he pulled himself up out of the coal and tried to stand erect. But he could not maintain himself in that position. On all fours he crawled over the hot bunker plates and coal towards the ruddy flicker of the fire-room entrance. His under lip curled out instinctively to catch the dark sweat that poured from about his head. He reached the door. Like a dying animal, covered with black mud, he glared through the hole at O'Connel.

With the heat and the air pressure assaulting the borders of his last province of strength, the Irishman, sweat-drenched and inflamed, was probing the conflagration before him with an enormous, iron slice bar. In proportion to the extent that his body succumbed to tiredness and weakness, he furiously re- venged himself upon it by demanding of it heavier and grosser performances. He was left-handed and his right arm had been a little wasted by a series of injuries; but when he found that exhaustion was creeping into his good left arm, he flung it from him as if it had sentient personality; and, in no sense to

DELILAH 17

get relief, but rather to defy his own strength and to humiliate his left arm, he swung angrily about to grip and handle the slice bar with his right hand alone. It was then that he saw Warrington staring at him from the hole.

This confrontation unloosed a considerable emotional and mental convulsion in each of them. The effort to reinstate the image and idea of the boy in his consciousness, which had been intensely monopolized by a quite different problem, and the sudden realization that "the little, white-necked louse was still at it" unpoised the Irishman. He emitted a raucous bleat, such as might come from a gargantuan calf.

"A-a-a-A-a-a ! What the hell! Quittin'?" He sneered with both corners of his big mouth.

The instant the boy saw the great creature fighting with the fire, he had succumbed to the torturing obligation of main- taining the authenticity of his difference from him. He couldn't quit. The flaming power of his abhorrence of the Irishman and of the idea of admitting any sort of inferiority to him, openly or secretly, concentrated what little physical energy was left in him and strengthened the waning current of his blood. It began to pound unbearably within the sick regions about the back of his head. If his miserable body would only keep up with him . . . see him through . . . Were O'Connel a person like himself there would be no question of keeping on ... he could say, "I am so tired, help me up the ladder" . . . even sink into the arms of an enemy . . . like himself . . . but this . . . this thing! When the Irishman shouted his question at him, the boy, still on all fours, turned about and faced back into the bunker ; then he paused there as if endeavouring to mar- shal before him in the black path, in one convenient obstacle, all the ramifications of the dread necessity for going back.

This manoeuvre confounded O'Connel; so he went over to the hole and gripping Warrington by one of his slim arms dragged him out onto the floor plates of the fire-room. The boy jerked himself free and crawled back into the bunker. Until the thought of his fires called him back to the boilers, O'Connel stood in bewilderment staring at the hole and listening to the spasmodic coughing that began to come through it.

18 DELILAH

In his first excitement over being down with O'Connel and his fear of not getting out enough coal to meet shovel for shovel the Irishman's effort, Warrington had gotten down, and heaved out into the fire-room considerably more coal than the fires needed; so that the frantic, almost futile efforts that his exhausted body now engaged in, with his eye lids tightly pressed together as if to shut out the feverish dimness that enveloped him, held things back not at all for the moment. To load his shovel from the pile that he knocked down onto the floor of the bunker, hoist it to the level of his knees and then project its load through the hole to O'Connel was demand- ing more intense mental concentration, attention to bodily balance and physical sacrifice than he ever had been called upon to suffer before. To get a load in the shovel, he felt with its blade for a clear space on the steel near the coal as a blind man searches the way before him with a stick. When he had found such a space, he laid the back of the shovel upon it and then lunged forward on the handle. Such coal as the edge of the shovel encountered slid into the shovel. At this point the terrible phase of his repetitious struggle was upon him. He balanced himself unnaturally on his heels, which he kept wide apart and opposite each other, and rested his back against the bulkhead. Then jamming the end of the shovel handle into his stomach just above the loins, he slid his hands half-way down the handle and slowly began to pull. The force of the lift was taken by his stomach, as a fulcrum, and each shovelful seemed on the verge of sending his straining intestines bursting through the pit of his abdomen. When the shovel hung poised at about the level of his knees, he opened his eyes with an effort, located the red bunker hole, closed his eyes again, and fell toward it. The shovel of coal proceeded through the hole until his body brought up sharply against the steel wall above it. This jerked the coal forward from the shovel. Often he missed the hole, and the coal and shovel clattered tauntingly against the bulkhead.

The Irishman could not get out of his head the idea of this "punk" actually trying to battle it out with him. Every time a shot of coal spat into the fire-room, he turned his head towards the hole. Eventually, the strange manner in which the coal

DELILAH 19

jumped off when the shovel stuck through into the fire-room caught his attention. After watching for the rather long time required by three of these reappearances of the shovel, O'Connel could not resist the temptation to look into the hole. He leapt over, as the shovel was being withdrawn, and peered in. Slowly, as he watched the agony-drenched ritual develop in the reddish haze of the bunker, a crude, eerie revulsion proceeded within him. Some strong attitude, which particular one he had not the faculty to determine on the instant, began to disintegrate. Some handhold to his immediate situation seemed to be giving way. He slumped back uneasily into the centre of the fire-room, where he slung his head from side to side lionesquely, as if seeking to sight something which he could rush upon and smash to reaffirm that all was right with his world. His eyes found the air-pressure gauge. It indicated an excessive pressure of air in the fire-room. His rage, blasting him along the channel pro- vided by this, swept him up the ladder. With his sweating, tightly clenched fist, he crashed open the little, air-tight hatch- cover and, like a gleaming wet demon rending up through the earth, projected his coal-blackened upper bulk into the midst of the group clustered on the deck.

"You crummy bastards !" he howled at the ship in general, "watch them blowers!"

The senior Chief Machinist's Mate, Stengle, a small, coffee- coloured man, was jerking about between the two huge nostrils that sucked air down into the fire-room, trying to regulate their speed. The mechanism that controlled them from below had broken down early on the run.

"Keep your shirt on! Keep your shirt on!" he said, shaking a big Stillson wrench at the Irishman as if it had been a forefinger. "I'll have to let 'em run high, or shut 'em down . . . Can't do that."

9

When O'Connel had dropped back down the hatch, leaving the abrupt banging of its cover as the period to his final, vituperative roar, the men awoke to the fact that the pair below

20 DELILAH

already had survived for thirteen minutes. This was the record so far, for although several individuals had lasted the full quarter of an hour, one or the other of every pair that had gone down up to now had been relieved before the thirteen- minute mark. O'Connel always lasted it out; but no one ex- pected or demanded of Warrington to stay down more than five minutes. As the fourteen-minute mark was approached, the situation took on the aspect of a prize fight in which some "dark horse" was putting up a totally unexpected and wonder arousing show. The men, including the resting gang from the Forward Fire-room, crowded a trifle excitedly around the hatch expecting every second to see it exude the sweat-soaked body of the boy; and the man whose duty it was to relieve him hovered preparatorily about as if made restless by a feeling that he should have been down long ago, but that it was no fault of his that he was not. A red-headed Oiler, named Feenan, who was in the habit of making clumsily sarcastic remarks about the boy's careful and rather over-elegant manner of speaking, stepped to the railing, his unpleasantly freckled face set with primitive primness, spat accurately into the sea, and said:

"He'll never stay down the fifteen minutes."

As if by sudden, unanimous consent, the sporting attitude of the crew gave way to a general feeling of uneasiness.

"Maybe the kid's passed out in the bunker and that wild guy has forgotten all about him."

"What time is it now?" Stengle was asked for the third time.

"Maybe the big harp got sore and smacked him."

Everybody laughed restlessly.

Stengle moved over to the hatch, pulled it open and stuck his dirty, little, grey head down into it. O'Connel feeling the pressure of the air jump suddenly from off his chest and ear drums, and perceiving the white fire he was feeding begin to turn red, raised his face questioningly to the hatch. It seemed to Stengle that the Irishman was more all in than he ever had seen him before.

"Time up?" shouted O'Connel.

DELILAH 21

"Minute to go," Stengle screamed back. His voice barely pierced the barricade of mechanical uproar between them. "How's the kid making out?"

At this question, the alien, about-facing disturbance within O'Connel burst into clear recognition. He flung his two great fists into the air as if they were gonfalons he was bearing into battle, and shouted triumphantly, half -incidentally up to Stengle,

"Going strong!"

Stengle popped his head back out of the hatch and permitted the cover to spring shut.

"Going strong," he repeated to the men around him.

A wave of surprised admiration swept up the deck, and even swirled for a moment about the bridge when "Unc" Blood, the Chief Quartermaster, was summoned there to relieve En- sign Woodbridge at the wheel for a moment.

Blood stationed himself upright behind the wheel, as motion- less and set as a carbonized, baroque statue, and fixed his lecherous, little eyes steadily on the Captain in a suggestive fashion, a fashion that often caused the Captain to preface his Wardroom stories about the Chief Quartermaster by saying, "Blood came up bursting with news . . ."

These two had "been together" going on six years, and the Captain never failed to assume what he felt was a dis- couraging attitude towards the man's propensity to gossip. He assumed this attitude now. For several minutes he would not look in Blood's direction : But when he finally — as he always did — shot a quick glance at the aging mariner to see if he still was "bursting," Blood's sanguinary glance nailed him. Before the Captain could escape, the point of Blood's blackened beard, which curved to one side in a satyrlike manner, dropped an inch and a half, the bright red cavity of his mouth twitched about his decayed teeth, and the two spikes of his mustachios, which at one moment resembled those of a Western sheriff and at another those of a Chinese gentleman, see-sawed slightly from one side to the other. When the Captain could bear this grin no longer, he said shortly:

"What's the matter?"

Then he stepped quickly over to the binnacle and glanced

22 DELILAH

at the compass in the hope of catching Blood off the course; but, as always in these encounters, the Chief was dead on. In a twanging voice, as if he were saying something slightly vindictive, but really believing himself bathed in a fine, jesting manner, Blood said:

"You know, Capn', that new lemon from the Galveston they dumped on us last month at Cavite ? . . . He's been down fourteen minutes and is still going strong! . . . Running neck and neck with 0'Connel.',

"You mean that new youngster?" said the Captain a trifle incredulously; then turning in good-natured and pleased sur- prise to Ensign Woodbridge (who, arriving back on the bridge in time to overhear Blood's news, already had exclaimed, "Well, I'll be damned") he said: "Woodbridge, that little Ordinary Seaman they gave us is down with O'Connel and sticking it out,"

"Well, I'll be damned," said Ensign Woodbridge again, not so much with the feeling of surprise that had first engendered the remark, but with a sense of getting his exclamation in its proper rank and order.

10

O'Connel no longer was exiled in the depths of fire, coal and steel with a despicable alien. As his stark delight ascended flight after flight of sweet and fierce recognition, he pounded his shovel and shouted, "Guts! Guts! Guts!" He thought: "He's probably Irish after all ! . . . Shovel for shovel with me, O'Connel !" He rushed over to the bunker hole to roar in some greeting as if to a well esteemed newcomer.

But the glimpse he got of the Texan down this new per- spective brought him up sharply. A veritable incarnation of distress, the boy was struggling with the shovel as if it were some awkward, slippery burden. O'Connel gave a start that seemed to indicate that he was about to leap into the bunker to rescue his wounded comrade.

As he hesitated, Warrington jammed the handle of the shovel into his stomach for another try, and O'Connel realized the

DELILAH 23

other's agony so intimately that his being began to function somewhat as if it were he, himself, fighting there in pain. He dove in to put an end to it.

The boy, sensing the great creature crowding the obscurity before him, glared toward it desperately and emitted a hawk- ing, defiant sound, a sound electric with the sharp anomalous authority that often concentrates in even the meanest man in the throes of physical anguish. It arrested O'Connel and slowly pushed him back into the fire-room again, where he found him- self, lost in a wilderness of uncertainty and pity, clumping along a network of unfamiliar mental and emotional trails. "I'm gonna stop this," he told himself truculently, "time must be up . . . them tight bums on the top side holding out till the last second . . . the bastards !" It entered his mind that the thing to do was to "tell the kid the time was up."

"Time up I" he shouted with the relief of having hit upon an actable line of conduct.

The next instant he was at the bunker hole yelling again:

"Time up ! Time up ! Time up !"

When the boy finally heard him, he sat slowly down cross- legged about his shovel, drifting into the incomparable luxury of oblivion, slowly pulsing away from an acute crisis of high- pitched, kinetic agony.

For a second O'Connel's eyes lingered on the wet haft of the shovel, along which the light from the bunker lamp flick- ered. It projected upright from the dark mound of the small body like a limb stuck into the cairn marking some isolated and valorous death.

Seeing that his end was gained there, O'Connel swung back into the fire-room, kicked open the door of the coal bunker opposite to that in which Warrington was, and with furious surreptitiousness heaved out nine or ten shovelfuls of coal from that as yet untouched supply. After soundly reclosing this bunker hole door, he fed a shovelful to each of the fires, and then, steadying himself angrily on his slightly swaying legs, he rapidly transferred the remainder of the coal he had gotten out to the diminished pile in front of the Texan's bunker hole. It was a custom that the relieving watch should find a small

24 DELILAH

supply of coal out to start with. As he heaved the last shovel- ful, he felt the air pressure rise from off of him. He dropped the shovel guiltily. A relieved, victorious feeling surged through him.

"What th' hell !" he yelled up at the open hatch.

The murky bodies of the relief followed one another quickly down the ladder.

The Irishman's figure, assuming a slight exaggeration of its usual arrogant, hard-boiled stance, shuffled over to the bunker hole. He stuck in his head and shouted,

"Hey! Lay off! Time's up!" Then, as he crawled through the hole, he added in loud, incompetent dissimulation, "Hold up, I'll give y' a hand."

Morrow, the relief coal heaver, knelt by the hole and pulled the boy's body through as O'Connel shoved its shoulders within his reach. Morrow and his watch-mate, Whorly, started to carry him towards the ladder ; but O'Connel, arising from the bunker hole, snatched the small body from them and climbed up the ladder unassisted, maintaining the boy on his left shoul- der and chest with the pressure of his right arm. As the two heads arose from the hatchway, the crowd of men surrounding it, comprising nearly the entire ship's company, let out a tri- umphal yell. The big bruiser, shaking off all the black hands that shot out to relieve him of his burden, climbed to the deck and stood for a moment glaring in a squinting manner at the slick sea, which the sun, burning the first suggestion of colour for its setting, had raddled a greyish pink.

As he stood there swaying above the crowd of heads with the boy in his arms, he seemed to the monk on the quarter- deck like one of the bulky Pietas, absurd of colour and strangely awkward of workmanship, that the Italian mountaineers bear down the trails to their devotions on feast days.

11

Throughout the day the monk had confined himself rigidly to the exact area assigned to him by Lieutenant Fitzpatrick when that officer had led him to the camp cot and said with

DELILAH 25

authoritative cordiality: "Here, Father, you stay right here." For the past twenty minutes, as the afternoon ended, he had stood in precisely the same spot by the railing contemplating the nearer of those two implacable square holes down which the young men slid with jaunty energy, and from which they were dragged a few minutes later like sooty cadavers. The glimpse he had gotten of Poe's tortured face had dismayed him in an unprecedented manner. The whole spirit and system of vio- lence that was doing for these men appeared to him more detached and mystical than any he had ever encountered before. The smooth slide and play of the ambient discipline, the rush of the steel boat over the water, the throb and beat of the machinery, the pert sway from side to side of Delilah's rounded, little stern — like the hip movement of a young Moro girl when she walks with a basket of mangoes balanced on her head — and the crouching shadow of nausea that lurked in the pit of his stomach as if about to spring upon him in full force, combined to intimidate him. His usual certitude and clear vision in the face of violence and misery became dimmed. He did not know quite what to do. His invincible surmise that his purpose in life was to place himself without reserve between all the Tor- tured and their Torturers remained, all the while, clear-cut and coruscant; but here there seemed to be no torturers to set himself up against, no tangible, apprehensible sword to which to bare his breast : only the tortured and their agony were there before him. Now, here was another one ! The old man clenched his fists feverishly as the crew propped Warrington against the railing and turned the hose on him.

"Give him another shot," cried one of the men supporting the boy's shoulders.

The monk jammed his two clenched fists up under his chin against his neck and waited for the impact of the water. When it. crashed against the sick, slender body, the monk nearly went down under the spiritually multiplied smash and bite of it. The second dose of salt water had washed away some of the coal dust and much of the thin undershirt that formed Warrington's only upper covering. For a fraction of time, after the stream of water had shifted from it, the boy's thin chest shone smooth

26 DELILAH

and grey in the soft glare of the sun like a wet river stone; then on it, here and there, the blood broke out in bright chan- nels from the wounds he had received in flinging himself against the iron wall to empty his shovel into the fire-room. The monk glared until the vermilion threads had dripped as far as the boy's heaving stomach, at which instant, as if it were a signal, he pulled up the dark flaps and edges of his gown and girded them about his hips, securing them with the sash that encircled his waist as he tramped forward towards the group amidships. The profound and magnificent indignation, the ever tense mainspring of his being, finally had projected him clear and undubious up through all the intangibilities and uncertainties that had been cluttering his ordinarily clear path- way: Yet he looked quite ridiculous as his bare, bony legs swung along beneath his upper bulk now enlarged with the packed tucks and folds of his voluminous skirts. He looked somewhat like a combative rooster prancing forward to en- counter an enemy.

The exhausted and startled group of men fell back before him. Cavendish, the blond Second-Class Quartermaster, began to laugh with nervous embarrassment.

"I see that you are getting short of men," the monk said firmly, addressing a man whom he had picked out at random from the crowd, "give me a shovel."

No one made a sound. The only movement was a unani- mous, definite turning of eyes upon Olgan, the Cook, the luck- less man at whom the monk was sending his demand and his gaze. Olgan stood there miserable and pusillanimous, his patchy haired, lobeless-eared head hanging, and his milky eyes shift- ing unseeingly from one of the ecclesiastic's rectangular knees to the other. With silent, instantaneous assent the small com- munity affirmed the leader that opportunity had indicated to represent it in this flabbergasting crisis, and dumped the full load and unprecedented responsibility of it upon his contemp- tible shoulders. For the first time in his shapeless life, Olgan was obtruded as a social spearhead, and although it shattered him, he pierced the situation before him rather well.

DELILAH 27

"There ain't any up here, sir . . . They're all down there below," he said plaintively.

When he finished saying this, he backed, slightly doubled up, through the crowd until he brought up against the four bronze cables of the railing. But this effort at putting his fellows between himself and what seemed to him a kind of assault was automatically frustrated by the crowd, which parted, leaving a clear lane from him to the monk.

Stengle, before any possible operation of the inevitable seniority and authority machinery could "pass the buck" to him, hustled over to the Starboard Engine-room Hatch and dropped half-way down the ladder.

"Hey! Mr. Fitzpatrick," he shouted ominously but respect- fully, "the priest is askin' for a shovel and is headin' for the After Fire-room."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick lifted his white, grease-streaked face to Stengle with an expression that said clearly : "Damn it, what next?" Yet there was not much surprise there, for Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, almost with his emotions alone, had apprehended immediately what the situation was.

"Take the engine-room," he ordered.

Stengle climbed the rest of the way down the ladder, and the officer mounted the ten feet or so to the deck. As he emerged into the air he had to grab hold of the upright hatch cover, for he began to sway dizzily as if he suddenly had arisen from a too hot bath.

"Father, Father !" he called to the old man, who was then stooping over the fire-room hatch, feeling for a hold.

The monk straightened up and fixed upon the Second-in- Command a gaze that seemed to be travelling over a long stretch of foreground.

"Look here . . . come aft for a minute . . ." the young officer's voice was thin and uncertain with exhaustion and emotion.

He walked nervously over to the monk and, oblivious of the oil with which he was spattered, tried in a friendly, coercing manner to put his arm around the monk's shoulders. He missed

28 DELILAH

this hold and his arm drifted about the old man's neck. The monk, to steady the officer, put an arm around his waist. Thus they made their way along the starboard side towards the quarter-deck : But before they had gotten as far as the galley, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick halted as he felt the swiftly moving ship sway into a turn. He darted a glance over his shoulder. Then he abruptly swung the monk towards the railing. With his free hand he pointed emphatically.

"Look! . . . see . . . it's not necessary ... it wouldn't help . . . we're there!"

Within clear view off the bow, far across the immobile stretch of unctuous, murrey sea, there lay what seemed to be, under the prismatic splendour of the setting sun, two great chrome-splashed rings, from the sharp perimeters of which there sprouted vague green clusters of monstrous ostrich plumes.

12

The monk, who knew Isla-Sulu well, wanted the Captain to proceed at once through the narrow break in the coral wall that served for entrance into the larger of the lagoons ; but the Captain, smiling amicably, and breaking into the Pidgen Eng- lish which served him as a sort of slang, and which he seemed to fall into whenever his natural disinclination for forcing his will upon people was unmasked by his friendliness or good humour, said that he wanted "to have a look see first." So Delilah whipped around the atolls on a perfectly circular course, close inshore, while the Captain steadily examined through his binoculars the segmentary beaches, the palm clusters, the mat- ted undergrowth, the stretches of coral and the flashes of the distant interior lagoons that broke through where the vegeta- tion of the rings was thin. His probing encountered only the rounded, colourful implacability that the two conjoined atolls presented all along their circumferences : But the tranquillity seemed definitely malignant, — like that which pervades a bril- liant stalk of bananas in which lurks an aroused tarantula.

When Delilah had arrived opposite the narrow, jungle-

DELILAH 29

framed entrance to the large lagoon for the second time, the Captain ordered a decrease in propeller revolutions that slowly brought Delilah down to about eight knots speed. He stooped, as the knife edge of the bow headed for the exact centre of the entrance, and pushed the button of the General Quarters bell. Delilah and her men had begun to relax and cool off under the greatly decreased speed and the blue twilight. The men had lined the railing and were staring at the shore in much the same subdued manner, compounded of affirmation, curiosity and relief, with which they would gaze at the empty coal barges alongside after a grilling day spent in loading Delilah with coal. But at the sudden, exigent goading of the bell, the men came alive again and lunged towards their battle stations. The fire- room hatch covers were slapped shut once more, the blowers wrhirred back to life, the ammunition gangs dragged and banged the shell cases to the guns, and Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Ensign Snell turned over the engine-rooms to the battle crews and hurried to their posts, the first to the bridge and the second to the top of the After Conning-tower.

Delilah, ready to leap and strike, drifted with menacing quietness to the middle of the round lagoon that formed the island's centre. The unobtrusive purring of her machinery im- bued the immanent silence of the place with the feline, intimi- dating quality of a pard-infested cavern. The Captain took to his binoculars again. In them the lustrous evening world became a shadow elusive of detail . . . the compact cluster of nipa houses, dark and deserted, that waded on high stilts out into the water . . . the group of brown, out-rigged bancos on the pale beach nearby . . . the feathery growth beyond them . . . some cindered ruins near the profusion of tall palms that drooped over the entrance to the lagoon . . . the rickety, planked pier that reached out some thirty yards towards Delilah . . . and the high wall of orchid-clotted jungle that received the broad trail leading from the wharf ... all these betrayed nothing but their apparent utter lifelessness. It might have been an artificial scene. Only the weighty fragrance from the flow- ers of the ylang ylang tree — white, feverish, little blossoms like very young girls burnt out by excessive, unrecognized de-

30 DELILAH

sire — affirmed the living quality of the environment. It lay on the lagoon as if it were an invisible fog.

"Mr. Fitzpatrick, I'm going alongside the dock," said the Captain finally, letting go of the binoculars, which hung from a strap around his neck. "But I don't want to put out any lines. Keep the six-pounders manned. Have the starboard guns ready to open fire on the jungle around the mouth of the trail, and the port ones trained on those bancos over there. Get fifty men ready to go in the Landing Party. You had better take Mr. Woodbridge with you ... if you have to land."

As Delilah swung warily in towards the dock, men scurried after their regular shoes and the two Gunner's Mates and their striker issued out rifles, bayonets and ammunition belts. Those told off to go in the Landing Party jerked and snatched at the equipment, working themselves up out of their fatigue and the nervousness that inevitably preceded the rough and tumble business they believed to be ahead of them. The measure of what experience had taught them to expect was taken by the care with which they tested and examined their bayonets. They looked to their bolts and ammunition only when they were ordered to. Their curses became more restless and venereal, and they charged them with an unwonted, rubefacient vicious- ness.

Delilah's side touched the face of the dock and slid lightly along it. The timbers of the structure creaked and crackled. The Captain ordered the engines "Full speed astern" . . . then "Stop!" Delilah halted in her tracks on the still water along- side the dock. The armed men rushed to coagulate against that part of the railing opposite the pierhead. Some were bare to the waist, others wore tattered, sooty undershirts that clung transparently to sweating muscles ; and their coal-stiffened hair bristled as with ferocity.

Among them, with a rifle in his hand, Warrington, the young Ordinary Seaman who had "stuck it out" below with O'Connel, leant dizzily against the bronze railing wires, which bulged and gave with the turbulent knot of men. It occurred to him that these straining wires alone formed the barrier with-

DELILAH 31

holding a furious gust of steel and violence from bursting into the quiet, green blot of land that loomed before him.

"Take 'it easy!" shouted Ensign Woodbridge in his pleasant, uproarious voice, and grinned into the face of the Carpenter's Mate, who was gesturing with the axe which he carried in place of rifle and bayonet.

The men clanged gun butts on the iron deck, unconsciously pointed truculent bayonets through the railing in the direction of the trail as if their victims were in sight, and twisted their open, breathing mouths into baroque grimaces. They rein- carnated one of those raging Gothic squads, depicted in old woodcuts, about to roar through the shattered gate of a city.

Little Lieutenant Fitzpatrick stood in the centre of the men carefully examining through his binoculars the terrain over which he probably would have to take the Landing Party. He was just as he had come up out of the engine-room, bare- headed, clad in the khaki athletic clothes that had survived his graduation from the Naval Academy, and smeared with oil and grease. But he was, nevertheless, as neat as a pin. When En- sign Woodbridge shouted, "Take it easy!" at the men, Lieu- tenant Fitzpatrick pulled his head away from the binoculars, which he continued to hold straight up in front of him, as if just then becoming aware of the commotion about him. The crisp glance of his small, brown eyes darted from one to another of the men, and left each, as it were, sucking in on his inflated restlessness. As his eyes came back towards the binoculars, they lit upon Ensign Woodbridge, who was leaning, a little detached from the group, against a stanchion of the railing.

In most men Ensign Woodbridge's posture certainly would have seemed affected, a nonchalant stance copied from some actor surveying the fictitious battle into which he was about to dash: but Ensign Woodbridge was unquestionably genuine, actually the almost mythical thing the actor, himself, imagines he looks like as he poses before the audience fired by the foot- lights and his own exhibitionistic certitude. He had managed, as always before what he called "a row," to change into an immaculate uniform whose whiteness had been tinted a delicate

32 DELILAH

coffee brown to decrease its visibility: But its brass buttons were highly polished and the gold in its shoulder straps glis- tened. His shoes were shined and his cap sat on his carefully combed hair at a precise and interesting angle. He was, as Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had once put it, "the perfect target."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's lips caught up into a wry, compli- cated smile as he clamped his eyes back onto the glasses. He murmured distinctly to the man at his elbow :

"Would you mind going down into my room and bringing up the cap in the second drawer under my bunk, the one with the white cover on?"

Hardwood, the Seaman, a white youth who talked like a negro, said, "Yes, Suh!" and swung away in a hurry, as if he feared something would happen before he got back. When it arrived, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick hastily jammed the new cap on his head. Its broad gold strap shone luminously even in the twilight. Standing there with it on amidst the crowd of the Landing Party, he looked something like a short, begrimed, gold-headed poker stuck into a coal pile.

The Captain came up with the monk and the men straight- ened to attention, from which they gradually relaxed as the conversation between the skipper and the tonsured old man proceeded.

". . . I'll give you a Very pistol, and if you need the Land- ing Party you fire a red ball; if you don't, then fire a green ball ... so we'll know how things are."

"If you don't mind, Captain, I'd rather not have anything that's like an arm," the monk said with a touch of apology in his tone, "you see, I . . ."

"All right, all right, whatever you want to do, Father, but we've got to hit upon something. What do you say to this? When you get in there," he pointed to the beach, "if you find you need us, try to get back far enough down the trail for us to see you. Keep your arms stretched straight out sideways from your shoulders and work 'em up and down . . . like wings. If I don't see you within exactly one hour," he took his watch out of his fob pocket and looked at it, "after you hit the

DELILAH 33

dock, the . . . uh . . . Mr. Fitzpatrick will come out and look for you."

The old man smiled in humorous understanding of the Captain's slight hesitation. He kept nodding his head slowly and easily up and down. The Captain continued :

"If you straighten things out, will you come down within view and stand for a moment with your arms stretched straight up over your head without moving them? Then we won't worry about you any further."

The Captain made a friendly, homely grimace, and curiously enough the same sort of apologetic colour that had tinted the monk's refusal of the signal pistol now leaked into the Cap- tain's smile. It never once occurred to him to suggest to the monk to cry out if he were in imminent danger on the chance that the ship might hear him: the idea was so out of proportion in the perspective the monk engendered, and so off the course of ideas that his attitude set up.

Hardwood and Cruck, the Chief Boatswain's Mate, cast off a section of the railing with a solemn expertness that seemed to take on the significance of a ceremony uniting the dangerous land with the fierce, little ship. Ensign Snell, who had been standing amongst the men, indistinguishable in his dirty dun- garees except for his amicable quietness and assurance, lowered himself over the side to the dock and held his hands up to help the monk down. The blue eyes in Ensign Snell's broad, likeable face looked up at the old man much as they would have beamed down at a child their owner was about to hoist up piggy- back. As the black-gowned figure went over, the men became tense and immovable ; they might have been watching him walk the plank. He stood on the dock for a moment with his hand lightly poised against Delilah's side, as if he were surreptitiously blessing her. He raised his face, the long chin of which reached just to the deck line, and looked at the Captain, who leaned over somewhat to look back at him. The two antipodal men smiled at each other. Then the ecclesiast turned and swung unhur- riedly along the dock, up the trail and into the jungle. Delilah remained rigid, still, expectant, listening for the slightest in-

34 DELILAH

imical sound. Finally the Captain walked up the deck towards the bridge. His footsteps drummed out a hollow solo in the stillness. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick kept his glasses fixed on the spot where the monk had disappeared.

At the end of a quarter of an hour several men had drifted aimlessly away, one after another, from the Landing Party by the rail. When Lieutenant Fitzpatrick finally noticed this, he sang out :

"Everybody in the Landing Party stand by."

The sound of his order rang startlingly along the deck and out over the breathless, darkening water. The stragglers rushed back to the Landing Party, and the crews at the six-pounders, attaching over-importance to the order, sprang alert and glared at their respective target areas. Even the Captain reached has- tily for his binoculars : when he tried to use them he noticed that it was getting dark and replaced them with others that could be used at night. He took up a second pair of the night glasses and walked from the bridge back down to the clenched, fistlike group by the hole in the railing, where he handed the second pair of night binoculars to Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and told him that he didn't "want any lights in the ship for a while yet."

Ensign Woodbridge's mind was painting, and his will promptly dissolving, distraught illustration after illustration of the fate that possibly was overtaking the monk. In a moment of nearly physical effort to clear his mind of a horror, he made a just perceptible, unlocalized gesture ; but every movement and attitude he made were so thoroughly impregnated with the tra- dition that had produced and supported these men, their situa- tion and their medium, that they received the impression of it instantly, as a photographic plate receives an obscure and mi- nute shadow. They seemed to take it as a signal that they were no longer obligated to bear the strain in silence.

"What the hell kind of business is this anyhow?" broke out O'Connel, leading the burst of indignant demands they made of one another.

This imprecation in the riotous voice of his enemy awoke the Texan, who had been heavily asleep on his feet. His sud-

DELILAH 35

denly opened eyes, muddled by dreams and conflicting reality, struggled in alarm with the dark, encircling shore.

"Unc" Blood rotated the point of his beard nervously and indulged in the curious sound he habitually made by first draw- ing in suddenly through his nostrils, then grunting bluntly from the region of his tonsils.

The Carpenter's Mate, a middle-aged man with an angular, intimidating face, waved his axe slowly above his head and spat out :

"By God, in the old Navy there was none of this stuff of puttin' a priest ashore ! We'd 'a been in there long ago kickin' the guts out of 'em !"

Above the high, stiff, white collar of his blouse, Ensign Woodbridge's slim face again smiled jeeringly, nepotically at him. The Carpenter's Mate had served with his father when the Navy went against the Boxers.

But the tenseness was not relieved. At no given moment the upper stretches of dull blue air exploded silently into a silver infinity of pulsing, glowing fragments. Under this equivocal starlight, despite the apparent illumination, the lagoon water remained black. An occasional leaping fish gored in it a cloudy spiral of phosphorescence.

"There he is !" abruptly shrieked a gunner from forward.

Into the murky circle of Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's hungry binoculars there moved, amidst several lesser lumps of shadow, the tall, unmistakable, black erectness topped with silver. The monk came down with a sort of dignified swiftness to a spot just clear of the jungle. The long lines of his drape slowly ex- tended themselves straight up towards the sky, and the faint brilliance of his upturned face, framed between the ebony col- umns of his lifted arms, seemed to be in some unfailing, daedal communication with the radiant direction of his reaching.

CHAPTER II

TWO

i

The forced run that Delilah had made to Isla-Sulu had de- ranged her insides. One of her condensers was impaired. A main bearing had burnt out, permitting the starboard shaft to disturb its alignment, and there was a nervous knock in one of her cylinders. She barely had been able, after a remarkable ses- sion of make-shift, emergency repairing, to falter back to the dock at Zamboanga.

The combined storm of these interior penalties had been dreaded secretly all along, as an eventuality, by the Captain; whose conviction, for many months previous to this run, had been hardening about the idea that if he was going to lead her the kind of life upon which they seemed to be insisting, he would have to get her into some kind of shape. Every time of late that he had given the engine-rooms or the Helmsman an order that called upon her for some rigorous performance, there had loomed faintly and distantly, but very sombrely on the edge of his small stock of permanent apprehensions, a dis- turbance that, forced into the inadequate channels of a ready, mental phrase, seemed to warn that all that was left of him was somehow inextricably committed to all that was left of her. In his mind the apperception of this impression had been like the recognition of a covenant; and quite unconsciously, on the occasions when he suffered this impression, he had regretted her neglected condition, a condition — enforced by governmen- tal economy — that her extreme age made increasingly danger- ous. Years ago the Department had put her down on its public books as an antiquated, slow creature fit only for coast defence : after which it promptly had flung her into a savage, semi- charted region, where she was called upon to engage in active service, at high speeds, far from bases.

Now the Captain (in rank he was a Lieutenant-Commander)

39

40 DELILAH

forwarded to the Department, through his proper superiors in Cavite, an urgent, radioed request to put her out of commission long enough for a major repair operation to be performed upon her. He had it in his mind that once in the Navy Yard, under the operation, he would "take the bull by the horns" and, le- gally or illegally, regardless of the risk to himself personally, see to it that her boilers and cylinders were replaced, her steer- ing cables renovated and new steel plate layed into her deck and, where necessary, into her hull. Her serious condition now, which even the most economical could understand, would be a pretty good fulcrum upon which to lay his lever.

At lunch in the Wardroom he told the Executive Officer what his intentions were, and asked him to get up a list of everything that could be done to her from bow to stern.

"Even if we get everything," he ended, "it won't bring her up to what we're making her do."

These last words blew into the celebration that was flaming within Lieutenant Fitzpatrick over the ship's recent faithful, victorious performance as a gust of rain might sweep a trium- phal beacon. He read into them an implication that faintly lowered the whole tone of their existence in her, and twinged his uncompromising partiality.

"Twenty knots wasn't so bad, Captain; the new boats cruise at only five more."

The Captain smiled and rather ceremoniously took off his big, horn-rimmed spectacles, which sat amidst the weather-tan on his small precociously wrinkled, thirty-three-year-old face with a kind of flagrant incompatibility. His blue eyes blinked for a moment as if testing themselves in the new freedom. His wearing these spectacles was, more than anything else, some notion of his wife's. She had said that he was to wear them whenever he used his eyes ; but, really, she had an idea that they smoothed him down a bit. He inevitably took them off and put them in their broad, thick brown case whenever he felt a poign- ant, impracticable urge to dispense with the routine pretence behind which even the simplest of human dealings must ma- noeuvre, whenever he felt an urge to let down, for the particular person opposite him, the mask that disguised the full, detailed

DELILAH 41

inexpressibility of what actually was behind the stand that he was being forced to take. And nearly always, when he took off the spectacles, he would make a compensatory sweep at the cow- lick that disordered the uneven, sandy hair parted on the side just above his low forehead. He made this gesture now.

"And look at her," he replied. "As a result of it she'll have to limp all the way up to Cavite at six or seven knots."

There were many things that Lieutenant Fitzpatrick would have replied to Snell or Woodbridge; who, on their parts, sat staring into their coffee cups and thinking of the clear points that could be made with "the Old Man," that should be made by anybody who "drew as much water as an Executive Officer." It was clear by the expressions on their faces that their pleasant feeling of being subjects for approbation was being slowly de- flated, deflated by the apparent discovery that the Captain felt so ordinarily about the feat they and the ship had performed.

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick flicked the ash off his cigarette and glanced away through the port-hole. The water, which quivered a few inches below the port like a slab of blue jelly, flashed and stabbed recklessly with the beams it caught from the sun . . . "the Captain didn't seem to understand fully what she'd done," he thought . . . "didn't seem to be inside the situation . . ." For three years, now, Delilah had been the Lieutenant's first ship. For only a slightly longer time she had been the Captain's first command.

As if he already had received the favourable answer to his request, the Captain next morning headed Delilah out of Zam- boanga, and put her on the first leg of the course that would take her up through the islands to Manila Bay. She pounded awkwardly through the smooth purple water in a wounded and creeping way that emphasized the intended swift precision of her life. There had not been much, in the way of amplifying the emergency repairs achieved by the crew in Isla-Sulu, that Zamboanga had been able to provide.

The unnaturalness of her situation affected the men with a kind of exposed-nerve over-alertness. They closed hatches, turned cocks, shifted the rudder, much as if they were fighters pulling their punches. There was about the whole ship, as a

42 DELILAH

matter of fact, the neurotic quality that pervades a training camp compelled to send a boxer into the ring with a hand broken and imperfectly healed. The men frankly were relieved when, just out of Basilan Strait, with Bototindoc Point abeam, the ship was put about and headed back towards Zamboanga. At once the rumour whirled through the ship that Delilah was not to leave Zamboanga after all. The rumour had little to go on, perhaps, besides the almost palpable wish of the men, a burst of strident, mechanical hum in the Radio Shack, and the rapid trip aft of Portness, the jockeylike Radio Electrician; and it proved to be false. The demonstration of its falseness, however, was of such a quality as to set vibrating through the general atmosphere of ill-being a high-keyed expectancy, a sharp apprehension that, as Arnold, Quartermaster, Second- Class, put it, "something must be up."

Once alongside the dock again, the order was given to stand by; and the Captain, leaving Delilah with steam up and every- thing in readiness to get under way at a pull of the engine-room telegraph, went ashore to confer with the Governor-General's representative. At noon Delilah still was standing by. The fold- ing tables were let down into the layer of intense heat under the re-spread awnings, and the sweating men ate hastily, almost surreptitiously, with an eye up at the head of the dock. A glimpse there of a small, gold-spotted, white figure would have sent them, working at huge mouth fuls, hurrying to their sta- tions for getting under way : But it was the middle of the after- noon before the Captain was seen coming down the dock. He walked slowly into the white-hot motionlessness of the universe as if he were a bit of its circumference that had begun to melt and drip towards the centre. His appearance of labouring over the broad planks of the long dock probably owed less to his per- turbation or the heat than it did to the confusing, oppressive intensity of the light. He kept his eyes lowered as if even a glance towards the sky would have injured them. The masts of the ship, the palm trees, the distant radio tower shimmered blackly in the infinity of still, bright confusion as if they were fragments of filament at the core of some frightful luminosity.

His three officers and the Quartermaster on watch, saluting

DELILAH 43

stiffly, met him at the narrow timber that served as gang-plank. He stepped aboard with an obvious gesture of relief that he, himself, thought was the result of getting in under the awning out of the sun ; but his perspiring face was more than usually ruffled with the mild distemper that nearly always coursed through the wrinkles in his face after an official session with the civilians ashore. After a quick appraisal of the Captain's face, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick withheld the question that would have satisfied their curiosity.

"All right, get under way at once, Mr. Fitzpatrick," the Cap- tain said. After a moment of hesitation in which he was both thinking and taking a step in the direction of the quarter-deck, he added :

"Lay your course for Taytay Bay."

"Taytay Bay. Aye, aye, Sir." Despite himself, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had been unable to keep his enunciation of "Taytay Bay" from becoming an exclamation of astonishment : Nor could the group of men lounging or occupied at tasks nearby, very ostensibly not listening, keep itself from mirroring, in its moist expanses of work-soiled skin and dungarees, its superior's surprise.

Later, with the jungle- framed, red roofs of Zamboanga hid- den astern behind the rise of Caldera Point, the Captain joined Lieutenant Fitzpatrick on the bridge. He had taken a shower and changed his clothes. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick was at the pelorus ; Bidot, the Quartermaster, ' First-Class, was closely watching the chronometer in his hand ; Ferguson, a stout, truc- ulent Seaman a trifle over five feet tall, was leaning forward across the wheel to stare intently at the compass. Ferguson's grimy, stubby hands were delicately poised on the spokes of the wheel, and each time he was precisely on the course, he would sing out, "Mark! . . . Mark! . . . Mark! . . ." So slowly was Delilah limping ahead, that the light, stern breeze streamed the smoke from her stacks out before her on the bright air, and its billows swept a shifting roll of shadow over the translucent surface of the bridge awning. Somewhere aft, a man was sing- ing, in a voice shrill, quavering, beautiful against the hum of the blowers, a slight, nostalgic melody whose words begin :

44 DELILAH

"O, we won't go back to Zambo' any more . . ." The business of taking a bearing on Teinga Island engrossed the whole at- tention of the three on the bridge ; but, like some sensitive cell- unit, they were aware of his presence the moment the Captain came up the ladder. An expectant audience before whom, they felt sure, the Captain now would raise the curtain on this new and provocative act of the ordeal through which they must push their crippled ship, they yet fumbled no single minute of time or space in overlaying the glistening strip of water between Delilah and the green lump of frothy island with a great tri- angle, invisible but informing.

Anxious as he was to hear what the Captain had to say, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, under stimulation of the Captain's pa- tient, interested presence, could not resist the temptation to make a slight display of the virtuosity he so indubitably and effectively enjoyed in the elegant precisions of his navigation. When the final leg of the bearing was taken, he stepped jaun- tily to the chart-board and applied his data with just a trace of the decorative pomposity that might distinguish a member of a French eating club noting, for purposes of judgment, an item of deliciousness for some dish entered in a contest. When he had quite finished with his final gesture, the Captain frankly smiled at him.

"We've got a big job of navigating to do," he said, "we'd better talk it over. My request to take her back to Cavite for repairs is granted all right; but on the way we've got to take her all around Palawan and then around through the islands between Palawan and Mindoro" . . . Here his indignation broke through his information . . . " 'on the way, for God's sake! Get that! On the way!"

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick was knocked clean off his balance by the unexpectedness of the information, aggrandized as it was by the unwonted force with which the Captain empowered it.

"Why, Deacon," he ejaculated, using the off-duty nickname by which his intimates had addressed the Captain ever since his Annapolis days, "what on earth for?"

"We've got to look for caches of guns and ammunition . . . and for fellows running them in."

DELILAH 45

For the Captain, it was days before Delilah's mission was re- garded as anything but the absurd and somehow indecent affair that it had been for him at first impact. In the first place, he could not help but see this mission in the light of his sympa- thies. He was not so sure that his sympathies were not actually with the Moros for whom the smuggled arms were intended. Decidedly, his sympathies were not with the tricky, little, half- breed, Manila politicians and their helpless American masters who had bungled him into this position. The real basis, how- ever, for his strong emotion was the unfeeling ignorance, the downright unpractical ignorance of the civilians ashore who insisted on sending a disabled vessel chasing around in the bad weather season through hundreds of miles of unchartered waters looking for trouble . . . "risking thousands of dollars' worth of government property and seventy-one good, white lives just to coddle the guilty fears of a crooked gang of Tag- alog politicos." He shied away from Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's way of putting it . . . "like sending a delicate, injured woman into some arduous activity" . . . but he wanted to get his ship up to Cavite. He wanted to get her in shape.

The first night out, he had welcomed with relief the sudden torrent of rain that had driven at the gently rolling ship as he had settled himself under the sheet of his bunk. On his back, with his hands clasped under his head and his knees drawn up, he had lain comfortably listening to the drumming of the rain, the giant throb of the propellers just beneath him, and to the quiet, regular creak in the cabin following each roll of the ship. His mind, unused to dealing consciously in symbols, struggled nebulously with the feeling that this cloudburst would wash his ship clean of its contact with the people in Zamboanga. As he thought of the hot hours he had spent pawing over charts and maps in that office ashore, and scrabbling about amongst the pretentiously disguised fears of the politicians, he became op- pressed by the confinement of his white, over-sized pyjamas, which through habit he wore even in hot weather. He sat up,

46 DELILAH

pulled the jumper over his head and dropped it on the deck be- side his bunk. The atmosphere in the small, boxlike cabin, very little larger than a couple of piano crates joined back to back, was so realistically humid that he had not noticed until he was about to lie down again that the rain was deflecting in semi- mist from the wind-catcher of the port-hole onto the foot of his bunk. He couldn't close the port . . . too hot ... he had to have one port open anyway ... he turned the wind-catcher so that the rain would deflect up towards the ceiling. As he lay down again, his gaze flattened by the steel ceiling less than four feet above him, he had a restless instant pressured by the illusion that he was smothering under water that had filled the cabin. The bulkheads seemed to distend and become concave under the tremendous pressure of the illusory water. A slight gesture had served to dispel this impression. He had raised his forearm and, with its hairy, outer surface, rubbed instinctively at a tingle just above the right nostril of his sizeable, triangular nose. Through the dim, subaqueous glow that pervaded the cabin as the rain stopped and the stars came out, he could distinguish, hung on the bulkhead at the foot of his bunk, the precise blur of the frame that held his wife's picture, and across the cabin, more dimly still, the generous puff of almost imperceptible shadow that marked a vaseful of intensely white flowers. The flowers very faintly tainted his breathing with dank, fragrant difficulty. As the port-hole would swing slowly through the beam of a cluster of stars, an occasional glint, a minute, pre- ternatural absence of shadow, would flicker over the invisible surface of the mahogany desk, over the back of the chair, across the glass in the frame, along the sides of the silver vase . . . The flowers should have been put in the wardroom ... it was nice of her to send them down to the dock ... he liked her best of all his wife's friends out here ... if he came south again for any length of time he'd get Laura to come down from Manila and stay with her for a visit . . . they'd both enjoy it . . . only that would mean he'd have to spend a lot of time ashore in Zamboanga . . . some of those people were probably all right if you didn't have to have official dealings with them . . . just the same as in Manila ... or as in Washington, for

DELILAH 47

that matter . . . What a shifty crowd they all were ! . . . That Governor-General's man! . . . Even with all their shiftiness the politicians they sent out to Manila couldn't handle the Tagalogs ... he couldn't ever get people like that out into the open, couldn't ever get at what they really were after, except by sus- pecting it, no matter whether it was good or bad.

Suddenly there spread throughout his memory, like an in- stantaneously grown weed, the rank pain and shame of his first important experience, years back, with the politicians. He had landed with a hundred-and-ninety men, under orders to take a Latin-American town and drive its garrison of seven hundred some ten miles back from the coast line. The local Consul's order to the cruiser had been confirmed by Washington despite the Commanding Officer's warning that on account of the garrison's size there would be a stiff fight. "Take the town" . . . well, he'd taken it. As long as he lived he'd never forget Henderson, the Coxswain, stretched out in a row with the others in the twilight, stiff, blue, the front of his throat a bloody gap. Next to Henderson had lain the Mail Orderly, his long white face lined with a weird agony. A finely sharpened bailing hook had clawed out his testicles and lower intestines. "I saved as many of the boys as was possible, though." His innermost private conscience assured him of that. The simplicity of the tactical problem involved should have made his actions clear to almost anybody ... a National Guard lieutenant with only a smattering of tactics would have understood what to do in that problem.

The enemy had concentrated on the water-front of the town, waiting for him behind cobble-stone breast works. The cruiser had shelled them out of there ; but they'd taken to the windows and roofs of the water-front houses. The Commanding Officer had been afraid to throw many shells into the houses . . . de- stroying those would have been almost impossible to explain to civilians at home. "I'm afraid you'll have to chance it," the Commanding Officer had said, "but we'll keep them off the beach until you get there." As the boats had approached the town, its whole face had blazed with rifle fire. He had seen with his binoculars that even women were firing from some of the

48 DELILAH

windows. Watching carefully the volume and area of splash in the water, he had become certain that his party would not have been able to survive on the beach in face of that fire. When his boats had almost reached the jetty, he had swung off to the right, as if he were going back, and, to the complete surprise of the enemy, had landed at a little village a mile below the walls of the town. From there he had marched two miles inland to another village, almost in the rear of the town. The undisci- plined garrison, in a panic lest their avenue of retreat be cut off, had then fled back into the farm land for almost the ten miles. Everybody had congratulated him ... he had taken the town ... he had kept the casualty list way down . . . the civilians in the place had been exposed as little as possible.

But some kind of political turmoil had arisen in the States over the move, and the politicians who were responsible had scrambled around saving their faces. They had recalled his Commanding Officer and him to Washington and hauled him up before a gang of Senators . . . "Watch out for yourself, Deacon," the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation almost had whispered to him, "the President's man in there, Senator Stalk, has orders to prove, right or wrong, that you exceeded your authority, that all you were supposed to do was a little harmless police duty. But remember, you are representing the Navy in there. It's going to be hard."

Senator Stalk, a well-dressed, little weasel of a man, had bored at him relentlessly with the same technique that criminal lawyers use on a witness. He was a lawyer, when he wasn't a Senator, a coal company lawyer from up in Pittsburgh . . . "Where's your mathematics, Lieutenant? Can't you figure per- centages? You say you lost eleven men in taking the three towns ; yet you ask us to believe that you lost less men than if you had taken only one town."

"Well, Sir," he had attempted to reply, "the tactics of the situation . . ."

"Never mind about the tactics of the situation, Lieutenant, let's stick to common sense."

Senator La Bandia had been almost as much of an ordeal as Senator Stalk. He had understood vaguely that La Bandia had

DELILAH 49

been taking out some kind of personal, irrelevant vengeance on him, that the man's questions and jibes had smacked of some- thing like a petty, suppressed envy. Old Admiral Fellows had told him afterwards that La Bandia had practically been reared on his place out in San Francisco, that his father had been the gardener there. In the end, they had summoned, as an expert witness, Commander Kerns. It was a mystery how Kerns ever had gotten as far as he had. He was dull, unpro- fessional, without energy, and up until the time he had testified at the hearing, he had been passed over for promotion by the Selection Board. "Yes, the town could have been taken without taking the other two villages," he had testified. "Yes," in his opinion, "the garrison would have retreated if the Landing Party had gone straight in. Yes, probably without a fight . . . Yes. . ."

The Navy, from Manila to New London, had been pro- foundly disturbed by the phenomenon of Kerns' appearance before the Senatorial Committee.

On the day after Stalk and La Bandia had put him through that third-degree, backed by Kerns' testimony, he had smiled in honest entertainment in the first moment that his eye had caught the headline in the newspaper: SENATORS UN- MASK BUNGLING MILITARIST . . . then the bitterness of what all this meant had bitten into him . . . "Why ! Why ! I have studied all my life for my country; so that I could do things like this properly for it when the order came . . . And I did do this properly. Any tactician in any country anywhere would say so." For years his country had educated him, schooled him, drilled him, tested him, and then because he had served it properly in the way his books and drill prescribed, it had thrown him to the first gang of temporary office-holders that had howled for a victim. He remembered how the whole event, a year later, had returned to his memory just as it was doing now, and how a kind of fear had taken hold of him when the rumour spread of how the politicians were trying to reward Commander Kerns and the few other officers whom they had persuaded or forced to play their dirty game : And there was no recourse to the people of the country themselves, for early

50 DELILAH

in the Navy's history an iron-clad rule had been established that no officer could make a public speech or write for publica- tion without permission of the Secretary of the Navy, and with- out first having submitted his utterance to that politician for cen- soring and approval. This rule was aimed exclusively at pro- tecting the Navy's technical secrets; but it had not taken the politicians long to pervert the rule in behalf of the most danger- ous kind of pork-barrel chicanery or dubious, demagogic manip- ulations. Now it was merely a gag that forever blocked all frank communication between the nation and its Navy.

Stalk ... La Bandia . . . now this Governor-General's man . . . They hung lividly before his mind's eye like exhibits in a gallery of wax criminals . . . What a pity there wasn't some- thing like the British Admiralty to stand in between the Navy and the risky expediency of people like that . . . that Governor- General's man was a bad one . . . he'd been a lawyer, too, a second-rate criminal lawyer back in Kansas . . . "But won't your boat run, Captain?" this Governor-General's man finally had asked. The memory of the man's question evoked all too clearly the stocky image of the man himself : smelling slightly of sour perspiration, a mussy, greying head, tobacco stains seeping from the corners of his badly shaven mouth.

"Well, she'll make six or seven knots; but it's dangerous."

"Captain, isn't it your business to risk danger in an emer- gency?"

Before he had had a chance to reply to this, the small Chi- nese-Tagalog quarter-breed, comically gotten up in a new, ill- fitting Constabulary Officer's uniform, had hastily put in, throwing a frightened glance through the large, horizontal win- dow as if he had expected to see a horde of Moros pouring from the green restlessness of the nearby jungle :

"And this certainly, certainly is an emergency! Why! Sup- posing all the Moros got guns?"

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say that he wished to hell the Moros all would get guns ; that he didn't see why the natives of Luzon should have them and the natives of Min- danao shouldn't; that . . .

"We have sent for some more warships that are in good

DELILAH 51

order to look into the situation thoroughly," the Governor- General's man had continued, spitting inaccurately into the ring of discoloured mucous around the cuspidor, "but meanwhile, right now that is, we have got to know what is going on in Malampaya Sound, for instance; and Major Mendoza here has gotten word about some activities in Saint Paul Bay, in some kind of an underground river there. We've got to know. They can't get those other boats down from China before next week. The Governor-General has put pressure . . . the Governor-Gen- eral has arranged," he corrected himself, "for you to attend to this; so I am afraid you'll have to tinker up that boat of yours and co-operate." He had said the phrase "good order" and the word "co-operate" as if he were indicating to the Captain some failure or fault. Major Mendoza had seemed to shudder slightly at the mention of the "underground river."

As he had walked onto the head of the dock, he had felt, despite the cabled instructions in his pocket confirming the orders to proceed at once on the mission, a surge of relief. There at the far end, leaning with an air of pert assurance against the face of the dock, had waited for him his world of open and apprehendable life. He couldn't quicken his pace . . . The heat wouldn't permit that . . . But it had helped that the instant his foot had touched the first plank of the dock, he had felt a kind of relieving reconnection. Marching heavily down the dock between high-piled bags of copra, he had struggled, at the outermost borders of his consciousness, with the tenta- tively fluttering, unrecognized feelers of a mood of depression. He had thought it was his unusually keen repugnance, that day, of the stench swirled up by the heat from the tide mud and the dried, almost rotting, coco-nut flesh. "I must have developed in the night," he had guessed, "a little irritation of the nose and throat." Never in his life had he consciously suffered a mood of acute depression. Probably, if he had, he would have been so spiritually confounded, so intimately outraged, that, in sheer protest, he would have destroyed himself. The magic, rarely failing fuse, which permits into the circuit of each indi- vidual consciousness only bearable loads, unfalteringly pro- tected him from what he would not bear — this faithful fuse

52 DELILAH

equipped with illusion, with symbolization, with forget fulness, equipped even with the exaggerations of these for the penul- timate boon that Society repudiates as ' Insanity.' '

He became physically sick, in some almost visual way un- comfortable, when his mind filled up with the hints and premo- nitions begotten by conferences such as he just then had been through. On this occasion, as in all such moments, he had been approached obscurely by intimations of how completely his world, this world awaiting him but a few paces away at the foot of the dock, was built upon and surrounded by the tricky mud and filth from which he was walking away. It had been his fear of these intimations, perhaps, that always had blocked his avowed purpose to study the politicians and their methods so that he could deal with them " without making a fool of him- self" : for it was powerful, if not clear, in his consciousness that such a study might too definitely reveal for him all the solid, reassuring world that was the Navy — the hard, clean, polished world of steel within unequivocal lines, where men like the lines lived by Articles For The Government Of The Navy like the steel — as not being a bright planet revolving on its own axis in clear space, sufficient in itself. It might instead, such a study, reveal the Navy as something like a submarine sunk deep in the mud of unscrupulous politicians drooling tobacco juice, ignorance and lethal opportunism . . . where someday, through a rusty rivet, through a sprung seam, the mud would sneak and claw its way in ... as it had into the Russian Navy that the Japanese engaged so confidently because they knew it was filled with the mud ... as it had into the Spanish Navy that succumbed to the Americans only because it first had succumbed to the mud. These implacable intimations, fluttering at the en- trance to the brightly lighted areas of his mind, poised him, inevitably, on the brink of conscious depression.

For Lieutenant Fitzpatrick as Executive Officer and Engi- neer Officer, the outrage in Delilah's assignment at first had loomed jaggedly ; but it slowly had been dissolved in the beauty

DELILAH 53

and danger of the rare problem before him as Navigator. Bit by bit, under this solvent, he had come to persuade himself that, despite the constant fear at the back of his head to the contrary, she could "go on forever at six or seven knots." As he and the Captain had worked it out tentatively, her itinerary began at Taytay Bay, worked back down towards the equator through the bays and shelters of Palawan's east coast to Balabac Island; north again along the mysterious, almost uncharted west coast of Palawan; and then into the labyrinth of small islands that sprays out from its northern tip, amongst which the mission was to be permitted to dissipate itself. It was, however, the Island of Palawan, itself, stretching in thin, glamorous out- landishness for two hundred and seventy miles over the rarely navigated water between the South China and Sulu Seas, that seductively had engaged his anticipation. The mere, non-com- mittal shadow of it on the chart there had eddied through his senses like mist from a hypervolatile drug. Nearly uninhabited, its jungle unexplored, its writhing, unknown coast line shunned by all save wary, groping ships forced through storms or ir- regular needs to approach it, the dark sliver of island, ostracized in an unmentioned area of sun-drenched sea, promised for him the great navigation adventure of his life. "The shores are faced by numerous islands and coral reefs," read the United States Coast Pilot, reluctantly blurring the cold exactness of its vir- tually scientific prose, "and, owing to the unfinished surveys, navigation is conducted with difficulty." On the chart, itself, across the nearly blank stretch representing the complicated sur- face of sea to the west of Palawan, through which his skill, his intuition and his glistening instruments must guide the ship to the mouth of a strange, underground river, was brusquely printed the warning: "Dangerous And Unsurveyed Ground." By the time Delilah had reached and subsequently left Taytay Bay, he literally had memorized every item of the meagre in- formation relating to the itinerary that was contained on the charts and in the reference works carried in the ship. When- ever he closed his eyes, in the first few seconds the lean, weird blot of Palawan Island glowed on his retina, solid, bright, pur- pureal, like the silhouette of a vase in a sunny window that

54 DELILAH

lingers behind closed eyelids. He got little rest, for in addition to the four-hour watch he stood every eight hours under way, he visited the bridge at least twice in each of his off watches. He even slept there on a cot during dark hours when Delilah would be creeping slowly across a patch of particularly danger- ous liquid mystery.

He took advantage of the ship's two day stay at Puerto Princesa, which was, in any realistic sense, the only known town on Palawan's great, wild length and varying ten miles of breadth, to include in his making-ready operations things that could not be gotten at handily under way. He and "Unc" Blood, the Chief Quartermaster, who was almost a jeweller and an optician at such matters, furbished and adjusted his sextant until it fairly glowed with polish and precision. The instrument, which had been presented to the Lieutenant by the Captain's wife on the occasion of his second birthday on Delilah, lay ready in its red satin case like some angular, be-mirrored device of esoteric sun worship. His enthusiasm of preparation com- municated to the rest of the Quartermasters, Bidot, Cavendish, Arnold and their striker, Warrington, spurred them to the over- haul of every other piece of equipment on the bridge that per- tained to navigation. They turned the awninged, circular top of the Forward Conning-tower, monopolized though it was by the grey, three-inch gun, into a kind of temple where the sharpened pencils, parallel rulers, dividers and course protractor lay en- throned on the creamy spread of the chart-board in all the punc- tilious array of holy implements set and ready to supplement the ritual of the splendid sextant.

After Delilah had left the port, this sense of especial alert- ness and preparation tinctured even routine procedures, and so far did it extend into the realm of extraordinary precaution that at all hours of the night, men aroused for a moment by the heat, which had driven them from the forecastle bunks to sleep on cots stretched along the deck, would raise their heads to listen, as in a dream, to the melancholy quaver of Bidot or Cavendish chanting up to the bridge the marks and deeps of the lead line.

Ordinarily, the voyage south-west down the east coast of

DELILAH 55

Palawan, close inshore, would have been considered by all con- cerned a major piece of business in itself; but to Lieutenant Fitzpatrick it had become mere practice and schooling for the precarious opportunity ahead : the unexampled voyage, without benefit of beacons, lighthouses or adequate data, up the west coast of the island, through nameless coral clusters, in and out of bays like tropical fjords, past threats labelled falteringly with such phrases as ''Shoal patches reported by H.M.S. Merlin in 1885."

So little did he spare himself in this preparation that the Captain, aroused by his officer's bloodshot eyes and the dark symptoms beneath them, began waiting patiently for the chance to check, within Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, himself, the ravages of the intensity that the whole ship had come to sense as a kind of magic fever in whose heat and visions their chance of security rested . . . "That guy," Arnold assured a ring of washed and combed men, resting in clean undershirts through the moments before evening meal, "could take her in and out of a keyhole."

The Captain's chance came while the officers, too, were wait- ing for their dinner. It was Ensign Woodbridge's watch on the bridge ; but the Captain and Ensign Snell were relaxed in deep wicker chairs on the starboard side of the throbbing quarter- deck. Between them sat Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, who was perched on the edge of his chair, bent tensely over a pencil that worked at a note pad on his knee. A tall, frosted, glass pitcher of lemon- ade, framed off from the heavy heat by a sort of corona of coolness, stood on a small table before them. Each time the victrola, lashed to the carriage of the torpedo-tube, would come to the end of its record, Ensign Snell would get up slowly, pause as if he were about to stretch himself, then step over and stop the machine. Going deliberately through the box of rec- ords, he would make a selection, usually a record he, himself, had bought and carried back to the ship. It innocently never occurred to him to inquire if the others would like the selection : he simply started it playing and sat down again. In succession, he had chosen and set going: When It's Moonlight On The Alamo; Just A Little Love, A Little Kiss; Down The Old Green River On The Good Ship Rock and Rye; Dreamy Eyes;

56 DELILAH

Don't You Remember California In September? ; If We Cant Be The Same Old Sweethearts Let's Try And Be The Same Old Friends. From away forward, below the break of the fore- castle, came the shouts of a group of belated bathers, shouts that were recognizable, even with the event hidden, as coming from naked bodies suddenly being drenched with buckets of water to clear themselves of soap; but these shouts from for- ward there, from the glistening wet bodies flexing like shafts of meaningful whiteness in the layers of brilliance and shadow beneath the awning, would seem to burst forth as if in ecstatic response to some chord in the music, a seemingly elicited shout, like the yell, wild and glamorous, that rips from the lips of men in a Mexican crowd who suddenly feel themselves at one with a phrase of melody to which they are listening.

Ensign Snell, his gaze lost in the uncertain yellow and ver- milion softness of the evening horizon that pulsed delicately on the far edge of sea like the throat of a moth, was thinking: "What a damn shame it was when they took away our liquor !" He almost smacked his lips when he thought of how good the stuff his glass contained would have tasted with just a shot of gin in it. "Aiming to abolish it in the whole country eventually . . . that's what mother said . . . don't see, though, how they'll ever get away with it . . ." He smiled wryly as he thought of his mother talking about "drinking," smiled at the glass in his hand resting on the arm of the chair as if that pleasant, cool object were somehow her representative here.

The Captain, seeing him smile at the glass, thought, as he looked from him to Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, who still was figur- ing on his pad : "Fine thing it was only lemonade the boys could get hold of on this trip . . . there would be plenty to worry about if Fitzpatrick, with all this navigation and these engines on his hands, were able to start kidding his nerves with pick- me-ups." He had protested as vehemently as the next one when they first had prohibited "wine" (that was the euphemism he and the rest had used) in the ships . . . "taking their damn, experimental spite out on the Navy which had no way to protect itself" . . . but he slowly had come to see the point in it ; he was seeing it very thankfully at this moment. His mind, however,

DELILAH 57

drifted back to the days when the point had not yet even been thought of, sauntered nostalgically along through old memories that rose before it as it went along, friendly, valorous mem- ories washed clean by time of all the headaches and vomit and lapses of efficiency . . . "but," he said to himself, precipitated back to thought by the first glimpse of Chief Machinist's Mate Stengle walking toward the quarter-deck, "ships were slower in those days . . . the whole thing was slower . . . you had more time to retrieve yourself . . . mistakes . . . not so much ticklish machinery . . ."

Stengle came straight aft and stood informally at attention. He, as a matter of fact, could stand at attention in no other manner. His entire being, washed and clean garbed though it now was, was somehow irremediably informal and dirty; not soiled, but dirty in a kind of pure, smeary, earthy way. He was about five feet, six inches tall and he could not have weighed the proper amount even for that scanty height ; but they waived that, each time he was up for re-enlistment, just as they waived his stomach trouble. He had fifteen years of impeccable service behind him, and in the opinions of the Captain and Lieutenant Fitzpatrick he knew more, from the practical aspect, about re- ciprocal steam engines than anybody else in the Navy. Lieuten- ant Fitzpatrick once had told him so, and on that occasion, Sten- gle's habitually contemptuous face had betrayed no pleasure, no emotion of any kind, as it certainly would have done if this compliment had been paid him by any enlisted man associated with him in the black gang. Officers had come to mean, for him, something quite impersonal, something theoretical, not human, mere gold-bedecked symbols of the irresistible power that gave pattern and compulsion to the world about him. Now, he fixed his small, restless, black eyes on Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's bowed head until the officer looked up and stared at him without rec- ognition for a moment, struggling to slow down and divert to the man before him the stream of consciousness that had been pouring along over the figures on the pad. With what bor- dered on a grimace he finally synthesized the shapeless, oil- soaked oxfords . . . the clean, worn dungaree trousers . . . the small paunch above the tight, black belt . . . the thin, brown

58 DELILAH

arms hanging loosely out of the white, cotton undershirt on the texture of which spots of sweat had begun to widen . . . the little, brown face . . . "All right, Stengle, what do you want?"

There almost was hostility in his tone ; but it was not because he disliked Stengle. He did like him. He would have said defi- nitely, if he had thought about it, that he even was fond of him. Here, now, however, the man's presence had struck him impor- tunately, as if he were in some way an unpleasant reminder.

"Sir, I would like to get a couple more days lay-up in one of these bays we go into. We'd oughta get at those bearings again . . . have to if my say counts for anything."

"Why !" said Lieutenant Fitzpatrick in surprise, his sensitive, arched eyebrows going up, "are they going that bad?"

The Captain quickly put in : "How will tomorrow morning do, Stengle?" He spoke from the depths of the chair where he had slumped, almost stretched out as if asleep, his arms akimbo across his face.

"It'll do fine, Captain." Stengle saluted as he spoke. He always saluted the Captain when he had any contact with him what- soever, even of the most casual, passing kind. If he had passed him twelve times in one hour, cap on or not, he would have raised his hand in his inept gesture precisely that many times, and without appearing ridiculous.

"That will do then. You may go."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Ensign Snell were startled. Even with danger hanging overhead like a sword on unravelling thread, the Captain never interfered with his three officers, never failed to give them the chance to go through with it, unless, as Ensign Snell phrased it, they were "about to drop the ball."

Ensign Snell looked away from the confusion that began to spread over Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's face, and fixed his eyes on the glass of lemonade in his hand as if this action would re- move him from consciousness of what was happening. If he had been able to think up some utterable excuse he would have left the quarter-deck. He got very red in the face.

A flicker of sadness held the region about the Captain's mouth as he sat up and looked at Lieutenant Fitzpatrick. A person looking at the Captain an instant later would have

DELILAH 59

thought that the expression on his face, if thsre was any defi- nite expression on it, was one, or recently had been one, of ex- treme reluctance. He put on his glasses, tossing the case on the little table, where it jangled warningly against the base of the lemonade pitcher. Here was the repugnant opportunity for which he had been waiting so carefully.

"Mr. Fitzpatrick, how did you come to miss the trouble about those bearings ? We oughtn't to have to wait for Stengle, you know." The anguish on the tired face, on which surprise still lingered, almost stopped him. "Stengle is a good man; but you are the Engineer Officer, remember. I think lately you're leav- ing too much of the job to him.,,

The pound of the ship's propellers, the mellow roar of an infinity of small bubbles bursting under her frothing stern, the hiss of the water along her sides, all combined to draw about the three men on the quarter-deck an effect of congealing silence. Ensign Snell was unsettled by a fear that Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, weakened and upset as he was, conscious of how much he had done, might try to excuse his neglect of the en- gines, might not "take his beating standing up." He got hold of a package of Fatima cigarettes on the table and lit one, lit it fumblingly behind cupped hands, which he kept up in front of his face even after the cigarette was lighted. With what was for him a nervous gesture, he stepped to the rail and looked at the sky. Turning around, his heavy face ingenuously lit up with a quite artificial smile, he said in a tone of voice appropriate to one just arriving through a doorway of a room full of friends, said briskly with no slightest intention of irony but only in a desperate, confused attempt to help his friend in this intolerable moment :

"It's a nice day . . . cooler."

With the contingency upon them of no prostitutes, no bar- rooms, no restaurants, nothing but the narrowness of the ailing ship struggling near breakdown in an ornate vacuum of

60 DELILAH

bright fish, sea and light, and the toiling forays upon the unreal land, the men soon became even more restless than before under the general tension and concern, which now was aggravated by much loose talk of the uncertainty ahead. The very leisureli- ness of the business pointed and underscored the tension. De- lilah made only a hundred and sixty or so miles even when she steamed for a steady twenty- four hours ; but this she rarely did, for, like an easily fatigued invalid, she paused almost every afternoon, to linger for the night, in the shelter of some con- venient, purple bay or in the lee of a jungled shoulder. Dis- abled as she was, the Captain was reluctant to risk any but the most necessary chance of her being caught by rough weather or of breaking down entirely, especially at night, while at sea: But these pauses, even when there were no Landing Parties, instead of providing a recess for the men, seemed only to call attention in another way, a delaying, retarding way, to the peculiar quality in their condition of ill-being.

Delilah's temperament, always a thing calling for skilful handling, now exhibited its most cross-grained aspects. In ap- parently deliberate recklessness of the careful persistency of their nursing and attention, she seemed to be doing everything in her power to make the lives of her men miserable. Not being able to range above seven knots, her most uneconomical speed, she kept the watches below feeding her an inordinate amount of coal. Her infirm condensers extracted so paltry a supply of fresh water that, when no safe supply was found ashore for her small storage tanks, the men were forced to wash less and drink water reminiscent of the sea from which it came. Almost continuously in her frequent stops, and often while she was under way, Stengle, his Machinist's Mates, the Boilermaker, the imperturbable, bald-headed Blacksmith and Lieutenant Fitz- patrick (who now with grim, exacting impartiality devoted half his time to the engines and half to the navigation) had to work at her ailing organs ; and whenever she was not at anchor dur- ing the warm, heady nights, disturbing enough in themselves, she kept many of the men anxiously awake with the knocking and thumping of her bad shaft and cylinder.

DELILAH 61

All this anxiousness and ever-increasing stress concentrated upon and penetrated the Captain as if he were the vital element in a barometer at the centre of a gathering storm. Sleep, for him, at anchor or under way, day or night, became a matter of occasional naps d^zed into semi-consciously while he stood on the bridge, a steadying hand on the grey-painted, canvas wind- breaker, or as he was stretched out on his bunk, fully dressed except for his shoes and cap, or as he sat in a chair on the quarter-deck, the backs of his joined hands over his eyes. At any hour of the night or early morning, if Delilah happened to be anchored, the Quartermaster on watch, pacing the starboard strip of deck, automatic pistol on his hip and long glass under his arm or night binoculars slung on a strap from his neck, would hear the Captain's impersonal, almost mechanical :

"Quartermaster."

When the Quartermaster sprang towards him with, "Here, Sir," he would ask :

"How's she holding?"

With the Quartermaster's answer, a look over the side at the water, a long gaze into the star-configured sky and then a glance at the nearest bulge of land, he would go back down be- low. His presence in the ship was so relentlessly supervisory, so powerfully at the back of its life, that his contact was al- most exclusively an indirect one, devoid of the savour and satis- fation of doing or finding out things for himself. He even did not dare to stand and watch the men working on the engines. They would get nervous, drop their tools or something of the sort.

A woman had asked him once, while he and Ensign Wood- bridge had been dining ashore with some civilians :

"Just what do you do on the ship, Captain?"

For a second he had tried to think of something he actually did do. Finally, he had had to answer truthfully :

"Not much of anything, I guess."

Ensign Woodbridge, seeing he was going to let it rest at that, had said sardonically :

"Oh, he just takes the responsibility. If I run the ship on the

62 DELILAH

rocks, or the man in the engine-room fails to stop her and she piles up on the dock, they court-martial him/'

"But suppose he's not to blame; suppose he's in bed or some- thing like that when it happens?"

"No matter; he's to blame just the same; even if it hap- pens while he's ashore."

This had startled the civilians. They had found it almost in- comprehensible. The impact in it for their sensibilities had been unintelligible but threatening, something like the flash of steel for the bull beneath the folds of the matador's bright cape.

One of the deeds that did fall within the nameless categories of his province was an attempt to lessen still further the con- centration, almost the fever of concentration, that had tight- ened itself about Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's being. Into the half of his time that he now permitted himself to devote to naviga- tion, he strove to crowd as much effort as he had given it before. "It had helped some," the Captain told himself, "raking him over the coals about the engines. But it wouldn't do to ride him too hard; he's so damn touchy . . . the devil only knew what course he'd take if I did . . . but I have to keep him in shape somehow . . . he's a marvel at this kind of business . . . almost guessed himself from one patch of deep water to another ... it was astonishing . . . but he's making himself sick . . . and that damn stretch of west coast still ahead."

He suggested to Lieutenant Fitzpatrick that he take ashore one of the Landing Parties that they sent over at each anchor- age to search about for caches of arms or anything that looked like traces of gun-runners.

". . . It'll do you good. You need the exercise."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick almost lost sight, then, of the fact that the man before him was his close friend, as well as the Captain of his ship. The idea flamed up in his temper that the man was nagging him . . . "What, in Christ's name, did he want anyway?" . . . His smallish, dark, Irish face, almost Span- ish in impress, frankly betrayed his indignation . . . "First he lands on me about leaving the engines too much to Stengle; now, when they really need attention, he wants me to go scratch-

DELILAH 63

ing around in the jungle ashore . . . God damn him anyhow !"

"Is that an order, Captain?" Lieutenant Fitzpatrick said thickly, standing at attention, his perspiring, grease-smeared chin pulled a little too high, a little absurdly high. From the Port Engine-room Hatchway, alongside which they were stand- ing, arose the sickening smell of burnt oil and dead steam, and the raw steel deck areas that a momentary drench of fierce rain had been able to reach beneath the awnings exhaled in the heat an acrid breath of oxidization.

"Of course not, Fitz. It's just a suggestion about which . . . when you get yourself together . . . you're to use your own judgment." He walked away.

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick climbed back down the engine-room ladder, gripping with a kind of ferocity at the greasy steel rungs, which felt hot and elusive on his sweating palms. Resent- ment and anger, the first anger his friend ever had aroused in him, pumped muttered exclamations to his lips and the blood in such a whirl to his head that he had difficulty in keeping his balance on the ladder.

In the end, dressed for the shore duty, he had walked aft with the natty swing of arms and legs that naturally pervaded his walk even with his face showing clearly the collapse of all tone and crispness in his being. He apologized formally to the Captain.

"Good!" said the Captain, the word plainly not being a re- sponse to the apology, but an accompaniment of his obvious taking in of the Landing Force uniform, "Enjoy yourself, Mr. Fitzpatrick, it looks fine country over there through the glass."

Then impulsively, his whole frame relaxing, Lieutenant Fitz- patrick had put out his hand as he had been in the act of turning to go. At once the Captain had taken it in his firm, dry grip.

"You're making a mountain out of a mole-hill, Fitz . . . out of a mole-hill. As a friend, if you'd treated me as badly as you're making out, I'd take you ashore and give you a trim- ming ; as the Commanding Officer, I would have had you con- fined to your room long ago . . . They're waiting in the boats there for you, Mr. Fitzpatrick."

64 DELILAH

These Landing Parties on Palawan aimed at exploring the land borders and approaches of the bays that might serve as bases for gun-runners. Usually the boats beached on great cres- cents of fine sand, glowingly pale, that stretched back past the high water mark, where an occasional, rebellious trunk leant wildly toward the sea from the vast palm groves, as silent and passive as abandoned cathedrals, in which the beaches lost them- selves. These groves the Landing Parties would explore thor- oughly, meeting tenaciously the demands of this mission in which they had no slightest confidence or belief. When, after floundering through the shaggy, dry slipper iness of palm debris layered for centuries beneath the great trees, they came to the barricades of jungle that inevitably walled in the groves, they looked for paths and openings. Failing to find them, they then attempted to break through the entanglement of often swampy vegetation, buttressed by heavy creepers with huge hairy leaves, ferns as tall as trees and massive vines armed with shiny spikes, that festered in the gloom beneath towering limbs from which orchids drooped. If they could not break through, they con- cluded that no gun-runners had broken through either. They never found what they were looking for, nor even a sign, save now and then a cluster of lost-seeming natives clinging to the margin of the sea, that any men of any kind ever had been there before them ; nor did they come upon a single one of those formidable relics of the Spaniards, a rampart, an esoteric flight of steps, a whole fort even, ruins all but obliterated in jungle, such as they had encountered everywhere else on their comings and goings throughout the archipelago.

The emptiness of the luxuriance through which they so faith- fully and stubbornly made their search did not, however, per- mit them to subside into unalertness. Once a Landing Party, tenaciously pressing along in a compact group through the obscurity of a less resistant avenue of greenery, jerked itself to a swaying halt on the very brink of a cliff so extensive, so faced with immense depth that it seemed the precipitous edge

DELILAH 65

of the world. What had helped to save them, to bring them up so abruptly just in time, was the unexpected blaze of the sun- shine into which they had plunged from the gloom of the forest. It was as if the universe had silently exploded in their faces. Under this vast illumination they gazed down into, out over, the profundity at their feet. Far below there, the delicate, close- packed tops of the tallest jungle trees stretched away as far as the eye could see in every direction like the surface of a green ocean rippled by a light breeze. Here and there on this limitless surface, hazy with distance and leafy depth, there glistened like spreading patches of vermilion and cream-coloured foam the clusters of those blossoms, blossoms of the creepers, of the parasites, of the trees themselves, that, reaching for the sun, had risen out of the dark smother beneath to waste their fla- grant beauty in the brilliance of this high desolation.

Sometimes they landed against shores from three to ten feet high, like ancient sea walls over which vegetation runners and thick roots had matted. They secured the boats to tide-exposed roots clustered with large oysters, dark roots which they could see, in only faint distortion through the weirdly clear water, ex- tending down into bright nothingness where fish like bursts of pigment swam flicker ingly about the tangle of submerged tendons as if these harboured some hidden desire. The men climbed the roots to the land, the boat-keeper passing up to them their haversacks, rifles and ammunition belts. At the end of each day's march, often bleeding from scratches in which the vegetation had left some stinging ichor, their bodies slowed down dangerously under the heat and humidity, their necks and wrists tense with the cling of black, puffed leeches in which the gorge of blood showed darkly, they would rush to the sea, fling off their sweat-drenched clothes and swim frantically for a few minutes. The boat-keeper, roused from his nap beneath a tarpaulin stretched across two thwarts, would climb a tree and keep a look- out over the clear water for the deep sight of a shark, a projectile in liquid crystal, hurling itself toward the swimmers.

Bidot, the Quartermaster, First-Class, climbing up to put on his clothes, would pause on the way up to pick a dozen or more of the great oysters bared by low tide. Holding on with

66 DELILAH

one hand, his slim, white body entwined with the black roots, he would select each shell carefully, as if he were an epicure in a familiar restaurant, and fling it up to solid ground. Up himself, he opened the oysters with his bayonet and sucked out the cool flesh with a loud and enthusiastic ripple. No one else would touch them; but, half persuaded, they gathered about Bidot as he ate, the expressions on their faces ranging from sheepish envy to smiling repugnance. Perhaps the great, juicy hunks of life were too dark, too generous, too apposite to the hard monstrosities, encrusted and misshapen, from which Bidot ex- tracted them. Once Cruck, the Chief Boatswain's Mate, his rugged, aggressive nakedness leaning over the sitting Hard- wood to pick off some clinging leeches, had held one of the small, bloated things out to Bidot with the remark, "Here, You, you might as well eat this too." The men had howled in de- lighted revulsion; but Bidot had gone on undeterred sucking at the oyster. Mixing the sucking motion of his lips with a soft, artless grin, he irrelevantly had nodded his head, from which the long, straight, wet hair hung down evenly as from the head of a Japanese.

On the occasion that Lieutenant Fitzpatrick went ashore with the Landing Force, they found a village composed of a dozen or more nipa shacks built out over the water on thin, cane piles, as if the dwellers there wanted to maintain themselves as far out as possible from the mysterious land. The inhabitants ap- peared to be Moros. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick searched the village thoroughly. The children peeked in solemn hostility from be- hind their bewildered, smiling mothers and fathers while Lieu- tenant Fitzpatrick, Cruck and Ferguson went through each tawny, fish-scented house to discover, as always when they en- countered the occasional village, nothing much besides a scat- tering of rice, mangoes and coco-nuts. It came out that one of the natives here could speak broken Spanish. Lieutenant Fitz- patrick, who could speak Spanish well, seized upon him eagerly as representing the first opportunity to make inquiries that had offered itself, since the ship left Puerto Princesa, in this fan- tastic world where the rare voices spoke a dialect as strange as the world itself.

DELILAH 6?

Standing face to face, their mouths aimed almost obtrusively at each other, the officer and the native shouted in the way men shout in seeking to communicate through a language that is but imperfectly mutual. They stood on a platform in the centre of the village, a platform made of thick, bamboo stalks laid and lashed with fibre side by side. Behind the spruce officer, his cap with its broad, gleaming ribbon of gold sitting at a slight angle on his neatly combed, black hair, the natives had gathered in loose order, forced there, in a sense, by the squad of sailors leaning on rifles that had lined up behind the Malay who spoke Spanish. This man was naked except for a width of bright green cloth draped around his tobacco-coloured hips and a sparse twist of similar cloth about the womanish coiffure of his stringy hair. His small body, smaller than Lieutenant Fitzpat- rick's, was wasted by some organic disease. His knee and elbow joints glistened bulbously in the intensely bright sunshine. His puffy lips, towards which his whole head and face appeared to stretch and strain, seemed unable to close, and about the lips and his blackened teeth seeped the bright vermilion of betel nut juice.

To Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's question as to whether there were any more men or villages near here, the sick man pointed up the coast, north-east, saying, 'Tar, far away." To this phrase in Spanish, he added a clicking, resonant word that was merely a pregnant sound for the officer, who then pointed inland and asked if there were any men in there. The native answered simply: "Never."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick asked him, at this, if he knew any- thing about a great cave somewhere across the island. The man did not understand, nor did he understand any elaborations or simplifications of the idea, until the officer got it into a Spanish equivalent of "underground river." Then the man's eyes widened as if he were a child just past infancy before whose gaze something wondrous has arrived. He fell back a step, shifted his eyes to the natives over Lieutenant Fitzpatrick's shoulder and flung them a restrained, staccato phrase. The smil- ing faces instantly reposed into shapely, expressionless ovals. Almost as one being they had flinched back without moving

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their feet. A very small baby, like a chocolate blossom lying confidently on the thin, hard symmetry of its father's breast, closed its great, liquid eyes at its parent's sudden movement, clutched more tightly in its minute hand a beflowered sprig of jasmine and began to cry.

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick looked at his men. He thought one of them must suddenly have waved a pistol. The Malay did not answer him, made no further sound. He gave off an unmistak- able impression of having been a victim of trespass. The thin crying of the child, the lapping of water under the platform, the slight knocking of a tied boat against a pile, the suck-suck of water struggling in some small cavity below took possession of the silence about them. From the shore, out of the great mass of sunward pouring green, against the background of which the clustered blossoms of a fire tree shone brilliantly like small, bloody wounds, an elongated bird sailed out over the sea, its colour lost and indistinguishable beneath the incandes- cence of the sky, its pursuit relentless and calm, its victim mad with light and the failing flutter of the great, dark membranes that served it for wings.

The officers always ate below, even in the warmest weather. There was no room on the small quarter-deck for the comfort- able spread of a table, and under way, a veritable rain of cin- ders from the stacks swept and dribbled in under the awning. If Ensign Woodbridge could be said to have had a stock set of conversational subjects, one of them certainly was his complaint that "always sticking the officers' quarters aft was an incon- venient bit of conventionalism." He had all kinds of arguments to support the contention that in designing each individual ship the Wardroom should be allocated to that portion of the vessel, wherever it might turn out to be, that would prove most com- fortable and most adaptable to the officers' needs and functions. He was developing his idea again at dinner, putting into his conversation fresh material in the form of items derived from

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his actually having redesigned the ship in the hours of the pre- vious night, when he had been unable to sleep.

''Take us now," he was saying, gesturing with his soup spoon, the handle of which he held droopingly by its tip be- tween right thumb and forefinger, "here we sit skidding around in this little box with the propellers trying to knock us out into the water. Cinders, noise, motion, we can't eat, sleep or think. We're packed in here, the most uncomfortable spot in the ship, like one of those four-masters Chips carves inside a bottle.''

He was waiting for the Captain to say to him, as he usually did, "Well, what would you propose? What scheme have you to take the place of this one?"

This time he was ready for him. He had a design roughly but carefully laid out on paper. It would take only the slightest rise to the bait on the Captain's part to send him striding into his room after the three sheets of paper on which he had a re- designed Delilah, clear and shipshape, to meet the Captain's invariable demand, in discussion, that if you tore something down, something had to be supplied in its place. But this time the Captain did not rise to the bait. He did not rise even when Ensign Woodbridge, struggling hard for his long-deferred chance of victory on the field of this subject, said :

"You'll never convince me this ship was designed by Naval Constructors . . ." he paused, looking hopefully, then ironically at the Captain . . . "it was designed by politicians."

Even this absurd remark did not get hold of the Captain's attention. The whirr of the small electric fan for some seconds, had no other rivalry than the clash of silver on china and the occasional blurred intake at Ensign Snell's lips when he forgot and sucked at his spoonful of soup instead of drinking from it. He had done this ever since he was a little boy . . . each time it happened now he remembered how invariably and patiently his mother had rebuked him for it at home. This slight action, never failing to remind him of his mother, carried with it a faint, pervading haze of pleasure. The old rebuke, which was what he thought he remembered, became the rebuke of the action now whenever it occurred. Abashed, he always stole a

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glance around to see if anyone had noticed. It was as if his mother were at the table, whispering a little too loudly : "Wil- liam, don't suck at your spoon!"

Nobody at the table, really, had taken in anything Ensign Woodbridge had said. To one side of the stream of thought running through the head of each had been the realization that their friend was talking about the Wardroom; but they knew what he had to say on that subject; they had heard it before. As the Tagalog Mess Attendant carried out the silver soup tureen and returned for the soup plates, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, as if impelled to utilize the temporarily clear space of table before him, pulled out his pad of note-paper and pencil. The pencil poised above the surface of the pad, arrested by the very thought it hung there ready to deal with. The direction of his stare seemed to indicate that his thought was concerned with the faintly visible spray of white leaves woven into the still whiter background of the table-cloth.

The Captain was turning over in his mind the incident ashore, which Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had reported to him in detail. Stripped of its drama and colour, the reaction of these natives to the question about the subterranean river was, in his thought, an item in the business to which he was turning his hand just as if it had been a gasket or a screw-bolt used in the repair of his engines. He was thinking about it still when the boy brought in the fruit.

"You know," he said aloud, "the way those people acted over there," he pointed to the port-hole full of sunset in which the cluster of bestilted, little houses was deeply framed, "is, at bottom, the way people acted in Puerto Princesa when I asked about that subterranean river." He laughed uncertainly. "The whites treated my question as a joke; said they didn't believe there was such a thing, that most likely it was just another native superstition. The natives, that fellow in charge of our coal barges, for instance, skeetered away from the ques- tion as if it had poison in it."

"It's marked definitely on the chart as being there, Captain," Lieutenant Fitzpatrick said, halting a golden slice of mango just below his lips.

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"Oh, I guess it's there all right ; but I wouldn't put too much faith in where the chart places it. The charts are very nearly blurring when they deal definitely with that west coast."

"The island is probably honeycombed with caves of one kind or another," said Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, "I saw an enormous bat over the village this afternoon."

"Probably a tree bat," said disgruntled Ensign Woodbridge.

"The native Constabulary Officer there at Puerto Princesa took it as a personal affront when I kept after him about it. Finally, he said to me in a sullen sort of way, as if I had been forcing him to eat dirt about something : 'Captain, the reason I haven't been over there yet is because you can't get there overland. It's directly across the island from here, but the jungle is impassable.' "

"Oh, but he's wrong about its position," said Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, "that is, if the chart's right. It's about opposite Tinitian, that little village off which we lay overnight, a couple of days before we got to Puerto Princesa."

"Likely as not they're both wrong," said Ensign Woodbridge.

The Captain pulled the band from a very thin cigar, slit the tip with a fruit knife, and lit it. Ensign Snell was smoking his cigarette between seemingly solid swallows of coffee.

"Partridge, that fellow with the general store," said the Captain, "told me that the former Constabulary Officer sta- tioned there, an American, had a good deal of information about the region where it's supposed to be, Saint Paul Bay, they call it. He said the American often had hiked across a trail that leads from somewhere in Honda Bay through a pass to Ulugan Bay, which is right next door, theoretically, to our underground river, and he said that this fellow once set out to climb some mountains there, mountains around five thousand feet high ; but the natives quit him cold when they got the idea these were the mountains under which this river was supposed to flow."

He smiled. Some amusing pattern had dropped, for a moment, over the puzzle in his mind. He continued to smile. Finally he leaned forward in his chair. Ensign Woodbridge knew at once that the Captain was going to tell a story. The others did not

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realize it until he said, after taking two short puffs at his cigar:

"These fellows all remind me of the man in Paris who got a note from a girl he'd picked up in a cafe." The Captain stopped and looked, slightly abashed, at Ensign Woodbridge. "I guess you've heard this all right." Ensign Woodbridge had; so had each of the others. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, to be exact, had heard the old story fifteen years ago if it was the story he was sure it was : But they all said quickly, almost together :

"I don't believe I have."

"Let's see."

"No, I haven't."

In this deceit lay no flattery, no hypocrisy: it was an act like recounting a fairy-tale to a child. Telling a story, around a table like this, was the only non-professional accomplishment after which the Captain strove. For him, somehow, the telling of a story was more than a device, a simple pleasure of gregari- ousness. It would have seemed ridiculous to him, for example, to have heard it placed in the same category as playing poker, a game at which he long and profitably had surpassed, and from which, as a result of the solemn, changeless expression his wrinkled face infallibly assumed throughout a game of it, he had gained his midshipman nickname, "Deacon." For him a story or a joke well told in an atmosphere of coffee and good tobacco was a splendid thing, the execution of which was to be classed with playing the violin, painting a picture or singing a song. He knew that it really was not, and he would not so have classified it outspokenly for others ; but in the privacy of his own secret standards, standards maintained by feeling rather than by thought, the classification held. To Ensign Woodbridge, who could not tell a short joke but who was a master at telling a pointed story, he paid a manifest deference that extended over into their professional relationship. It was quite realistically an attitude akin to that which musicians assumed towards Paderewski or Rachmaninoff. He always took Ensign Wood- bridge with him to dinners ashore if he could manage it; and when the young officer had skilfully and colour fully brought the whole table with him right up to a telling climax, the Captain would beam around at the guests with the assurance that he had

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brought along to the dinner something quite as fine as the duck and sherry of the hostess. He consciously attempted to profit by the technique he observed in Ensign Woodbridge's narrations, and he sensed nothing to the slightest degree absurd in this. The Captain told his stories well. The trouble was that his memory for them was so bad that he could not remember a story unless he had heard it three or four times. By the time he had heard one often enough to remember it, it was wilted, dead, superfluous. His Wardroom, however, stuck by him. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, certainly, would have accepted a bullet wound in preference to depriving the Captain of this luxury, this one release into, what was for him, fine art.

"This man, this American," the Captain continued, "had smiled at the girl, who was sitting at the table next to his. Of course," he put in hastily, "she probably had smiled at him first." Ensign Woodbridge was thinking : "He put that in because he sees himself as the man in the story." The Captain went on: "The girl stood up, looked speculatively at him for a moment, started to walk off with another smile over her shoulder, when she changed her mind and sat down at the table again. She pulled out a pencil and paper from her pocket-book and quickly wrote something on the paper. She leaned over and laid the paper on the man's table." Here the Captain, savour- ing to the full his position in the midst of the narration, stopped to look around at the faces of his audience. On the face of Ensign Woodbridge he could detect plainly the play of sincere delighted engrossment ; for Ensign Woodbridge was entertained with the vision of the Captain playing the part in this comedy into which he unconsciously had projected himself. This satis- factory look on Ensign Woodbridge's face kept the Captain from seeing too deeply into the faces of the others, on which was clamped the smiling, faintly over-enthusiastic expression that takes hold of faces whose owners do not want the true state of their reactions to a story disclosed.

The Captain blew a cloud of smoke at the low ceiling. It impacted, spread, recoiled down the surfaces of the four walls and clung in the dark green folds of the gathered drapes at the port-holes and the door to his room. The walls and ceiling were

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painted a very light, creamy green; the floor, on which there was a green rug, was shellacked a deep red. These colours took on a misty, delicate quality through the ambient smoke. The fragrance of the tobacco struggled pleasantly with the faint aroma of salt water and disinfectant that pervaded the Ward- room. "She then walked quickly away before he had time to make up his mind to do anything about her. He walked towards his hotel thinking about the note in his pocket. At a street lamp, one of these polyhedron affairs, you know, that lean lopsidedly from the top of a post, he stopped and tried to read the note. But it was beyond him; he only knew a few words of French. There was a policeman on the corner ; so he asked him, on the chance that he could speak English, if he would translate the note for him. The policeman could speak a little English. He would be 'delighted, enchanted' he said with that pompous, tricky way those fellows have. He took the note, his eyebrows went up, he got insulted, mad, then strode off saying he ought to arrest the man. He threw the note back at him.

"The poor fellow reached his hotel, his curiosity at fever pitch, but afraid to ask anyone what the paper said. He saw the bellboy then; you know, one of those birds that are always after you to let them get you a girl. Here was somebody that wouldn't be bothered by the damn thing. He called the boy up to his room, and asked him what the note said. The boy took it, read it, stared incredulously at the man and fell back a step. 'Monsieur!' he exclaimed in shocked horror and disgust, and fled from the room. And this was a boy, mind you," here the Captain pointed seriously with his cigar, "that would do any- thing, absolutely anything.

"He was now determined to get to the bottom of this thing before he went to bed; so he went out again and walked into the hooker district, where he searched around until he found the lowest dive in the place, a place where the vilest kind of degeneracy was the order of the day. Well, here he called the madam to one side and asked her if she spoke English. She said no, she didn't; but she had a fellow there who did. She summoned him, a horrible, slimy pimp, who took the note and read it. At once he screamed something at the madam, and

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both their faces took on a look of great disgust. They grabbed the poor man, others piled on, and they all threw him into the street, yelling horrified names after him.

"Now he was afraid to do anything more about the note; but his curiosity wasn't dead. Quite the opposite. He'd wait until he'd found a close friend, he decided, who wouldn't mis- understand the thing, to translate it for him. He stowed it away in his wallet. Finally, he went home on the steamer, and one of the first people he saw on board was an old and close friend, who he knew spoke perfect French. As the boat sailed out of the harbour, he called his friend to one side and told him the whole story. His friend said laughingly, 'Here, let me have it, I'll translate it for you in a jiffy.' He pulled the wallet out of his pocket. Inside it was the note. Eagerly he took it out. Unfolding it, he held it out to his grinning friend. The friend reached out his hand for it . . ." the Captain paused and looked from one of the officers to the other with a kind of warning clearly contained in his expression . . . "when the wind snatched the note and blew it overboard I"

The Captain relaxed back in his chair, delighted, relieved. Ensign Snell roared exclamations. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick laughed adroitly. Ensign Woodbridge alone of the three was laughing sincerely: he was laughing at the spectacle, even the fictitious spectacle, of the little Captain in a situation like that of the man in the story.

They were quiet for a time, their faces ruffled pleasantly by the smiles that lingered there, as the memory of a storm lingers on the sea's surface in the quiet atmosphere after the gale suddenly has vanished. Striving to prolong the pleasure of this dinner . . . the first easy-going minute they seemed to have had since leaving Taytay Bay . . . the Captain said :

"If there is any contraband in these parts, that subterranean river is probably where it is, because the Japs or whoever are running in the guns would think it the last place in the world where anyone would go prowling about . . . You know, it would have been a real help having that American Constabulary Officer along. Might have saved us a lot of trouble."

"What's the idea of replacing him with that little Tagalog?"

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asked Ensign Woodbridge. "Why, if a Moro stuck his head around a palm tree and shouted, 'Boo !' that bird would jump right in the bay with his eyes shut."

"That's the new policy," was the Captain's reply.

"I know, Captain, but why a native from way up north strutting it around down south here? . . . And that other one in Zamboanga, especially ! This isn't Tagalog country. Mindanao certainly isn't. Why not put Moros in these two jobs, for instance, if they must have natives? It is Moro country; and at least they'd be able to speak the language they use around here ... I don't think that clown in Puerto Princesa could speak a dozen words of this dialect."

"That's the new policy too. The're putting the whole shebang, every branch of the government, into the hands of the natives of Luzon and the other northern islands. That's what's behind all this trouble we're having now. The Moros think we've sold them out to the northern Philippinos, and they've started to fight. That's why the Manila crowd are so scared some firearms will be run in down here."

"But that's the rottenest thing I ever heard of !" exploded Ensign Woodbridge. "These people south, here, these Moros, are the only sound groups in the Philippines. Why ! The Taga- logs, Bicols and such riff-raff used to be their slaves . . . weak, barbarous trash that didn't even know how to grow rice until a few Chinks came down and conquered them. Hell, everybody's conquered them, done what they liked with them, Chinks, English, Spaniards, Americans. Everybody knows they used to run to the hills like rats whenever a few Moros would sail along their coasts."

The Captain shrugged his shoulders. He believed this too, believed it all the more as Ensign Woodbridge touched it with the quality of eloquence. "It's rottener even than that," the Cap- tain said. "Not long back, our politicians got most of the Moros to disarm and quit fighting. They even surrendered their arms as a sign of good faith, and they had plenty of them then. Came in and piled them up in the market places before the American Constabulary Officers. The deal was that the en- croachment on their territory by Tagalogs and such like, pro-

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tected by American arms, would stop . . . that if independence ever was granted, they wouldn't be left holding the bag with Northerners placed in authority over them." A faintly puzzled expression, perhaps a touch of shame took possession of the Captain's face. "As soon as the Moros had surrendered their arms, the politicians turned the poor devils right over to the Tagalog bosses. They're even putting northern native Constab- ulary Officers over them, as you see. That's why the southern half of the islands is so dead set against what the northern half calls, 'Independence.' "

"Well, the Northerners are Christians," defended Lieutenant Fitzpatrick. He immediately was embarrassed by having uttered this phrase. It had not sounded like what he meant at all. What really was in his feelings was that these people that the Captain and Woodbridge complained of were Catholics, like himself; but his intellect would not permit his emotions, for some reason or other, to make precisely clear what he would have said.

"Christians!" exclaimed Ensign Woodbridge. "Bare-assed Christians ! They'd be anything . . . Christians, Buddhists or anything else their conquerors were."

"But look at the Moros," continued Ensign Woodbridge, "the real Moros in the hills back of Zamboanga and Jolo . . . and incidentally, if you want to go by size, Mindanao is damn near as big as Luzon . . . has anybody ever conquered them? Not so that you can notice it! We're still battling them, and we've got way farther than anybody else. But . . . Why! We can't even send a liberty party ashore inside the walls of Jolo without issuing out automatics."

Lieutenant Fitzpatrick started to say that it was far from his intention to defend what was going on; and Ensign Snell launched a question; but Ensign Woodbridge, as if he had not noticed this, resumed :

"And what are the Moros fighting to defend? A real culture . . . the only culture that ever has flourished in these islands, a culture that takes in beautiful brass- work, and weaving, and real sculpture and poetry. That's why it's so sickening when the dispatches to the papers in the States call them bandits. The Moros are literate, and they were literate, too, before we or

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the Spaniards or anybody else got here. With my own eyes I've seen, in every part of these southern islands, gangs of little children gathered around a schoolmaster with a Koran, learning to read . . . and that same thing's been going on for centuries."

All at once he stuck his face across the table at Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, bent on ignoring the evident probability that that officer really might be agreeing with his position almost in detail. His curly hair, his blue-green eyes, the pastel-like texture of his skin, his long clean-cut face over the high, starched collar of his white blouse seemed literally to glow with young- ness, aroused and alluring, as if over him had been poured some magical, golden liquid that seduced and compelled. He was becoming excited, which had a tendency to dispel the adroit, Mephistophelean atmosphere that habitually surrounded his speech and attitudes ; and under the stress of this excitement his southern accent became more pronounced.

"Did you ever see any of those gooks up north with a book that the Americans, English or Spaniards didn't bring? Did you ever see a book anywhere up there outside the Manila region, for that matter? Everybody knows that illiteracy in the northern islands, in any and all languages, is just about one-hundred per cent. Christians, for Christ's sake! What's that got to do with it?"

"Some Caloocan skirt must have left you waiting in a carratnato" said Lieutenant Fitzpatrick sarcastically, helplessly.

"Sure she has," replied Ensign Woodbridge, "but not very long! . . . And that's a point too, if you want to bring it up. That's just what the crowd on Luzon, Samar and Leyte are, a gang of whores . . . and pimps . . . and bootblacks."

"Come, come, now, Woodbridge," interjected the Captain.

"Let me ask them just one more thing, Captain," pleaded Ensign Woodbridge, including in his attack poor Ensign Snell, who had been congratulating himself, with a touch of depreca- tory smile on his face, on being well out of this. Ensign Wood- bridge lowered his voice as if restrained by the fact that he was addressing the Captain, "Just one more thing and then I'm done. Tell me this : Have any of you ever encountered on Luzon a whore, a pimp or a bootblack ?"

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"Not as many as you have, probably," jeered Lieutenant Fitzpatrick.

"You bet you have, and not just around Manila either, but in every barrio from one end of the northern islands to the other. On the other hand, did you ever encounter a Mindanao or Jolo whore, pimp or bootblack ?"

"Sure !" testified Ensign Snell firmly.

"Where?"

"In Jolo."

"O that!" grudged Ensign Woodbridge scornfully. "All right then, Tulai Mary, a couple of her friends ... a couple of whores in the whole of Mindanao and Jolo ; but how about pimps and bootblacks ?"

"Cheap sophistry," said Lieutenant Fitzpatrick.

"Cheap sophistry, hell!" answered Ensign Woodbridge, "It brings out just the point you, yourself, dragged into the dis- cussion. The Tagalogs and such mongrels are tribes that take easily to whoring, pimping and bootblacking . . . while the Moros, even these water Moros that hang on around the coasts . . . Why, man, the proof of the whole thing lies in the fact that wherever the Army stations a garrison down south here they have to import a couple of housefuls of Jap girls to keep the boys from going crazy. But they don't have to import any for the posts up in the northern islands !"

At this moment, some general vision of the remote and alien tragedy in which he was being forced to take part sailed full- rigged out onto his consciousness. His excitement recalescing, his accent deepening, his voice seemed to take on a shadow of the orchestral quality that soars with the pain and beauty of some great, tragic phrase in minor.

"The Moros are a fine, literate people who look you straight in the eye. Take them now, out all over their islands ready to face all comers . . . machine guns, battleships and all. They've got nothing to fight with but a few knives. But they get out there and die . . . you've seen them, I've seen them ... in the open sunshine, dressed in gay silks and gold filigree buttons, dying in defence of their weaving and their sculpture, their

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brass-work and their decent traditions, their poetry and their pure women."

The other three were powerfully disturbed by this final out- burst. While Ensign Woodbridge, silently filling his pipe with hands that almost trembled, sought to regather about him the folds of his usual urbane manner, they looked down steadily as if their eyes were held by what they saw reflected in some morose pool deep within their beings. It had been a clear implication, a too clear implication, of the tension at the bottom of the whole business of their life out here, a business that inevitably was a perversion, somehow, of the life they had taken solemn oath to lead . . . "It isn't really the intention of the politicians to sell out like this . . . bad as they are ... I don't believe that," the Captain told himself, as he unconsciously drew and redrew a triangle with his thumbnail on the elusive pattern of the table-cloth . . . "They weren't doing it deliberately. They just couldn't help following the path of least resistance ... a kind of moral laziness . . . The native Manila politicos wheedled around the weak American office-holders out here as kept women wheedle and nag things out of the men that keep them . . . the Moros scorned that kind of stuff . . . and here I am out here ready to kill off all the decent people in the islands for the sake of the scum ... to put the finishing touches to the destruction of a fine, free people . . . And for what? . . . Simply to turn them over to a wretched crew of half-breed intriguers whose only previous relationship to them has been the occasional one of slave . . . The whole American position here was wrong . . . it was like those unhealthy combinations you see in a boarding school where the nasty little boy, protected by the bully for dubious favours, goes around hitting the decent children . . . and the Moros were the decent people out here, there was no doubt about that . . . nor much doubt that the Americans were the bully and the northern islanders the nasty little boy . . . By God ! It was worse even than that ! ... It was exactly like the Reconstruction when we sent an army into the Southern States to put niggers and carpet-baggers in all the offices over the whites . . . and all because these poor devils of Moros had

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the courage to maintain their integrity while the Tagalogs and such like were smirking and lying on their backs for anybody who happened to beach a ship in their vicinity . . . What was eating these northern tribes anyhow ? . . . They weren't content with running their own show in their own islands and letting the Moros settle down and run theirs . . . They seemed to have some kind of feverish, fixed idea about acting the part of conquerors over the Moros . . . with the help of the American good right arm, of course . . . And what the Moros wouldn't do to them if the Americans weren't there to back them up and take the Moros' guns away ! ... In those old days, before the occupations, the Moros really had been something . . . they were organized . . . even to the point of sailing large vessels, war vessels, in fleets and manoeuvring them . . . That monk said they used to signal from ship to ship with red flags . . . a wig-wag system . . . Even in his time, the monk said, he had seen a column of these praus swing, on signal, right- front-into- line in a stiff breeze off Sarangani Island . . ."

Portness, the Radio Electrician, climbed down the conning- tower ladder and stood in the doorway looking at Ensign Woodbridge. He stirred about, rustled the radio message in his hand to attract attention. Ensign Woodbridge, who was the Signal Officer, looked up.

"All right, Portness, what have you got?"

"Code signal from Cavite, Sir." He stepped over, handed the message to the officer and swung back up through the conning-tower. As Ensign Woodbridge looked at the ominously long message, he realized that it was in code used only for signals of extreme secrecy and importance. His eyebrows arch- ing and his lips assuming the stance of a whistle, although no sound issued, he pushed the message past the silver vase of flowers in the centre of the table towards the Captain. As the piece of paper, this last straw of complication, travelled along the surface of the table-cloth with all their eyes following it, their moment of relaxation slowly died. Once more they became tense men on a crippled ship, whose hard-pressed, short-handed crew was growing dangerously restless, creeping through intense

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heat and ever-threatening waters into punishing mystery, creep- ing relentlessly to ensure the destruction of weird and gallant men who aroused in them only pity and admiration.

The Captain and the Signal Officer rose from the table and walked aft into the Captain's cabin where the Confidential Code Book was kept. It was heavily bound in lead so that it would sink quickly with the ship or when thrown into the sea.

The Captain, as he went through his door, the curtain of which was being held aside for him by Ensign Woodbridge, waved the piece of paper apologetically at Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Ensign Snell. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, in a voice that did not seem quite to succeed in tone and purpose, said smilingly :

"Captain, don't let the wind snatch it and blow it overboard. "

The legal limits and caste barriers, more formidable than iron and steel, that are placed between commissioned officers as a group and enlisted men as a group are no mere markers of class distinction, although they fit with seeming final apposite- ness into the aspects of this. They extend, too, with their rigidities slightly disguised under amenity, even into the more comprehending precincts beneath the quarter-deck, where each subordinate is separated by them from the officers above him in rank. This separation takes the concrete form of dividing into distinct wardrooms, where the size of the ship permits it, the three general classes of officer rank: junior officers, senior officers, Captain. The case of the Captain, that remote symbol of impeccable and irresistible power who even must dine alone when the facilities of his ship provide adequate isolation, is, in extreme degree, an explaining example of these limits and barriers which are as indispensable a part of war on the sea as are the guns and the compass.

The Captain never can be just a man from Illinois who sleeps in rumpled pyjamas, makes mistakes about history and uses his finger, when he thinks no one is looking, to push food onto his fork. Familiarity, when it is permitted to prevail, if it does not breed the proverbial contempt, certainly breeds

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between the giver and receiver of an order, an order that may lead to death or frightful mutilation, at least two things impair- ing the confidence, the aggressiveness and the speed with which a battle crisis must be met.

First, in the giver of the order, it breeds a realization that if he takes this step, which in his judgment is exigently indi- cated, it may convert into a gory horror that tall, ruddy- faced man who has the next chair at dinner, who likes radishes, which he eats with a loud rending noise, and who smiles with pleasure when his home town of Baltimore is mentioned. The order may be given; but the doubts, emotional stresses and tempta- tions to rationalization, set up then, distract from the almost inhuman concentration on the development of the battle that must prevail, if those already dead in the struggle are not to have died in vain and the battle is to be won.

Second, in the receiver of the order, familiarity breeds the constant reminder that the giver is merely a human being like himself, that the tactics on which he bases the summons to death may be as faulty as his familiar table manners, that he may be as mistaken here, in this fatal matter, as he was the other night at dinner in regards to the basic causes of the War Between the States. In the end, the order may be obeyed ; but the slight taint of hesitation, dissatisfaction and lack of confi- dence in the obedience may be quite sufficient to infect a hundred surrounding men, lead to a half-hearted spurt where fury, accuracy and decisiveness are imperative. It was no crowd of cronies that responded with lethal alacrity to the command, "Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!"

These limits and barriers are a device, operating constantly, in battle and out, afloat and ashore, in work and in friendly conversation, to remind all concerned, keeping it protected and vividly functioning, that it is not this nondescript, little indi- vidual in glasses, this mere human being, who gives the order, who must be saluted, in whose presence all must stand; but that it is something essentially non-confusable with his per- sonality that gives the order, and to which the deference must be paid, something that is but reposed in him as a jewel is

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placed in a rough and makeshift casket with which its ultimate quality is not to be confused.

The order to engage the enemy may come from lips belonging to a man familiarly describable in terms of human failings, possibly of vulgarities ; but these defects are hidden and made non-tainting behind the limits and barriers within which the man has been isolated and consecrated. If happily this man, in his person, is valiant, kindly, glamorous, then the order enjoys all the added benefit of this personal setting, much as the jewel is more advantageously displayed in a beautiful case : Yet it merely is through the man, through his years of training and testing, his consecration, that the order to steam into death roars out to his crews, roars straight up out of the living depths be- neath a hundred million people fighting for a richer and more significant life, depths where a band of lonely Pilgrims still make the first covenant to "submit to such government and governors as they should by common consent agree to make and choose" . . . where gentlemen still rear the spacious and graceful man- sions on the fragrant margins of tidewater . . . where a frozen Army, dying and forlorn on ice-bound Pennsylvania hills, still bleeds out a gleaming pattern within the loom of its dreaming, iron leader's will . . . where women, like rare, embattled flowers, fighting back to back with their men in a fantastic ordeal of isolation and raddled death, earn for themselves an unparal- leled freedom . . . where the dream of schools free and open to all of whatever creed and aim is passionately realized even through famine and corruption . . . where Poe and Bierce sing of desire and hope lost in the ferocity of a lovely and monu- mental wilderness . . . where Willard Gibbs still launches the theorems that gave to the modern world the chemistry of its very life . . . where prairie schooners still breast the mystery of vaster landscapes than men with women and children ever had dared before . . . where two brothers still conquer first the yearning desert of the sky . . . where a lesser, seven hour a day slavery to the machine is substituted for the bestializing, dawn to dusk slavery to the land . . . where Melville, with his pale monster, still chants in mephitic, beguiling frightfulness his rebuttal to Dante's Comedy ... the cogent summons from

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these depths it is, in times of clear right or inescapable wrong, crystallized, reposed within the essentially irrelevant person of the Captain, together there with the covenant pledging the decision of their efforts to Death or Victory, this it is before which the men of Delilah's world stand, salute and obey.

These rigid limits and barriers, set between superior and subordinate Commissioned Officers in the attempt to differen- tiate and preserve from being lost in the individual the power reposed in him, are graphically understood by those concerned : But between the Commissioned Officers and the crew, the limits and barriers, like foundations that grow broader and vaster as they sink deeper into the earth, become less matters for under- standing than for apprehending, and intangible though they are, their formidable cleavage makes of the group in the Wardroom a different order of beings from the group in the Forecastle.

To the enlisted men, amongst whose various grades of Chief Petty Officer, Petty Officer, Seaman and Fireman the rigid limits and barriers are not set up, the Commissioned Officers loom as a kind of golden, incomprehensible cloud ever on their horizons, a removed, privileged existence almost beyond aspira- tion, beyond envy, a cloud to be understood, as an entity, only through portents, signs, visitations and, in a measure, through long experience, an aureate nimbus from which the inescapable lightning plays, supervising every detail of their existences, advancing them, demoting them, giving them money, taking it away, feeding them, imprisoning them, leading them to die. However, Chief Machinist's Mate Stengle, for example, a man impossible to think of as sentimentally patriotic, could be brought to say, as the result of a more definite realization than this general attitude of the enlisted man implies, that it was not Borden, himself, that he saluted when he stood before the Captain, but that it was "the two-and-a-half gold stripes on his shoulders."

To the officers, the group in the forecastle is a murky clot of being quite as mysterious in their eyes as they are to it. They apprehend this group much as if it actually were a part of the ship, its thrilling and brutal blood, a thing, like O'Connel to Warrington's mind, of wild and formidable power coupled

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with devastating irresponsibility, which at all costs must be confined within the vital veins and organs of the ship. The officers peer respectfully into this phenomenon at the founda- tion of their existences with something akin to the strange sensation that is aroused by a primordial odour ... by a sight of the tentacles of a great, uprooted tree, dark, moist, bowel- like ... by blood pulsing in regular spurts from a hole in a bulge of white skin above an artery ... by the labyrinth of an opened ant heap ... or by the mystic confusion of entrails from an animal. Despite this sensing of the wild, primordial power beneath- them, and their respect for it, the officers yet go jovially about the business of keeping this power harnessed within its courses, go about it as assuredly as a mahout keeping a giant elephant at piling teak. This joviality the men recognize as a proper omen. They accept, too, its absence in the mere, grim hardness of a truly bleak nature ; but the smirk on the face of an officer who in confronting them confronts something that he fears, or the defensive hardness on the face of an officer who is intimidated by them, they instantly scent out as a danger to their very lives.

It was across these legal limits and caste barriers separating them, chasms and walls that have resisted mutiny, boredom, political pressure, death and ridicule, that Lieutenant Fitz- patrick, the officer, and Warrington, the enlisted man, in a night watch as Delilah loped slowly along over the glassy plains of lonely water under the Malay moon, were swept towards each other by an incalculable current, a mere, off-routine eddy of humorous warmth, which was to hurl them, much before they realized it, deep into the proscribed territory of each others' personal orientations.

It is probable that no other powerful combination of the frail elements composing the event would have served to breach the great wall between them, that no other synthesis of time, place, droll crisis, laughter and careless remarks would have served to plunge the officer so suddenly and quietly through into the disturbing universe of the boy's mind, leaving him no time to administer a mutual curb, nor even to derive a warn-

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ing that one might be necessary. He had mounted the bridge ladder to go on watch, as he had done countless times before, fol- lowed by a seaman in dungarees, by a man enlisted to serve his time in the world's toughest corps of mercenaries. Then suddenly this trained barbarian from the depths of the forecastle, who was to obey his slightest order and give him manual assistance in driving the ship across four hours of sea, had been veered around by a tangential gust of humanity. The officer had found himself played upon, with unbalancing unexpectedness, by the very kind of human power to which he was most susceptible, found himself face to face with a strange, gentle being, fierce with idealism, equipped with the traditions of formal scholar- ship, and alluring with all those responses that most clearly are delineated by suggesting that, being present in the per- sonality of a man, they complement the sound subtleties and spiritual disciplines of a finely bred woman.

In the previous watches that he had stood with Warrington since the forced run to Isla-Sulu, he, as Executive Officer responsible for the training of the crew, had taken advantage of leisure moments to coach the boy for an examination for promotion to the Petty Officer rating of Quartermaster, Third- Class. Although the new hand had been assigned on the bridge to strike for this rating when he had first arrived in the ship, his achievement of it had been then but a distant possibility, for he was only an Ordinary Seaman; but after his display of indomitable, emergency quality in the fire-room, the Captain, in effect, had ordered Warrington advanced to Seaman. The Executive Officer, pleased to find his original prejudice in assigning the boy to so important a station as the bridge thus speedily confirmed, immediately had set about helping to pre- pare him for the further promotion; for which he now was eligible. He had arranged, in order to enlarge the opportunity for this instruction, that Warrington, acting as his Quarter- master, stood nearly all his sea watches with him.

It was neither Lieutenant Fitzpatrick nor Warrington who first realized that this program of instruction had been deviated from, that their conversation had ceased to deal with quarter-

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decks and signal flags, soundings and bearings : It was Saunders, the Seaman at the wheel. From his post in the darkness at the rear of the bridge, he listened with surprise, then with increasing uneasiness, to the officer and enlisted man warmly, personally giving and taking long sentences and big words over some subject that significantly had nothing whatsoever to do with the watch, the ship or even, any longer, with the laughable incident in which they had found their predecessors of the watch involved. At the end of the first two hours, when his relief, Cruck, came up to take over the wheel, Saunders shot a few surreptitious words into the Chief Boatswain's Mate's ear regarding what was going on, and Cruck, setting himself at the wheel as some rugged neighbour woman might position herself at a window to get the full benefit of a next-door event, prepared to satisfy himself as to just what had so astonished Saunders.

By noon the next day, the whole crew was astir with the report of the conversation as rendered by Saunders, who in speech, spiritual equipment and person was a slightly fatter and smoother version of Cruck. The latter, relegated to the status of corroborator by a sort of crude dignity he insisted on maintaining in the varying degree that, at any given moment, he realized his prestige as Chief Boatswain's Mate, was turned to by Saunders at almost every punctuational point in his report with such interjections as, "Ain't that right?" . . . "Didn't he?" . . . "He says that to him, I'm a son of a bitch if he didn't, didn't he, Cruck ?" The portentousness with which Cruck's brutal face and head gestured assent and backing to the narrative leant a kind of sanction to the curiosity of the men, framed as it was in the nerve-pressing bareness of their present situation. It almost was as if— forced by the absence of usual interests and stimuli, women's bodies, alcohol, res- taurant food, shore brawls, new people — they had tuned down their receptivities to the substitution of such stimulation as this unique event. On each succeeding day for nearly two weeks, men off watch gathered in the forecastle to hear whatever pair of helmsmen that just had stood a watch with Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Warrington repeat, in necessarily approximated

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and caricatured terms, the progress of the continued conversa- tion.

Beginning when they laughingly had exchanged remarks about the ridiculous event introducing that watch, they had drifted without thinking about it into a sequential discussion of the human trait, as old, no doubt, as consciousness itself, that causes men to project into entities that by definition are lifeless, such as the sun, a mountain, an abstraction or a ship, the sentience of a human being or an animal. They had gone on from this to the difference between an "emotion" and an "instinct," and when Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had to speak to the engine-room near the end of the watch, they were dealing with the possibility that what in one race bordered on being an "instinct," might in another race border on being an "emo- tion." They resumed the conversation every time they were on the bridge alone, alone, that is, save for the routine, mechanical presence of the helmsman. Oblivious of him, and all unconscious that through him, whoever he might be, the entire enlisted per- sonnel was their eager audience, they soon were hunting down the apparently safe valleys of mutual readings, stalking along the not quite so safe ridges of parallel thinking, strolling arm in arm through the recalled visions of pleasant places they both had visited, and darting, their sympathies and recognitions seeming almost miraculous to them, amongst the perilous inti- macies of their innermost philosophies and moralities.

The commonplace fragment of humorous incident that started them off, the mere breath of assault upon the barrier between them, proving efficacious only through some millionth chance by which the angle of incidence and very gentleness of the assault coincided with some pattern of weakness in the barrier, was in itself an outgrowth of Delilah's stricken health, her precarious situation and her persistent venting of her distress upon her men. On account of her high, thin, sail-like bow, Delilah was very sensitive to a wind, and had to be handled, especially at the low speeds to which she now was restricted, much as if she were a ship under sail. In her present mood, she continually had managed, on the night in question, to take the shifting, uncertain breeze on first one bow and then the other in spas-

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modic succession, driving the helmsman, struggling to keep her accurately on the course, further and further towards a crisis of impatience.

Ignorant of what the Captain's long code message had con- tained, and of the fact that it was this message that had led the Captain to reverse the schedule on which Delilah travelled by day and sought the shelter of the bays and inlets by night, Hardwood, the helmsman, had cursed the Captain to himself and ruminated on the evidence that the officers really did not know what they wanted, what was the best thing to do . . . "It was just plain murder to push this ship along through these crazy waters on a flickery night like this . . . and then hide all day in some damn bay like a galanipper in a hole . . . The way they'd mostly been doing before had some horse-sense to it travellin' by daylight . . . restin' up at night . . . that was the way to do it . . ." Standing there at the rear of the bridge, a bulky blot beneath the low, scallop-shaped, conning-tower awning, a shadow marionette nicking a shadow wheel, he sud- denly had been forced to transfer all of his irritation and atten- tion to Delilah; for the ship, as if she deliberately had been out to make a final attempt at breaking the uncommon patience with which he had borne her perverseness for nearly two hours, quickly had flung her head way off to starboard. When he rapidly had wound the wheel to the left to offset the puff of wind he had felt she must have been taking on her port cheek, she instantly had shaken clear of the fitful breeze and answered his rudder by jumping smartly past the course to the left. Ejecting soft, warm Alabama curses from the depths of his indignation into the golden glow of the binnacle bowl, Hard- wood had stopped her swing, had disgustedly given her what he knew should have brought her properly round, and then had lifted his head to glare at her arrogant nose trembling on the silvery horizon.

"You damn bitch, get back on thea!" he had flung at her.

Ensign Snell, on watch with him, had been slightly bent over the wind-breaker, staring down contemplatively for a moment at the fulsome, glistening, white furrows Delilah was turning up out of the black-green sea : but at this shout hurtling

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out of the night he had turned about and stared. So had Bidot, his Quartermaster of the watch. Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Warrington, coming up to relieve, startled by the astonishing exclamation up on the dark bridge, had paused on the ladder, one behind the other, with their heads and shoulders just above the level of the top step. When it finally had seeped through Ensign Snell's leisurely comprehension exactly what the sput- tering Hardwood's situation was, he had begun to laugh, a laugh from which his not inconsiderable reputation in the Squadron probably took its personal tones, a solid, lifting fugue that mounted easily from his muscular stomach, shook his body somewhat, twisted his pleasant, Americanized Dutch face into honest puckers and charged his eyes with amiable blue light.

"What's the matter? She teasing you?" he had said.

"I declah, Suh, evah since we pushed her outa Zambo' with that monk aboard she jes' won' seem to do no thin'."

8

The daylight watches on the bridge were not those that found Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Warrington, in any real sense, resuming their conversation. Throughout the day under way, the bridge, in addition to being the station from which the vessel was controlled and navigated, was the headquarters for numerous reports, instructions and orders regarding ship's work. Too, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick being the Executive Officer, the bridge absorbed, when he was on watch there, all the traffic that surrounded that general-managing function; and the Captain was forever mounting the bridge ladder in a casually determined manner, binoculars in hand, to inspect, with an air slightly redolent of the hesitations of courtesy rather than of apology, the compass, the Rough Log, the reaches of the ever-looming land and the expanse of glittering sea towards whose horizon he was trusting (there was never any doubt of that) the three on the bridge safely to pilot his ship. Consequently, it was in the night watches, especially in the bitter vigil from Midnight-to-Four in the morning, watches

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free from interrupting visits to the bridge by any save the Captain, solitary watches in which there was little to do through four long hours of darkness but keep a look-out over the sea and hold the ship on her course, that their opportunity virtually was forced upon the Officer and the Seaman who had so much to say to each other.

Always, at the beginning of each of these watches they stood together, Warrington, who usually preceded Lieutenant Fitzpatrick by some minutes in taking over the watch, would hasten through the preliminary routine involved and stand stiffly on the starboard side of the bridge, against the curve of the wind-breaker, gazing intently ahead over Delilah's bow at the horizon as if he hoped to see arise there an assurance that the officer would reopen their communion. Each time, his hope that this would come about, as well as his fear that it would not, or that the Captain's also coming on the bridge would prevent it, was definitely desperate. Fatally exiled as he saw himself to be in this lost and brutal world of the forecastle, that first memorable watch, when he and the officer had been swept away from their moorings, had burst into the murk of his general, dangerous despair like the white flare on the life- preservers that are flung at night; and at the end of it, as at the end of the succeeding watches in which they talked, he had swum feverishly through the ship's routine towards the next possible descent of the saving illumination as if that possibility were the only purpose of his presence in the ship.

The hours that Delilah spent in the brilliant, obscure little anchorages, jungled retreats naively pigmented with strange fruits, rare flowers, with now and then a tiny cream-coloured woman and soft-eyed children who never before had seen an occidental, streamed between him and his next sea watch with Lieutenant Fitzpatrick like bright barricades of delay. Forced to leave in the Landing Party, a necessity he formerly had viewed with relief, he now was inundated by a feeling of deprivation, as if he were being driven perversely from a scene where something might happen of which he longed to become a part; and he would welcome the sailing out again of the ship beset by the same intensity of eagerness with which the rest

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of the crew had greeted its steaming in. This served still further to ungear him, within himself, from the alien turbulence of men in which he was immersed.

Before, the common anxiety, which he shared, to flee the oppressive ship had drawn him, in a kind of minor, mechanical sense, to an occasional participation in their community. To this degree he had been a real part of them, part of the Landing Party that would pour over the side as a man might seize, without permitting his desire to come up definitely to the surface of recognition, a chance to get away from a sick wife, whom, even before she was sick, he had thought of vaguely in terms of a desire for change.

In the first hour after the men would land, while they were tramping or resting in the jungle, the sudden remembrance of the ship and the necessity for going back to her would depress them; yet, after the expedition ashore had extended through hours of bizarre fragrances and vegetation, under the increasing pressure of strangeness pointed and compacted by the flash of an incredible bird, the sting of an iridescent insect, the threaten- ing droop of an eerie and monstrous tree, they would dash back out upon the beach almost cheering for sight of the grey little craft, usual, known, understood, floating trimly and safely there, a quick antidote for their dim feeling that they had been trembling on the verge of being lost in a brilliant and intolerable wilderness. Then on their way back, once more, with each stroke of the oars that brought them over the clear water closer to Delilah, the burden of their ordeal aboard her, a perceptible tightening of their nerves and spirits that was unconcealable beneath their loud ejaculations and laughter, would again settle down about them.

Warrington, however, now approached the ship with satis- faction. In this situation too, now, his attitude was polarized oppositely from these men. The former flash of unity with their vibrations, which he as well as they unconsciously had enjoyed, rising when in the brief moment of celebration on reaching the shore they had smiled together in the same way, at the same thing, at being free of the ship, now was no more. For him now the ship, with all its vacuous suffering, was a setting for, an in-

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discerptible part of, the rich contact with that mind and spirit which might, which must occur again. He approached the ship, the inimical emptiness of the world there, as if he had been an Epicurus approaching fanatical abstinence in an iron garden to deny himself all food so that, when eventually he did place on his tongue so much as a crumb, the poignant taste of it would spread like a revelation through his whole being.

The descent of night at sea, with its long lonely watches, now plunged him into a warm shadow of febrile anticipation. This was true, perhaps especially true, even of those nights on which he was scheduled to stand the dreaded Twelve-to-Four, that watch through the four most dark and lifeless hours of the ship's night. In the time before he and Lieutenant Fitzpatrick had broken into their first conversation, Warrington often had paid Arnold, Cavendish or Bidot two dollars, out of his salary of twenty-two dollars a month, to trade the Eight-to-Twelve or Four-to-Eight for this mid-watch when it came around to him. He, like most people in the ship, had found this watch to be one of the minor but miserable ordeals of his routine existence. The ordeal, which lasted sluggishly, like a hangover of dissipa- tion, quite through the working day following the night of the watch, arose out of the mechanics of the relationship between his being and sleep. After the hour of taps when he was free to do so, he would get to sleep between nine-thirty and ten o'clock. Better than this was seldom possible in the crowded forecastle of the noisy little vessel. After he had fallen asleep, it seemed to take the two hours or so of unconsciousness for his tired muscles, his tight nerves, his pressured brain to unwind their tensions and relax. Then just at the deathlike moment when sleep had begun to possess him completely, to pour through his being in soothing triumph the warm luxury of its healing peace, at the very moment when he was drugged most heavily but had not yet had time to gain any restoration from the drug, there would come a nightmare tug at his shoulder . . . "Twelve o'clock . . . You've got the Twelve-to-Four haven't you? . . . Come on, sailor . . . On your feet." He would sit up heavily, mechanically in the darkness, like a dead body

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responding reflexively to stimulation. Painfully his eyes would open wide under the dimly sensed necessity not of seeing but of convincing the oppressive shadow hovering impatiently above him that he actually was awake. Infuriatingly, the shadow would never disappear until he was on his feet. Then with all that made him think, feel and live writhing, helplessly abject and betrayed, within the heavy recesses of his mechanically aroused body, he would totter about on vague legs adjusting his clothes. The hurried mug of hot coffee from the big copper pot near the Forward Fire-room Hatch enabled him to breathe deeply, and he would smile at the one or two others, recently awakened like himself, who were gathered around the pot; but he smiled in precisely this same fashion, a tight, sharp grin in a face whose skin felt drawn and slick, even when no other men happened to be there at whom to smile. The brief lift of the hot stimulant carried him steadily enough up the bridge ladder and through the effort of officially taking over the watch from the man who had awakened him; after which he just stood there on the swaying top of the conning-tower until four o'clock in the morning, moving only to perform some occa- sional task or to keep himself awake until the time when he could return below for three more hours of sterile sleep, just stood there in the dark fighting for alertness, while his nerves slowly rewound their tightness, his brain its pressures and his muscles their tense resistance to fatigue.

What, for Warrington, had raised the routine abomination of this mid-watch to the power of a formidable dread was that it had been in this watch, in the darkness through which the ship slowly struggled across an infinity of surface as insub- stantial yet as implacable as the darkness, that the clear terror and despair of his fate, ambushing his relaxed spirit and thoughts suddenly severed from their drug of sleep, always had closed down in full force about him. As the black minutes passed, the despair and terror would press closer, closer, closer, to the muted pulse and beat of the machinery in which he was isolated, press in ferociously about him from all sides like the walls of Poe's torture chamber, until his successor, arriving

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with chronometerlike promptitude, had served as the touch on the lever throwing back, at the final crushing moment, the limits of contracting pain.

A determination to destroy himself had found in the despair of this particular four hours the empowering mechanism for its accomplishment. He had rigorously practised timing his resistance to the disaster of these four hours so that the resist- ance would reach its last limit of possibility at precisely four o'clock in the morning. If ever at this moment his relief were seven minutes late, he had determined, he would take this as his signal. At the seventh minute of lateness, after having per- mitted for these minutes the unresisted, searing constriction of the walls as they burst together upon him, he would plunge, already dead, over the ship's side. In the water, he would main- tain himself close to the side of the ship so that the two pro- pellers, when the stern caught up with him, would suck him into their blades : But now in this all too brief Twelve-to-Four, in the glorious privacy of this dark hole in the night, the jagged crystal of his fatal necessity was dissolved by the monopolizing intoxicant of his hope . . . He would cling, waiting, to the horizon . . . would hear the officer climbing the ladder behind him . . . would hear him step to the chart-board back of the helmsman and snap on its shaded light . . . would strive to gain a favourable premonition from the crisp, pleasant accents that went so surely about the responsible business of taking over the watch from Ensign Snell. "Will he relax from that official manner? . . . Will the conversation start once more?" Now the officer was coming towards him. He could sense him circling the faint redolence of the well-greased gun that par- titioned the centre of the bridge. He dared not glance around as Lieutenant Fitzpatrick ranged alongside him at the railing, his clean, starched uniform a tidy mass of blurred white angles and surfaces smudged with gold in the obscurity. Warrington had not the immediate courage to precipitate by a glance or a word the probable disaster of finding that, after all, the only fellow being whom he had reached in the dreadful desert of his situation had become again the inaccessible officer.

But Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, on his part, had gotten his curi-

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osity, his emotional and mental integrity, as well as his vanity, too deeply into this new, arresting personality, this challenging, unsuspected intellect, to withdraw from it summarily. Some- times he did wait for the rigid figure in dungarees to open the conversation. Once he waited for half an hour; but in the end, as always, he had to do it himself. Neither of them realized that once the boy had tried to carry the conversation to him, had tried by as much as a glance to point the obligation of their relationship, it might have served to check the officer's own advances, might have served in that mysterious way that makes one hesitate when the person towards whom one is struggling suddenly makes a gesture of encouragement. Such a hesitation, such a slight mechanical movement of withdrawal on the officer's part might have sufficed to remind him that certainly this was no relationship for him, might have made him, in the instant of pause, look about him in bewilderment at the territory he already had entered. But it actually was not until the opportunity for this withdrawal was quite passed, until he and Warrington after days of conversation, beginning to understand what manner of individual each had before him, had commenced instinctively the marshalling and aligning of forces for the inevitable struggle whose issue, when it can be decided, is moral supremacy, that Lieutenant Fitzpatrick real- ized fully the unusual, heretical plunge he had taken.

Once at the end of twelve hours of fiery sunlight through which they had lain at anchor behind Arrecife Island, lurking there in the tranquil inferno of coral reefs, sunken rocks and shallows of Island Bay like a ship in hiding from a powerful enemy, the other officers almost had gotten hold of a hint of this relationship growing up so swiftly between Lieutenant Fitzpatrick and Warrington, a hint of so extraordinary a thing as a breach in the everlasting social and official barriers between officer and enlisted man. On this occasion, the tang of some- thing out of the ordinary had aroused the Captain for a critical second or two from the preoccupation that had of late settled upon him. He had sat up in his chair and looked speculatively at the Executive Officer as if he had been about to look into something; but the fierce current of thought and feeling, like

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a heavy, exclusive illness, that had welled up out of the code message and swept him along, drowning everything but his preoccupation with it, had sucked him back before the intention had crystallized. The look, the question, the suggestion that would have resulted under ordinary circumstances, which, like a flash of light on a dark horizon, would have pulled Lieutenant Fitzpatrick up with the astonishing realization that he was dangerously off his course, never developed. The Captain had sunk back in his chair, the stimulus of something slightly wrong on the quarter-deck about him submerged, the brief moment of interruption unable to compete with the flood of danger, uneasiness and despair pouring from the code message through his consciousness.

All the officers were sitting together on the quarter-deck: the Captain, Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, Ensign Woodbridge and Ensign Snell. Delilah being at anchor, the Quartermaster of the watch, Warrington, was pacing soberly back and forth on the starboard side, the curt brim of his small, round, white hat turned down all around in non-regulation fashion to protect his grey eyes from the glare. One limit of his pacing was the small log desk fastened to the side of the After Conning-tower ; the other limit was a point abreast of Smokestack Number Four. Fie would pause now and then to study through his long- glass, which he braced for steadiness against an awning stanchion, the upward lick of the thin empty, black, horizon line to seaward, the rising, evanescent twist of white above a reef, the shimmering unreality of one or another of the numerous small islands above which an occasional palm tree hung like the dark framework of a burnt-out star. The day was cooling off. It soon would be possible to look steadily at the slick surface of the sea; but there was nothing for him to see there. There was nothing of importance for him to see on the land side either. It trembled there, the land, behind its screen of diminutive, feathered islands, like a flat, green and blue illusion stretched between the sky and sea. The high mountains, the nearer ones a glowing, mystical blue, those more distant betraying their greater height and distance only in

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appearing soft, grey and doubtful, hung above the misty, new- green heaviness of the jungle as if too light to sink down to it. The bright, disconnecting drifts of white vapour extended like ragged space between the jungle and what seemed the suspended base of the graceful mountains. There even was no sign of life, despite the cooling of the day, at the mouth of the little river shortly up which was hidden a tiny village. The one movement he had detected on the shore turned out to be, when he trained the glass on it, a flight