Читать книгу In Singapore - Clarence Stratton - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSHIPS MAY START FOR PORTS
At his very first visit to the authorities of the city, Thomas felt the difference between the crisp, efficient manner in which affairs were conducted here and the aimless, leisurely fashion he had seen in other city offices.
He was telling his tale to the young clerk at the City Hall, as he called it, when that young man, no older than Thomas himself, stopped him, before he had hardly started, with an impersonal direction:
“Central Police Station, 240 Johore Road, Room 56. Captain R. C. Dalton. Good-morning.”
Thomas was so shocked by the heartlessness of this dismissal that he stood and stared at the clerk with the green eye-shade. The other caught the blank face of the inquirer with the tail of his eye and looked up quickly from his blotter.
“Don’t think me curt,” he said kindly. “You must remember that on some days I have a score of inquiries like yours. And besides,” and here his blue eyes twinkled for a second, “if you want to find a trace of your father, the sooner you get to Captain Dalton, the sooner he can begin working on the case.”
The truth of that observation struck Thomas at once. His hearty, “You’re right. Thank you,” was called back over his shoulder as he dashed through the door into the corridor leading to the street.
“Must remember that,” he told himself as he walked smartly towards Johore Road. “Out here, not what you say but what you do counts.”
The quiet of the police offices was at first disappointing. He recalled his one experience in an American court room, and now the absence of people darting in and out, the absence of loud voices in the corridors, the absence of banging doors, the quieter voices of the officers, and, above all, the deadened footfalls of the natives who moved noiselessly about made the whole building much more impressive than it deserved to be.
The assistant in Captain Dalton’s anteroom listened more than he spoke. His pointed questions, asked in a matter-of-fact tone, nettled Thomas. Did this fellow realize that he had traveled halfway around the globe to talk to him? Did he know that he had come from America? In a brave attempt to impress this immense distance upon the automatic underling, Thomas broke out:
“I’ve come almost around the world!”
The young man understood the youth before him much better than the latter did himself.
“Nice little trip, isn’t it?” was all he answered. “I’ve been around the world myself—four times, in fact. And I worked nearly six months in your city of Chicago, too.”
“What is the use,” Thomas thought to himself, while the other’s nimble pen scratched on a blue report blank, “of trying to tell these people anything? They know it all in advance.”
“The last ships your father sailed on? Their names?”
The list that Thomas could give seemed woefully lacking, now that he was actually involved in starting his investigation.
“Know the one he sailed on into Penang?”
“No,” Thomas faltered.
“Sorry. Now the one he sailed in from Penang to Singapore.”
Thomas could only wiggle his head from left to right.
“That’s unfortunate.”
The stranger from the United States realized that he was not offering the police much help.
“Then how do you know he ever came here?”
Thomas could only gaze in astonishment.
“Why, his last letter said he was coming,” was all he could get out in a weak voice.
“Many a sailor or ship starts out for a place and never reaches it,” observed the clerk, leaning back in his chair.
That remark struck all Tom’s hopes and plans as a tidal wave might overwhelm a small boat. Down they went, totally wrecked. His thoughts leaped back to Penang, to the shipping he had so little regarded in the harbor, to the outlandish riggings from all the known and unknown ports of both hemispheres. How frightening was the remark that a ship could start out for a place and never reach it. He had never seen a wreck or a fatal collision. In his own harbor he had gazed on vessels with mashed-in bows slowly making their way up the channel. He had seen dismasted coasting schooners towed to shipyards by tugs. Ferryboats had collided in soupy fogs. Ocean liners had cut holes in the steel sides of cargo tramps. Newspapers had printed stories of heroic rescues in mid-ocean and accounts of total losses with no lives saved. But even though he was fitting himself to design ships that would be hammered by waves, beaten by storms, grazed by reefs, and pounded by rocks, he had never before felt the consequences of these misfortunes by wind and water to the people still on land.
With a suddenness that left him white and speechless the tremendous power of the waters of the globe swept over him. Often in jest his companions had uttered the meaningless phrases, “watery grave” and “trackless ocean,” without arousing in his mind any real picture of the horror of a grave in the depths of the mysterious seas or the helplessness of a disabled ship among running billows. The tragedy of the word “trackless” held him fixed:—the straining timbers, the hissing rigging, the sloping decks, the splintering masts, the cries of the men, the sucking whirlpools that mark the spot for a short time only, the few pieces of wreckage carried by winds and currents to distant shores; but where the tragedy occurred there are no marks to proclaim it to passers, no help to later seekers; and after the fury of the storm had exhausted itself, the waters would become as gentle and blue and inviting as any part of the smiling, beautiful ocean can be.
For the first time a sickening sense of the treacherous power of these masses of water—which until now he had instinctively admired and loved—took possession of his entire being. Before this untamed, strong thing he cowered, feeling himself no more than the weakest kind of insect in the immense universe.
He hardly heard the clerk’s cheery voice.
“All right. Just a minute now.”
Thomas was not aware that he had disappeared into the inner office. He sat huddled on the bench against the wall. For a few minutes longer he let his fancy dwell on all the terrors and horrors of the sea. Then resolutely he set his shoulders and drew his lips together firmly. He rubbed his fingers, for they had grown cold and numb with his fright. He set his eyes resolutely on the dull face of the office clock.
The sense of suffocation beat upon his aching chest exactly as it did when he stayed under water too long. That feeling jerked his mind back to himself. When that agony of holding his breath under water grew so keen that his eyes wavered and his senses began to reel, when the pressure on his chest threatened to crush his bones in another second, he had always found some degree of relief by beginning to let his stored-up breath out very gradually and to turn his gaze upwards towards the lightened surface of the water.
In an effort to gain some relief from the oppressive terror of the pictures in his brain, he did the same thing now. There was nothing on the ceiling to make him think of tempests and waves. He could gaze calmly on the cool green of its paint. His chest was filled to the bursting point with air that, in his emotional excitement, he had drawn in with deep breaths. Conscious that he was not forced to hold any in reserve until he reached the surface, he opened his mouth and released his chest muscles with a sound like that of steam escaping from the exhaust pipe of an engine.
Men and ships had gone down, of course, but both ships and men had weathered gales and typhoons; wooden bottoms torn by collision and rocks had held until port had been safely gained; hundreds of persons had been rescued in all seas; and men in small boats had crossed thousands of miles to reach land.
Storm and water, rocks and fire could do much; but man could do more.
Those few minutes in a bare room in a police office in far-away Singapore made Thomas suffer as much as any other equal length of time in his entire life. In compensation they gave him a truer respect for the elemental force his life-work would deal with, and a truer sense of the responsibility his profession would demand.
He had entered that building somewhat perky and over-confident. A few words from an unregarding clerk—who never suspected the effect of his utterly commonplace yet true words—had plunged Thomas into the depths of despondency. When he left that building he was a changed person. His boyish perkiness had been cast off. But he was no less confident in himself, for the determination that had spurred him on for months was too strong to be shaken by an emotion. He was more quietly and cautiously confident in his own abilities, less likely to make impulsive beginnings, stronger in endurance, and more patient in striving against hindrances.
The sense of swimming in an immensity was still strong upon him, for he brought himself back to his present surroundings by a vigorous shake of his head, exactly as he always did when he threw the water from his matted hair.
Had something been said to him that he had not heard?
He was on his feet facing the clerk, whose extended hand offered him a small identification card. Five minutes before, the clerk’s direction would have plunged him into deep despair over the delay. Now he could bear it calmly.
“Come back in three days, please.”
