As this is really meant to be the record of a spiritualistic experience which came, if not precisely to Captain Johns himself, at any rate to his ship, there is no use in recording the other events of the passage out. It was an ordinary passage, the crew was an ordinary crew, the weather was of the usual kind. The black mate’s quiet, sedate method of going to work had given a sober tone to the life of the ship. Even in gales of wind everything went on quietly somehow.
There was only one severe blow which made things fairly lively for all hands for full four-and-twenty hours. That was off the coast of Africa, after passing the Cape of Good Hope. At the very height of it several heavy seas were shipped with no serious results, but there was a considerable smashing of breakable objects in the pantry and in the staterooms. Mr Bunter, who was so greatly respected on board, found himself treated scurvily by the Southern Ocean, which, bursting open the door of his room like a ruffianly burglar, carried off several useful things, and made all the others extremely wet.
Later, on the same day, the Southern Ocean caused the Sapphire to lurch over in such an unrestrained fashion that the two drawers fitted under Mr Burner’s sleeping-berth flew out altogether, spilling all their contents. They ought, of course, to have been locked, and Mr Bunter had only to thank himself for what had happened. He ought to have turned the key on each before going out on deck.
His consternation was very great. The steward, who was paddling about all the time with swabs, trying to dry out the flooded cuddy, heard him exclaim ‘Hallo!’ in a startled and dismayed tone. In the midst of his work the steward felt a sympathetic concern for the mate’s distress.
Captain Johns was secretly glad when he heard of the damage. He was indeed afraid of his chief mate, as the sea-pilot had ventured to foretell, and afraid of him for the very reason the sea-pilot had put forward as likely.
Captain Johns, therefore, would have liked very much to hold that black mate of his at his mercy in some way or other. But the man was irreproachable, as near absolute perfection as could be. And Captain Johns was much annoyed, and at the same time congratulated himself on his chief officer’s efficiency.
He made a great show of living sociably with him, on the principle that the more friendly you are with a man the more easily you may catch him tripping; and also for the reason that he wanted to have somebody who would listen to his stories of manifestations, apparitions, ghosts, and all the rest of the imbecile spook-lore. He had it all at his fingers’ ends; and he spun those ghostly yams in a persistent, colourless voice, giving them a futile turn peculiarly his own.
‘I like to converse with my officers,’ he used to say. ‘There are masters that hardly ever open their mouths from beginning to end of a passage for fear of losing their dignity. What’s that, after all - this bit of position a man holds!’
His sociability was most to be dreaded in the second dog-watch, because he was one of those men who grow lively towards the evening, and the officer on duty was unable then to find excuses for leaving the poop. Captain Johns would pop up the companion suddenly, and, sidling up in his creeping way to poor Burner, as he walked up and down, would fire into him some spiritualistic proposition, such as:
‘Spirits, male and female, show a good deal of refinement in a general way, don’t they?’
To which Burner, holding his black-whiskered head high, would mutter:
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ah! that’s because you don’t want to. You are the most obstinate, prejudiced man I’ve ever met, Mr Burner. I told you you may have any book out of my bookcase. You may just go into my stateroom and help yourself to any volume.’
And if Burner protested that he was too tired in his watches below to spare any time for reading, Captain Johns would smile nastily behind his back, and remark that of course some people needed more sleep than others to keep themselves fit for work. If Mr Bunter was afraid of not keeping properly awake when on duty at night, that was another matter.
‘But I think you borrowed a novel to read from the second mate the other day - a trashy pack of lies,’ Captain Johns sighed. ‘I am afraid you are not a spiritually minded man, Mr Bunter. That’s what’s the matter. ’
Sometimes he would appear on deck in the middle of the night, looking very grotesque and bandy-legged in his sleeping suit. At that sight the persecuted Bunter would wring his hands stealthily, and break out into moisture all over his forehead. After standing sleepily by the binnacle, scratching himself in an unpleasant manner, Captain Johns was sure to start on some aspect or other of his only topic.
He would, for instance, discourse on the improvement of morality to be expected from the establishment of general and close intercourse with the spirits of the departed. The spirits, Captain Johns thought, would consent to associate familiarly with the living if it were not for the unbelief of the great mass of mankind. He would not care to have anything to do with a crowd that would not believe in his - Captain Johns’ - existence. Then why should a spirit? This was asking too much.
He went on breathing hard by the binnacle and trying to reach round his shoulder-blades; then, with a thick, drowsy severity, declared:
‘Incredulity, sir, is the evil of the age!’
It rejected the evidence of Professor Cranks and of the journalist chap. It resisted the production of photographs.
For Captain Johns believed firmly that certain spirits had been photographed. He had read something of it in the papers. And the idea of it having been done had got a tremendous hold on him, because his mind was not critical. Bunter said afterwards that nothing could be more weird than this little man, swathed in a sleeping suit three sizes too large for him, shuffling with excitement in the moonlight near the wheel, and shaking his fist at the serene sea.
‘Photographs! Photographs!’ he would repeat, in a voice as creaky as a rusty hinge.
The very helmsman just behind him got uneasy at that performance, not being capable of understanding exactly what the ‘old man was kicking up a row with the mate about/
Then Johns, after calming down a bit, would begin again.
‘The sensitised plate can’t lie. No, sir.’
Nothing could be more funny than this ridiculous little man’s conviction - his dogmatic tone. Bunter would go on swinging up and down the poop like a deliberate, dignified pendulum. He said not a word. But the poor fellow had not a trifle on his conscience, as you know; and to have imbecile ghosts rammed down his throat like this on top of his own worry nearly drove him crazy. He knew that on many occasions he was on the verge of lunacy, because he could not help indulging in half-delirious visions of Captain Johns being picked up by the scruff of the heck and dropped over the taffrail into the ship’s wake - the sort of thing no sane sailorman would think of doing to a cat or any other animal, anyhow. He imagined him bobbing up - a tiny black speck left far astern on the moonlit ocean.
I don’t think that even at the worst moments Bunter really desired to drown Captain Johns. I fancy that all his disordered imagination longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanity of the skipper’s talk.
But, all the same, it was a dangerous form of self-indulgence. Just picture to yourself that ship in the Indian Ocean, on a clear, tropical night, with her sails full and still, the watch on deck stowed away out of sight; and on her poop, flooded with moonlight, the stately black mate walking up and down with measured, dignified steps, preserving an awful silence, and that grotesquely mean little figure in striped flannelette alternately creaking and droning of ‘personal intercourse beyond the grave.’