

                    The Romance of Captain Duffy

                       By H. de Vere Stacpoole

                  The first honest story about South
                  Sea island castaways ever written.


North of Natuna and nearly in the latitude of Laluan lies Fovea, a
little, lost island inhabited mostly by butterflies, orchids, flying
foxes and spirit crabs.

These white and spectral crabs are not found, I think, in the islands
round about. The butterflies and moths also present remarkable specimens
for the consideration of the collector--or would if a collector ever
came.

“No one ever comes here.” That is what Fovea says to you after you have
become acquainted. Words spoken by the wind in the mangroves and the
beating of the blue and patient sea on the little beach facing eastward,
from which you can see sometimes the smoke of the Malacca-Hongkong mail
boats on the far horizon.

I was there only two days and the place struck me so much that I chanced
to mention it to a man I met at Chale’s Hotel, Malacca.

A gentleman by the name of Duffy. Mr. Duffy was a very rough diamond.
He had started in life as a cabin boy and was proud of the fact;
sailing ship, steamship, cable, salvage work--he had been through the
lot, emerging at the age of fifty or so with the honorary title of
captain, an unquenchable thirst and a little fortune scraped together
somehow out of tin--also a face forcibly carved and steadfast looking
as the face of a figurehead.

The captain moved uneasily in his creaking basket chair, then, calling
the native boy who was on the hotel veranda, he pointed to the empty
glasses on the table by which we were sitting.

“_Macham Taddy_,” said he, which, translated means “the same again.”
Then: “Fovea? Oh, yes, I know the place. Ought to.” He hung in irons
for a minute till the drinks came along. “Funny, you talking of that
place, and of being there two days. Well, I’ve stuck it there near
three weeks; hove on the beach as you might say. It’s not more than
a hundred yards before the trees begin north and south of that lump
of rock above the tide marks, and I reckon I know every yard of that
hundred. Remember that lump of rock near the middle standing there
like a bollard? I’ve put in many an hour sitting on that rock,
wishing for ships.

“You see, there’s no harbor, so the junks don’t come--though Saigon’s
only a biscuit toss off; there’s no copra, there’s no rubber and there’s
no tin. Against all that there’s no mosquitoes or Dutchmen; against that
there’s no bars.

Remember that little trickle of water that comes down from the trees and
makes a sink by the big tree fern? That’s the long bar of Fovea and many
a drink I’ve had there, lying on my face like Nebuchadrezzar.

“What I’m saying happened only a few years ago. I was in Canton. I’d
gone there to see a Chinaman over a tin proposition that turned out
trumps, and I was full of buck and beans, at a loose end as you may
say, and looking for fun. I went into Charlie Brent’s to look for it,
and there at the bar was standing Captain Bill Travers.

“That chap ought to have been born a bishop; sure as death if he put
foot on a ship he’d sink her or she’d catch alight or lose her sticks
or start a butt or bust her boilers. But it was never, somehow or
other, his fault, and the companies didn’t spot him for a hoodoo till
he broke the back of the _Ararat_, seventeen-hundred-ton freighter,
on the Paracels. Then they fired him and marked him ‘dangerous’ among
themselves, and he went hunting for another ship--which was like
hunting hell for violets--and here he was in Charlie Brent’s.

“‘Hullo, Bill,’ I says. ‘What are you doing now?’

“‘Pigs,’ says he. He was captain of a pig boat, chink owned and manned
and running from Canton.

“And one hour after meeting him, I’d booked to come along with him as
passenger, for fun--you can get a lot of drinks into an hour, with a
chap like Bill to do the talking and Charlie to do the mixing. Also,
you can hear a pig boat near as far as you can smell it. A cargo of
grunters is better’n a siren and you’ve only got to twist one of their
tails to set the whole lot off.

“I reckon they could have heard us at Hongkong as we put out of the
Canton River and a rat got loose among them. Night it was, and when
they weren’t ‘hrrumfing’ and snoring, off they’d go like half a
million cartwheels wanting greasing.

“‘You’ll get used to it in time,’ says Travers. But the time never
came, for next night the chinks rose and took the ship, knocked Travers
on the head and hove him over--and they bottled me in the glory hole
where paint and carpenters’ tools were kept; then they took the ship’s
money and half a boatload of prog, opened the sea cocks and left her to
scuttle.

“I didn’t cut my way out till morning, and there we were, down by the
head, all the pigs drowned, and the water washing inside of her like
the washing of a beach every time she moved to the swell.

“There were bulkheads that kept her still floating and Fovea showed
right ahead to s’th’ard. Nothing to push off in but an old collapsible
that the brutes had left by chance, and nothing to take off in her but
half a ham we’d had for supper and was still on the table with
biscuits and butter, though the floor of the cabin was six inches deep
in water--lazaret flooded, of course.

“Well, sir, I got that collapsible together and got her over on the
starboard side. The ship was listed so that there wasn’t more than
four foot of free board, so, getting over the boat was easy. I waited
while the drift took us along closer to the island, and then, all of
a sudden, came a bang which was a bulkhead giving, and following that
came a noise like an elephant gargling his throat.

“I didn’t wait--I pushed off in the old floating umbrella just in time
to get clear of the suck of her, and then I watched her sink, funnel
under, truck under--gone!

“Bad to look at, even though she was what she was--four hundred ton of
rusted plates and an engine that an old flivver would have sneezed at.
But a ship for all that. It’s bad to look at a ship going under. I’ve
seen it three times and every time I’ve been near sick in my stomach.”

“How far were you from Fovea?” I asked.

“A matter of two miles nor’-nor’-east,” replied the captain. “Current
with me, so I wasn’t long getting to the beach. The sight of that stream
coming down eased me a lot. I was mostly fearing there wouldn’t be
water. Trees don’t always spell free water, but there it was, and beyond
in the wood I saw custard, apples and bananas--same as you may have seen
them right back beyond that big tree fern.

“That’s how I was fixed with crabs and shellfish for grub--a blessed
fruit shop with nothing to offset it but a few biscuits and half a
ham. Lucky I had been able to bring off a boxful of matches so’s I
could roast the crabs; but I’ve never wanted to look at a ham again.

“There I was, and you can imagine--nothing to do after I’d made a tour
of the place and woods, nothing to do but sit and wait for a ship and
wonder what sort of damn fool I was for signing articles as you may say
with Travers. A free man linking on to a hoodoo like that, and I’d have
felt worse in my mind if I’d known I hadn’t done with him yet.

“The only bright spot in the ointment was the fact that the chinks
hadn’t searched me and taken my money. I’d managed to brain two of
them with a clinker bar before they shoved me into the paint shop, and
then I reckon they were too scared of me to let me out. Twenty-two
hundred dollars I had on me in American notes, and I’d sit and count
them and count them till common sense came along and clapped me on the
shoulder and said, as plain as the parakeets screeching in the trees:
‘Bill Duffy, give over fooling like this or you’ll go bughouse and
imagine yourself a bank teller. Go and build a shack for yourself
among the trees--never mind if you don’t want it, it’s something to do
and something to keep your mind busy.’

“So I did.

“I built a shack, cutting branches with my knife and twisting canes
to make the walls, and thatching it with palm leaves. I built it in
that little clearing by the water sink, and when I’d put the topknot
on I laughed. Guess what that thing fetched up in my mind. Well,
I’ll tell you. Did you ever see the house a bower bird builds? Well,
that was it, same as if it had been photographed and made ten times
bigger.

“I’ve seen the chap dancing before it to attract the hens. The chap I
saw had laid out a little garden with shells and blossoms and such, and
there he was dancing in it and the hens sitting round.

“‘Well, there’s the shack finished,’ I said to myself, ‘and nothing
more to do.’ And right on that, common sense comes along again and
claps me on the shoulder and says: ‘Bill Duffy, if you want to keep
the madness off you, do what the A’mighty had in His mind for you to
do when He showed you that bird away there in Borneo. He knew what
was coming to you: He’s sent me to give you the hint. And you take
it, and put your back into it and made a garden.’

“Pretty dangerous advice, mister, for if things hadn’t happened as they
did, the next ship coming along might have found me imagining myself a
bower bird instead of a bank teller. However I made the garden, fetching
shells from the beach and laying them out, and getting blossoms and
sticking them in the ground.

“I hadn’t no more notion of making a garden than you’d have of making an
airplane. I just did what the bird had showed me what to do, which shows
that birds may sometimes teach humans. And pretty it looked when I’d
finished with it, notwithstanding that it came to me all of a sudden I’d
nothing more to do--unless I started on another shack.

“‘Why,’ I says to myself, ‘if I go on making shacks and gardens all
over the place, next ship that comes along will maybe find me imagining
myself a house builder ’n’ decorator. What about that?’ I says to
Common Sense, but she’d hove off. Not a word from her, and down I lay
that night and dreamed I was a beaver--same as I’ve seen them by Moose
Lake--and I was building and building, putting in hot-water pipes so
that the bower birds mightn’t feel the cold--a man all the time, but a
beaver--you know the sort of sludge--till all of a sudden I was woke up
by a clap of thunder.

“I heard it rolling over the sea, and then I heard the crying of sea
gulls. Then I lay waiting for the wind and rain which didn’t come.

“There are no sea birds round Fovea, as you know, but I didn’t think of
that. Time wasn’t more than midnight, I reckoned, for the first thing
Nature gives a chap on his lonesome like me is a watch which hasn’t got
no second hands but can tell him noon and midnight pretty accurate.

“‘Funny,’ says I; then I was asleep again, solid.”

Captain Duffy reached for his glass, finished it and put up his thumb to
the waiter who had appeared again on the veranda.

“_Macham Taddy_,” said I, indicating mine.

Then I waited for the story to go on.

But the captain seemed up against an obstacle.

Then I saw that it was not a kink in the story that was holding him,
but some vision of memory. It was evident that the hotel veranda and
the sunlight and the palms of the hotel garden and the table by which
we were sitting and myself were, for him for the moment, nonexistent.

Then he came back to himself with a jolt.

“Solid--till I woke with the parakeets screeching in my face and it an
hour after sunup, as innocent as a babe of all that had been happening
in the night.

“What had been happening in the night began in China where the
fighting was going on and where they wanted ammunition. Six cases of
gelignite the French mail boat from Rangoon to Canton had aboard her
in the forehold, labeled ‘chocolate,’ and some Frog must have gone
smoking a cigarette there or something--though how he got there is
beyond me, unless they’d taken the hatch cover off. Anyhow a fire
must have started and she blew up and went down like an old tin can.
It all came out afterward.

“That was the clap of thunder I’d heard, not knowing that the screeching
of the sea gulls was the passengers clinging to spars and drowning--all
but one.

“All but one--and when I came out on the beach that morning, there she
was.

“A young female dressed for dancing same as you see them on board the
liners. _I_ didn’t know there’d been a dance on board the hooker; I
didn’t know any damn ship had blown up. I just came out on the beach
and there she was, and an elephant playing the fiddle wouldn’t have
given me a greater setback. Then I saw a big spar half beached by the
falling tide and I began to tumble to the situation.

“I came toward her, but she didn’t heed me. She was sitting there and
seemed to be talking to the sea, all dithery and waving her hands for
all the world like a girl I’d seen acting at Portsmouth in a play where
a chap poisons his uncle pouring stuff in his ears and----”

“‘Hamlet’?”

“That’s her--and one shoe off, lying on the sand. She’d been drenched,
but the sun had dried her, and there she was, wild as a coot, clean out
of her mind for the moment and minding me no more than if I hadn’t been
there.

“I picks up her shoe.

“‘Now, then,’ I says to her, same as if she’d been a child, ‘come, put
it on,’ just as if we’d been shipmates. And at the sound of my voice she
seemed to come together a bit and she looked at the shoe and then she
looked at me and then back at the shoe; and then she gets up all tottery
and holds out her hands like so, as if she was calling on the saints to
see her and the fix she was in; and then something caught back in her
throat and--off she went.

“It was like a dam bursting--laughing and crying, crying and laughing,
and when I got a hold of her it was like holding an earthquake till she
went limp so’s I could have hung her over one arm like an overcoat.

“I got her to the shack and laid her out with my coat under her head.
She’d gone right bang asleep. I’ve seen a chap do that after he’d been
beat up by a lot of chinks; I reckon Nature just steps in and pulls
down the blinds.

“Anyhow, there she was, shut-eye for twenty-four hours, and she came to
next morning bright and herself again.

“I tell you I’d had a night of it-- afraid to wake her, afraid she
wouldn’t wake up, crawling on my hands and knees to listen if she was
alive and breathing; and when she woke up, maybe you’ll believe me or
not, she had no more idea of what had happened than a child unborn.

“She remembered coming on deck after dinner to dance, but she was cut
off from there at the waist, so to speak. I had to tell her I reckoned
the ship she was on had blown up and she’d come ashore clinging to the
spar. She gave me her own name and the name of the ship; she’d been
traveling alone from Malacca to Canton there to meet her people. She
was as sane and sensible as you or me, but she couldn’t remember the
blow-up.

“Brains are queer things; a chap gets a belt on the head and he doesn’t
remember getting it, nor he doesn’t remember anything from maybe half an
hour before he got it--I’ve seen that myself. Same with her in a way.

“That girl must have seen things and heard them, too--enough to
raise the hair on your head, but the A’mighty had just snuffed the
recollection of them out.

“I didn’t grumble. She recollected enough of that ship to give me no
end of trouble inventing lies. You see, naturally, being warm-hearted,
she was anxious to know what had become of the captain and crew and the
other passengers; and I said they were sure to have got off on a raft,
what folks didn’t get off in the ship’s boats.

“She asked why they hadn’t come to the island; and I told her there was
a big current that would make it easier for the boats to push west for
the mainland. She took it all in, trusting as a kitten, settling down as
you may say, in her basket and beginning to take notice of things.

“I gave her a custard apple and some bananas and then I went off into
the woods to hunt for some avocados I’d seen the day before, telling
her I wouldn’t be more than half an hour gone and reckoning she’d
settle down better alone.

“Up on the high ground--if you took notice--there’s a bald patch where
the trees don’t grow. I didn’t bother about the avocados; I just sat
down there on an old stump to get my bearings and see what was best to
be done.

“The thing had hit me in the eye, so to speak--you can imagine. A young
girl in that rig-out and me alone with her and she as innocent as what
you please, and the whole thing coming of a sudden.

“I fixed it in my mind that she’d keep the shack and I’d build myself
another away at the other end of the beach, and when I’d got that
straight there wasn’t much else to think about--except food.

“Well, I couldn’t do more for her than I was doing for myself, and what
between crabs and custard apples and bananas and such, she’d have to
make out--so she did, and never grumbled.”

Captain Duffy paused and seemed plunged in reverie for a moment--a dream
happy yet unhappy.

“That next three days wasn’t like--well, it was like the biggest lie
a man ever imagined. You’d know if you could have seen her--never a
grumble, always smiling, happy as a child. And yet a woman all the
time--and such a woman! A man doesn’t know what a woman is till he
has to fend for her and get her food and be all alone with her.

“She’d come and watch me building my shack--and, ‘Aren’t you going to
put a little garden to it?’ says she one day. She’d been greatly hit
by the garden with the shells and truck. I hadn’t told her what had
put it in my head and I didn’t want to, but it came to me as she said
that, that things were shaping that way if I didn’t look out.

“But I needn’t have worried.

“The lease was up. If I’d been alone on that damn place I’d be there
still, maybe, but being as I was, wanting nothing more in this world
or kingdom come, the lease was up.

“That rent was owing, and the brokers coming in, and they came in a
damn old trading schooner, the last of her kind and the worst, owned
by McCallums of Singapore and bound for Canton. Water she wanted, and
fruit.

“When I saw her standing in and sure to be full of gaping ballyhoos, the
first instinct that came to me was to cover the girl.

“I told you how she was rigged--all right for a dance room on a ship,
but even there pretty much wanting, especially under the arms, so I
got her into my coat. It was Shantung silk; I’d bought the suit new at
Canton, and you may judge by my size that it fitted her. And so I put
her into it. She looked up into my eyes, raising her chin----

“Gosh!” He broke off and reached for his glass.

“Did you?” said I.

“Did I what? No, I didn’t--no, there was no kiss. I reckon hell’s
full of chaps sitting round and wagging their heads and saying: ‘No,
I didn’t--might have done, but didn’t!’” Then, after a pause:

“What stood between me and her all through was that rig-out she was in,
I believe. If she’d been an ordinary female dressed as such, things
might have been otherwise. You see it had put up a sort of bar between
us--as it might have been saying: ‘Here’s a lady in distress.’ And not
only that, but it seemed all the time to be punching in the fact of the
difference between the likes of her and me. I’m not anything more than
the A’mighty made me. A rope’s end taught me all the dancing I know,
and I learned French swabbing decks on an old drifter out of Cherbourg.
We weren’t the same brand of goods. She was a lady--all the same,
things might have been different if it hadn’t been for that.”

I took it that he was speaking of the dance dress, which had evidently
cranked up his inferiority complex in some curious way.

“Or maybe not,” he went on. “Anyhow, there was the schooner coming in
and she dropped a boat and took us off. McRimmon, the captain, had his
wife on board and the next thing was she and the girl were clacking and
throwing their arms round one another, and Mac--he’d got a long white
beard and so took advantage of it, as you may say--kissed her.”

“His wife?”

“No, the girl. Well, he wasn’t the chap to give something for nothing,
and so he charged me ten dollars, he did, for the lift to Canton, and
bunked me in the fo’c’s’le, seeing that the girl had the only spare
place aft.

“She’d come up in that mail boat to meet her people at Canton.

“She’d told me all about herself at Fovea and how her father was in
business at Shanghai. She’d left Shanghai and come down to visit her
aunt or some one who was living at Malacca, and the arrangement was
she was to be met on her return by her people at Hollyers Hotel,
Canton.

“Well, sir, when we fetched Canton, and I’d paid McRimmon his ten
dollars for the lift, and got her into a cab and took her to the hotel,
there was no people to meet her, only a telegraph from Shanghai saying
they were delayed and giving the date of their arrival--adding up which
I found I’d have her two days to myself and no McRimmons to butt in.

“So I left her at the hotel, where I booked a room for myself as well,
and bunked off and got a shave and haircut and a new suit from
Silver’s, and a panama and a malacca cane; saw the shipping people and
gave evidence about the blow-up--and back I gets to the hotel, only to
find that the damn ball dress had fetched me in the eye again.

“She’d gone to bed.

“She’d landed in a mix-up of what she’d wore at Fovea and what
Mrs. McRimmon had lent her. There wasn’t much to notice to my mind;
but she thought different and she’d done a dive between the sheets
till the milliners had time to fix her up. The hotel manageress told
me they were working double shifts and reckoned to have her fitted
by the day after to-morrow.

“Day after to-morrow!

“Well, what did it matter to me? I was saying we weren’t the same brand
of goods--and that’s the truth. All the same, feelings have nothing to
do with that. I wanted her--yes, sir, I’d have gone through hell ’n’
fire for that woman, and I’d have yanked her with me through a hedge of
relations half a mile thick and her clinging to me and tellin’ them all
to go to blazes. But I hadn’t a chance, so it seemed to me as I stood
in the hall with the hotel manageress telling me that.

“I sent word up to her, hoping she was all right, and she sent word
down to me saying she was, with kind regards. And I sat in the lounge
waiting, hoping every time I saw a bell hop it might be another word
from her, but nothing came but newspaper men--chaps from the Canton
_News_ and the Shanghai what’s-its-name, all wanting the story of how
it happened.

“I tell you by next day the whole wide world was wanting to know how it
happened, not meaning so much the blow-up of the mail boat, but the
girl’s escape. It was going round and round the world like a squirrel
in a cage, that yarn, how Captain Duffy had saved her and how they were
on an island together. McRimmon and his crowd had been talking and the
slosh journalists from hell to Hakodate had got the whisper---- Well,
you can think!

“I was close as an oyster about myself; but McRimmon wasn’t. And
next day, opening the Canton _News_, I found myself in print a yard
long. I was Captain Duffy, a fine, good-looking, upstanding feller
full of chivalry, but so modest that it was hard to get me to speak
of my doings. It gave the lie to facts and the looking-glass, but I
swallowed it. I reckon it fed some hungry spot.

“I said to myself that night--she was still in her room--I said to
myself that when her people came, if she was not down before then,
I’d run up the flag and tell ’em straight: ‘Duffy’s the man who’s
going to have your girl. He’s got forty thousand dollars in the
Hongkong-Shanghai Bank. He mayn’t be a scholar, but he’s a fine,
good-looking, upstanding feller, full of chivalry but not too modest
to claim the woman he wants.’

“That’s what I told myself not knowing I was still being trailed by that
ball dress and those milliners and their delays.

“If I could have got that girl alone that night I could have done
the trick and she’d have hauled down her colors; but the fitters and
riggers held her, as I was saying, and when she come out of harbor
next day---- Well, it was just like this:

“I was sitting in the lounge just at noon when the glass swing doors
flung open and in came her people--dad, mother, and a young chap with
pomatumed hair and an eyeglass, followed by chinks carrying their
luggage. And at the selfsame minute, like a thing in a stage play,
down the stairs comes she in a white dress looking like a snowdrop,
as you might say. And that young feller with the eyeglass runs to her
and gives her a kiss you could have heard all over the shop.

“And she hadn’t any brothers or sisters; she’d told me that when we were
talking of her family.

“When a gun’s bust, you can’t fire it again. There’s things that can’t
be done twict if you don’t do them once, and Captain Duffy he took his
hat and went out on the hotel front to look at the weather--which was
fine. He didn’t go back to that hotel. Didn’t bother about having his
luggage sent for; took the Rangoon boat which was due out that
afternoon, and left them to hunt for the fine, good-looking, upstanding
feller that was too modest to wait for thanks.

“Do you believe in that yarn about Adam ’n’ Eve? I don’t. ’Pears to me
if he’d been the same sort of mug as me and waiting for that girl till
she was dressed, he’d have been waiting--anyhow, that’s my personal
experience and opinion.”


[Transcriber’s note: This story appeared in the May 7, 1929 issue
of _The Popular Magazine_.]
