I did so; that is to say, I passed him one of two water-kegs in the locker, and also took out a little barrel of biscuits. He and the mate drank like fishes, and then handed me the keg. I also drank. Then we ate some biscuits. The sun rose higher. We lay and gasped. There was only half a gallon of water left in the keg, and the devil knew where we were. I said nothing. The day passed, and then the night, and then another day. The keg was drier than bones in a desert.
‘The other keg,’ the Captain said.
I looked at him, and said: ‘There is no other keg.’
At that, they looked at each other like criminals in a cellar when they hear the police kicking down the door, and a sort of despair came down upon the mate, and he put his face between his hands and wept – only he was too dry to have any tears left. The night was a hundred years long, and the next day came like a flame-thrower, and the mate went mad, and jumped overboard, and the sharks were very pleased to see him. And the Captain raved and gasped and, for the first time in his life, cried for water. Then he too went. He thought, all of a sudden, that this blue sea was some stream or other where the women of his village used to go and do their washing, and leaned over the side of the boat. Sharks have a habit of leaping up and snatching. They leapt up. They snapped. His name, if I remember rightly, was Avertchenko. But who cares?
So I was alone in the boat. I used the keg of water that I had hidden, sip by sip, and ate the biscuits. I do not mind being alone. I do not enjoy company. But then being imprisoned in that little boat, rising and falling and rising and falling, with nothing left but a sky like a house on fire, and a sea that covered the whole world … why, then, suddenly it seemed to me that I wanted company. I never felt like that before, and perhaps it was the sun that made me feel so. I kept looking out of my burnt-up eyes, and seeing nothing but this damned emptiness everywhere, this rotten emptiness for fire and salt …. and it seemed to me that a hole had been bored in my chest, and some of this silence and emptiness had leaked into me.
I lay like this for days, drinking my water drip by drip. And then I was down to the last pint of water and the last biscuit, and also the last thread that held me to the world. In one day I knew that I also would start singing and babbling about snow and grass and trees. But I broke this last biscuit, determined to keep alive as long as I could, for it is a man’s duty to save himself. I broke this biscuit, I say, and a cockroach crawled out. I watched it. It ran across my hand, dropped to the bottom of the boat and tried to find a place to hide. I followed it with my eyes, put out a finger and headed it off. It crawled up my finger, ran up into my palm, and stayed there, doing something or other with its feet. I put up my other hand to shelter it from the sun, and there it stayed. I made crumbs of a little biscuit and – devil take it – I actually moistened these crumbs with a finger dipped in water. I wanted that cockroach to stay with me. I wanted it to stay alive. Yes, of all created things, that thing is the only one which I w r anted to live with me! It made me feel that the whole world was not dead, and that, somehow, there was land beyond the sea, the salty and murderous sea.
So the madness that was coming on me went away, and the night came with cooler air; and still the cockroach rested on my hand, which I did not dare to move for fear of frightening it away; and that night passed quickly until it cracked – my last night – cracked like my last biscuit and let in the dawn. And for the one time in my life, just for an instant, I felt that I also was small and resting as it were in the palm of some hand powerful enough to crush me.
I looked over the water; it was calm as glass, and saw a sail. It belonged to a Norwegian clipper-ship, but I was too weak to signal. My head went round and the darkness fell down, and I knew nothing more until I tasted water, and found myself lying on a deck looking up into the face as round and red as the sun, the face of a man with a yellow beard. There were men all around me, all offering me clothes, blankets, food, drink, sympathy. But I looked at the palm of my hand. The cockroach was gone. I had been lost and alone on an empty sea in an empty boat for forty days and forty nights. But when I saw that my cockroach was gone, then, for the first time in my life, I felt lonely.
The Devil that Troubled the Chessboard
A SHOCKING book might be written about Pio Busto’s apartment-house. It stands on a corner not far from Oxford Street. It stands. No doubt Busto, who knows all the laws pertaining to real-estate, has managed to find some loophole in the Law of Gravity; I can think of no other reason to account for the fact that his house has not yet fallen down. Pio Busto knows how to make a living by letting furnished rooms. He puts a sheet of wallboard across a small bedroom and calls it two apartments. His house is furnished with odds and ends raked from the junk-heaps in the Cattle Market. No space is wasted. He sleeps in a subterranean wash-house, and would convert even this into a bed-sitting-room if the coal-cellar were not crammed with spare furniture and bed-linen. He is something of a character, this Busto; he looks like Lorenzo the Magnificent, and sleeps with a savage old dog named Ouif; in case of burglars he keeps a service revolver under his pillow, and a cavalry sabre hung on a bootlace over his head. He keeps evil spirits at bay with a rusty horseshoe, the lower half of a broken crucifix, and a lithograph of the Mona Lisa whom he believes to be the Virgin Mary.
His rooms are dangerous. You sigh; they shake. You sneeze, and down comes a little piece of ceiling. What is more, the walls are full of holes, bored by tenants of an inquisitive turn of mind. The curiosity of these people is often highly irritating – your view is sometimes obscured by the eye of your neighbour, who is trying to peep back at you. But Busto’s tenants rarely stay long. They are mostly rolling stones, and by the time they come down to Busto’s house, which is very far from the bottom of things, they have acquired momentum. They come, and they go.
As for me, I lived for more than three months in one of the cheapest of those spy-hole-riddled bedrooms. I completed my education there. Through three or four tiny holes, which must have been bored by some neglected genius of espionage, I watched people when they thought they were alone. I saw things which walls and the darkness were made to conceal; I heard things which no man was ever supposed to hear. It was degrading, but impossible to resist. I stooped. I stooped to the keyhole of hell, and I learned the secrets of the damned.
Among the damned was Shakmatko.
Picture for yourself this terrifying man.
I saw him for the first time in the saloon bar of the ‘Duchess of Duoro’– long-drawn-out, sombre, pallid, and mysterious; dressed all in black. He had the unearthly, only partly human appearance of a figure in a Japanese print. I glanced at him, and said to myself, with a sensation of shock: ‘Good God, this man is all forehead!’ Imagine one of those old-fashioned square felt hats without a brim: his skull was shaped exactly like that. It towered straight upwards, white and glabrous. His forehead conveyed an impression of enormous weight – it seemed to have pressed his face out of shape. You can reproduce something of his aspect if you model a human face in white plasticine, and then foreshorten it by squashing it down on the table. In plasticine that is all very well; but alive, in a public-house, it does not look so good.
And if all this were not enough, his eyes were hidden behind dark-blue spectacles.