Уильям Моэм - The Narrow Corner

“Wake up the doctor, will you? I don’t half like the look of my Jap. Seems to me he’s sinking.”

“The doctor’s ’ere. Come to the side.”

The dinghy came on and Captain Nichols, leaning over, saw that the Australian was alone with a blackfellow.

“D’you want me to come over?” asked Dr. Saunders.

“Sorry to trouble you, doc, but I think he’s pretty bad.”

“I’ll come. Wait till I get my things.”

He stumbled down the companion and picked up a satchel in which he had what was necessary for emergencies. He climbed over the side and let himself down into the dinghy. The blackfellow rowed off quickly.

“You know what it is,” said the Australian, “you can’t get a diver for the asking, not a Jap, and they’re the only ones worth having. There isn’t one in the Arus out of a job now, and if I lose this chap it’s going to queer my pitch good and proper. I mean, I shall have to go all the way to Yokohama, and then the chances are I shall have to hang around for a month before I get what I want.”

The diver was lying on one of the lower bunks in the crew’s quarters. The air was fetid and the heat fearful. Two blackfellows were asleep and one of them, lying on his back, breathed stertorously. A third, sitting on his haunches on the floor by the sick man’s side, was staring at him with eyes that had no meaning. A hurricane lamp hanging from a beam gave a dim light. The diver was in a state of collapse. He was conscious, but when the doctor went up to him there was no change in the expression of the coal–black Oriental eyes. One might have thought that they gazed already at Eternity and could not be distracted by a transitory object. Dr. Saunders felt his pulse and put his hand on the clammy forehead. He gave him a hypodermic injection. He stood by the side of the bunk and looked reflectively at the recumbent form.

“Let’s go up and get a little air,” he said presently. “Tell this man to come and tell us if there’s any change.”

“Is he for it?” asked the Australian, when they got on deck.

“Looks like it.”

“God, I do have bad luck.”

The doctor chuckled. The Australian asked him to sit down. The night was as still as death. In the calm water the stars from their vast distances looked at themselves. The two men were silent. Some say that if you believe a thing with sufficient force it becomes true. For that Jap, lying there, dying there, painlessly, it was not the end, but the turning over of a page; he knew, as certainly as he knew that the sun in a few hours would rise, that he was but slipping from one life to another. Karma, the deeds of this as of all the other lives he had passed, would be somehow continued; and perhaps, in his exhaustion, the only emotion that remained to him was curiosity, anxious it might be or amused, to know in what condition he would be reborn. Dr. Saunders dozed off. He was awakened by a blackman’s hand on his shoulder.

“Come quick.”

The dawn was breaking. It was not yet day, but the light of the stars had dwindled and the sky was ghostly. He went below. The diver was sinking fast. His eyes were open still, but his pulse was imperceptible and his body had the coldness of death. Suddenly there was a little rattle, not loud, but deprecating and conciliatory, like the manners of the Japanese, and he was dead. The two sleepers had wakened and one sat on the edge of his bunk, his black naked legs dangling, while the other, as though he wanted to shut away from him what was happening so close, sat crouched on the floor with his back to the dying man, and held his head in his hands.

When the doctor went back on deck, and told the captain, he shrugged his shoulders.

“No physique, these Japs,” he said.

Dawn now was stealing over the water, and the first rays of the sun touched its stillness with cool and delicate colours.

“Well, I’ll be getting back to the Fenton ,” said the doctor. “I know the captain wants to sail soon after it’s light.”

“You’d better have some breakfast before you go. You must be pretty peckish.”

“Well, I could do with a cup of tea.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ve got some eggs, I was keeping them for the Jap, but he won’t want ’em now, let’s have some bacon and eggs.”

He shouted for the cook.

“I just fancy a plate of bacon and eggs,” he said, rubbing his hands. “They ought to be pretty fresh still.”

Presently the cook brought them, piping hot, with tea and biscuits.

“God, they smell good,” said the Australian. “Funny thing, you know, I never get tired of bacon and eggs. When I’m at home I have them every day. Sometimes my wife gives me something else for a change, but there’s nothing I like ’alf so much.”

But when the blackfellow was rowing Dr. Saunders back to the Fenton , it struck him that death was a funnier thing even than that the schooner’s captain should like bacon and eggs for breakfast. The flat sea was shining like polished steel. Its colours were pale and delicate like the colours in the boudoir of an eighteenth–century marquise. It seemed very odd to the doctor that men should die. There was something absurd in the notion that this pearl diver, the heir of innumerable generations, the result of a complicated process of evolution that had lasted since the planet was formed, here and now, because of a succession of accidents that confounded the imagination, should be brought to death on this lost and uninhabited spot.

Captain Nichols was shaving when the doctor reached the side and he gave him a hand to help him on board.

“Well, what’s the news?”

“Oh, he’s dead.”

“I thought as much. What’s bein’ done about buryin’ ’im?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask. I suppose they’ll just throw him overboard.”

“Like a dog?”

“Why not?”

The skipper gave signs of an agitation that not a little surprised Dr. Saunders.

“That won’t do at all. Not on a British vessel. He must be buried in the proper way. I mean, he must ’ave a proper service and all that.”

“He was a Buddhist or Shintoist or something like that, you know.”

“I can’t ’elp that. I been at sea, man and boy, for more than thirty years, and when a chap dies on a British ship he must ’ave a British funeral. Death levels all men, doc, you ought to know that, and at a time like this we can’t ’old it up against a fellow that he’s a Jap, or a nigger, or a dago, or anything. Hi, you men, lower a boat and look sharp about it. I’ll go over to the schooner meself. When I see you didn’t come back all this time I said to meself that this was going to ’appen. That’s why I was shavin’ when you come alongside.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m goin’ to talk to the skipper of that there schooner. We must do what’s right. Give that Jap a send–off in style. I’ve always made a point of that on every vessel I’ve commanded. Makes a rare good impression on the crew. Then they know what to expect if anything ’appens to them.”

The dinghy was lowered and the skipper rowed away. Fred Blake came aft. With his tousled hair, his clear skin and blue eyes, his springtime radiance, he looked like a young Bacchus in a Venetian picture. The doctor, tired after a night of little sleep, felt a moment’s envy of his insolent youth.

“How’s the patient, doctor?”

“Dead.”

“Some fellows have all the luck, don’t they?”

Dr. Saunders gave him a sharp look, but did not speak.

In a little while, they saw the dinghy coming back from the schooner, but without Captain Nichols. The man called Utan spoke English well. He brought them a message that they were all to go over.

“What the hell for?” asked Blake.