THE LION´S DISEASE
A Novel
by
Kaj Genell
Copyright © Kaj
Genell, 2022
All characters and events in this book are
entirely fictional, and any resemblance to actual
persons or events is purely accidental.
Personnel and passengers on m/s Punjab:
Daniel Stork, Captain of m/s Punjab of London
Ruth Stork, wife of DS.
Mr. Nicholas Williamson is a doctor and a veterinarian.
Mrs. Tonya Williamson, wife of NW, is also a doctor.
Midas Sully, 1st Officer
Alfonso Ruiz 2nd Officer
Samuel Diggersson, 3rd Officer
Harmenz Verstegen, Chief Engineer.
Ralph Bartlett, communications officer. ( Telegraphy,
telephone,
satellite.)
Bernard Schoener, the cook.
Geronimo Weichsel, repr. of Ship. Comp. Rattner & Rattner.
Paul Contour, an author, passenger.
Derek Holtz, a banker, shareholder Rattner&Rattner..
Joseph Johansson, carpenter.
Abubakar, Petty Officer.
Linda Benson & Dorothy Carlson, animal caretakers.
Eleven others, incl.: steward, shipmates,
electricians, machine men and other ship´s personnel, kitchen aides, cleaners, etc...among them:
Midshipman Witherspoon.
Oliver Haskett, sailor.
Rufus Conway, purser.
Leo Hart, steward´s assistant.
Rodney Small,
Toby Panetta, an Engineer´s apprentice.
Ruben Leopold. Med. Dr.
Miss Cumberstreet. Med. Dr.
Everything set in LONDON and on OCEANS in the year of 20XX.
My name is Samuel Diggerson, 3rd officer of the m/s Punjab of London, which you most
certainly have heard a lot of, in connection to the famous journey. I hesitated
a lot to come forward but finally decided to give a better account than the
multitude of wholly inaccurate tales about what happened related to the fate of
this ship on the Atlantic & Indian Oceans. This is my story.
LONDON
HARBOUR
|
A |
ll this took place only years after the horrendous
pandemic, the Covid19, had paralyzed
the world. Economy had been slowing down, and the tricky disease made a lot of
people face death, sorrow, hunger, as well as homelessness.
In the last days of October of this year, Rattner & Rattner, the renowned and prosperous London Shipping Agency, had hired me as an officer onboard the Punjab, a Handysize Geared Bulk Carrier. Minutes after being appointed an officer at a visit to the Staff Employment Office, I set out to find my ship from Emmet Street, where the office building was situated. I was on foot, in light rain and some wind in the dusky remains of Tuesday afternoon, out for the vessel, which was an immense one, lying at anchor outside the Northwest Pier of London Outer Harbor. I had been hired in an extreme hurry due to a mishap on a red London bus on the morning of the ship´s departure; the ordinary 3rd Mate – a man whose name I forgot - unprovoked got busted up by a drunkard, and, because of a broken arm, was brought to the hospital for surgery. The Company was in dire need of a replacement, and with a terse notice, I, who was then 1st Mate on another Carrier, the Swanee, of the same size, but an oil carrier, constantly sailing between the Persian Gulf and Great Britain, decided to jump in.
It was a commotion to try to reach the area. My
beloved Swanee lay by an anchor in a whole different part of the port. I went
by subway and by bus and on my way happened to end up on a small bridge, about
a hundred yards tall, in one of the harbor areas, viewing a large portion of
the London port from a distance. The harbor rested with thousands and thousands
of ships, cranes, sheds, and piers in front of me. Stairs and viaducts, trains
and carriages were seen everywhere, and miles of rails in grey and blue
nuances, covered by smoky fog, were spotted in all directions. How strange are
the cities, man built out in the plain and by the outpour of rivers! But they
were part of work, of human endeavor.
Work, this agreement between people, is often not
entirely rational or logical, yet it remains the only meaningful agreement
because, since primordial times, it has been based on reciprocity. This small
mutual agreement is quite fundamental. There has been, since the earliest
epochs, no other decency to be found in the world of humans anywhere in the
world than in the simple agreement of work. Some say that slavery was born the
day after work was invented. I realize that. Maybe so… But that does not affect
the nobility of Work itself.
The city, this immense organism, the actual big city,
skyscraper City, was the predicament, the condition, and the very place of this
decency and agreement, and in this decency, quite simply, marked by smoke, fog,
and a thousand smells, … marvelous. So this was the city of British decency, of
the decency of civilization, I thought, as I folded my collar against the wind,
which came in, gust after gust on this evening, from the West.
“Of all the
airts the wind can blow,
I dearly like
the West,
`Cause there
my lovely dearie lives,
The girl that
I loe´ best.”
I silently hummed. I always loved Robert Burns. My
father was from Edinburgh. But as for myself, I have mostly been living in New
York.
When I approached my future home, m/s Punjab,
now by foot on a distant busy narrow pier, I noticed that this ship, a
relatively modern and ingenious one, which my former boat, the tanker, was not,
with its 160000 deadweight tons was towering over far more modest and older
vessels, which also were part of the London fleet of conventional general cargo
ships. This fleet consisted solely of cargo compartments that could carry rare,
sensitive, and expensive goods long-distance. These goods typically include famous
cars, old airplanes, sculptures, racehorses, circus animals, and ready-made
building elements for bridges —in short, items that cannot be transported
across the globe by container ships.
When I was brought out to m/s Punjab by the company's
extra ferry, it was already late in the day, 08.00 pm, and I was at the first
real sight of her body, impressed by the size and beauty of the ship and, as I
thought, the ingenuity with which it was built. In the shadow of progress in
the money-intensive internet and communication industry, the ancient art of
ship construction has also been thriving.
I swiftly – dressed up in my grey, private suit, and
not in any uniform - escaped from the ferry to a steel ladder, on which I, with
some effort, climbed up along the side of the vessel. Halfway up a small door,
which was set on the side of the ship and had the door neatly shut behind me, a
small elevator in seconds brought me right to the main deck. The decks were
perplexing, shining in light blue. Leaning towards the hatch of one of the
large, square cargo holds, which all four of them were neatly covered with
orange steel hoods, large as tennis courts, the Captain was standing, together
with the 1st officer, to welcome the new 3rd officer, who, so late at night,
was about to report himself to them.
The ship was a magnificent vessel, much like a snow white
castle.
The Captain was a man in his sixties, thus 25 years my
senior, named Daniel H. Stork. He was a rather tall man, resembling an
American, but with a round head, a face color almost like he was from India,
dark, thinning hair, and a piercing look in his blue eyes. Yes, he seemed very
aware of everything around him. Stork had an air of seriousness and strong
authority about him. He was talkative, quick-thinking, and imaginative.
He had a perpetual stubble, and it seemed he needed to
shave twice a day. Most of the time onboard the ship, this very virile man was
bare-headed, and his thin hair made him easily recognizable from afar.
For the last five years, he had been with Rattner
&Rattner, mostly on container vessels. He had been the boss on many a
tugboat, cargo ship, and ferry and had enjoyed it. The grave but very talkative
Irishman said that he had often been flattered by being entrusted as a captain
by the Rattners on still more modern, still more expensive, and still more
beautiful ships. The executive director
of the Amsterdam office had asked him to take on the “Punjab” project during a
trip to Surabaya, on the island of Java. He thought it was a tough job, and he
was looking for a crew, and – through connections, I had been recommended to
him as a reliable chap, he said.
The ship was also in a hurry, though the Captain did
not tell me until many weeks later, when we had become friends, that it was
originally bound for Cherbourg when it should have picked up the manager´s
daughter. The latter had a yearning to be with the ship on its journey, this
time to the exceptional destination it had. The Captain had protested against
this, claiming that he was hired to take responsibility for the ship, which was
managed by a company and governed on reasonable grounds. He could not act in
his profession for a company that operates on grounds like “not waiting for
crew, because of the need to pick up the CEO´s daughter.”
Mr. Kaminsky then retorted that the Rattner &
Rattner Company always had a multitude of agendas, with getting the cargo out
for delivery being the main one. The other reasons were of less importance but
had to be waged in, he said. They always said things like that. Miss Kaminsky
should be picked up on the 22nd.
The Captain had not, in turn, answered to this; he
recalled but told Mr. Kaminsky that as soon as they had left London harbor, he
was the Captain. He merely hoped they would reach Cherbourg and Rachel
Kaminsky, he had added in a casual tone. “Ultimately, the Ocean decides.”
The Captain was a man of strong will.
The ship was painted white, including the hull,
deckhouses, hatches, masts, and rafters. The decks were blue. She was
enormously big, rectangular in shape like modern ships, very high, sturdy,
deep, and comprehensive. There were twenty-five people on board: twenty crew
members and eight passengers. The two animal tenders, Linda and Dorothy, were
included. On this trip, the Captain also brought his young, beautiful wife,
Ruth.
It was now October, the month of storms on the North
Sea, and “Punjab” had in the afternoon just haply gotten underway from
Amsterdam, via Le Havre, carrying lots of wheat, a couple of cars, and some
horses as well as some other animals, amongst them a lion. Then they added more
cargo here in London, more machines, an old airplane, parts of a submarine, and
more animals, while they unloaded the wheat. The lion was a lioness, brought
aboard, of course, in a cage. The cage was made of steel. The lion itself was
dressed in a suit, a green one, made of the thinnest tarp, and, although I just
spotted her very casually, as I was inspecting “my new backyard,” I felt sorry
for her. Taking a lioness from Amsterdam all the way to Java in Indonesia
seemed to me to be on the brink of animal cruelty.
All cargo was loaded into the four large compartments
by experts in loading cargo, airplanes, and animals. The animals were held in
hatch No.1, closest to the main deckhouse and the bridge, amidships.
Like most general cargo bulk carriers, which have some
4 or 5 holds covered by metal hatch covers, geared bulk carriers, such as the
Punjab, are mainly in the giant size range. All ships nowadays are too big.
They often have several cranes mounted, allowing them to load and discharge
cargo anywhere without shore-based equipment in foreign harbors. A typical
General Cargo Carrier of the geared bulk type has a crew of around 13-35. There
is a Captain who is in charge of everything. We always have 3-4 deck Mates, and
the 1st Mate is in charge of the cargo. The Chief Engineer is, of course, in
charge of the engine and systems. 3 to 4 other Engineers, 1st and 2nd Oiler, 2
to 4 deck crew, and 2 to 3 galley crew,
plus Radio-Electronics officer, one Bosun, one Electrician, and a Cook, a
Steward, and 2 Steward’s assistants.
Some ships house a couple of deck-engine utility men extra.
The Punjab also carried a few passengers: two doctors,
who were also veterinarians and were mainly there to look after the horses and
other animals; one author of novels, Mr. Contour; and Mr. Schultz, a banker, likely
an acquaintance of the Rattner family. Initially, all passengers were told they
would have to stay in their cabins since Captain Stork was busy taking command
of a ship that was entirely new for him. Finally, the company representative on
board was Geronimo Weichsel, a supercargo clerk.
Stork wandered around the ship, and one could see by
the look on his face that he thought it was way too big by the way he watched
his craft. Even I thought it was not wise to build ships of this size. These
ships are made in Japan, and the Japanese know what they are doing, of course.
Only I wouldn´t say I like these seafaring monsters.
The doctors were a middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Williamson. Paul Contour, a tiny, slender boy from Texas, USA, claimed he had
written a novel set in Baltimore. We were later not able to find it on Amazon
or elsewhere, though.
Since it turned out that the only reason Punjab was
anchored up in this part of the London harbor was to wait for me, we, as soon
as I had accepted to be a member of the crew on this ship, which was set for
Surabaya, Java, we raised the anchor at noon, had the tug boats from Livett´s
and Thames Tugs arrive to connect their cables to our vessel and drag us out of
the port, out through the busy Thames and out into the beautiful English
Channel.
The weather on this day was windy, but the magnitude
of our vessel, which was built in China, impressed the forces of the Sea. We
withstood any influence, either from waves or wind, and our maneuver out into
the open Sea was like gliding out on a dancefloor.
All of us in the crew were busy with navigation and handling
the four tug boats and the boatmen. I myself, who was completely new on this
ship, had no time for philosophical observation until we were three miles from
the coast. I looked back at the city of London, and at three o´clock spotted a
yacht that seemed to be the one from which Rupert Murdoch had fallen on his
last trip.
“You have to take care”, I told myself, ”one never
knows what will turn up on a voyage like this!”
Where the Atlantic meets the North Sea, there are
strange currents below the throbbing grey surface of the sea.
I know that I am sentimentally inclined, but I
consciously hate sentimentality, which I strongly associate with U.S.A. and
Hollywood culture. I always advocate for a more holistic approach to reality
than associating everything with the past.
------------------------
26th of October.
Dusk arrived. I was standing on the poop deck at
night, only hours after we departed from the port. After chatting with Ruiz,
one of my colleagues, about a small crack in one of the ventilators on deck, I
was watching the many-colored clouds in the sky. The lights of the small cities
ashore were slowly gliding by as we sailed southwards in the English Channel,
more precisely, the Strait of Dover. We thus ultimately headed for the turbulent
Atlantic.
I had earlier introduced myself to the rest of the
crew, which, besides the Captain and the 1st officer, Mr. Midas Sully, who just
looked stone-faced at everything, all were of the average competent kind. I also learned the name and face of the 2nd
officer, Alfonso Ruiz.
The stone-faced 1st officer, Sully, with hazel eyes,
was a strange character. He was a tall guy, fifteen years my senior; big black
tousled hair, whiskers, and light grey eyes. He spoke in a hollow voice and was
a significantly dominant guy. He said he had seen my credentials and said that
he, just like me, had attended Christ College.
Alfonso Ruiz, a young rather naïve fellow from
Paraguay, stood at the steering wheel, and we had put out a whole bunch of
sailors on the lookout. These waters by the French coast have heavy traffic by
everything from fishing vessels to tankers. We wanted at least to come through
the Channel before some of us went to bed that night. Sully and the carpenter
stood aloft in the back talking, puffing cigars. Longitudinally on the port
side, two dolphins were strangely spotted. They soon disappeared, though.
I ransacked my
memory. I thought I had met Sully on some occasions. But I did not know where
or when. He was significantly older than I—I was just thirty-five—so I don´t
think we had been in the same classes in high school or at the same parties. I
often reflect on my year at Christ College because it was only one year due to
a family catastrophe. I was not at all sure if I had met him at all.
Amidships, a sailor shouted out in a harsh voice that
one of the horses had become sick. Some horses were located in large boxes in
cargo compartment number two, where there were also a couple of other animals.
In one of the boxes, a beautiful black creature was lying on the floor. If you
know about horses, you know that they very rarely prefer to lie down. If a
horse is on the ground, it is either sick or dead.
When I got aboard, I had laid out the course on our
main chart and put up our destinations in our ancient logbook. We had told our
telegraph operator, Ralph Bartlett, to cable to our destinations. Later, I
could not find the chart. I told Sully. He could not find it either. Then I saw
I had accidentally placed my coat on it. Paul Contour, a vain red-haired fellow
with a tiny, bent nose, who had eyes like a hawk, but seemed a little mean,
like a snake, laughed at me.
Just hours into this journey, this boded no good.
After dinner, which was a steak, we all ate in silence.
The Captain, who said he had a headache, withdrew with his wife. The latter
also felt sick and stumbled on a tall shipping threshold leading to the
Captain's departments, a small suite of three rooms on the starboard side of
the white ship.
“Well, at least we are on our way,” Ruth, who was
black and ultimately from Trinidad, daughter of a drummer, flustered in my ear,
before disappearing, probably in an attempt to make me feel cozy, despite the
strange atmosphere on board and my own hasty departure. I had only had time to
bring a fraction of my luggage due to the haste of the escape from London.
Every hour in port costs millions of pounds to a ship of the Punjab´s
magnitude.
She let her large, black, curly hair fall over her red
dress, smiled generously, and her large, healthy teeth shone in the light from
the small yellowish roof lamps. She occasionally carelessly licked her upper
lip.
“Sure,” I said, echoing my younger self, adjusting my
rather impressive uniform´s cap with its shining white cloth on top of it. “It
will be a gas coming to Java.”
Just to be aware of Ruth made a man feel younger.
She had a broad face, looked a bit Latina, and her overall
appearance was quite striking.
I then took a stroll on the deck. We were now well off
the coast and should be able to relax a bit.
I then met with the doctors, who were highly taken
aback by the sight of the North Sea. They flung bits of bread towards the
seagulls, but the birds just looked perplexed. In the corner of my eye, I
caught a glimpse of Sully, however, and I thought I could discover a wry smile.
This really was some boat, I thought to myself.
The next day, we would reach Cherbourg for sightseeing,
Captain Stork had told us. They sent the luggage to Cherbourg for me to pick it
up at the mayor´s office, he said.
None of the crew knew the exact plan of the journey to
reach Java. This was all due to safety measures, according to what the Captain
and the Rattner man, Mr. Weichsel, had told us. The other officers and I were
just hired as crew, and the Captain is always the sole master of the ship. That
is—as it has always been—the rule of the Sea and is an anthropological truth.
The “Punjab”
had reached her maximum speed and had moved freely through the southwest trade
in the Atlantic Ocean. I looked forward to the sightseeing in Cherbourg. I had
a distant relative who lived there. When I stood on deck, feeling the massive
body of the enormous vessel under my feet, trying to focus on three birds,
seagulls, who had followed us all the time from London harbor. I was dressed in
my uniform – black trousers, dark blue jacket, and a cap with an ornate gold
brim - accompanied by the steward and the two doctors Williamson, I noticed
that Mrs. Williamson rubbed her eyes and then, after a second of hesitation,
cried out in a loud, harsh voice:
“I cannot see a thing! I am BLIND!”
First dinner.
|
I |
am sorry to
interrupt my telling of the actual story, but I think it is right to do, to inform
you a little about myself at once. There are two main reasons for this. It is
because I am an essential part of the story you will read 1.) as an agent on
board the Punjab, 2.) I am the one
who narrates the story, and – as we all know – the sender of the message often
controls its content, pitch, color, and tone.
I am from Glasgow. My parents, Espen and Elsa
Diggerson, both of them architects, raised me there. I was their only child,
apart from my sister Gwen, who – bright and beautiful as she has always been –
did not pose any trouble of any kind.
With me, it was different. I had no real interests and
no talents. I was not exceptionally bright and did not form any circle of
friends around me.
My parents grew exceedingly worried, and at last, they
decided to send me to New York to try to make me more competitive. At nineteen
years of age, I was transferred from the suburbs of Glasgow, with no prospects
or interests other than reading novels, to Queens, NY, where I began my real
education at Columbia University.
I intended to become an author, and my idol was – and
there was no question about that - Cornell Woolrich, the master mystery and
thriller writer, whose book “Fright” I thought was the best book I ever read,
and hence, the best novel that was ever written.
After a year, it turned out that I had absolutely no
talent for writing.
I could not even find anybody who shared my interest
in Woolrich, much less anybody who thought that “Fright” was the best book ever
written. During this time, when I discovered this, I had found a new favorite
author, whose name I will not publish here.
I then looked around for a real education. I soon
found that being a sailor nowadays was not only reserved for boys who had grown
up in canoes and on fishing boats but also a modern, quite technical
occupation, with a good salary, regulated work hours, and a solid pension.
I decided to try to become a sea captain.
I asked Gwen about it. She said:
“Definitely! If it is not just another of your whims,
that is!”
-----------------------------------------------------
I immediately rushed up to Mrs. Williamsson to assist; however, both she and Mr. Williamson showed me away.
“Now let´s see, are you really blind, Tonya? Honey!”
Nicholas, her husband, said, almost in a mocking way.
He waved his hand before her eyes as she was standing
by the railing, clutching it with both her hands, but turning her head one way
to the left, one way to the right, in what seemed a desperate try to be able to
perceive anything of the outer world.
“Oh, I see now; on the right side, I can see.”
“On the right side…?”
Nicholas Williamson mumbled, disgruntled in disbelief but definitely
more serious. His small face, a little reddish, was ridiculed by his abnormally
small nose, which always had a tremble. The head was small, too, in relation to
his body, which was 195 cm tall. Of course, as a doctor, he had known about
one-sided blindness, homonymous hemianopsia, which, if not a symptom of stroke,
is often just a hysterical condition. Still, he seemed to think that this did
not usually occur during action, but more when a person is tense and immobile.
Here they were amid wind and air, the giant ship
plunging southwards across the roaring Atlantic, and highly unlikely that any
partial blindness of that kind would ever occur, he seemed to think.
“Yes, Nick,” she panted, grabbing his flannelly coat,
”it is just so strange. I know, I know, it is odd.”
Now the Captain became visible on the stairway, in his
uniform, with an extra sweater, a green knitted one, just like mine, high up, his
brimmed captain´s cap on, binoculars in his hands, and from this outpost he
shouted:
“What is the matter, Mrs. Williamson?” in a high voice,
his jacket waving in the chilly wind.
Midshipman Witherspoon, a young black fellow with a
mustache, came running, bringing a deck chair, where Nick and I placed the
woman who was, of course, very troubled by her, at least for the moment,
inexplicable condition.
Ruth Stork, Captain Stork´s wife, also came rushing
from the ship's aft, which she had a particular flair for, and took out a small
bottle of whisky, containing at most 2 deciliters of fluid, from her handbag.
Tonya, who saw (!) the tiny bottle, waved her away with a gesture of dismay.
“No-no, no whisky. This will pass.”, she said. ”This
will pass by itself. It is probably just a tension of the ocular nerve, or the
brain itself”, she said, broadly anatomically.
Sickness is in itself something quite out of the
ordinary. It is an aberration, and it is not very common either. And life is
such that the rareness of sickness and the sadness of many sicknesses do make
sicknesses since they are a threat, a thing handled with as much fear as
superstition. Doctors are welcomed, and doctors are feared. Doctors live amid a
non-ironic duality, unlike anything the human community has ever produced.
Doctors are people with a strange profession, and they are men and women from
Hell and Heaven.
Mr. Nick nodded professionally.
After a couple of minutes, Mrs. Williamson was
escorted by her husband to their quarters, which were far below deck on the
starboard side of the enormous m/s Punjab, which continued its journey heading
southward in the light breeze that caressed the faces of the rest of us, who
were standing on different decks.
----------------------------------------------
Dinnertime was approaching. It was five o´clock,
British time, and we all streamed on staircases and through narrow corridors
which, due to the solidity of the ship, dampened all noise to a minimum in the
two dining rooms.
As was the ruling habit in the old English commercial
fleet, since Captain Bligh of s/s Bounty, the Captain was dining with his wife,
the three mates, i.e., the officers, the Chief, and the passengers.
The rest of the crew - the “petty officers” and the
able seamen - were dining in a larger dining room situated deep down in the
center of the ship's hull, with only artificial lighting in it. However, the
Captain´s dining room was on the third floor of the main deck´s building, with
large square portholes on three sides and a panoramic view of the surrounding
Sea. Out there, white foam erupted on the tops of the dark blue-green salty
waves that swiftly ran northwards, coming way far from the waters of Madeira,
the Canary Islands, and still further away.
------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Williamson did not attend the dinner. But all the
others were there. All the other eleven persons sat down at the dinner table,
all treated to by one single purser, the very competent Mr. Rufus Conway, who
was from Lancashire.
Dr. Holtz, who had a degree in Economics and was thus
the most educated person on board in terms of academic merits, started the
conversation because a vital phone call had delayed the Captain. Stork stepped
out on the side of the dining room, on a small runway on the side of the ship,
where the rest of the dinner party members could watch him talking and making
gestures.
“So delightful an assembly, a congregation of
extinguished people I will have the luxury of dining with during the next
thirty or forty days until we arrive at Surabaya.”
“Shouldn´t we be waiting for the Captain?” Linda
commented, also with a small gesture, bidding the purser, who was just about to
place some crawfish on her plate, to slow down.
Holtz waved her comment aside. Not only did the man
have a degree. He was a multimillionaire too and owned 11% of the entire
Rattner& Rattner sphere.
“I wouldn´t be surprised if we got acquainted very
well and will have an extraordinary time all of us!” the banker continued,
caressing his trim beard.
“I´ll wait for the Captain.”
“He told us to dig in.”, Contour, the author said, who
apparently was in a state of hunger.
The Captain now returned in a state of commotion and
anger.
“It was the Office. I had just forgotten to bring
another man with us. I am sorry to trouble you with this information. It does
not matter, because he will catch up with us in Cherbourg. Nothing to worry
about.”, he said, panting, while he sank in his chair that had curved, rounded
supports for both elbows and was made of Scottish pear tree.
“Aye, but who was that to be, sir?” Sully asked,
almost before the revered Captain had finished his sentence.
“The security officer, of course.“ Stork answered,
smiling a little, to release the tension around the table,” The man from Secret
Service.”
Here Weichsel, who was a slim, tiny fellow with watery
blue eyes, blushed. He realized that it could have been his realm of
responsibility that, in an unfortunate and to him dishonoring way, had been
thus displayed.
Ruth Stork, who wasn´t much of a talker, dressed
in a light blue frock, hindered further
discussion on the subject since she now opened her mouth, smiled and bowed to
everybody, and said:
“Very welcome, all of you!”
The entire dinner party, including Weichsel, highly
appreciated this small speech. Verstegen, the Chief, even enthusiastically
clapped his hands at Ruth´s words, hands that always had a small portion of
motor oil on them, just by the sleeves of his shirt.
I enjoyed the assembly. Compared to my last journey on
the Swanee, the giant oil carrier, where we had not a single passenger
and indeed no animals onboard, this seemed to me, as it also seemed the case
with all the others, highly
entertaining.
All of us thought little of Mts. Williamsson, since we
all estimated her condition to be nothing but a temporary bout of hysteria.
We were all having dinner amid a heated discussion
about the possible expectations for our exciting journey. Most of us were
unfamiliar with Surabaya, and the excitement rose to ecstasy. We were - as I
said - none of us much taken aback by either the incident with Mrs.
Williamson´s vision nor – as a matter of fact - by the fact that we, until
Cherbourg, did not have any man from the MI5, Secret Service, to supervise us.
I immediately guessed that he had something of substantial economic value in
our cargo that was not openly accounted for and which needed special
protection. Still, as a newcomer on this ship, I thought it was not for me to
start to question what it was all about openly.
I was increasingly delighted to be hired for this
trip.
Verstegen, who sat by my side, whom I had never met
before, asked about my previous experience of the Sea and welcomed me on board
while drinking a pint of Scottish beer in heavy clunks.
“You are from Holland?”
“The Netherlands,” he corrected with a friendly smile
and a wink of the eye. The man was utterly sympathetic, unpretentious, and
seemed to have a heart of gold. He reminded me of my best friend in grammar
school, whose father had looked like Mr. Verstegen and drove a taxi and who at
that time had been my idol. As a kid, I thought that driving a taxi cab was the
ultimate adventure.
Not much of value was said during the dinner, and afterward,
we sat in the saloon, some of us watching the Telly, others just enjoying each
other´s company. Since we were expected to spend a lot of time together, it
seemed that all of us were careful in approaching each other, and eager not to
ruin any future alliances by making a bad first impression on anyone. Dorothy,
one of the young animal lovers, approached me and welcomed me as well, and
asked me about my interests, aside from ships and the Sea. She said that I
looked quite like a gambler, as I was good at playing cards.
“I actually don´t ever gamble,” I said, with a certain
shyness before the young blond girl, with her intelligent eyes, one of which
had a yellow speck in its green iris …”I mostly read books. I am pretty much
interested in everything, aside from gambling and sports,” I answered modestly.
“Do you like animals?” she asked, and I wasn't sure if
she was serious.
But when I was going to ask her if she was, Mrs.
Williamson, accompanied by her husband, all of a sudden appeared eerily in the
doorway to the dining room, where the rest of us had just minutes ago had our
dinner. She probably had had some in solitude:
“I still cannot see anything on my left side.”
All of us went stark silent.
“Well,” Captain Stork said - since he was the Captain:
”We certainly hope that your eyesight will return by tomorrer.”
He did not sound exactly irritated, but there was a specific
bite in his tone yet.
He was in total control of his universe, and at the
same time seemed to take a philosophical attitude to everything that was said,
as well as to every movement of a head or a limb. He had absolutely no pretense
and was immediately respected.
“It is not that,” Tonya said, while she turned her head in the broader circle, and here she was about to drop a real bomb:
”I have investigated the symptoms, and, although I
have not yet conferred with my husband,” – she nodded at Nicholas,” I think the
lioness could have infected me.”
“BY THE LIONESS??” the Captain, Dorothy, the banker,
and the Chief shouted out.
Nicholas stood staring like he had seen a ghost.
“Are you sure?” he stuttered.
“Are you sure?”
Of course, Tonya was not sure, I thought to myself,
while I, with my typical naiveté, tried to conclude what many of the people who
had their job to look after the animals for sure already knew very well:
“So we have a sick lioness on board?” I asked.
“Yes, the lion is sick,” Nicholas said, ”but lions
cannot infect people.”
My throat
went dry. I stared at Ruiz, who stared back.
“They can. It is rare. But they CAN!” Tonya said,
mustering her man up and down with her gaze. Maybe she implied that she had
looked up things in some books or on the internet, which was available on the
ship due to the ingenuity of Mr. Bartlett, the communications officer, who, for
some odd reason, was not invited to the Captain’s table.
“Now, I need clarity here. I will not let anybody
leave this room until we have sorted this out!” the Captain said in a loud
voice, shoving everybody. What a clear-cut skipper he was. Agile and ready to
deal with whatever adversity came before him.
“Is there, or is there NOT a possibility for lions to
infect people with eye disease?” the Captain – running his fingers through his
thinning hair - asked all of us, but of course, the two doctors in particular,
who seemed to have some marital trouble between them.
This question was hanging in the air. Soon, many of us
realized that the answer would not be easily obtained. But for now, the able
Captain insisted, and like a man entrusted with omniscience, he turned right
away to the one person who, according to him, had at least part of the answer:
“How is the lion?”
The question was directed straight to young Dorothy.
-----------------------------------------
CHAPTER THREE
LIKE A TRAFFIC LIGHT
“It is true,” Dorothy said, who seemed to be a clever,
apt, and educated young girl,” that she came on board in Amsterdam a fortnight
ago. She was in good shape, and she was part of the late Count Hillman Estate.
Carson Hillman, the rolling-in-riches businessman who owned a castle outside
Amsterdam, and his wife, Lorna-May, just died. In their multimillion-dollar
will, some of the….”
She was interrupted by the pretentious banker, who
seemed furious over the two young, uneducated girls, who got more attention
than he did.
“Do we have to listen to this? Just kick the lion
overboard and let us get on to Surabaya! For God´s sake!!” The tongue of the
banker ran wild.
The Captain blinked coldly, and in a contrastingly
calm and steady voice, he addressed the whole assembly, in a way we soon would
be accustomed to. He was at the same time demanding and curious.:
“Proceed, please! I do want to listen to the whole
story, in just the way Dorothy is presenting it.”
Dorothy, without any change in her tone, took up
again:
“Sir! Some of the money, left by the Hillmans, was
marked to ensure that their much-loved Betty – the lion – was brought back to
her native Java.”
“Amazing story!” the author exclaimed, as he seemed to
think it was almost a saga.
The author, like all authors, had a strange look at
life.
To the author, events are real enough, but more real
are events, if they are dramatized and described in a narrative. They are then
transformed and transmogrified into the Universal and brought before the eyes
of Humanity, to the realm of
understanding and reflection, and aesthetic beauty and inserted in human
history and civilization. Drama is the form that the human mind most easily
understands. Drama is the thrill of mind. All events ought to be part of the
marvel of being put in the right place in a book. But most of all marvelous
events, and fanciful things, like this about the Carson Hillman Estate.
“The lion was safely on board when there was an
accident, though.” Dorothy said. “Five large boxes, containing four mongooses,
from the Flanders, were taken in, and the personnel just dropped one of those
boxes in proximity to the lion's cage. One mongoose got out, and out of fright,
it happened to attack the lion, which had started to roar at the whole scene.
The mongoose bit Betty in her nose. And a few days after this, Betty became
sick and lost part of her vision. Mrs. Williamson - who was on board - decided
when we were about to leave Amsterdam, on our way to Le Havre, that the
mongooses should be kept under surveillance.”
“So?” said the Captain. “And why wasn´t the lion and
the mongooses unloaded for care and examination in London? Or Le Havre?”
“Mr. Williamson thought that it would go away by
itself.”, Dorothy said and rubbed her own nose as if she was going to sneeze or
something.
“But the mongooses then?” the Captain insisted.
“They are still with us, in their boxes.”, Dorothy
answered. “There is nothing wrong with them. They are thriving as usual. I see
to them every day.”
“But why weren´t they taken off the ship? They are
likely the source of the strange disease.”
“I don´t know. They are well, anyway, all four of
them, sir. Two males and two females.”
“I bet they are.”, Stork said, relatively calmly.
There was a pause.
“I understand.” He then retook his seat, now slightly
more pensive.
Stork looked down, his left hand again on his chin, as
was his habit, and said, now to Tonya´s husband: ”Mr. Williamson, can you
please tell us a little more about the exact health of the lion?”
The tall Nicholas was sitting straight-backed on the
edge of a deck stool near the LED monitor.
“Of course, Captain …” he said, but without absolute
conviction, ” … she lost her vision, alright, but I didn´t think it was more
than a temporary effect of the mongoose attack. Nothing serious was my initial
response to it. I actually didn´t even look it up in my books. I now can see
that this was maybe rather unwise.”
“It probably was.”, Mrs. Williamson filled in, winking
her eyes in all directions, now and then covering up one eye or the other with
a piece of cloth.
“Don´t you have a diagnosis or something on this
condition that this Betty is suffering from?” the Captain asked, whose
determination and strength appeared to me of a grandeur that I had hitherto
never met by any superior officer in any fleet with which I had served. Not to
talk about the professors at Colombia, where I studied.
The Williamsons looked at each other. They shook their
heads.
“No,” Tonya finally said, ”you see, the eye condition
seemed so strange and varying. One day, she could see things with one eye and
the other, and one day she couldn´t see a thing. But, at the time, we thought
that we would soon figure it all out.”
“What about your own condition. How exactly is your
own eye condition?”
“Well, sir. Not so well.”
Tonya, who was extraordinarily pale now, trembled and
looked at her tall husband, a man whose body was as long as his head was small,
and suddenly started to cry.
“You won't believe me!!” she shouted. “You will not
believe me!”
The Captain, as well as Nicholas, rushed to her, and
they both put their arms around her to try to console her.
“Now come on, come on!” the Captain said, comforting
her, ”Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Just tell us how your eyes are!
Please!”
“You won´t believe me. You´ll think I am mad!” she
cried again, all red in her face.
I stepped into the discussion and humbly asked if she
would like a glass of whisky or something.
“Yes, whisky,” she whispered and looked at me, in her
curious way, with a little smile, which did not look much like a smile.
After Sully had brought her a glass of bourbon, she
said:
“You know, I would not believe it if it were another
person. It varies. It is like a stop sign. A couple of minutes, I can see
clearly on the left side, and then, all of a sudden, I can only see on the
right. And it just goes on and on and on….”
She cried and drank. Sully had to fill up her glass
once more. Water poured down on her collar.
“You didn´t tell me that.” Nicholas groaned
reproachfully. “If you had…”
“No, I didn´t.”
The Captain was, like all of us, bewildered.
“This is serious. This might cost millions and
millions of pounds! If not trillions.”, he concluded.
“This is a disaster.”, he added.
We all stared at him.
“You are jumping to conclusions, aren´t you?” both the
banker and Alfonso Ruiz, the 2nd officer, who had been almost silent all day,
said in choir. Alfonso – the decent fellow - was not someone who generally
participated in discussions without being asked to do so.
Then Linda, the other animal carer, lifted her head,
which she had held low, and partly covered up with her hands, when she spoke.
“It is the same with me. JUST LIKE A TRAFFIC LIGHT.
LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, NOTHING, LEFT, RIGHT, NOTHING. And it goes on and on
and on….”
We all rose from our chairs and retreated from each other in a panic.
We were all amid a new, strange pandemic. Out on the
Sea, and with a condition, which threatened us all, in a way, that nobody ever
heard of! This was maybe way worse than the obnoxious COVID-19.
The Captain thought the name “Betty” was silly and
suggested the lion should just be called “The Lion” because we only had one on
our ship. Later, he apologized and told everybody that they, of course, could
use whatever name they pleased. But he added that his late mother´s name was
…“Betty”.
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an eary version of this story, and in its entirety, can be found as a book on Amazon. I am now reworking it, for a second extended version.....
