The Adela, the reconverted minesweeper that had become the mainstay of commerce and progress in Sipolog Oriental, was on her way to San Roque. As Horacio Arenas, our new assistant, wanted to put it, the Adela was “expected” at San Roque, which was the provincial capital, “in seven hours.” He spoke at some length of this particular voyage, looking worn-out instead of refreshed after the two-week vacation we had hoped he would enjoy.

There he was, he said, one of the hundred-odd impatient passengers that shivered under the low canvas awning of the upper deck. A choppy sea met the ship as she approached Punta Dumadáli, and the rise and fall of the deck suggested the labored breathing of an already much-abused beast of burden. Her hatches were in fact quite full, Arenas said. Hundreds of sacks of copra had filled her hold at Dias. Piled all over the lower deck were thousands of pieces of lauan boards from the mills of San Tomé. The passageways alongside the engine room were blocked by enormous baskets of cassava and bananas. A dozen wild-eyed Simara cows, shoulder to shoulder in their makeshift corral at stern, mooed intermittently as though the moon-drenched sea were their pasture.

For the moon had risen over the Maniwala Ranges three miles to the starboard. As more and more the Adela rounded the Punta Dumadáli, the wind sent the ship buckling wildly. An hour before, all this would have been understandable; it was puzzling, if not thoroughly incomprehensible, now. This kind of sea was unusual for the reason that the Dumadáli headland was known to mariners to throw off, especially this time of the year if at no other, the full force of the noroeste. If some explanation were to be sought, it would be in some circumstance peculiar only to this voyage. This was the consensus, which made possible the next thought: that some presence was about, some evil force perhaps—so the talk went on board—which, until propitiated, might yet bring the ship to some foul end. The cows, so insistent in their lowing before, were markedly quiet now. The ship continued to pitch about; whenever the wind managed to tear at the awnings and cause loose ends of the canvas to beat savagely at the wire-mesh that covered the railings, small unreal patches of sea glimmered outside in the moonlight.

It was no secret that there was a dying man on board. He was out there in the third-class section. Whatever relation his presence had to the unpleasantness in the weather no one could explain, but the captain did do something. He had the man moved over to the first-class section, where there were fewer passengers and possibly more comfort.

The transfer was accomplished by two members of the crew. They carried the cot in which the man lay, and two women, the man’s wife and her mother, followed them. Ample space was cleared for the cot; the two women helped push the heavy canvas beds and chairs out of the way. Finally the two men brought the canvas cot down. The ship listed to the starboard suddenly; and it seemed that from all quarters of the deck the hundred-odd passengers of the Adela let out a wild scream.

Then the ship steadied somehow. For a moment it seemed as if her engines had stopped. Then there was a gentle splashing sound as though the bow had clipped neatly through the last of those treacherous waves. Either superior seamanship or luck held sway, but the ship might have entered then an estuary, perhaps the very mouth of a river.

The excitement had roused the passengers and, in the first-class section at least, everyone had sat up to talk, to make real all over again the danger they had just been through. The steaming-hot coffee which the steward began serving in thick blue-rimmed cups encouraged conversation. The presence of the two women and the man in the extra cot in their midst was hardly to be overlooked. A thick gray woolen blanket covered the man all over, except about the face. His groans, underscored by the faint tapping of the wind on the canvas awnings, were becoming all too familiar. The mother attracted some notice, although for a different reason; she had a particularly sharp-edged face—brow and nose and chin had a honed look to them. The wife, who had more pleasing features, evoked respect and compassion. It was touching to see her sit on the edge of the empty cot beside her husband’s and tuck in the hem of her skirt under her knees. She could not have been more than twenty, and already she wore the sadness of her widowhood. The glare of the naked electric bulb that hung from the ridgepole of the deck’s canvas roof accentuated it, revealed that she was about six months gone with child, and called attention to her already full breasts, under a rust-colored camisa, that soon would be nourishing yet another life.

It was four hours before, at Dias, where the accident had occurred. Although Dias was a rich port, no wharf had been constructed either by the government or the local association of copra and rice merchants. The old method of ferrying cargo in small outriggered paráos was less costly perhaps, it was even picturesque. But it was only possible in good weather. And already the noroeste had come. The same waves that pounded at the side of the Adela at anchor lashed at the frail paráos that were rowed over toward the ship and were brought into position for hauling up the copra. The man, one of the cargadores, had fallen off the ship’s side.

He would have gone to the bottom had he not let go of the copra sack that he had held aloft, and more so had he not been caught across the hips by the outriggers of his paráo. Nevertheless, the next wave that had lifted the ship and gathered strength from under her keel it seemed flung him headlong toward the prow of the boat. The blunt end of this dugout pressed his body against the black, tar-coated side of the Adela. The crew pulled him out with difficulty, for the sea kept rising and falling and caused the prow’s head to scrape continuously against the ship’s side. The crew had expected to find a mass of broken flesh and bones, but in actuality the man came through quite intact. He did not start moaning and writhing until his wet undershirt and shorts had been changed and he had been laid out on the cot. There was nothing that could be done further except to keep him on board. Something after all had broken or had burst open somewhere inside him.

His family was sent for. The wife, accompanied by her mother, clambered up the ship’s side thirty minutes later, to the jocose shouts of “Now you can see San Roque!” from innocent well-wishers in the paráos. The shippers, the Dias Development Co., had sent a telegram to the provincial doctor at San Roque, and an agent of the company had come on board and personally commended the cargador to the captain. When at last the fifty-ton copra shipment was on board, the Adela weighed anchor.

Now, for having transferred the man from the third-class to the first-class section, the captain earned some praise, and the connection between this act and the pleasant change in the weather elicited much speculation. If only the man did not groan so pitifully, if only he kept his misery to himself; if only the two women were less preoccupied too by some bitter and long-unresolved conflict between them. “Don’t you think he is hungry?” the mother once asked; to which the wife answered, “He does not like food. You know that.” And then the mother asked, “How about water? He will be thirsty perhaps.” To which the wife’s reply was, “I shall go down and fetch some water.” The matter could have stopped there, but the mother wanted to have the last word. “That’s better than just standing or sitting around.”

The wife got up and walked away, only to return about ten minutes later with a pitcher and a drinking cup from the mess room below. The mother had the pitcher and drinking cup placed at the foot of the sick man’s bed, for, as she explained, “He will ask for water any time and you won’t be near enough to help me.” The mother waited to see what her daughter would make of this; and the latter did have her say: “I’ll be right here, Mother, if that’s all you’re worried about.”

The man grew restless. His wife’s assurance (she said again and again, “You will be all right!”) drew nothing but interminable sighs (“O, God of mine!”). Between the man and his wife, some inexplicable source of irritation had begun to fester. “It is in your trying to move about that the pain comes,” the wife chided him gently. “We are getting there soon. It will not be long now.” Whereupon the man tried to raise his knee and twist his hips under the blanket. The blanket made a hump like one of the Maniwala mountains in the distance, and he let out a wail, followed by “But this boat is so very slow, God of mine! Why can’t we go faster? Let the captain make the boat go faster. Tell him. Will someone go and tell him?”

Almost breathless after this exertion, he lay still. The mother, this time as if her son-in-law were an ally, took it upon herself to comfort him. “Better keep quiet and don’t tire yourself. The captain will make the boat go faster, surely.” And by putting down his knee carefully, the hump that the blanket had made before leveled off now into foothills instead of those high ranges of the Maniwala.

The business of the telegram came after this lull. It was preceded by a prolonged groan, and then the question was there before them: “And did they send the telegram?” “They” meant the Company of course, in whose service the man had enlisted as a cargador. If the answer to this was in the affirmative, then there was reason to say that the doctor would attend to him and put him together again and return him to his work. His wife assured him that the telegram had been dispatched. “So be quiet,” she added. “The other people here would not want to be disturbed now. They want to sleep, no doubt,” she said, looking about her, as if to solicit the approval of the twenty or twenty-five passengers around—which included merchants, students, and at least three public school teachers on some Christmas holiday jaunt.

The mother asked about food—a proper question, although under the circumstances perhaps a tactless, one. “I am not hungry, Mother,” was what the daughter said, firmly. “I’ll sit here,” the mother offered, in a less authoritative tone than she had been accustomed to use. “I’ll do that myself if you are hungry,” countered the daughter. “I don’t care for food,” the mother assured her. “And did I tell you I wanted to eat?” Whereupon the daughter declared that she was not hungry—”let me tell you that, Mother.” The mother alleged that her most loving daughter was no doubt “too choosy” about food, “that’s why.” She ought to “go down below and ask for anything to eat.” “Eat whatever you can find,” was her solemn injunction, as if to overwhelm her daughter’s claim that she was not hungry at all. “Don’t worry about me, Mother,” the wife added, pointedly. “I don’t get hungry that easily.” And then to round off this phase of their quarrel, the mother said, loud enough for anyone who cared to hear: “Maybe it’s sitting at the captain’s table that you’ve been waiting for all this time.”

The daughter said nothing in reply and the mother did not press her advantage either. It was clear, though, that the meaning of the remark, its insinuation, was not to be easily dismissed. What the mother had so expressed was a little out of the ordinary; the air, as Arenas put it, was rife with conjectures. It was not difficult to remember, he said, that ship officers, or sailors in general, had never been known to endow women their highest value. What remained to be understood was why the mother thought of her daughter in some such awful connection as this.

Five hours later, Arenas said, after the Adela had docked at the San Roque pier and the discharging of some of her cargo had begun, the subject came up again. Perhaps the first person to disembark had been the captain himself, to infer from the fact that somebody, possibly one of the mates, had shouted to someone standing on the wharf: “Duty before pleasure, captain!” A jeep of the Southern Star Navigation Co. had rolled up the ramp and then hurried off the mile-long seaside road toward the town, into San Roque población itself. The town was brightly lighted, particularly the section along the seaside.

“Now he’s gone and we have not even thanked him,” said the mother. “And the doctor has not come. How can we leave this ship? Answer that,” she demanded. “You are too proud, that’s what. All that you needed to say was a word or two, a word of thanks, surely.” The wife remained silent through all this. “And he could have taken you in the jeep, to fetch the doctor; if there was that telegram, and it has been received—” She did not go further. The wife assured her calmly that the telegram was sent. “So what harm could it have done to have spoken to the captain, to have reminded him, since he would be riding into town anyway?” the mother said; and to this the daughter’s reply was the kind of serenity, Arenas said, that can come only from knowledge: “All men know is to take advantage of us, Mother,” she said.

Taken aback by these words, the mother searched the faces of people round her for help. She got nothing and she said nothing. The passengers had crowded at the railing to watch the lumber being unloaded. A gang of cargadores tossed pieces of lumber from over the ship’s side to the wharf ten feet away while someone chanted: “A hundred and fifty-three—and fifty-four—and fifty-five . . .” and the wood cluttered askew on the fast-mounting pile. The cows lowed again from their corral at the stern of the ship. This blended afresh with the man’s groans and with the chant and the clatter of the boards. Meanwhile, the wife talked on softly: “We have arrived, and it’s the doctor’s jeep we’re waiting for and nothing more,” wiping her husband’s brow with a handkerchief. “Two hundred and three—and four—and five . . .” chanted the counter, over down below. “This is San Roque now,” the wife continued. “A big town it is, with many lights. And with many people.” Her husband’s brow sweated profusely and it was all she could do with her handkerchief. “And the lights are bright, and so many. Rest now and tomorrow we can see the town,” she said softly, folding her handkerchief this way and that so as not to get any section of it too damp with sweat.

It was at this point, Arenas said, that a motor sounded from down the road, followed by the blare of a jeep’s horn and the swing of its headlights. The lights caught the man who was chanting his count of the lumber being unloaded, and they held him transfixed. He shouted out the numbers louder. The jeep stopped in the middle of the now cluttered up wharf, for what with the stacked rows of copra and the lauan boards from San Tomé there was no space for the jeep to move in. The driver, having gone no farther than possible, turned off his engine and slid off his seat awkwardly’ and then approaching the man who was doing the counting, he demanded: “How much longer?” And the other replied, “Possibly until two o’clock—what with the men we have. You know how it is, sir.” To which the other said, sternly: “Stop calling me ‘sir.’ And to think that the captain just told me he’ll pull out in two hours, not a second later.”

Words, Arenas said, which, although intended for somebody else did make the wife say to her husband: “They’ll first move you over there, to the wharf—that will be solid ground at least—and there we shall wait for the doctor.” She had dropped her voice to a whisper.

Across the ten feet of water to the edge of the wharf, lights fell harshly on the piles, on the heads and arms of the cargadors who slid up and down the gangplank with the copra sacks on their shoulders, looking like so many over-sized ants. To the right was the driver in his jeep; he had not turned off his lights and it flooded the first-class section with a garish glare. “What shamelessness,” cried the wife. The jeep’s lights singled her out. The driver had got stuck between the wall of copra to his left and a new pile of lumber to his right. He was trying to turn the jeep about but did not have the room. The man who had addressed him “sir” had stopped his work, and the clatter of the boards had ceased. Up on the deck, Arenas said, the wife shouted: “What does he want of me? What does he want me to do now?” The mother pulled her away. “She’s overwrought. Forgive her,” she begged. “And as you’ve observed, I’ve been hard on her myself. I don’t know why. Why must God punish us so?”

Once more the driver tried to maneuver his jeep and all the time his lights seemed to fix themselves forever on the wife, who, to meet this challenge, sprang away from the ship’s railing and rushed down to the lower deck, shouting: “Here, here I am. Take me. What can you want of me?”

It was that way, Arenas said. Two hours later, the man was moved to the wharf, and there behind a pile of copra and another pile of lauan lumber the wife and the mother waited. Word was abroad that the captain, who had returned from town, had said that he had contacted the doctor. Contacted, Arenas said, was the very word. And wasn’t that so revealing?

We didn’t know at first what he meant, we told him. Did he want to remind us about the war, the same one during which the Adela had swept the mine-strewn sea in behalf of progress and civilization? The word Arenas had used belonged to that time, and he seemed to say, All this because it had been that way at that time. You must understand, you might forgive, even.

But we didn’t want him to be apologetic like the mother-in-law he had described; and so, afterward, when he talked again about the subject, wearing that worried look on his face with which we had become familiar, we had to urge him: “Better not think about it any more.”