"I don't quite know," he said, "but I think I am right in saying you won't spread this around. Why? I base my ideas on what I see. I see a fine ship with lovely lines, when big holds are what make a ship pay. Everyone says the Etosha must be fast, and yet no one has ever seen her making much above twelve knots. I drop a question to the engineer, and he closes up like a clam, instead of displaying a warm admiration for his engines." He swung suddenly at me. "I hear you lost a man overboard to-day."
I was rapidly losing my temper.
"Yes," I snapped. "And there'll be another one over the side very soon now. Damn you and your impertinence, Stein. Get out!"
He continued to look at me coolly. "My mind is made to inquire and search out the truths of things in nature," he said in a pompous Teutonic way. "If Etosha were a beetle, I'd say she was a throwback from her species. But gentlemen, I waste your time. You will not reconsider?"
"No," I snapped.
"Ah well," he smiled while the jaw remained cruel. "Ah well." He turned and went.
The unpleasant taste left in our mouths by Stein's visit was to worsen a day or two later on the fishing grounds into something more sinister, almost a sailor's superstition that he was a harbinger of evil, through a strange incident. I took Etosha out into deep water at the spot where I judged the plankton, which comes up in the cold currents from the Antarctic, would be when it meets the warmer seas of the tropics. Judging the right place — in that wilderness of waters — is the measure of a skipper's success as a trawlerman, and it may mean everything between prosperity and adversity. Skippers have their favourite (and jealously-guarded) secrets of wind and weather which will bring the fish. One I know worked out his bearings on the fishing grounds by a thermometer trailed in the water astern, at a depth of four fathoms. He claimed it worked, and his holds were certainly never empty,
I had tried in vain to replace the boats smashed in the eruption, but had had to be content with a double-ended substitute which turned out to be a surf-boat. It was certainly quite appropriate to its work in breakers, but not much good for the open sea. The lack of boats was to play a big role in the events which later took their toll of lives.
The net had been out since dawn and Etosha was patrolling the great open South Atlantic with the leisurely gait of a policeman on beat. It was about two bells in the first dog watch. And a policeman would not have seen anything to disturb his thoughts in the calm, easy swell, with the sun dropping towards St. Helena far in the west. We'd had a fair haul of pilchard, stockfish and maasbanker, but not what I was hoping for when we met that elusive marriage-point of plankton and tropic waters.
"All aboard for the yachting trip," said John lazily, yawning and stretching himself on the bridge-rail. He swept the horizon with his eyes. "Not a damn thing in sight — I all alone in a wide, wide sea!'
The immensity and stillness of the coming evening had put all thoughts of Stein away and I would not have wished anything but the present idyll of sea and sky merging, somewhere in the east, into Africa.
"I think we must be a little too far south," I murmured. "The water's probably a bit cold for the fish."
"Lucky little planktons," grinned John. "Nothing to darken the shadow of their one-cell lives. Oh happy, happy plankton! Why not try the thermometer trick?"
"To hell with that," I said, falling into his easy mood. "Why don't we pour some whisky over the stern and make them all drunk, and then we can be sure of catching the drunken fish at the end of the bender."
The helmsman eyed me quizzically, not knowing whether this was the white man's humour or not.
"At this rate we'll be out here for a week," replied John. "Hallo, a stranger coming into the nest."
I followed his pointing finger, but it was a minute or so before I saw the flash of white in the south-west. I think the habit of vigilant, never-ceasing watchfulness, the hall-mark of the submariner, had become an unconscious part of John's life. The sea — it always is the enemy.
I reached for my binoculars and focused them on the white triangle rising above the sea.
"Pirates in these waters," I remarked, still in the easy mood of the last hour of daylight. "A windjammer. Stand by to repel boarders."
John watched the sail rising quickly.
"She's crackin' it on, all right," he said, "and I'll eat my boots if she isn't that old Grand Banks schooner from Luderitz."
I kept my glasses on her.
"She's got a wind that we haven't," I said.
I saw the gleam of flying jib narrow, the sun catching it with a yellowing shaft.
"She's altering course towards us," I observed. "She was lying a couple of points nearer north a moment ago."
"I'd have loved to have seen her in her heyday and not under Hendriks," said John watching the lovely sight of a sailing-ship at sea under full sail. "They say, though, he's not such a bad skipper for a Coloured."
"A throwback to some of his Malay ancestors. They love the sea," I said.
The three masts of the schooner were in full view now, although her hull, dark-painted, was not clear to the eye yet.
"He'll sail the masts right out of the old Pikkewyn if he's not careful," said John. "I hate his guts for those jackyard topsails, though. Why couldn't he leave her clean, as she was? I never thought I'd see her under three jibs, though. That old hull must have a lot of life in it yet to stand ail-that sail."
I smiled at John's fastidious appreciation of sail.
The old Grand Banks schooner was a brave sight. The sails were yellow Bushman-ochre on a ground of grey, for all the world like the rock the old primitives used as their desert canvas. The slant of the sun and the distance concealed her age and neglect. She was a lovely, living thing, young and alive in her glory.
"She's coming our way — look at the bone in her teeth," cried John as a nicker of white creamed under her forefoot. "Eleven knots, if she's moving at all."
The old schooner was coming straight at us. Something in my mind sounded a note of warning — that dead straight course, the alteration when she sighted Etosha: but I dismissed it as fantasy.
The schooner came on and I could see her fine lines clearly. She was leaning over close-hauled, so far that the boat swinging from the davits seemed almost to skim the water spurting down her rail.
At a mile distance she made no alteration of course. Etosha was lying almost at a standstill.
John, too, I could see felt a little uneasy, despite his enthusiastic comments.
"Shouldn't we get out of her way, Geoffrey?" he asked. "Steam gives way to sail, and all that."
"Give her a spoke or two," I told the man at the wheel. Then I thought of the heavy net trailing astern. "No, port fifteen," I corrected, ringing for a slight increase in speed to swing her bows away from the newcomer.
"That should clear us, all right," I said, "even if Hendriks is fool enough to come racing through the water as if we didn't exist."
"She's put her helm down," exclaimed John with a note of anxiety. "What the devil is she playing at?"
The Pikkewyn had allowed her head to fall off slightly and was bearing down straight at us. She was half a mile away.
"Blast!" I exclaimed. "Hard a'port," I snapped. I couldn't ring for more speed because of the heavy net holding us down. Ordinarily, nothing but a warship could have outmanoeuvred Etosha. But now she was wallowing like a hamstrung horse.
The schooner again altered course and came roaring down upon us. I have never been at the receiving end of a torpedo, but the sight of that old ship tearing down upon me, seemingly hell-bent on ramming Etosha, gave me some idea of what it is like to see that inexorable track streaking through the water.
I snatched a megaphone. "Cast off that net," I roared, "quick, damn you! cast it off!"