‘Oh, yes,’ said Balfour, ‘making your own—well, going after it, in the modern way. But a digger’s mate is like his shadow—that’s another thing to know—his shadow, or his wife—’
At this remark there was a ripple of amusement around the room: not open laughter, merely a quiet expulsion of breath, issued from several quarters at once. Moody glanced around him. He had sensed a slackening in the air, a collective relief, at the conclusion of his narrative. The men had been afraid of something, he thought, and his story had given them reason to put their fear aside. He wondered for the first time whether their trepidation was connected in some way to the horror he had witnessed aboard the Godspeed. The thought was strangely unpleasant. He did not want to believe that his private memory might be explicable to another man, and still less, that another man might share it. (Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. This realisation, when it came, surprised him.)
Balfour was grinning. ‘Ay—his shadow, or his wife,’ he repeated, nodding appreciatively at Moody, as though the jest had been Moody’s, rather than his own. He stroked his beard several times with the cup of his hand, and laughed a little.
For he was indeed relieved. Lost inheritance, falseness in marriage, a highborn woman put to work—these betrayals belonged to a different world entirely, Balfour thought; a world of drawing rooms, and calling cards, and gowns. It was charming to him, that such changes in fortune might be counted as tragedies—that the young man might confess them, with the stern, controlled embarrassment of a man who had been taught to believe, from the moment of his birth, that his estate would never change. To speak of that here—at the vanguard of the civilised world! Hokitika was growing faster than San Francisco, the papers said, and out of nothing … out of the ancient rotting life of the jungle … out of the tidal marshes and the shifting gullies and the fog … out of sly waters, rich in ore. Here the men were not self-made; they were self-making, as they squatted in the dirt to wash it clean. Balfour touched his lapel. Moody’s story was pathetic, and had aroused in him an indulgent, fatherly feeling—for Balfour liked very much to be reminded that he himself was modern (entrepreneurial, unencumbered by connexion) while other men still foundered in the trappings of an outworn age.
This, of course, was a verdict that said less about the prisoner than about the judge. Balfour’s will was too strong to admit philosophy, unless it was of the soundest empirical sort; his liberality could make no sense of despair, which was to him as a fathomless shaft, possessed of depth but not of breadth, stifled in its isolation, navigable only by touch, and starved of any kind of curiosity. He had no real fascination with the soul, and saw it only as a pretext for the greater, livelier mysteries of humour and adventure; of the soul’s dark nights, he had no opinion. He often said that the only inner void to which he paid any kind of notice was appetite, and although he laughed when he said it, and seemed very well pleased, it was true that his sympathy rarely extended to situations where sympathy was expected to extend. He was indulgent towards the open spaces of other men’s futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts.
‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘mark this as your second piece of advice, Mr. Moody: find yourself a friend. Plenty of parties about that’d be glad for an extra pair of hands. That’s the way, you know—find a mate, then form a party. Never known a man to make it solo. You kitted with a costume, and a swag?’
‘I’m afraid I am at the mercy of the weather on that count,’ Moody said. ‘My trunk is still aboard ship; the weather was too inclement to risk crossing the bar tonight, and I was told to expect my belongings at the customhouse to-morrow afternoon. I myself was conveyed by lighter—a small crew rowed out, very bravely, to fetch the passengers in.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Balfour said, more soberly. ‘We’ve seen three wrecks in the past month alone, coming over the bar. It’s a frightful business. There’s a penny to be made in it, mind. When the ships are coming in people don’t pay too much attention. But when they’re going out—when they’re going out, there’s gold aboard.’
‘I am told that the landing here at Hokitika is notoriously treacherous.’
‘Notoriously—oh yes. And there’s nothing to be done about it, if a vessel’s on the long side of a hundred feet. She might blow off a full head of steam and it’s not enough to force her over. Capital firework show, with the flares shooting up all around. But then—it’s not just the steamers. Not just the big ones. It’s any man’s game on the Hokitika Bar, Walter. That sand will ground a schooner on the wrong tide.’
‘I well believe it,’ Moody said. ‘Our vessel was a barque—none too large, agile, hardy enough to weather the most dreadful of storms—and yet the captain wouldn’t risk her. He elected to drop anchor in the roadstead, and wait for the morning.’
‘The Waterloo, that her name? She’s a regular, in and out from Chalmers.’
‘A private charter, as a matter of fact,’ Moody said. ‘Name of Godspeed.’
He might have pulled a pistol from his pocket, such was the shock that name produced. Moody looked around (his expression was still mild) and saw that the attention of the room was now openly fixed upon him. Several of the men put down their papers; those who had been dozing opened their eyes; and one of the billiard players advanced a step towards him, into the light of the lamp.
Balfour, too, had flinched at the mention of the barque’s name, but his grey eyes held Moody’s gaze coolly. ‘Indeed,’ he said, seeming in an instant to shed all the effusion and bluster that had characterised his manner up until that point. ‘I confess to you the name of that craft is not unknown to me, Mr. Moody—not unknown—but I should like to confirm the captain’s name also, if you have no objection.’
Moody was searching his face for a very particular quality—one that, if he had been pressed, he would have been embarrassed to name aloud. He was trying to see if Balfour seemed haunted. He was sure that if the other man’s mind leaped to imagine, or to remember, the kind of preternatural horror that Moody himself had encountered aboard the Godspeed, then its effect would be only too visible. But Balfour merely looked wary, as when a man hears of the return of one of his creditors, and begins in his mind to tally his excuses, and methods of escape—he did not look tormented, or afraid. Moody was certain that anyone who had witnessed what he had would bear the mark of it. And yet Balfour was changed—there was a new shrewdness to the other man’s aspect, a new sharpness to his gaze. Moody felt energised by the alteration. He realised, with a surge of excitement, that he had underestimated him.
‘I believe the captain’s name was Carver,’ he said slowly, ‘Francis Carver, if I remember rightly; a man of considerable strength, with a brooding look, and a white scar upon his cheek—does that description match your man?’
‘It does.’ Balfour was scanning Moody’s face, in turn. ‘I am very curious to know how you and Mr. Carver came to be acquainted,’ he said after a moment. ‘If you would indulge the intrusion, of course.’
‘Forgive me: we are not acquainted,’ Moody said. ‘That is, I am sure he would not recognise me if he saw me again.’
He was resolved, in accordance with his strategy, to field Balfour’s questions politely and without reservation: it would give him licence later to demand some answers of his own. Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of co-operation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair. He did not look about him again, but instead kept his eyes wide and his face open, and directed his speech wholly to Balfour, as if the eleven staring men on his periphery did not trouble him in the least.