made me pause. What did he mean? The unsteady phantom of terror behind his glassy eyes seemed to stand still and look into mine wistfully. “They turned me out of my bunk in the middle watch to look at her sinking,” he pursued in a reflective tone. His voice sounded alarmingly strong all at once. I was sorry for my folly. There was no snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in the perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a long row of empty iron bedsteads an accident case from some ship in the Roads sat up brown and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the forehead. Suddenly my interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like a tentacle and clawed my shoulder. “Only my eyes were good enough to see. I am famous for my eyesight. That’s why they called me, I expect. None of them was quick enough to see her go, but they saw that she was gone right enough, and sang out together – like this.” … A wolfish howl searched the very recesses of my soul. “Oh! make ’im dry up,” whined the accident case irritably. “You don’t believe me, I suppose,” went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit. “I tell you there are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf. Look under the bed.”
‘Of course I stooped instantly. I defy anybody not to have done so. “What can you see?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said, feeling awfully ashamed of myself. He scrutinised my face with wild and withering contempt. “Just so,” he said, “but if I were to look I could see – there’s no eyes like mine, I tell you.” Again he clawed, pulling at me downwards in his eagerness to relieve himself by a confidential communication. “Millions of pink toads. There’s no eyes like mine. Millions of pink toads. It’s worse than seeing a ship sink. I could look at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all day long. Why don’t they give me back my pipe? I would get a smoke while I watched these toads. The ship was full of them. They’ve got to be watched, you know.” He winked facetiously. The perspiration dripped on him off my head, my drill coat clung to my wet back: the afternoon breeze swept impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff folds of curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter’s gale in an old barn at home. “Don’t you let him start his hollering, mister,” hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel. The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly. “The ship was full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.,” he whispered with extreme rapidity. “All pink. All pink – as big as mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their ugly mouths. Ough! Ough!” Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks disclosed under the flat coverlet the outlines of meagre and agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after something in the air; his body trembled tensely like a released harp-string; and while I looked down, the spectral horror in him broke through his glassy gaze. Instantly his face of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines, became decomposed before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of desperate fear. He restrained a cry – “Ssh! what are they doing now down there?” he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon my mind in a lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness. “They are all asleep,” I answered, watching him narrowly. That was it. That’s what he wanted to hear; these were the exact words that could calm him. He drew a long breath. “Ssh! Quiet, steady. I am an old stager out here. I know them brutes. Bash in the head of the first that stirs. There’s too many of them, and she won’t swim more than ten minutes.” He panted again. “Hurry up,” he yelled suddenly, and went on in a steady scream: “They are all awake – millions of them. They are trampling on me! Wait! Oh, wait! I’ll smash them in heaps like flies. Wait for me! Help! H-e-elp!” An interminable and sustained howl completed my discomfiture. I saw in the distance the accident case raise deplorably both his hands to his bandaged head; a dresser, aproned to the chin showed himself in the vista of the ward, as if seen in the small end of a telescope. I confessed myself fairly routed, and without more ado, stepping out through one of the long windows, escaped into the outside gallery. The howl pursued me like a vengeance. I turned into a deserted landing, and suddenly all became very still and quiet around me, and I descended the bare and shiny staircase in a silence that enabled me to compose my distracted thoughts. Down below I met one of the resident surgeons who was crossing the courtyard and stopped me. “Been to see your man, Captain? I think we may let him go to-morrow. These fools have no notion of taking care of themselves, though. I say, we’ve got the chief engineer of that pilgrim ship here. A curious case. D.T.’s of the worst kind. He has been drinking hard in that Greek’s or Italian’s grog-shop for three days. What can you expect? Four bottles of that kind of brandy a day, I am told. Wonderful, if true. Sheeted with boiler-iron inside I should think. The head, ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious part is there’s some sort of method in his raving. I am trying to find out. Most unusual – that thread of logic in such a delirium. Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn’t. Good old tradition’s at a discount nowadays. Eh! His – er – visions are batrachian. Ha! ha! No, seriously, I never remember being so interested in a case of jim-jams before. He ought to be dead, don’t you know, after such a festive experiment. Oh! he is a tough object. Four-and-twenty years of the tropics too. You ought really to take a peep at him. Noble-looking old boozer. Most extraordinary man I ever met – medically, of course. Won’t you?”
‘I have been all along exhibiting the usual polite signs of interest, but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of want of time, and shook hands in a hurry. “I say,” he cried after me; “he can’t attend that inquiry. Is his evidence material, you think?”
‘“Not in the least,” I called back from the gateway.’
‘The authorities were evidently of the same opinion. The inquiry was not adjourned. It was held on the appointed day to satisfy the law, and it was well attended because of its human interest, no doubt. There was no incertitude as to facts – as to the one material fact, I mean. How the Patna came by her hurt it was impossible to find out; the court did not expect to find out; and in the whole audience there was not a man who cared. Yet, as I’ve told you, all the sailors in the port attended, and the waterside business was fully represented. Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them here was purely psychological – the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed. The examination of the only man able and willing to face it was beating futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of questions upon it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box, were the object to find out what’s inside. However, an official inquiry could not be any other thing. Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.
‘The young chap could have told them, and, though that very thing was the thing that interested the audience, the questions put to him necessarily led him away from what to me, for instance, would have been the only truth worth knowing. You can’t expect the constituted authorities to inquire into the state of a man’s soul – or is it only of his liver? Their business was to come down upon the consequences, and frankly, a casual police magistrate and two nautical assessors are not much good for anything else. I don’t mean to imply these fellows were stupid. The magistrate was very patient. One of the assessors was a sailing-ship skipper with a reddish beard, and of a pious disposition. Brierly was the other. Big Brierly. Some of you must have heard of Big Brierly – the captain of the crack ship of the Blue Star line. That’s the man.
‘He seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon him. He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust. At thirty-two he had one of the best commands going in the Eastern trade – and, what’s more, he thought a
