Jimmy Goggles the God

"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But
it's happened to me. Among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer.
Gummy! how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll
remember anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had
read it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said
vaguely, "but the precise--"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh
on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all
the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair
have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.
Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,
with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said,
in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me,"
he said, "but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some
time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
At last he took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs,
and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set
the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the
jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.
He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty
thousand pounds,' he said, 'on that ship, and it's for me to say
just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble
to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got
hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and
the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving-dress--
a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.
He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.
And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked up,
as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean
and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we
used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers,
who'd started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides
fairly ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it
was a curious crew, all officers and no men--and there stood the
diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort of
chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded
thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.
'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.
Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little
Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us
used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye
and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty
mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.
It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little
suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.

"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,
you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where
the Ocean Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy
grey rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had
to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was
a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just
as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts
that was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in
all coming in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday
morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.
It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People
over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore
and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance,
wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined
by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps,
with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving
upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear,
and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting
things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools
and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after
the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way
forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay
in the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour
about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight
up or down the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond
a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.

"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.

"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.
I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always,
'there's her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale,
I caught up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought
the boat round. When the windows were screwed and everything was
all right, I shut the valve from the air belt in order to help
my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't
a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down
into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and
blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most
cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout
at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.

"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.
None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get
the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels
damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt
yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten
times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a
feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your
lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,
only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above you,
and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet
without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,
let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom.
It was like going down out of the dawn back into the night, so to speak.

"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of
fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came
with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer, and the
fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of
flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air
again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in
spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down
there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.

"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was
an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind
of reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed
that floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just
a moony, deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight
list to starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between
the weeds, clear except where the masts had snapped when she rolled,
and vanishing into black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't
any dead on the decks, most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose;
but afterwards I found two skeletons lying in the passengers' cabins,
where death had come to them. It was curious to stand on that deck
and recognise it all, bit by bit; a place against the rail where I'd
been fond of smoking by starlight, and the corner where an old chap
from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we had aboard. A comfortable
couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now you couldn't have
got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.

"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say I
spent the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went
below to find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work
hunting, feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing
blue gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about,
a dab at my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect.
I kicked a lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and
picked up something all knobs and spikes. What do you think?
Backbone! But I never had any particular feeling for bones. We
had talked the affair over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew just
where the stuff was stowed. I found it that trip. I lifted a box
one end an inch or more."

He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as
that! Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted
inside my helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting
confounded stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down
twenty-five minutes or more--and I thought this was good enough.
I went up the companion again, and as my eyes came up flush with
the deck, a thundering great crab gave a kind of hysterical jump
and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a start it gave me. I stood
up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the helmet to let the air
accumulate to carry me up again--I noticed a kind of whacking
from above, as though they were hitting the water with an oar,
but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to come up.

"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood
a-quiver in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd
seen young Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was
still calling him this kind of fool and that--for it might have hurt
me serious--when I began to lift and drive up towards the daylight.
Just about the level of the top spars of the Ocean Pioneer, whack!
I came against something sinking down, and a boot knocked in front
of my helmet. Then something else, struggling frightful. It was
a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and twisting
about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if it
hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was
all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking down again, and
I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot rolled
free of me and shot down as I went up--"

He paused.

"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what
looked like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went
clutching one another, and turning over, and both too far gone
to leave go. And in another second my helmet came a whack, fit
to split, against the niggers' canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.

"It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps
kicking about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw
the game was up at a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist,
and went bubbling down again after poor Always, in as awful a state
of scare and astonishment as you can well imagine. I passed young
Sanders and the nigger going up again and struggling still a bit,
and in another moment I was standing in the dim again on the deck
of the Ocean Pioneer.

"'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix!' Niggers? At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady--quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined
with these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good,
coming up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur
of the moment, I clambered over the side of the brig and landed
among the weeds, and set off through the darkness as fast as I could.
I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick to squint up at it,
and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.

"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another
squint to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats,
and then kept on. I stopped with my head a foot from the surface,
and tried to see where I was going, but, of course, nothing was
to be seen but the reflection of the bottom. Then out I dashed like
knocking my head through a mirror. Directly I got my eyes out of
the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of beach near the forest. I had a
look round, but the natives and the brig were both hidden by a big,
hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool in me suggested a run
for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but eased open one of
the windows, and, after a bit of a pant, went on out of the water.
You'd hardly imagine how clean and light the air tasted.

"Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your
head in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five
minutes under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like
a ploughboy going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen
niggers or more, coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way
to meet me.

"I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out of
London. I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water as
a turned turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my hands
free, and waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me to do.

"But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. 'Jimmy
Goggles,' I says, 'it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to be a
little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and the
change in the pressure of the blessed air. 'Who're ye staring at?' I
said, as if the savages could hear me. 'What d'ye take me for? I'm
hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,' I said, and with
that I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed air
from the belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular
imposing it must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step;
and presently one and then another went down on their hands and knees.
They didn't know what to make of me, and they was doing the extra
polite, which was very wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind
to edge back seaward and cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A
step back and they'd have been after me. And out of sheer desperation
I began to march towards them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps,
and waving my blown-out arms about, in a dignified manner. And inside
of me I was singing as small as a tomtit.

"But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a
difficulty,--I've found that before and since. People like ourselves,
who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely
imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two
of these niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry
trying to knock their brains out on the ground. And on I went as
slow and solemn and silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber.
It was evident they took me for something immense.

"Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures
to me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. 'What's the matter now?' I said.
I turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming
round a point, the poor old Pride of Banya towed by a couple of canoes.
The sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected some
recognition, so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal
manner. And then I turned and stalked on towards the trees again.
At that time I was praying like mad, I remember, over and over again:
'Lord help me through with it! Lord help me through with it!' It's
only fools who know nothing of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.

"But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away
like that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort of
pressed me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was
clear to me they didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever
else they thought of me, and for my own part I was never less anxious
to own up to the old country.

"You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with
savages, but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me
straight to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed
old black stone there. By this time I was beginning to sort of realise
the depth of their ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity
I took my cue. I started a baritone howl, 'wow-wow,' very long
on one note, and began waving my arms about a lot, and then very
slowly and ceremoniously turned their image over on its side and
sat down on it. I wanted to sit down badly, for diving-dresses ain't
much wear in the tropics. Or, to put it different like, they're
a sight too much. It took away their breath, I could see, my sitting
on their joss, but in less time than a minute they made up their
minds and were hard at work worshipping me. And I can tell you
I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so well, in spite
of the weight on my shoulders and feet.

"But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might
think when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before
I went down, and without the helmet on--for they might have been
spying and hiding since over night--they would very likely take
a different view from the others. I was in a deuce of a stew about
that for hours, as it seemed, until the shindy of the arrival began.

"But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down.
At the cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting
Egyptian images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly
twelve hours, I should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd
hardly think what it meant in that heat and stink. I don't think
any of them dreamt of the man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery
great joss that had come up with luck out of the water. But the fatigue!
the heat! the beastly closeness! the mackintosheriness and the rum!
and the fuss! They lit a stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there
was before me, and brought in a lot of gory muck--the worst parts
of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts--and burnt it
all in my honour. I was getting a bit hungry, but I understand now
how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell of burnt
offerings about them. And they brought in a lot of the stuff they'd
got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved
to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed
air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced
about me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different ways
different people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet handy
I'd have gone for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild.
All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better
to do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house
place got a bit too shadowy for their taste--all these here savages
are afraid of the dark, you know--and I started a sort of 'Moo' noise,
they built big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the
darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think
things over, and feel just as bad as I liked. And, Lord! I was sick.

"I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle
on a pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it.
Come round just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other
chaps, beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate,
and young Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out
of my mind. There was the treasure down there in the Ocean Pioneer,
and how one might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away
and come back for it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything
to eat. I tell you I was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs
for food, for fear of behaving too human, and so there I sat and
hungered until very near the dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet,
and I couldn't stand it any longer, and I went out and got some stuff
like artichokes in a bowl and some sour milk. What was left of these
I put away among the other offerings, just to give them a hint
of my tastes. And in the morning they came to worship, and found
me sitting up stiff and respectable on their previous god, just as
they'd left me overnight. I'd got my back against the central pillar
of the hut, and, practically, I was asleep. And that's how I became
a god among the heathen--a false god no doubt, and blasphemous,
but one can't always pick and choose.

"Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits,
but I must confess that while I was god to these people they was
extraordinary successful. I don't say there's anything in it,
mind you. They won a battle with another tribe--I got a lot of
offerings I didn't want through it--they had wonderful fishing,
and their crop of pourra was exceptional fine. And they counted
the capture of the brig among the benefits I brought 'em. I must
say I don't think that was a poor record for a perfectly new hand.
And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it, I was the tribal god
of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four months. . . .

"What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress
all the time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and
a deuce of a time I had too, making them understand what it was
I wanted them to do. That indeed was the great difficulty--making
them understand my wishes. I couldn't let myself down by talking their
lingo badly--even if I'd been able to speak at all--and I couldn't
go flapping a lot of gestures at them. So I drew pictures in sand
and sat down beside them and hooted like one o'clock. Sometimes
they did the things I wanted all right, and sometimes they did them
all wrong. They was always very willing, certainly. All the while
I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded business settled.
Every night before the dawn I used to march out in full rig and go off
to a place where I could see the channel in which the Ocean Pioneer
lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried to walk out
to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I didn't get
back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers out on
the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that vexed
and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going down
again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.

"And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on
that old black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside
and jabbering, and then his voice speaking to an interpreter.
'They worship stocks and stones,' he said, and I knew what was up,
in a flash. I had one of my windows out for comfort, and I sang out
straight away on the spur of the moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says.
'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.'
There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came,
Bible in hand, after the manner of them--a little sandy chap in specks
and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in
the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him
a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?'
for I don't hold with missionaries.

"I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told
him to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down
he goes to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious
as any of them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like
a shot. All my people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't
any more business to be done in my village after that journey,
not by the likes of him.

"But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had
any sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure
and taken him into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child,
with a few hours to think it over, could have seen the connection
between my diving-dress and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week
after he left I went out one morning and saw the Motherhood, the
salver's ship from Starr Race, towing up the channel and sounding.
The whole blessed game was up, and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy!
How wild I felt! And guying it in that stinking silly dress! Four
months!"

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said,
when he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand
pounds worth of gold."

"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.

"Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous
ceremony. But there wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate
scenes and explanations, and long before he came I was out of it
all--going home to Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day,
and thieving food from the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear.
No clothes, no money. Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying
is. And just a squeak of eight thousand pounds of gold--fifth share.
But the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because they thought
it was him had driven their luck away."

H.G. Wells