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Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: A Tale of the Coral Sea
Author: Randolph Bedford
eBook No.: 230 .html
Language: English
Date first posted: 2023
Most recent update: 2023
This eBook was produced by: Paul Moulder and Colin Choat
by
Randolph Bedford
THE palm-fronds threshed softly; odors of frangipanni bloom,reek of seaweed and coral trash, and of the Chinaman and theincense of his joss-house mingled and were destroyed and producedagain by the fitful land breeze. Nigh to midnight the land breezebecame too strong for anything but the frangipanni scent; thepalm-fronds threshed through the air saturated with moonlight; thered lamp on the jetty showed as a purple stain.
The last of the pilots of Torres Straits went to bed; the GrandHotel of Thursday Island closed its bar: but the two barefoot menon the veranda still talked on the topic that had lasted sincedusk—the wreck of thePandora; and one man, Pipon,tried to soothe the other, Moresby, who talked without ceasing ofthe wreck and twenty thousand pounds of pearls.
"Can't we get a launch, Jim?" he asked, for the twentieth time."A steamer or a launch?"
"I told you no," replied Pipon.
"Bear up, old man; y' can have a lugger."
"A lugger and a dead calm? It would be worse than waitinghere."
"Well, quiet a bit!"
"Quiet! How can I be?—when I am in a fever to bethere!"
He looked south as if trying to make out the coast of Australia,now the ghost of a shadow in the moon haze and sea blur.
"What could you do if you were there Martin? You couldn't doanything."
"I could stand by the wreck; I could—"
"You couldn't do any good. It's lucky Phil Regard is comingto-morrow. He's the British India diver. He'll do all there is tobe done."
"My pearls, Tom! The big one and nine ounces of little ones.Oyley was bringing them up. What depth did thePandora sinkin?"
"Nobody knows, old man; or how she went. The skipper was a goodman—exempt, too. Knew every key and every inch ofreef—and there's millions of 'em."
"It was my rotten luck, Tom, to miss thePandora by fiveminutes, and then pick up theMaranea to catch her here, andfind, when I did get here, that she'd sunk fifty or a hundred milessouth. And there's my pearls—Oyley was taking charge of'em—and then I missed the ship. Oh, gimme a raft—gimmea kerosene-tin—and I'll start!"
"Not you! Come on; take a fool's advice and sleep. You'll waitfor the morning, and then leave it all to Phil Regard. He'll behere to-morrow."
The grass trees rustled softly to the poinciana as the men wentto bed; the breeze strengthened to a wind, and replaced perfumewith a taste of salt; from the veranda above a man began towhimper—a man that had seen death and terror and was nowdreaming it all over again and shrieking out the story in hisrecurrent nightmare—the one survivor of thePandora,who had been picked up by a pearling lugger.
"She's going! Two minutes—you can't get the boats out ofthe chocks. Why didn't they have boat practice? You can't! Youcan't! Don't scream, women—dear women, don'tscream—it's better to drown than—ah, my God, thesharks! the sharks!"
Druce, the pilot of Torres Straits, boarded that slow, comfortable,old-time high-pooped steamer of the tea clipper type, theAirlie, at Goode Island, and brought her up in the earlydawn to the wharf at Thursday. A big, bearded, brown-eyed man wasthe first to land; he was a man in a hurry—in a hurry fornews, at least. He waited for neither bath nor breakfast, butaroused an irritated postmaster, and begged so for telegrams thatthe postmaster gave him his mail long before the beginning ofoffice hours. There were many newspapers, and he did not look atthem; a dozen letters, all man-directed and official, and he putthem in his pocket. A bitter disappointment settled on hisface—the letter from the beloved was not there. He found newhope in the telegrams. Alas! They were as the letters; and hisheart was heavy then. This diver of the sea, who knew no fear thathe could not fight down, fought against this disappointment andcould not conquer it.
"I telegraphed her from Darwin, and she hasn't wired a reply.She's thoughtless, not cruel, not cruel—my girl."
He took from his pocket-book a faded photograph—faded notby age but by wear; looked at it, and put it back again.
"God bless her! I'll telegraph again, and in seven days we'll betogether—for a month, anyhow. But—she might have madesure of not missing the post; a letter would make me a kingto-day."
He returned to duty by taking a telegram from his pockets, and afierce resentment held him for a moment as he read it:
Pandora sunk; locate wreck; if notimpossible recover gold, ship's papers. B. P. provide tug andtender; made splendid terms.
So he would not see her in a week—happiness was to bepostponed again. He thought of the long two months of salvagediving in the Flores Sea. Three months since he had seen her, andnow there was to be another fortnight of hunger for her!
But hope came to his comfort. "Another year and I'll have madeenough to retire on, with this new chance. And then, no separationtill dead finish comes!"
So he went to Burns Philip and arranged for the departure of thelittle steamer, hired diving tenders, and had his diving gearbrought from theAirlie's hold. It was then that Moresbyfound him—Moresby of the drowned pearls; and the newcommission made Phil Regard almost gay.
"Oyley had 'em," said Moresby. "I gave them to him to mindbecause I was going on a spree in Brisbane."
"Was he straight, d'ye think?"
"I think so. He put 'em in a little steel box in histrunk,—he had his own pearls in the box,—and his wifehad the key on a chain round her neck."
"What was the number of his cabin, and what was he like?"
"A dark, red-mustached chap—cabin number 41-43 B, portside, near the music-room."
"You know the ship?"
"I tell you, I sailed on her from Sydney to Brisbane, and lostmy passage at Brisbane through going to the races. I gave thepearls to Oyley when I was going ashore. But you will get 'emagain, mate?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows where she foundered. But, if Ido?"
"Five hundred pounds."
With the lack of ceremony characteristic of the latitude, everyman in the bar joined in the conversation.
"Five hundred pounds!" said Druce, the pilot. "Five hundredpounds for dredgin' fifteen or twenty thousand pounds out o' thePacific Ocean! Five hundred to find a ton of scrap-iron in eightythousand square miles o' coral? It's worth that to find the oldhulk that hit the rock somewhere, and sank on it, and jewed me outo' pilot fees."
"I thought it wouldn't be hard to find the wreck," said Moresbyhesitatingly. "If—"
"Oh," replied Druce, "if your aunt had whiskers she'd be youruncle. Why, I know ten wrecks about here that no man knows the nameof—ships that were never missed. You know, too, don't you,Dan'l?"
An old man, bent and wizened, replied quaveringly: "I've seenbelow me—when I've been down—old Spanish ships, an' oldDutch ships, an' old Portugees down below; me in twenty fathomwater, an' them deep below, me man—"
"Twenty fathoms—too much," said the big diver. "I've got agirl at home, and she wants me. Fifteen fathoms is all I care togo."
"Aa-ah," said the old diver, nipping with his strong and crookedfingers the arm and leg muscles of Phil Regard, "I was as strongand straight as ye; but deep divin', an' showin' off above theother min, an' takin' no notice o' the shootin' pains in melegs—callin' it rheumatics, an' all the time 'tis theparalyzer warnin' ye. An' then twenty-eight fathom I went, an'hauled up—I was a cripple."
He laughed as he spoke, but there was in his eye a tear ofsorrow for his own dead strength; and, to cover his self-pity, hesaid, with a feeble attempt at gaiety:
"But 'tis only here I am a cripple! Put me down in fifteen ortwenty fathom and give me the pressure on me skin again an' afour-knot tide, an' I'll fly along the floorin' of the sea like asunbird."
"And you're offering five hundred pounds for the chance ofthat?" said Druce to Moresby.
"Open your heart, Moresby. A mean man makes me spit blood."
"A thousand, then," said Moresby. "I want to be fair, and it'sall to nothing."
"It isn't," said Phil Regard. "I've got to go below on anothercontract, and you think I've only got to open a cabin door and takea key from some poor, dead woman, and open a box. But that meanstwo extra corners to go round, and the more corners the morechances of fouling. It's your pearls to my life. I want acertainty."
"Here y' are, then," said Moresby. "A hundred pounds for openingthe cabin door, and I'll take your word for it; and a thousand ifyou bring back the pearls."
"It's a deal," agreed Phil Regard, and they shook hands onit.
The warning bell of theAirlie clanged, and Drucedeparted to his pilotage. Phil Regard, as yet only half resigned,saw the steamer that should have borne him south disappear down thechannel, rounding the Residency, and so away to open sea. Then heresolutely put regrets behind him and went to his tug and tender toprepare for his attempt to find a few thousand tons of founderedmetal in an immensity of blue.
The survivor of thePandora had become quiet enough totalk of the horror of the wreck.
"I was steerage steward," he said, "Mister. I can't think! Stayby me, Mister—don't leave me alone."
"Hold on to my coat, if you like. I'll stand by."
"We never had a boat practice—rottin' in the chocks, theboats were. It was about eleven atnight—moonlight—quiet; y' could hear the scrapin' ofshovels in the stoke-hole on the flat sheets, and the noise came upthe ventilators. An' not a ripple. An' there I'm smoking by therail, waitin' till I can sneak out on the boat deck tosleep—the glory hole bein' so hot. An' then it comes. It waslike a kid tearin' brown paper for fun. It seemed to get heramidships—that was because she was drawing a lot more wateraft. Only one man came out of the engine-room. The man on thebridge was mad! I was mad! The quiet people in the cabins had thebest death. Sharks got all the deck lot. She ran a minute or two,an' I saw the water risin' closer up—an' loosed a raft andwent over. It was like hell. Mister, the howls. Her deck blew upamidships. I think she's sound aft. An' the steam jumped out of herfunnel as thick as wool, an' down she goes. An' then on the raft Iseen white fire cutting the water all over, crisscrossin' it. Itwas sharks. An' then a veil, an' more crisscrossin' of fire, o'white lightnin', an 'another yell."
"I know! I know!" said Phil Regard soothingly. "Don't think ofit! Help me. Tell me where you think she went down."
"I can't help thinkin' of it. Heads o' people in the moonlight,an' then rushin' fire, an' a scream like a horse burnin', an'another head pulled under. Oh—oh! Another head gone."
"Steady! Steady! Take a pull at yourself. Where did she godown?"
"A girl of twenty or so—I heard her singing in the saloonthe night before—a song about 'Mine, forever mine,' an' herhusband lookin' at her as if he was dyin' for her while she wassingin'. He was swimmin' with her when the sharks took him; an' Ibeat the sea with me 'ands, an' brought the raft close, an' I wasbringin' her up to the raft—swish! comes the shark fire, an'she went too. Oh, mate, hell it was!"
The diver's eyes grew moist at that; he thought of his belovedsafe at home, and the tragedy touched him nearly. But he saidagain:
"Where's thePandora?"
"I drifted to an island, an' then I went mad, an' the luggerfound me."
"To-day is Wednesday. When did thePandora sink? Now,think—listen! We may pick up somebody yet. Tell me."
"She sunk on Monday night."
"Where?"
"We made twelve knots to Cape Grenville; then we slowed to tento bring her in at daylight."
"What time at Cape Grenville?"
The survivor of thePandora wrinkled his brows as ifthought were a physical pain, and replied: "Twelve o'clock in themornin'. Y' can't find her—she's got no masts, on'y hydraulicwinchpoles."
Phil Regard, with the dividers in his hand, said inquiringly:"And she struck at eleven in the night?"
"It might have been later. I don't remember."
"We'll go on that. Where were you picked up?"
"The lugger came from Bushy Island."
Regard pricked off one hundred and ten miles on the chart.
"Somewhere east of New Castle Bay," he said.
Before noon he had left Thursday Island, taking the direct trackwith his light-draft tugboat—east between Tuesday and Hornislands; and then, after easting Mount Adolphus Island andthridding the reefs to the south of it, steering south through theturquoise of shallow water and into the sapphire of deep sea, heran south to Bushy Island, and then east over reefs, and then northagain, and then west, and then zigzag. And the next day he droveslowly over a blackness in the coral bed; a monstrous black thingsurrounded by lazy sharks and darting brilliant fish that made thesea-green water alive with swaying and flashing color, like the airof a tropical jungle: thePandora—almost on an evenkeel and sunk in fourteen fathoms.
With a little reluctance, Regard made the preparations necessaryfor such as dive in dress and helmet, and shaved clean the mustachethat had grown since he had dived in Flores Seas. The growing ofthe mustache had been an innocent vanity for the pleasure of hiswife, who objected to his professionally beardless face, just asthe new suit was for her benefit and not to be worn until the dayof happy meeting, that he might shine all freshly in her eyes.Then, in the warm shadow of the white awning, he stripped, anddonned the many woolen undergarments and the canvas dress, with itswater-tight red-rubber bands at wrists and ankles.
The tender put on his feet the great brass-toed boots oftwenty-eight pounds weight; and when he had climbed to the ladderand placed his feet upon the rungs, they screwed histwenty-eight-pound copper helmet on the collar-ring, and hungthirty-eight pounds of lead upon his breast and thirty-eight poundsof lead at his back. Life-line, piping, corselet, helmet, brassboots, and leaden weight complete, the men at the pump began toturn; the tender screwed the face-glass into the helmet and tappedupon it as a signal; the pumps lifted the pressure of the weightsfrom the diver's chest. The air thudded irritatingly into thecopper prison that was the helmet; the sense of confinement, andthe close smell of the natural breathing element of man unnaturallycompressed, returned to Phil Regard. He thought of the wife inSydney—the last thought of the divinity before bracinghimself to work that had the chance of death in it always, thoughuse had brought danger into contempt; then he opened the valve thathe might get way to sink with, and dropped easily and gently intothe caresses of the water. The sun's shimmer on the sea dimmed to agreat pervading shaft of tawny light that made the sea-greenlucent, as the white sand below reflected the rays of the breathingworld.
The black corpse of thePandora seemed to rise to him. Heclosed the valve, and sank as through a cataract of feathers.Avoiding the deck, he dropped to the bottom for a survey of thehull. The current hurried him; he might have to wait until slackwater. But the lugger drifted too, and he walked rapidly on histoe-tips around the wreck. There could be no doubt of theimpossibility of raising her. From the great gaping hole amidships,that extended from one side of her to the other, swam fish of allcolors, playing in those puzzling tunnels. Moving lightly as afeather-weight, as if the laws of gravitation had been repealed,Regard studied the situation. All about him stretched tangles ofseaweed and coral with white walks between the spongy copses andthe brakes. A yellow water-snake followed his every movement withcurious imitation, and white fish circled around his helmet so thata green hand must have become dizzy. From a rift in the rockwavered the tentacles of a devilfish feeling its way to crime withevery cup and sucker; immense shoals of young fish were beingdriven to the surface by stronger bullies. Yet, with all itsclamorous hunger and insolent murder, it was a world of bewilderingloveliness.
Upon the ribbed sand the starfish; above, the brilliance ofliving coral: the great violet bouquet-shaped madrepora, its coralflowers with buff branches and petals of magenta; staghorn coralsin brown and yellow and lilac and green; coral valleys of myrtlegreen, coral ridges of golden brown, all the glorified forms ofcarbonate of lime—beautiful as the fish, brilliant as thepainted finch, and tinted like the Raggiana bird of paradise.Regard stepped on a branch of heliopora coral, and it broke inindigo.
Brakes of broad-bladed sca-grass grew as in a swampy meadow forthe sea-cow; trepang like black cucumbers slumbered on the sand;weed-grown pearl oysters protected themselves with water madeturbid by Regard's footfalls; a big blue-spoked stingray falteredby a rock; and prone on the ruffled floor lay a great skate, whichis a flattened shark. Everywhere the water swarmed with strange andbeautiful forms: the parrot-fish in his livery of black and grayand scarlet; the giant anemone and his galaxy of sea-stars; thepeacock blue and green frills and furbelows of the giant clamshells, spotted turquoise and barred black; the grotesquetobacco-pipe fish of golden and azure spotted brown; the placidbrown oxray, so blundering that it is often unintentionallymalevolent, since if it once takes hold upon air-pipe or life-lineit never lets go; yellow-finned and ultramarine-bodied fish; blackand electric-blue fish; fish arabesqued in green and salmon andblack and gray and orange and blue and yellow; fish of protectivefin and tassel and little body; fish with long brown pennantsgrowing from their heads; mad fish with upturned noses; tasseled,branded, striped, speckled, barred, spotted fish, each painted likea Carpentaria finch.
The weight of ocean pressed the diver softly in his armor of theair; his body felt as if stroked by the silky hands of thecaressing sea—kindly even to the little fragile sea flowers.And then from the great tunnel in the hull of thePandoracame floating, gorged and lazy, the horrors of the deep.
Used as he was to these cruel cowards, in the light of the storyof the bride who had died in the wreck, they held for him a newhorror, and for a moment he was afraid. Their gorged habit, theirslow, plethoric movements, their dull eyes, forgetting for a momentto be greedy, told the tale. Regard felt almost physically sick.All those eyes looked at him threateningly, contemptuously; thelittle fish that swam up to his face-glass and gazed at him did notseem to be frightened as quickly as usual by the movement of hishands.
The sharks came nearer, and Regard, lifting the rubberwrist-band, shot air at them in a succession of silver bullets, andthe cowards became energetic and fled. A carpet-bag shark, theincarnation of filthy malevolence, hovered above him until Regardturned the escape-valve on his helmet and shot a madness of fearinto the horrible thing.
He finished his survey of the hull with difficulty, attendedalways by the yellow sea-snake, which followed him as if itexpected food from this strange monster, accompanying him to withina few fathoms of surface. For an hour Regard rested and fed; thenhe went to the ladder, and was loaded and imprisoned again, andsank down to the deck of thePandora.
His retinue of enemies left him at the entrance to the saloon;but the small fish, their brilliance seeming to light thehalf-gloom, swam into the depths and in and out at theportholes—"like schoolboys playing a game," thought PhilRegard. Even there some little things had begun already to benefitby the fall of greatness; little pearl shells as big as athumb-nail—born in motion from the spat, floating in thecurrent, and sucked down by the foundering ship—had here spuntheir byssus to tie them to the saloon stairs, hiding theirweakness in this unexpected asylum.
"All this death to make a safe hiding-place for a shell,"thought Regard bitterly, as he walked on tiptoe through this silentworld where all values of vision were distorted, where a wavingshadow seemed to be a fish and a fish of sober hues was as shadowuntil the hand felt its form.
He thought hard—racking his brains inside his copperprison for the memory of the plan of the ship.
"The ship's papers will be in the captain's safe; I'll get themto-morrow. The specie-room is inside the mail-room; I'll findthat." So, with due regard for the safety of air-pipe and life-lineagainst projections and fittings, he left the saloon, itsdecorations already dimmed by the traveling slime of the sea, andfound the mail-room, and beyond it the specie-room intact.
He talked to himself, and the words reverberated to him from thehelmet: "I'll bring dynamite and a wire down and blow thespecie-room open, rig a winch, and haul out the gold boxes. That'llbe to-morrow. And while I'm here I'll do the horriblejob—Moresby's pearls."
He went back to the saloon stairs. Above it a great gray shapehung watchfully, patiently, as if it had all eternity to wait in.Regard, with never a quickening of the pulse, fired the silverbullets from his wrist-band, and the gray shape backed and fled.Regard laughed and went on to find Moresby's pearls.
He opened a cabin door. Two fish fled through the porthole, andthe body of a woman came at him in the swirl of the water. The deadface struck his helmet. Regard cried out in horror, and backedaway. But in a moment he caught his courage and closed theporthole; then he shut the cabin door again and went to the next.He could not distinguish the letter denoting the corridor, nor thenumber either. He opened an inner cabin, and a drowned man came outand struck him. He opened another, and there were in it a dead manand a dead woman trying with her floating skirts to hide a littlechild from the sea. The man had tried to save another child, andthat other child had fixed his teeth in his father's arm, and sohad died in cruel fear of the green death that had shipped withthem. Horror gripped the diver as with fingers of cold steel.
Yet his duty was to be done, and he did it. He found B corridor,and the first cabin had in it a dead girl with her hands clasped asif she still prayed. He closed the cabin reverently, and came toanother in which an old man and an old woman had died in their bedplaces; and then to an outer cabin opposite the one he had firstentered. The light was better there; he saw that this was B 41 atlast, and that by a little care he might have saved himself theawfulness that had shaken him.
The lock of B 41 did not yield to the lifting of the handle, soRegard inserted the point of his small ax between the door and thebeading and levered it open. Two bodies, those of a man and awoman,—the man's as if he had died standing, the woman's inthe lower berth floating up against the wires of the upperberth,—moved queerly in the disturbed liquid—as if theywere alive.
"Porthole closed," said Regard to himself, trying not to look atthe dead for a moment. "He had the fan going—the lever's onthe top speed."
He looked at the body of the man, and shudderingly turned himaround in the water.
"That'll be the man Moresby gave the pearls to. Oyley was thename, and he looks it. There's the trunk under the berth. And thispoor soul has the key round her neck. I cant do it... But Ipromised. I'll do it to-morrow... No; better now—get it donewith. Forgive—whoever you are, forgive me. Young, too, andpretty." With a shaking hand and covering his face, he touched thewoman's neck, and there he felt the necklet and the key.
"It's horrible. I'll have to use both hands for thefastening."
As if he were physically afraid of it he looked back at thesinister dead man floating near the porthole; then, swiftly andwithout looking, he unfastened the necklet and held it up—anecklet and a key. The movement floated the body from its positionagainst the springs of the upper berth; it turned upright, floatingby his head—through the little circle of the face-glass itsdead eyes looked sorrowfully into his own.
And then—madness! Unbelief! Doubt! Unbelief again! Andagain madness! clamored through his brain. The air seemed to bewithdrawn; the helmet became a mountain of copper; the weights uponhis back and breast were each a ton of lead. He looked at thenecklet—yes, it was so! He had given it. He released it, andit sank to the ooze upon the sodden carpet. He looked at thebracelet of opal before the mirror, and recognized it, too; andthen at the dead woman gazing at him mournfully with eyes thatseemed to plead: "Forgive; I have been punished, and repented so;forgive."
Still unbelieving, but stunned, he pushed the dead man throughthe door and out of the alleyway (evicting it as if its presence inthat cabin still outraged propriety); and it floated up, bobbingqueerly in the tide eddies. Then he turned back, mad butunbelieving, and re-entered the cabin. There could be nodoubt—no doubt! He left her there, and fastened the cabindoor behind him. And then his heart broke.
He could not live! With his last conscious instinct, he hackedwith uncertain hand at the air-pipe, and missed it; then the weightof all the ocean settled on his heart and he wavered to thefloor.
He had a conscientious tender. At that sudden jag upon thelife-line the tender hauled carefully, and, by that luck whichshames the best judgment, drew Philip Regard safely through thealleyway to the deck of thePandora and up to sunlight.
But they might as well have left him there, for the strong manwho had dived never returned to the surface.
"Beats me!" said Druce, looking pityingly at the withered wreckthat sat every day, and through all the daylight hours of everyday, upon the veranda of Thursday Island hospital. "Can'tunderstand it. A fine, big, strong world-beater of a man paralyzedin fourteen fathoms. It beats me!"
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