A SUMMONS

One wondered whether the colonies were really worth the price we had to pay.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

A loud rap at the house door startled the young doctor, who was carefully embellishing architectural curlicues in the margins of a page half‑filled with his own neat cursive script. As there was no one but himself to answer, he crossed the small parlor in three steps and pulled the door open wide. There he found a thin, bedraggled boy, dressed in a dark‑green woolen jacket bearing some resemblance to a uniform and some to a jockey’s coat, stovepipe pants that ended well above his bare, scrawny ankles, and dusty brown boots with the nail heads exposed around the soles. In his gloved left hand he held out a yellow envelope. “Dr. Doyle, innit?” he inquired.

“So it is, my boy,” said the doctor, taking the envelope. It was a telegram. The doctor produced a penny from his coat pocket and pressed it on the boy, who, taking the coin without a word, dashed off down the street.

A telegram. Was it the longed‑for hospital appointment? Was it evil news concerning his poor father? The doctor carried the envelope back to his writing desk, where the half‑finished page rebuked him. Ignoring it, he tore open the flap and drew out the brief message.

Here was news. The African Steam Navigation Company was cordially responding to his now ancient and nearly forgotten query with orders for Dr. Conan Doyle to proceed at once to Liverpool and there take medical charge of the steamer Mayumba , bound for Madeira and the West Coast of Africa.

Africa. He glanced down at the page he had yet to finish, a tale of the American West, a place he had visited only in his imagination, or, more correctly, in the imagination of Bret Harte, whose adventure stories had brightened many a gloomy hour of his youth. Africa meant Stanley and Livingstone, Victoria Falls, jungles screaming with monkeys, villages populated by naked cannibals, so black they could not be seen in the dark and the whites of their eyes disembodied in the humid night air accosted the unwary. As ship’s surgeon, he was unlikely to see much beyond the coast; the interior of the continent would be closed to him. The experience would be geographically speaking the opposite of his previous post on the Arctic whaler Hope , during which he had clubbed seals and gone out with the harpooner in the boat, holding fast to the rope beneath the mountainous side of a right whale. The blue sky, the white gleam of the drift ice, the endless daylight, the intoxicating air – for seven months every moment had been filled with wonders, and the work so constant and challenging that in none of those moments had he been idle or bored.

The steamer Mayumba would be an adventure of a different order, his function an official one, doubtless requiring a coat of blue serge, gilt buttons, white duck trousers, and shoes that would slip on the decks and take on water when the ship did. The captain wouldn’t encourage him to participate in the business of the voyage, which was purely the transport of goods and passengers to Africa, discharging them, taking on new goods and passengers, and turning the prow for home. His work would be among and at the behest of these passengers, and he was unlikely to visit the forecastle unless a man was dying there. Instead of shifting ice and sparkling skies, there would be beaches, rivers, and tropical jungles. The doctor’s brain buzzed pleasantly over the contrast between his seagoing excursions, the first to the white world, where men pursued and slaughtered beasts as big as houses, the next to the dark continent, on a mission to administer quinine and morphine to various valiant servants and civilizers of the Empire.

In a week he was in Liverpool, lining up his books on the narrow shelf in his berth. Compared to the cramped and heavily populated whaler, the Mayumba was enormous, with space for twenty passengers and two saloons; the passengers’ saloon was as ponderously furnished as a hotel lobby. But unlike the Hope , she was dirty. Rust had a grip on her rails and spars, the skylights were streaked, and the upholstery faded and dingy.

The passengers would equally have benefited by a sprucing up. Among them were a parson named Fairfax, his wife, and two cadaverous boys of eight and ten, bound for Lagos; a pretty brunette, Miss Fox, not in her first youth, possessed of an educated air and an oversize bonnet, going out to meet her father in Sierra Leone; a Scottish crone, forever nameless, with bad lungs and a face like an ailing horse; two Negro tradesmen, dressed showily in the worst possible taste and escorted to the gangway by a phalanx of evil‑smelling prostitutes; a British Negress with the manners of a she‑wolf, who was betrothed to a missionary in the interior; and finally an Englishwoman, Mrs. Rowbotham, lively, cheerful, neatly dressed, and immediately flirtatious upon meeting the doctor as she was passing out of the saloon.

The captain, Duncan Henderson Wallace, a small man, bald on top with a flowing, well‑tended white beard that thrust out from his face suggesting the prominent chin beneath, promised to be good company. He moved gracefully, without fuss, inside a force field of authority. He greeted the doctor with a firm handshake and a bright eye that ran over his new colleague appreciatively, as if he’d seldom seen such a fine figure of a man, and indeed, the doctor was several inches taller and stones heavier than his commander. “Come and have a brandy in my office,” said Captain Wallace. “First time to Africa, is it?”

“It is,” said the doctor, following the captain into his private quarters, which were cleaner than the rest of the ship, and neatly appointed. In the conversation that followed, Doyle learned Mrs. Rowbotham was en route to her husband in Sierra Leone, and the querulous Negress was some madman’s idea of a desirable wife.

“I’ve had Parson Fairfax and his family before,” Wallace continued. “They go out once a year for six weeks, then back at the missionary work. It’s killing the wife, but she doesn’t complain.”

“The boys don’t look fit for much either,” the doctor observed.

“It’s the beastly climate. If they left those boys in Edinburgh, or better yet, Dundee, they’d fatten up in no time. But you’ll see, as we go on.”

“And we sail?”

“At dawn. It may be rough going this time of year.”

In the morning the weather was fine, but it deteriorated as the Mayumba made her way down the Mersey. At Holyhead there was such a gale blowing they had to put in for the night. The next day, in rough weather, they made for the Irish Sea, pitching and rolling, plowing through a fog thick as cream. The lighthouse beam was only a dull sheeny patch in the white sheet off the starboard bow. The crew labored earnestly, each wrapped in a white shroud that kept him from seeing his mates. Nor did conditions improve on the open water.

All the passengers were seasick. The doctor ran from one cabin to the next, dispensing blue bowls, and when the bowls ran out, buckets, to grateful ladies and gentlemen whose complexions, as they clung to their bedsteads or bent over their bowls, were distinctly green, except for the Negroes, who were gray. The steward arranged for the orderly rotation of bowls and buckets, which it was the doctor’s business to supervise. The waves tossed the ship up and then pounded her down and the seas swirled across the decks. The sailors were forever hurtling fore and aft, the captain and his mate washed in and out through the companionway, relieving each other on the deck. As the second day passed exactly as the first, Dr. Doyle recalled the captain’s weather prediction. The fog cleared off, and they could see the waves crashing over the prow.

The third day was worse. The aft cabin flooded and the only sound belowdecks was the moaning of the passengers. Occasionally retching could be heard, though most had emptied their stomachs completely by then. The doctor could do little to be of help, so he sat at his desk reading Macaulay, those beautiful sentences, his bare feet ankle deep in the briny water on the floor. The fourth day was like the third.

“But are we making any progress?” cried Parson Fairfax when the doctor looked in on him and his family. The boys were flat on their backs like two skeletons, their mouths agape, and the wife sat clinging to the bedstead, her hair loose over her shoulders, emitting a sharp groan with each lurch of the ship.

“Of course we are,” the doctor assured him. “This is a steamer. We make progress no matter the weather. Make sure those boys take some limewater, whether they ask for it or not,” he advised, going out the door.

In the officers’ mess he found the mate, a taciturn man, but pleasant to his fellow officers. He was drinking coffee, his eyelids heavy as he gazed into the cup he held between his hands. There was no putting it down on the table, where it would be swiftly transported to the opposite side when the ship rolled. He glanced at the doctor, weaving in at the door. “Join me, Doyle,” he said. “There’s some gin, if you care for it.”

“Just coffee,” the doctor said, pouring it out from the pot, which was lodged in a tray screwed down to the counter. He had put on his shoes to visit the passengers and his feet squished as he took a seat at the table.

“And how are your ladies and gentlemen bearing up?”

“As best they can,” Doyle affirmed, “under the circumstances. The parson fears we are making no progress.”

“Does he?” said the mate.

“I think he’s only frightened.”

“Well, it’s foul going, that’s sure. But we’re going all the same.”

“Yes, of course.” The doctor smiled at the foolishness of the parson.

“It’s lucky for them you’ve a seagoing stomach. Our last doctor was worse off than his patients in bad weather.”

“It’s not my first time at sea.”

“Is it not?”

“I was ship’s surgeon on the whaler Hope , under Captain John Gray.”

“A whaler,” said the mate. “Now there’s sailing. You’ve no retching passengers on a whaler.”

“I liked the life,” the doctor said simply. He would have told how Captain Gray had offered his doughty medical officer double duty as surgeon and harpooner on his next voyage, but the mate drained his cup and pushed back his chair. “I’m up, sir,” he said. “I believe we are in for a wild run for our money tonight, but by morning, if we don’t founder, we may find smooth sailing. The Bay of Biscay is a hellion, but by God she moves you, she moves you.”

The mate’s prediction proved true. In the night, it was as if they had entered a mountain range made of water. The doctor, aghast at what he saw through his porthole, made up his mind to go on deck. The ship lurched and trembled like a living thing and he held tightly to the handgrips as he came up. There he saw a sight that made him gasp for breath. In every direction great walls of black water, heavily veined with white, loomed so high they blocked the sky. The ship, which had seemed large, was here revealed to be a child’s toy. There was a continual rush of phosphorescent sea across the decks, hip‑deep liquid green flames, which cast upon the pale faces of the sailors manning the pumps an eerie, otherworldly pallor.

From somewhere a voice came to him like something from the Bible, clear, firm, distinct, a voice from the fire. “Go in, you fool,” it commanded. “Go in.” The doctor looked about and saw that it was the captain, waving one hand at him from the quarterdeck, holding on to the rail for dear life with the other.

Doyle ducked back into the companion and sloshed off to his cabin. He was as soaked as if he’d actually dived into the sea. He stripped off his clothes, draped them around his furnishings, and then, strangely exhausted by what he had seen, he fell into the bed and was instantly asleep.

* * *

How changeable is life at sea. When next the doctor opened his eyes, a warm beam of sunlight gleamed across his outstretched hand. Nothing in the room was moving up, down, or sideways, and there was a hum, as of a man gently snoring, coming from belowdecks. When he rose from his bed, the water he stepped into barely covered his foot. Outside his cabin door, he heard cheerful voices, then the slap and slop of a mop, and the roll of the bucket moving down the passageway. He found a dry shirt and trousers. He had no choice but to put on the sodden jacket, as he owned no other. He opened his door to find the steward grinning at him. “As you’re up, sir, I’ll just pass in with the mop.”

“And welcome you are, wherever you show yourself this morning, sir, I don’t doubt,” said the doctor.

“It’s true. I’ve found none to complain at the sight of me, would it were ever so.”

The doctor passed out, anxious to be on deck, to see that great roaring bull that had bellowed and threatened in the night transformed into a willing beast of burden.

All hands were in good cheer; full steam was ahead. “Good morning, sir,” called the captain from his post on the quarterdeck. “Will you come up?”

The air was delicious, charged after the storm with a luminous glamour that made even the old Mayumba sparkle. The decks were marvelously, miraculously dry. “I will tell you, Doctor,” Wallace said, as the two men surveyed the scene below them, “there were moments last night when I thought we would not meet again.”

“It was a furious sea.”

Wallace gave his medical expert a close look, pulling down the corners of his mouth, as if something provoked or displeased him. “I expect our passengers are a chastened lot, and a hungry one,” he observed.

“Yes, I heard a great hubbub in their saloon.”

The sound of four bells was accompanied by the appearance of the mate, smiling up at them from the foot of the ladder. “I’ve an appetite myself,” said Wallace. “Have you breakfasted?”

“I have not.”

And so the two men went down to the officers’ mess, where, for the first time since leaving land, a hot breakfast was laid out for them.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 508