Under the Waves: Diving in Deep Waters by R. M. Ballantyne (read book txt) 📖

She stops abruptly, for Miss Pritty has gone into sudden convulsions, in the midst of which she begs the stewardess, quite fiercely, to “Go away.”

Let us draw a veil over the scene.

Miss Pritty has been brought to this pass by Mr Charles Hazlit, whose daughter, Aileen, has been taken ill in China. Being a man of unbounded wealth, and understanding that Miss Pritty is a sympathetic friend of his daughter and an admirable nurse, he has written home to that lady requesting her, in rather peremptory terms, to “come out to them.” Miss Pritty, resenting the tone of the request as much as it was in her nature to resent anything, went off instanter, in a gush of tender love and sympathy, and took passage in the first ship that presented itself as being bound for the China seas. She did not know much about ships. Her maritime ideas were vague. If a washing-tub had been advertised just then as being A1 at Lloyds’ and about to put forth for that region of the earth with every possible convenience on board for the delight of human beings, she would have taken a berth in it at once.

We do not intend to inflict Miss Pritty’s voyage on our reader. Suffice it to say that she survived it, reached China in robust health, and found her sick friend,—who had recovered,—in a somewhat similar condition.

After an embrace such as women alone can bestow on each other, Miss Pritty, holding her friend’s hand, sat down to talk. After an hour of interjectional, exclamatory, disconnected, irrelevant, and largely idiotical converse—sustained chiefly by herself—Miss Pritty said:—

“And oh! The pirates!”

She said this with an expression of such awful solemnity that Aileen could not forbear smiling as she asked—

“Did you see any?”

“Gracious! No,” exclaimed Miss Pritty, with a look of horror, “but we heard of them. Only think of that! If I have one horror on earth which transcends all other horrors in horribleness, that horror is—pirates. I once had the misfortune to read of them when quite a girl—they were called Buccaneers, I think, in the book—and I have never got over it. Well, one day when we were sailing past the straits of Malacca,—I think it was,—our captain said they were swarming in these regions, and that he had actually seen them—more than that, had slain them with his own—oh! It is too horrible to think of. And our captain was such a dear good man too. Not fierce one bit, and so kind to everybody on board, especially the ladies! I really cannot understand it. There are such dreadfully strange mixtures of character in this world. No, he did not say he had slain them, but he used nautical expressions which amount to the same thing, I believe; he said he had spiflicated lots of ’em and sent no end of ’em to somebody’s locker. It may be wrong in me even to quote such expressions, dear Aileen, but I cannot explain myself properly if I don’t. It is fearful to know there are so many of them, ‘swarming,’ as our captain said.”

“The worst of it is that many of the boatmen and small traders on the coast,” said Aileen, “are also pirates, or little better.”

“Dreadful!” exclaimed her friend. “Why, oh why do people go to sea at all?”

“To transport merchandise, I suppose,” said Aileen. “We should be rather badly off without tea, and silk, and spices, and such things—shouldn’t we?”

“Tea and silk! Aileen. I would be content to wear cotton and drink coffee or cocoa—which latter I hate—if we only got rid of pirates.”

“Even cotton, coffee, and cocoa are imported, I fear,” suggested Aileen.

“Then I’d wear wool and drink water—anything for peace. Oh how I wish,” said Miss Pritty, with as much solemn enthusiasm as if she were the first who had wished it, “that I were the Queen of England—then I’d let the world see something.”

“What would you do, dear?” asked Aileen.

“Do! Well, I’ll tell you. Being the head of the greatest nation of the earth—except, of course, the Americans, who assert their supremacy so constantly that they must be right—being the head, I say, of the greatest earthly nation, with that exception, I would order out all my gun-ships and turret-boats, and build new ones, and send them all round to the eastern seas, attack the pirates in their strongholds, and—and—blow them all out o’ the water, or send the whole concern to the bottom! You needn’t laugh, Aileen. Of course I do not use my own language. I quote from our captain. Really you have no idea what strong, and to me quite new expressions that dear man used. So powerful too, but never naughty. No, never. I often felt as if I ought to have been shocked by them, but on consideration I never was, for it was more the manner than the matter that seemed shocking. He was so gentle and kind, too, with it all. I shall never forget how he gave me his arm the first day I was able to come on deck, after being reduced to a mere shadow by sea-sickness, and how tenderly he led me up and down, preventing me, as he expressed it, from lurching into the lee-scuppers, or going slap through the quarter-rails into the sea.”

After a little more desultory converse, Aileen asked her friend if she were prepared to hear some bad news.

Miss Pritty declared that she was, and evinced the truth of her declaration by looking prematurely horrified.

Aileen, although by no means demonstrative, could not refrain from laying her head on her friend’s shoulder as she said, “Well then, dear Laura, we are beggars! Dear papa has failed in business, and we have not a penny in the world!”

Miss Pritty was not nearly so horrified as she had anticipated being. Poor thing, she was so frequently in the condition of being without a penny that she had become accustomed to it. Her face, however, expressed deep sympathy, and her words corresponded therewith.

“How did it happen?” she asked, at the close of a torrent of condolence.

“Indeed I don’t know,” replied Aileen, looking up with a smile as she brushed away the two tears which the mention of their distress had forced into her eyes. “Papa says it was owing to the mismanagement of a head clerk and the dishonesty of a foreign agent, but whatever the cause, the fact is that we are ruined. Of course that means, I suppose, that we shall have no more than enough to procure the bare necessaries of life, and shall now, alas! Know experimentally what it is to be poor.”

Miss Pritty, when in possession of “enough to procure the bare necessaries of life,” had been wont to consider herself rich, but her powers of sympathy were great. She scorned petty details, and poured herself out on her poor friend as a true comforter—counselled resignation as a matter of course, but suggested such a series of bright impossibilities for the future as caused Aileen to laugh, despite her grief.

In the midst of one of these bursts of hilarity Mr Hazlit entered the room. The sound seemed to grate on his feelings, for he frowned as he walked, in an absent mood, up to a glass case full of gaudy birds, and turned his back to it under the impression, apparently, that it was a fire.

“Aileen,” he said, jingling some loose coin in his pocket with one hand, while with the other he twisted the links of a massive gold chain, “your mirth is ill-timed. I am sorry, Miss Pritty, to have to announce to you, so soon after your arrival, that I am a beggar.”

As he spoke he drew himself up to his full height, and looked, on the whole, like an over-fed, highly ornamented, and well-to-do beggar.

“Yes,” he said, repeating the word with emphasis as if he were rather proud of it, “a beggar. I have not a possession in the world save the clothes on my back, which common decency demands that my creditors should allow to remain there. Now, I have all my life been a man of action, promptitude, decision. We return to England immediately—I do not mean before luncheon, but as soon as the vessel in which I have taken our passage is ready for sea, which will probably be in a few days. I am sorry, Miss Pritty, that I have put you to so much unnecessary trouble, but of course I could not foresee what was impending. All I can do now is to thank you, and pay your passage back in the same vessel with ourselves if you are disposed to go. That vessel, I may tell you, has been selected by me with strict regard to my altered position. It is a very small one, a mere schooner, in which there are no luxuries though enough of necessaries. You will therefore, my child, prepare for departure without delay.”

In accordance with this decision Mr and Miss Hazlit and Miss Pritty found themselves not long afterwards on board the Fairy Queen as the only passengers, and, in process of time, were conveyed by winds and currents to the neighbourhood of the island of Borneo, where we will leave them while we proceed onward to the island of Ceylon. Time and distance are a hindrance to most people. They are fortunately nothing whatever in the way of writers and readers!

Here a strange scene presents itself; numerous pearl-divers are at work—most of them native, some European. But with these we have nothing particular to do, except in so far as they engage the attention of a certain man in a small boat, whose movements we will watch. The man had been rowed to the scene of action by two Malays from a large junk, or Chinese vessel, which lay in the offing. He was himself a Malay—tall, dark, stern, handsome, and of very powerful build. The rowers were perfectly silent and observant of his orders, which were more frequently conveyed by a glance or a nod than by words.

Threading his way among the boats of the divers, the Malay skipper, for such he seemed, signed to the rowers to stop, and directed his attention specially to one boat. In truth this boat seemed worthy of attention because of the energy of the men on board of it. A diver had just leaped from its side into the sea. He was a stalwart man of colour, quite naked, and aided his descent by means of a large stone attached to each of the sandals which he wore. These sandals, on his desiring to return to the surface, could be thrown off, being recoverable by means of cords fastened to them. Just as he went down another naked diver came up from the bottom, and was assisted into the boat. A little blood trickled from his nose and ears, and he appeared altogether much exhausted. No wonder. He had not indeed remained down at any time more than a minute and a half, but he had dived nearly fifty times that day, and sent up a basket containing a hundred pearl oysters each time.

Presently the man who had just descended reappeared. He also looked fagged, but after a short rest prepared again to descend. He had been under water about ninety seconds. Few divers can remain longer. The average time is one minute and a half, sometimes two minutes. It is said that these men are short-lived, and we can well believe it, for their work, although performed only during a short period of each year, is in violent opposition to the laws of nature.

Directing his men to row on, our skipper soon came to another boat, which not only arrested his attention but aroused his curiosity, for never before had he seen so strange a sight. It was a large boat with novel apparatus on board of it, and white men—in very strange