He carried the name bravely on his broad shoulders. He had carried it many years already when the boy Willems ran barefooted on the deck of the ship Kosmopoliet IV. in Samarang roads, looking with innocent eyes on the strange shore and objurgating his immediate surroundings with blasphemous lips, while his childish brain worked upon the heroic idea of running away. From the poop of the Flash Lingard saw in the early morning the Dutch ship get lumberingly under weigh, bound for the eastern ports. Very late in the evening of the same day he stood on the quay of the landing canal, ready to go on board of his brig. The night was starry and clear; the little custom-house building was shut up, and as the gharry that brought him down disappeared up the long avenue of dusty trees leading to the town, Lingard thought himself alone on the quay. He roused up his sleeping boat-crew and stood waiting for them to get ready, when he felt a tug at his coat and a thin voice said, very distinctly—
“English captain.”
Lingard turned round quickly, and what seemed to be a very lean boy jumped back with commendable activity.
“Who are you? Where do you spring from?” asked Lingard, in startled surprise.
From a safe distance the boy pointed toward a cargo lighter moored to the quay.
“Been hiding there, have you?” said Lingard. “Well, what do you want? Speak out, confound you. You did not come here to scare me to death, for fun, did you?”
The boy tried to explain in imperfect English, but very soon Lingard interrupted him.
“I see,” he exclaimed, “you ran away from the big ship that sailed this morning. Well, why don’t you go to your countrymen here?”
“Ship gone only a little way—to Sourabaya. Make me go back to the ship,” explained the boy.
“Best thing for you,” affirmed Lingard with conviction.
“No,” retorted the boy; “me want stop here; not want go home. Get money here; home no good.”
“This beats all my going a-fishing,” commented the astonished Lingard. “It’s money you want? Well! well! And you were not afraid to run away, you bag of bones, you!”
The boy intimated that he was frightened of nothing but of being sent back to the ship. Lingard looked at him in meditative silence.
“Come closer,” he said at last. He took the boy by the chin, and turning up his face gave him a searching look. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“There’s not much of you for seventeen. Are you hungry?”
“A little.”
“Will you come with me, in that brig there?”
The boy moved without a word towards the boat and scrambled into the bows.
“Knows his place,” muttered Lingard to himself as he stepped heavily into the stern sheets and took up the yoke lines. “Give way there.”
The Malay boat crew lay back together, and the gig sprang away from the quay heading towards the brig’s riding light.
Such was the beginning of Willems’ career.
Lingard learned in half an hour all that there was of Willems’ commonplace story. Father outdoor clerk of some ship-broker in Rotterdam; mother dead. The boy quick in learning, but idle in school. The straitened circumstances in the house filled with small brothers and sisters, sufficiently clothed and fed but otherwise running wild, while the disconsolate widower tramped about all day in a shabby overcoat and imperfect boots on the muddy quays, and in the evening piloted wearily the half-intoxicated foreign skippers amongst the places of cheap delights, returning home late, sick with too much smoking and drinking—for company’s sake—with these men, who expected such attentions in the way of business. Then the offer of the good-natured captain of Kosmopoliet IV., who was pleased to do something for the patient and obliging fellow; young Willems’ great joy, his still greater disappointment with the sea that looked so charming from afar, but proved so hard and exacting on closer acquaintance—and then this running away by a sudden impulse. The boy was hopelessly at variance with the spirit of the sea. He had an instinctive contempt for the honest simplicity of that work which led to nothing he cared for. Lingard soon found this out. He offered to send him home in an English ship, but the boy begged hard to be permitted to remain. He wrote a beautiful hand, became soon perfect in English, was quick at figures; and Lingard made him useful in that way. As he grew older his trading instincts developed themselves astonishingly, and Lingard left him often to trade in one island or another while he, himself, made an intermediate trip to some out-of-the-way place. On Willems expressing a wish to that effect, Lingard let him enter Hudig’s service. He felt a little sore at that abandonment because he had attached himself, in a way, to his protege. Still he was proud of him, and spoke up for him loyally. At first it was, “Smart boy that—never make a seaman though.” Then when Willems was helping in the trading he referred to him as “that clever young fellow.” Later when Willems became the confidential agent of Hudig, employed in many a delicate affair, the simple-hearted old seaman would point an admiring finger at his back and whisper to whoever stood near at the moment, “Long-headed chap that; deuced long-headed chap. Look at him. Confidential man of old Hudig. I picked him up in a ditch, you may say, like a starved cat. Skin and bone. ‘Pon my word I did. And now he knows more than I do about island trading. Fact. I am not joking. More than I do,” he would repeat, seriously, with innocent pride in his honest eyes.