The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tales of the clipper ships, by Cicely
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Title: Tales of the clipper ships
Author: Cicely Fox Smith
Release Date: January 24, 2022 [eBook #67242]
Language: English
Produced by: Steve Mattern, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE CLIPPER
SHIPS ***
TALES OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS
[Illustration: THE “MAID OF ATHENS”
“LIKE SOME LOVELY BUT WILFUL LADY FALLEN AMONG EVIL COMPANIONS” (p. 22)]
TALES OF THE
CLIPPER SHIPS
BY
C. FOX SMITH
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY
PHIL W. SMITH
[Illustration: colophon]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1926
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF ATHENS” 3
THE END OF AN ARGUMENT 71
ORANGES 91
SEATTLE SAM SIGNS ON 107
PADDY DOYLE’S BOOTS 123
THE UNLUCKY “ALTISIDORA” 133
“The End of an Argument” and “Seattle Sam Signs On” have appeared
in the “Blue Peter,” to whose Editor the customary acknowledgments
are hereby made.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID
OF ATHENS”
TALES OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF ATHENS”
I
Old Thomas Featherstone was dead: he was also buried.
The knot of frowsy females--that strange and ghoulish sisterhood which
frequents such dismal spots as faithfully as dramatic critics the first
nights of theatres--who stood monotonously rocking perambulators on
their back wheels outside the cemetery gates, were unanimously of
opinion that it had been a skinny show. Indeed, Mrs. Wilkins, who was by
way of considering herself what reporters like to call the “doyenne” of
the gathering, said as much by way of consolation to her special crony
Mrs. Pettefer, coming up hot and breathless, five minutes too late for
the afternoon’s entertainment.
“No flars” (thus Mrs. Wilkins), “not one! Not so much as a w’ite
chrysant’! You ’aven’t missed much, me dear, I tell you.”
Mrs. Pettefer, her hand to her heaving bosom, said there was some called
it waste, to be sure, but she did like to see flars ’erself.
“You’d otter’ave seen ’em when they buried the lickle girl yesterday,”
pursued Mrs. Wilkins.
“I _was_ put out, missin’ that, but there, I ’ad to take ar Florence to
the ’orspittle for ’er aneroids,” sighed Mrs. Pettefer, glancing
malevolently at “ar Florence” as if she would gladly have buried her,
without flars, too, by way of paying her out. “I do love a lickle
child’s fruneral.”
“Mask o’ flars, the corfin was,” went on Mrs. Wilkins. “The harum lilies
was lovely. And one big reaf like an ’arp. W’ite ribbinks on the ’orses,
an’ all....”
The connoisseurs in grief dispersed. The driver of the hearse replaced
the black gloves of ceremony by the woollen ones of comfort, for the day
was raw and promised fog later: pulled out a short clay and lit it,
climbed to his box and, whipping up his horses (bays with black
points--“none of your damned prancing Belgians for me,” had been one of
Old Featherstone’s last injunctions), set off at a brisk trot, he to tea
and onions over the stables, they to the pleasant warmth of their stalls
and their waiting oats and hay. Four of old Thomas’s nearest relatives
piled into the first carriage, four more of his remoter kindred into the
second, and the lawyer--Hobbs, Senior, of Hobbs, Keating & Hobbs, of
Chancery Lane--who had lingered behind to settle accounts with the
officiating clergyman, came hurrying down the path between ranks of
tombstones, glimmering pale and ghostly in the greying November
afternoon, to make up a mixed bag in the third and last with Captain
David Broughton, master of the deceased’s ship “Maid of Athens,” and Mr.
Jenkinson, the managing clerk from the office in Billiter Square.
The lawyer was a small, spare man, halting a little from sciatica.
Given a pepper-and-salt coat with wide tails, and a straw in his mouth,
he would have filled the part of a racing tipster to perfection; but in
his sombre funeral array, with his knowing, birdlike way of holding his
head, and his sharp, darting, observant glance, he resembled nothing so
much as a lame starling; and he chattered like a starling, too, as the
carriage rattled away in the wake of the others through the darkening
streets towards the respectable northern suburb where old Featherstone
had lived and died.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,” he said, settling himself in his
place as the coachman slammed the door on the party. “Well, well ...
everything’s passed off very nicely, don’t you think?”
Both Captain Broughton and Mr. Jenkinson, after due consideration,
agreed that “it” had passed off very nicely indeed; though, to be sure,
it would be hard to say precisely what conceivable circumstance might
have occurred to make it do otherwise.
Little Jenkinson sat with his back to the horses. He was the kind of
person who sits with his back to the horses all through life: the kind
of neat, punctual little man to be found in its thousands in the
business offices of the City. He carried, as it were, a perpetual pen
behind his ear. A clerk to his finger-tips--say that of him, and you
have said all; unless perhaps that in private life he was very likely a
bit of a domestic tyrant in some brick box of a semi-detached villa
Tooting or Balham way, who ran his finger along the sideboard every
morning to see if his wife had dusted it properly.
Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the
carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals--that
indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp
horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands,
cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white
split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees.
“Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time,
contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of
half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his
hands into ’em?”
A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once
fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which
suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well.
A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a
safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or
the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause,
and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain
circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become
no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an
uncomfortable one.
“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer;
“depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for
business, though--our business and doctors’ business, what! More people
get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes
to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing
on damp ground. Nothing worse--nothing! And then no hats. That’s where
our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles--eh, Mr. Jenkinson?
If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it?
Ever hear the story about the feller--Spurgeon, was it--or Dr.
Parker--Spurgeon, I think--one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much
matter, really--and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was
preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon--yes, I’m
pretty sure it was Spurgeon--‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I
should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young
Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in _my_
synagogue’--ha ha ha--good, wasn’t it?...
“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little
secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a
body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh,
you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I
came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my
back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron--_you_ know. Hot as
you can bear it. Best thing going--ab-so-lutely....”
He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their
breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.
“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old
gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t
wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton,
don’t you agree?”
Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be
taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really,
whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who
was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if
anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were
feverishly busy with your own thoughts.
“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the
way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The
sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been
thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the
best of ’em. But not now--not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old
dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....
“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old
gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept--fine cellar! ‘I
don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but
I like what I have _good_....’”
II
Old Featherstone’s home was a dull, ugly, solid, inconvenient Victorian
house in a dull crescent of similar houses. It stands there still--it
has been more fortunate than Featherstone’s Wharf in Limehouse and the
little dark office in Billiter Square with “T. Featherstone” on its
dusty wire blinds and the half model of the “Parisina” facing you as you
went in. They are gone; but the house I saw only the other day--its
rhododendrons perhaps a shade dingier, a trifle more straggly, and
“bright young society” (for the place is a select boarding
establishment for City gents nowadays) gyrating to the blare of a
loudspeaker in what was aforetime old Thomas Featherstone’s dining-room.
And the legend “Pulo Way,” in tarnished gilt on black, still gleams in
the light of the street lamp opposite on the two square stone
gateposts--bringing a sudden momentary vision of dark seas and strange
stars, of ships becalmed under the lee of the land, of light puffs of
warm, spicy air stealing out from unseen shores as if they breathed
fragrance in their sleep; so that the vague shapes of “Lyndhurst” and
“Chatsworth” and “Bellavista” seem the humped outlines of islands
sheltering one knows not what of wonder and peril and romance....
A maidservant had come in and lighted the gas in the dining-room,
lowered the drab venetian blinds in the bay window, and drawn the heavy
stamped plush curtains which hung stiffly under the gilt cornice.
Broughton sipped his glass of wine and ate a sandwich, surveying the
familiar room with that curious illogical sense of surprised resentment
which humanity always feels in the presence of the calm indifference of
inanimate things to its own transiency and mortality.
He knew it well, that rather gloomy apartment with its solid Victorian
air of ugly, substantial comfort. He had been there before many times.
It had been one of Thomas Featherstone’s unvarying customs to invite his
skippers to a ceremonial dinner whenever their ships were in London
River. An awful sort of business, Broughton had always secretly thought
these functions; and, like the lawyer on the present occasion, had been
heartily glad when they were over. The bill of fare never varied--roast
beef, baked potatoes, some kind of a boiled pudding, almonds and
raisins, and a bottle of port to follow. “Special Captain’s port,” that
turbulent Irishman, Pat Shaughnessy, of the “Mazeppa,” irreverently
termed it: adding, with his great laugh, “You bet the old divvle don’t
fetch out his best vintage for hairy shellbacks like us!”
Thirteen--no, it must be fourteen--of those dinners Broughton could
remember. They had been annual affairs so long as the “Maid of Athens”
could hold her own against the steamers in the Australian wool trade.
Latterly, since she had been driven to tramping the world for charters,
they had become movable feasts, and between the last two there had been
a gap of nearly three years.
Broughton’s eyes travelled slowly from one detail to another--the
mahogany chairs ranged at precise intervals against the dull red of the
flock-papered walls; the round table whose gleaming brass toes peeped
modestly from beneath the voluminous tapestry table cover; the “lady’s
and gent’s easies” sitting primly on opposite sides of the vast yawning
cavern of the fire-place; the mantelpiece where the black marble clock
ticked leisurely between its flanking Marly horses and the pair of
pagoda vases, with their smirking ladies and fierce bewhiskered
warriors, that one of the old man’s captains had brought years ago from
Foochow; the mahogany sideboard whose plate-glass mirror gave back every
minutest detail of the room in reverse; the inlaid glass-fronted
bookcase with its smug rows of gilt-tooled, leather-bound books--the
Waverley Novels, Falconer’s “Shipwreck,” Byron’s poems.
Thomas Featherstone seldom used any other room but this. He possessed a
drawing-room: a bleak chill shrine of the middle-class elegancies where
the twittering Victorian niece who kept house for him--a characterless
worthy woman with the red nose which bespeaks a defective digestion--was
wont to dispense tepid tea and flabby muffins on her periodical “At
Home” days. He had no study: he had his office for his work, he said,
and that was enough for him. He had been brought up to sit in the
dining-room at home in his father’s, the ship-chandler’s, house in
Stepney, and he had carried the custom with him into the days of his
prosperity.
So there he had sat, evening after evening, with his gold spectacles
perched on his high nose, reading “Lloyd’s List” and the commercial
columns of “The Times,” the current issues of which were even now in the
brass newspaper rack by his empty chair: occasionally playing a hand of
picquet with the twittering niece. He was a man of an almost inhuman
punctuality of habit. People had been known to set their watches by Old
Featherstone. At nine o’clock every morning of the week round came the
brougham to drive him into the City. At twelve o’clock he sallied forth
from Billiter Square to the “London Tavern,” and the table that he
always occupied there. At half-past one, back to the office; or, if one
of his ships were due, to the West India Docks, where they generally
berthed. At five the brougham appeared in Billiter Square to transport
him to “Pulo Way” again.
A strange, colourless, monotonous sort of life, one would think; and one
which had singularly little in common with the wider aspects of the
business in which his money had been made. Of the romantic side of
shipping, or indeed of its human side, he seemed to have no conception
at all. A consignment of balas rubies, of white elephants, of Manchester
goods, of pig iron, they were all one to him--so many items in a bill of
lading, no more, no less. Ships carried his house-flag to the four
corners of the earth: no one of them had ever carried him farther than
the outward-bound pilot. No matter what outlandish ports they visited,
it stirred his blood not a whit. Perhaps it was one of the secrets of
his success: for imagination, nine times out of ten, is a dangerous sort
of commodity, commercially considered; and if Old Featherstone had gone
a-gallivanting off to Tuticorin or Amoy or Punta Arenas or Penang or
Port au Prince or any other alluringly-named place with which his ships
trafficked, instead of sitting in Billiter Square and looking after his
business--why, no doubt his business would have been vastly the
sufferer! And, indeed, since he found such adventure as his soul needed
no farther afield than between the marbled covers of his own ledgers,
there would have been no sense in looking for it elsewhere.
You saw the old man’s portrait yonder over the mantelpiece, behind the
marble clock and the Marly horses--keen eyes under bushy eyebrows, side
whiskers, Gladstone collar, slightly sardonic smile. Broughton indulged
in a passing speculation as to what they did with his glass eye when
they buried him. The picture was the work of an unknown artist. “If I’d
been fool enough to pay for a big name,” old Thomas had been wont to
say, “I’d have got a worse picture for three times the money”; and the
old man had not forgotten to drive a hard bargain, the recollection of
which had perhaps a little coloured the artist’s mood. The unknown had
caught his sitter in a characteristic attitude: sitting erect and rigid,
his hands clasped one above the other on the silver knob of his
favourite Malacca walking-stick. A shrewd old man, you would say, a
shrewd, hard, narrow old man, and not have been far wrong in your
estimate; though, as even his enemies were bound to admit, he was not
without his moments of vision, his odd surprising streaks of generosity.
A man of but little education--he had run as a child daily to a little
school in Stepney, kept by the widow and daughters of a shipmaster, and
later had gone for a year or two to an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen
somewhere off the East India Dock Road--he was wont to say, and to say
as if it were something to boast of, that he had never read but two
books in his life--Falconer’s “Shipwreck” and Byron’s poems, both of
which he knew from cover to cover. For the latter he had a profound and
astonishing admiration, so much so that all his ships were named after
Byronic heroes and heroines.
The “junk store” some wag once called the Featherstone fleet: and the
gibe was not far wide of the mark. Anyone who has the patience and the
curiosity to search the pages of a fifty-or sixty-year-old “Lloyd’s
Register” will find in that melancholy record of human achievement and
human effort blown like dead leaves on the winds of time and change
sufficient reason for the nickname. Everywhere it is the same
tale--“Mazeppa” _ex_ “Electric Telegraph,” “Bride of Abydos” _ex_
“Navarino,” “Zuleika” _ex_ “Roderick Random,” “Thyrza” _ex_ “Rebel
Maid.” Old Featherstone had at one time more than fifty ships under his
house-flag, not one of which had been built to his order. “The man who
succeeds,” was one of his sayings, “is the man who knows best how to
profit by other men’s mistakes.”
The doctrine was one which he put very effectively into practice. He had
an almost uncanny nose for bargains; but, what was more than that, he
was gifted in a most amazing degree with that peculiar and indefinable
quality best described as “ship sense”--an ability amounting well-nigh
to a genius for knowing a good ship from a bad one which is seldom found
but in seamen, and is rare even among them.
Someone once asked him the secret of his gift, but I doubt if he got
much satisfaction out of the answer.
“Ask me another,” snapped out the old man in his dry, staccato fashion.
“I’ve got a brother can waggle his ears like a jackass. How does _he_ do
that? _I_ don’t know. _He_ don’t know. Same thing in my case, exactly.”
And certainly where he got it is something of a mystery. But since there
had been Featherstones buried for generations where time and grime
combine to make a hallowed shade in the old parish church of Stepney,
there may well have been seafaring blood in the family, and likely
enough the founder of the little bow-windowed shop in Wapping Wall was
himself a retired ship’s carpenter.
Whatever the explanation, there was undeniably the fact. He bought
steamers that didn’t pay and had never paid and that experts said never
would pay: ripped the guts out of them, and in a couple of years they
had paid for themselves. He bought unlucky ships, difficult ships, ships
with a bad name of every sort and kind. Ships that broke their captains’
hearts and their owners’ fortunes, ships that wouldn’t steer, that
wouldn’t wear, that wouldn’t stay. And never once did his bargain turn
out a bad one.
III
From Old Featherstone’s portrait, and that painted ironical smile which
still had the power to call up in him a feeling of vague discomfort,
Broughton’s eyes travelled on to the portraits of ships which--Old
Featherstone excepted--were the room’s sole artistic adornment.
Over there in the corners--one each side of the portrait--were the old
“Childe Harold” and “Don Juan.” They were the first ships Old
Featherstone bought, in the distant days when he was still young
Featherstone, a smart young clerk in Daly’s office, whose astonishing
rise to fortune was yet on the knees of the gods.
They were old frigate-built East Indiamen, both of them, the “General
Bunbury” and “Earl Clapham,” from some Bombay or Moulmein dockyard: teak
through and through, but as leaky as sieves with sheer age and years of
labouring in seaways. Young Featherstone bought them for a song: gutted
them, packed their roomy ’tween-decks with emigrants like herrings in a
barrel, and hurried them backwards and forwards as fast as he dared
between London and Australia while the gold rush of the ’sixties was at
its hottest. He was in too big a hurry even to give them new figureheads
to match their new names, with the result that a portly British general
and a highly respectable peer of Evangelistic tendencies had to endure
the indignity of an enforced masquerade, the one as the wandering
“Childe,” the other as the disreputable “Don” of many amours.
Goodness knows how these two old ships’ venerable ribs managed to stick
together running down the Easting: nor indeed how it was that they
didn’t carry their freight of hopeful fortune seekers to the bottom
before they were well clear of the Channel. However, by hook or by
crook, stick together they did, long enough at any rate to lay the
foundation of Featherstone’s success. The “Childe Harold”--she who was
the “General Bunbury”--created a bit of a sensation in the last lap of
her third voyage by sinking, poor old soul, in the West India Dock
entrance at the head of a whole fleet of shipping crowding in on the
tide. The “Don Juan”--the backsliding “Earl Clapham”--came to grief, by
a stroke of luck, just off the Mauritius, and her old bones (it must
have taken a small forest of teak to build her) fetched double what
Featherstone had paid for her for building material. But they had served
their purpose. Thereafter, Featherstone never looked behind him.
The old “Giaour”--_she_ started life as a steamer, in the days when
steam was suffering from over-inflation, and a good many speculators
were scalding their fingers badly with it. The “Cottonopolis,” of the
defunct “Spreadeagle” Line--that was how she began. Her accommodation
was the talk of the town, said to be the most lavish ever seen--a wash
basin to every six cabins--but she devoured such quantities of fuel, as
well as turning out such a brute in a seaway that her passenger list was
never more than half full, that the shareholders were glad to get rid of
her at a loss. There she was--an ugly great lump of a ship, with masts
that had a peculiar rake to them, something after the style of a Chinese
junk. Sail, too ... like a witch, she did!... Then the little
“Thyrza”--_she_ was a pretty little butterfly of a thing; but she was as
near being a mistake as any purchase Featherstone ever made. He had
bought her, so it was believed, with the intention at the back of his
mind of winning the China tea race; but the tea trade petering out, he
put her into the wool fleet instead. Broughton had seen the dainty
little ship many a time: a regular picture she used to look, beating up
to the Heads just as old Captain Winter had painted her. Rare hand with
a paint-brush that old chap was, and no mistake! Give him one good look
at a ship, and he’d get her likeness to a gantline ... notice things
about her, too, sometimes, that even her own skipper hadn’t found
out....
There was the “Manfred”--the unluckiest ship, surely, that ever left the
ways! The “Young Tamlin” was the name she used to go by, in the days
when she used to kill two or three men every trip. That was before Old
Featherstone got hold of her, of course: and her owners--she belonged to
a little one-ship company--got the jumps about it and sold her. Sold her
cheap, too ... but, bless you, that stopped her gallop all right! She
drowned no more men afterwards.
And--last of all--the “Maid of Athens.” ...
Broughton’s own ship--the pride of his heart, the apple of his eye, the
guiding motive, the absorbing interest of his life for more than
twenty-five years.
Broughton didn’t care much about that picture--never had done, though he
didn’t trouble to tell the old man so. No use asking for trouble: and he
was a contrary old devil if you crossed him! A Chinese ship-chandler’s
affair, it was, and moreover it showed the “Maid” with a spencer at the
main which she never carried: at least, not in Broughton’s time. A good
long time that meant, too ... ah well! They had grown old together, his
ship and he!
He remembered the day he got command of her as clearly as if it were
yesterday. He was chief officer of the “Haidée” at the time--getting
along in years, too, and beginning to wonder if he would ever have the
luck to get a ship of his own. She was a nice little ship, the “Haidée,”
the last of Daly’s fleet, and Featherstone bought her after old Daly,
who had given him a stool in his office years before, shot himself in
that very office in Fenchurch Street when the news came of the wreck of
the “Allan-a-Dale,” his favourite ship, on the Calf of Man. Quite a nice
little ship, but nothing out of the common about her: nothing a man
could take to particularly, somehow. And yet at the time he had wanted
nothing better than to be her skipper.
Old Captain Philpot had been queerish all that voyage; he used to nip
brandy on the quiet a lot, and take drugs when he could get them as
well. Soon after they left the Coromandel coast he went out of his mind
altogether, and Broughton found him one day, when he went down to
dinner, crawling round the cabin on all fours and complaining that he
was King Nebuchadnezzar and couldn’t find any grass to eat.
Good Lord! that was a time, too ... made a man sweat to think of it,
even after all these years! Hurricane after hurricane right through the
Indian Ocean: on deck most of the time, and sitting on the Old Man’s
head when he got rumbustious during the watch below. However, the poor
old chap died as quiet as a child, when he smelt the Western Islands,
and Broughton as chief officer took the vessel into port.
Old Featherstone came on board, as his custom was, as soon as she was
fairly berthed, and Broughton--tongue-tied and stammering as he always
was on important occasions of the kind--gave an account of his
stewardship. The old man listened with never a word, only just a grunt
or a brusque nod now and again; and when the tale was told made no
comment whatever beyond a curt “Humph! Well, you can’t have command of
this ship. She’s promised to Allinson. Can’t go back on him. Besides,
he’s senior to you.”
Then, with one foot on the gangway, he turned back and barked out:
“I’ve bought a new ship. ‘Philopena’ or some such outlandish name. She’s
at Griffin’s Wharf, Millwall. Better go and look at her. You can have
her if you fancy her.”
Half-way down the gangway he turned again.
“Come and dine with me at Blackheath on Thursday. Seven o’clock. And
don’t keep me waiting, mind! I’m a punctual man, or I shouldn’t be where
I am.”
That invitation--invitation? it was more like a Royal command--as
Broughton well knew, set the seal on his promotion.
The ship was the “Maid of Athens.”
IV
Broughton went in search of her as soon as he had finished up on board
the “Haidée” and turned her over to the care of the old lame shipkeeper.
He didn’t feel particularly excited; his feeling, naturally enough, was
one of pleasurable anticipation of an improvement in his material
circumstances--no more than that, as he realized with that wistful sense
of flatness and disappointment which inevitably accompanies the
discovery that some long-desired consummation has lost through the lapse
of time its power to excite and to intoxicate the mind. “If this had
happened ten years ago,” he thought rather sadly, “Lord, how full of
myself I should have been!” forgetting that middle age, when it does
make acquaintance with passion, seldom does it by halves.
He found the “Philopena” in a derelict, melancholy wet dock somewhere
among vacant lots and chemical works down in the Isle of Dogs, along
with a couple of dilapidated coasting colliers and a broken-down tug--a
smoky Thames-side sunset burning like a banked fire behind the
cynical-looking sheds of a shadowy and problematical Griffin--and he
fell in love with her on the instant.
There is--or perhaps one should rather say was, since it is doubtful if
the Age of Steam has cognizance of such sentimental weaknesses--a
certain kind of thrill, not to be satisfactorily defined in words,
which runs through a man’s whole being when first his eyes fall upon the
one ship which, out of all the thousands which sail the seas, seems
especially made to be the complement of his own being, as surely as a
woman is made for her mate. It is a feeling to which first love is
perhaps the thing most nearly comparable--it can make the most
commonplace of men into a poet; and even that lacks one of its
qualities--its pure and sexless virginity. Other ships there may be more
beautiful; but they leave him cold. They are not for him as she is for
him....
That thrill it was--that awakening of two of the root instincts of
mankind, the instinct to cherish, and the instinct to possess--which ran
(surprising even himself) through that most matter-of-fact and
unimaginative of men, David Broughton, when he first set eyes on the
ship that for twenty-odd years to come was destined to provide the main
interest and object of his existence.
There seemed to be nobody about the wharf, but Broughton untied a leaky
dinghy that he found moored under the piles and pulled out to her. The
nearer he got to her the better he liked her. Stern a bit on the heavy
side, he fancied--with too much weight aft she’d be inclined to run up
into the wind if you didn’t watch her. She’d want some handling, all
right, but it wouldn’t do to be afraid of her, either. Her lines were a
dream! He pulled all round her, viewing her from every angle; and as he
rowed under her keen bow he caught himself fancying that her little
dainty figurehead looked down upon him with a kind of wistful appeal--a
sort of “You won’t go away and leave me, will you?” look that won his
heart on the spot.
He made the boat fast to the crazy Jacob’s ladder and swung himself on
board. She was filthily dirty, appallingly neglected, with that
unspeakably forlorn and abandoned look which ships seem to get after a
long lay-up in port. The grime and litter everywhere made his heart
ache. The Dagoes had had her for the last year or two, and her little
cabin reeked of garlic and stale cigar smoke. The shipkeeper, a
drink-sodden old ruffian with a horrible red-running eye, who was
probably none too pleased at the prospect of losing his job now his
temporary home was sold, followed Broughton round grumbling and
croaking. Lor’ bless you, _she_ wouldn’t sail, not she! No more’n a
mule’ll go if he don’t want to! There was plenty had had a try at her,
and they all told the same tale. Somethink wrong with the way she was
built, must be ... or else they’d laid her keel of a Friday or
summat....
Broughton smiled to himself. Somehow, he thought, that ship was going to
sail for him! He couldn’t have explained the feeling for the life of
him, but there it was.
And so, in point of fact, things turned out. Just as a horse which is an
unmanageable fiend in the hands of a crack jockey will let some snip of
a stable lad do what he will with him--just as a dog made savage by
ill-usage will attach himself for life (and perhaps--who knows?--beyond)
to someone who first masters him and then shows him kindness--so did
this little wild “Philopena” under her new name of “Maid of Athens” show
no sign of the tricks and vices, whatever they might be, which had
brought her, like some lovely but wilful lady fallen among evil
companions, to the obscene desolation of that forlorn Millwall wet
dock. Twenty-five years ago ... ah, well, they had been happy years, on
the whole! A reserved and rather lonely man, not over fond of company,
Broughton had drifted into a negatively disastrous sort of marriage in
his young days with a woman considerably older than himself. With the
best will in the world to do so, he had been unable to feel any but a
superficial grief at her death a few years later; and in the house where
his married stepdaughter now lived he always felt like a stranger on
sufferance during his brief periods ashore. But he had found an abiding
content in the daily routine of his life at sea. He gave himself up to
his ship without grudging. She was his one interest in life, his hobby,
his love. He laid out his spare cash on little items of personal
adornment for her as for a loved woman, and on the new gear of which Old
Featherstone stinted her as his natural tendency to stinginess increased
with age.
It was a brother skipper, Tom Pellatt, of Maclean’s pretty little
clipper “Phoebe Maclean”--a silly, noisy chap Broughton privately
thought him--who had first put the idea into his head that the “Maid of
Athens” might one day become his own property in name as she already was
in spirit.
Pellatt had been dining on board when both ships were in Sydney Harbour,
and just as he was going he said:
“Tell you what, Broughton, you’ve been the making of this ship; and if
old Nethermillstone don’t leave her to you in his will he damn well
ought to, that’s all!”
Broughton put the suggestion aside with a laugh. Pellatt, who was one of
those people who, as the phrase goes, “talk as they warm,” and simply
said it out of a desire to say something complimentary and pleasing to
his host--Broughton’s absorption in his ship being something of a
standing joke among his fellow-captains when his back was
turned--probably forgot he had ever said it before he got back to his
own ship. But the words had sown their seed.
At first Broughton only played with the idea at odd moments: he would do
this, he would do that, if the ship were his--treating it as a pleasant
kind of game of make-believe wherewith to beguile an idle minute; but
always with the mental proviso that, of course, no one but a silly
gabbling ass like Pellatt would ever have thought of such a thing.
Then, gradually, he began to wonder if it really was such a ridiculous
notion, after all. Old Featherstone’s business would die with him, that
was very certain. Hadn’t he said as much himself, the last time
Broughton dined at Blackheath, about the time young Daly, whose father
Featherstone had worked for in his clerking days, came such a holy
mucker in the Bankruptcy Court?
“I don’t intend to leave my house-flag to be trailed through the mire!”
he had said.
And hadn’t he said, too, not once but many times:
“I shall never sell the ‘Maid of Athens’!”
Presently, from being a desirable but remote possibility, he began to
consider it in the light of a probability; and from that it was but a
short step to take to begin to look upon it as a right. Who, he asked
himself, had a stronger claim to the ship than he--if, indeed, half so
strong?
He began by degrees to make his plans more definitely. It was no longer
“if the ship were mine,” but “when she is mine.” He hugged the thought
to him, fed upon it, lived with it night and day. He hoped he could
honestly say he had never wished Old Featherstone’s death; but when the
news of his death had come he had not been able to repress a thrill of
exultation as the thought rose to the surface of his mind, “Now, at
last, she will surely be mine!”
It had been the old man himself who had finally turned what had until
then been no more than a vague hope into a virtual certainty.
It was on the occasion of that last dinner at Blackheath, a matter of
six weeks ago, just before the attack of bronchitis that had finished
the old fellow off. There he had sat in his big easy-chair by the fire,
looking incredibly frail and shrunken, his eyes, for all that, as keen
as ever in their sunken caves as they wandered from Broughton’s face to
the counterfeit presentment of the “Maid of Athens” riding proudly on
her painted sea.
“Well, Broughton,” he had snapped out, suddenly, for a moment almost
like his old self again, “you’ve thought a lot of the old ship, haven’t
you?”
Broughton, taken by surprise, and feeling, no doubt, just a little
guilty about those secret aircastles of his, said, stammering, well,
yes, he supposed he had.
And there the matter stopped. Not much, perhaps; but straws show which
way the wind blows. Broughton thought he was justified in reading a
certain significance into the incident.
And again, on the way up to the funeral that morning, he had looked in
at a little club he belonged to, and met half a dozen skippers of his
acquaintance: always the same tale--“Hello, Broughton! Off to plant old
Feathers, I suppose! Hope he’s come down handsome in his will.”
“Bless you, I’m not expecting anything!” had been Broughton’s answer, as
much to the jealous Fates as to them.... Well, it would soon be settled
now one way or the other. He didn’t really, in his heart of hearts,
believe in the possibility of that other way at all; but he included
it in his mind as a matter of form--again with that vague
half-superstitious notion of propitiating some watchful and sardonic
Destiny.
He was surprised to find himself so little excited now that the great
moment had arrived. He had had to keep a tight hand on himself on the
way up from the cemetery, lest he should betray his fever of nervous
impatience to his companions, and he had been relieved when the lawyer’s
constant flow of chatter obviated the necessity of his taking any share
in the conversation. Now, he was glad to find, he had got himself well
under control. He was even able to derive a certain quiet interest from
observing the suppressed eagerness on the decorous countenances of Old
Featherstone’s relations. A so-so lot, on the whole! Broughton thought
by the looks of ’em that old Thomas must have had the lion’s share of
the family wits.
Funny that a man should spend all his life piling money up, and then
have no one to leave it to that he really cared for! “My brother’s
children’ll get my money when I’m gone,” Old Featherstone used to say;
“don’t think much of ’em, but there it is! I hope they’ll enjoy
spending it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it.” ...
The little lawyer sipped the last of his port, drew his chair up to the
table, and rummaged in the depths of his shabby brown bag with the air
of grave importance of a conjurer about to produce rabbits from a hat.
Ah, here was the rabbit--a blue, folded paper which he unfolded,
flattened with immense deliberation, and began to read in the dead
silence which had suddenly fallen on the room.
By George, thought Broughton, the old fellow was warm and no mistake!
Houses here, houses there, shares in this railway, that bank, the other
mine. It didn’t interest him much personally, but it was as good as a
play to see the pale gooseberry eyes of that grocer-looking chap bulging
with excitement until they bade fair to drop out of his head.
“The house ‘Pulo Way’ and the contents thereof (with the exception of
certain items specified elsewhere),” droned on the lawyer’s unmusical,
monotonous voice, “to Rosina Barratt for her life.” ... Rosina
Barratt--that was the dyspeptic niece. Broughton felt glad to know he’d
done the proper thing by her. She deserved it. A decent woman: and he
must have been a crotchety old devil to live with in his latter days!
Good Lord, what an interminable rigmarole this legal business was!
Broughton moved restlessly in his seat. The ships--the ships! Was he
never coming to them?
His own name, starting at him out of the midst of the formal
phraseology, made his heart miss a beat. Here it was at last: but
no--not yet----
“To Captain David Broughton my oil painting of the clipper ship ‘Maid of
Athens’ in gold frame, knowing his regard for the ship and that he will
value the painting on that account....”
Broughton just managed to bite back a laugh in time. If the old chap had
known what he really thought about that picture!
The lawyer droned on. Somebody got that black clock on the
mantelpiece--somebody else the old man’s Malacca cane--two hundred
pounds to little Jenkinson--a hundred to the lawyer. The little clerk
sat up and smirked like a Sunday School kid that hears its name read out
for a prize; but the lawyer, Broughton thought not without a touch of
amusement, didn’t look any too well pleased with his.
The ships--the ships--what about the ships?...
“I desire that my two ships, ‘Maid of Athens’ and ‘Thyrza,’ shall be
sold within twelve months after my decease, and the proceeds of the sale
divided amongst the legatees aforesaid in the same proportion as the
rest of my estate.”
It seemed to Broughton that the lawyer’s respectfully modulated tones
went roaring and echoing round the room, with a note of derision in them
like the ironical laughter of fiends. A black mist swam before his eyes
for a minute or two, obscuring the prim Victorian dining-room and its
familiar contents--a mist through which the three lit gas-globes on the
brass chandelier shone large, round, and haloed like sun-dogs in the Far
North.
The mist, clearing, left everything distinct again. The thundering voice
subsided again to its former dry monotone. The lawyer brought his
reading to a close, folded his eyeglasses, and replaced his documents
in his bag. A discreet murmur of excited talk broke out among the
relatives.
The dyspeptic niece, important in the consciousness of her legacy, came
twittering up to Broughton as he rose to go.
“_So_ kind of you to come, Captain Broughton! My uncle would have
appreciated your being here. And you’ll let me know where to send your
picture, won’t you? I’m so glad it’s going to you. One likes to think
things are going to those who will appreciate them.”
The picture! Broughton nearly laughed in the woman’s face--nearly told
her to keep the damned picture. But he thought better of it--it wasn’t
the poor silly creature’s fault, after all!
The lawyer hailed him as he stood on the steps, buttoning his overcoat,
while he waited for his hansom.
“Can’t I give you a lift anywhere, Captain Broughton? Going to be a
foggy night, I fancy.”
Broughton shook his head with a curt “No, thanks--walking!”
The little lawyer, who was a shrewd observer of men and, like most
chatterboxes, a kindly soul, and who was, moreover, none too pleased
with his own legacy, shook his head and sighed as he watched the
square-set figure disappear into the fog and darkness.
“That man’s had a bit of a knock,” he reflected. “Wonder if he’s got
anything to live on? Not much, I dare say. Wouldn’t have hurt that
stingy old devil to leave him a hundred or two.... Ah well....”
V
Broughton strode away through the foggy suburban streets. He was afraid
he’d been a bit offhand with that lawyer chap. Well, he couldn’t help
that! He felt he couldn’t stand his gabble--not at present.
He wanted above everything else to be alone. He didn’t feel as if he
could face the well-meant curiosity and the equally well-meant sympathy
of those men who had wished him luck that morning. His wound had struck
too deep for such superficial salves to be other than an added
irritation. Normally inclined to err on the side of amiability, he felt
just now at odds with all the rest of humankind. He could fancy the
whispers that would follow him--“There goes poor Broughton--feeling
pretty sickish, you bet!”
The first staggering sensation of blank and bewildered disappointment
had passed away, and in its place there surged up within him a cold tide
of black anger against Old Featherstone.
So the old devil had been laughing at him in his sleeve that night--even
as he was laughing at him now, very likely, in whatever unholy place he
was gone to! He had guessed his thoughts, he supposed, in that damned
uncanny way he had. If the dead face now lying under the cold cemetery
mould had lain in Broughton’s pathway now he would have ground his heel
into the sardonic smile that still curled its stiff and silent lips.
Him and his blasted picture!... A thing that wasn’t worth giving
wall-space to! A damned ship-chandler’s daub! Why, give him a few
splashes of ship’s paint and a brush and he’d make a better fist at it
himself!
He strode blindly on, through interminable crescents of smug villas,
their pavements greasy with fallen leaves, along dreary streets of
shabby “semis,” without noticing or caring where he was going: swinging
his neatly rolled umbrella regardless of the fine rain which had begun
to fall and was gathering in a million glistening drops on his black
coat. His mood cried aloud for the relief of physical effort, of
physical discomfort. Now and then he was brought up short by a blank
wall that drove him back upon his traces; now and then he cannoned
unnoticing into passing pedestrians, who turned, conscious of something
unusual in his manner, to watch him out of sight, then continued their
way wondering if he were drunk or mad.
Presently the streets of dull “semis” gave place to streets of seedy
rows, with here and there a corner off-licence or a fried-fish shop
discharging its warm oily odours upon the chill air; and at last,
turning a corner, he found himself suddenly in a wide road whose greasy
pavements were lined with stalls and flares, yelling salesmen, and
groups of draggle-tailed women.
He looked about him stupidly, uncertain of his bearings, though the
blare of a ship’s syren striking on his ear told him that he was not far
from the river. He was suddenly aware that he was wet and hungry and
very tired, and that his feet in his best boots hurt him abominably, for
he was no better a walker than most sailormen. He asked a passing
pedestrian where he was.
“Lower Road, Deptford.”... Why, he was less than a quarter of an
hour’s walk from the Surrey Commercial Docks, where the “Maid of Athens”
was even now lying, having just finished discharging the cargo of
linseed she had loaded at the River Plate. He couldn’t do better than
get on to the ship, he decided; he had been knocked out of time, and no
mistake, and there he would be able to sit down quietly and think things
over.
The fog, which had been comparatively light on the higher ground, had
been steadily growing denser as he neared the river. There were haloes
round the flares that roared above the street stalls, and the lighted
shop windows were mere luminous blurs in the surrounding murk.
“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman
hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no
mistake--thick as ever I see it!”
Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the
road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel--a solid mass of
clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand,
getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. You
couldn’t see your hand before your face.
Broughton groped his way along the narrow, slimy causeway which lay
between the stacks of piled-up lumber, exuding their sharp, damp,
resinous fragrance, and the intense darkness, broken occasionally by a
vague tremulous reflection where some ship’s lights contrived to pierce
it, which brooded over the unseen waters of the dock. Lights showed
forlornly here and there at the openings of the lanes which led away
between the piled deals--abysses of blackness as dark as the Magellanic
nebulæ. Ship’s portholes gleamed round and watchful as the eyes of huge
monsters of the slime. Bollards started up suddenly out of the fog like
menacing figures, and cranes straddled the path like black Apollyons in
some marine Pilgrim’s Progress. Once Broughton pulled himself up only
just in time to save himself from stepping over the edge of a yawning
pit of nothingness in which the water lipped unseen against the slimy
piles. The thought involuntarily crossed his mind that perhaps he might
have done worse; but he put it from him resolutely. His code, a simple
one, did not admit suicide as a permissible solution of the problems of
life.
All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted
as the grave--nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain,
once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock,
and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up
river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older
basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned
smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley
which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his
memories.
Old Mike came hobbling out at the sound of Broughton’s step on the
plank.
“’Strewth, Cap’n,” he exclaimed in astonishment, “you’ve chose a grand
night to come down an’ no fatal error! Will I make a bit o’ fire in the
cabin an’ brew ye a cup o’ tea? Sure you’re wet to the skin!”
“Poor old chap!” Broughton thought, as he watched him busying himself
about his fire-lighting with the gnarled and shaking hands that had
hauled on so many a tackle-fall in their day. It would be a hard blow
for him when he knew that ship was to be sold. He had served in
Featherstone’s ships many years as A.B. and latterly as bos’n, until a
fall from aloft put an end to his seagoing days; and this little job of
shipkeeping was one of the very few planks between him and the
workhouse.
The world was none too kind to old men who had outlived their
usefulness. What was it that old flintstone had said: “You can’t teach
an old dog new tricks”? Well, that was true enough, anyway!
He called to mind an incident that had happened in Sydney his last
voyage there. An old man had come up to him begging for a job. He didn’t
care what--night watchman, anything; and he had opened his coat to show
that he had neither waistcoat nor shirt beneath it.
“You don’t remember me, Broughton,” the old fellow had said; and,
looking closer, he had recognized in that incredibly seedy wreck one of
his own old skippers--before whose almost godlike aloofness and majesty
he had once trembled in mingled fear and awe. It was a pitiful tale he
had to tell. He had been thrown out of a berth at sixty-five, through
his ship being lost by no fault of his own, and couldn’t get in
anywhere. That proud, arrogant old man, full of small vanities!...
Broughton had had little enough cause in the past to think of him over
kindly; but the memory of the encounter had remained with him for weeks
at the time, and returned to trouble him now with an added
significance.
Old Mike’s bit o’ fire smouldered a little and went out, leaving
nothing but an acrid stink to mark its passing. The well-stewed
tea in the enamel cup at his elbow, with the two ragged slices of
margarine-plastered bread beside it in the slopped saucer, grew cold
unheeded. Outside, the rain dripped down like slow tears. And there he
sat, with his clenched hands before him on the table, staring into the
Past.
There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t
mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for
her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing
more than he could help. But he--what had he given to her? Money--well,
he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though
his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was
neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of,
sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin.
The years of his life had gone into her--affection, understanding,
ungrudging service, sleepless nights and anxious days. What wonder that
she seemed almost like a part of himself? What wonder that to a man of
his rigid, slow-moving type of mind a future in which she had no part
was a thing unthinkable?
His memory passed on to all the mates and second mates who had
faced him at meals over that very cabin. A regular procession of
them--Marston--Reid--what was the name of that chap with the light
eyelashes?--Barnes, was it?--Digby--he was a decent chap, now--went into
steam years ago and was chief officer in one of the B. I. ships last
time Broughton heard of him. That was what _he_ ought to have done. He
had known it at the back of his mind all along. But he couldn’t leave
her--he couldn’t leave her!
Well, well, there was no use meeting trouble half-way! What was it old
Waterhouse, his first skipper in his brassbound days, used to say? “If
you’re jammed on a lee shore and can’t stay, why, then try wearing. If
that don’t work, try boxing her off. But whatever you do, do something!
Don’t sit down and howl!”
They used to laugh at him and mimic him behind his back, cheeky young
devils; but it was damned good advice for all that. He was on a lee
shore now right enough; but there was bound to be a way out somewhere if
he kept his head.
An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him--just
such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin
many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and
seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a
blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay
down on the cabin settee.
A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the
rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out
... if he could only think of it ... somewhere....
VI
He awoke to a flood of bright sunshine streaming in through the
skylight. The wind had driven fog and rain before it, leaving a virginal
and new-washed world under a sky of pale, remote blue.
Broughton heaved himself off the settee, catching a glimpse of
himself--haggard, rumpled, and unkempt--in the mirror over the
sideboard, as he did so.
“By George!” he said to himself, viewing his reflection, “Marianne would
have looked down her nose at me if I’d turned up at Sibella Road like
this. She’d have thought I’d been having a thick night, and small blame
to her!”
There was no doubt that he presented a sorry spectacle. His trousers
were still damp and splashed with mud-stains; his collar was creased and
black with fog. He was stiff and tired in body; but his mind, naturally
resilient, was infinitely refreshed by the long hours of sleep.
His spirits rose every minute. He whistled to himself as he rummaged out
a blue suit from his cabin, washed, and shaved. He even indulged in a
smile as he recalled the little lawyer and his two singlets.
After all, looked at in the light of day, things might have been a whole
lot worse. There was always a chance that one of the three or four
British firms who still owned sailing ships might buy the old girl. She
had a great name; and people were beginning to be a bit sentimental
about sailing ships now they were mostly gone. Or one of the big
steamship lines might take her on for training purposes. If either of
those things happened, it wasn’t likely they would want to put anyone
else in command. It was common knowledge, though he said it himself,
that no one could get what he could out of her. They would very likely
put her into the nitrate trade. Of course it would be a bit of a
come-down, still--any port in a storm! He remembered how sick he had
been about it the first time she loaded coal at Newcastle. He had felt
like going down on his knees and apologizing to her for the outrage! Or,
again, there was lumber--plenty of charters were to be had up the West
Coast. True, her size was against her; with her reputation and twice her
tonnage she wouldn’t have had to wait long for a purchaser. But she
would be a good investment, for all that. Why, damn it all, if he had
the money loose he’d buy her himself without thinking twice about it!
But twenty pounds a month doesn’t leave much margin for such luxuries as
buying ships.
He paused half in and half out of his coat, struck by a sudden idea.
His half-brother Edward! Why, he was the very man--just the very man!
Rolling in money that he made at that warehouse where he sold staylaces
or something up in the City! The blighter was as sharp as a
needle--always had been from the time when he used to drive bargains
over blood alleys with the other kids at school. He’d see the advantage
of a proposition like this fast enough! He could either lend the money
on reasonable interest on the security of the ship, or if he liked he
could buy her himself and let Broughton manage her for him.
He hurried over the rest of his toilet, swallowed a cup of tea and a
rasher old Mike had got ready for him, and started off for the City, all
on fire with his new project.
How did that piece of poetry go that Old Featherstone got the ship’s
name from? He had read it once, but he wasn’t much at poetry: he
couldn’t make much of it.
“Maid of Athens, ere we part----”
That was it! He repeated the line once or twice under his breath,
finding in it a new and surprising significance. He ran his hand
caressingly along the smoothness of her teak rail, sleek and glossy and
warm in the sun as a living thing.
“Maid of Athens, ere we part----”
“There’s a deuce of a lot of water to go under the bridge before it
comes to that, old lady!” he said aloud.
By the time he reached the dock gates the proposition had grown so rosy
that his only fear was lest someone else should discover its
attractiveness and get in ahead of him. By the time he got off the bus
in Saint Paul’s Churchyard it seemed to him that he was doing his
half-brother a really good turn in allowing him the first chance of so
advantageous a business opportunity.
The spruce-looking master mariner who gave in his name at a little hole
marked “Inquiries” on the ground-floor of a warehouse just behind the
Church of Saint Sempronius Without was a very different person from the
haggard being who had glared back at him from the glass an hour ago.
Edward Broughton’s place of business was a large, modern edifice each of
whose many ground-floor windows displayed a device representing a nude
youth running like hell over the surface of a miniature globe, holding
in his extended hand a suit of Elasto Underwear--“Fits where it Hits.”
This famous slogan it was which had made Elasto Underwear and Edward
Broughton’s fortune; for he was by way of doing very well indeed, was
Edward, and had even been spoken of as a possible Lord Mayor. David
remembered him in the old days, when he was at home from sea, as a pert
little snipe of a youngster with red cheeks and sticking-out eyes.
A stylish youth, looking like a clothed edition of the young gentleman
on the placards, ushered him into a small, glass-sided compartment and
left him alone there with two little plaster images wearing miniature
suits of Elasto Underwear. One was after--a long way after--Michael
Angelo’s David, the other (also a long way) after the Venus of Milo.
Broughton looked round him with all the sailorman’s lordly contempt of
the ways of traders. He looked out through the glass sides of his cage
on long vistas of desks where girls sat at typewriters and between which
there scurried young exquisites with sleek hair and champagne-coloured
socks--dozens of them, presumably engaged on the one all-important task
of distributing Elasto Underwear to the civilized and uncivilized world.
So this was where brother Edward made all his money! Rum sort of
show--“Fits where it Hits,” indeed--what a darned silly idea! And how
much longer were they going to keep him waiting?
His eyes wandered for the twentieth time to the clock. Half-past
eleven--he had been here half an hour. The two underclothed statuettes
were beginning to get on his nerves. He should smash ’em if he stopped
there much longer.
Issuing forth fuming from his plate-glass seclusion, he stopped one of
the hurrying exquisites.
“Does Mr. Broughton know I am here?” he asked.
“Y-yes, sir!” The youth could not have said what made him tack that
“sir” on. “You see, he’s very busy in a morning, if you haven’t an
appointment. And this week the auditors are here. Could you leave your
name and call again?”
“I see. No, I’m afraid I can’t. Will you have the goodness to tell him
again, please? Say that Captain Broughton would like to see him--on
business--important business.”
The lad hesitated for a moment between dread of his employer and a sense
of something masterful, something which demanded obedience, about this
brown-faced, quiet stranger. The stranger won, and with a “Very good,
sir,” the messenger disappeared among the desks.
Presently he returned. Mr. Broughton would see his visitor now.
David’s half-brother sat in a vast lighted room behind a vast
leather-covered table. He still had the round red cheeks and prominent
eyes of his youth, but he was almost bald and showed an incipient
corporation.
A youth laden with two huge ledgers backed out of the presence as David
entered. Like the King, by Jove! Brother Edward was getting into no end
of a big pot.
“Oh, good morning, David!” He waved his caller graciously to a seat.
“This is quite an unaccustomed honour. I’m afraid you’ve come at rather
a busy time--the auditors, and so forth. I hardly ever see anybody
except by appointment. But I can give you ten minutes. And now--what can
I do for you?”
The words were pleasant enough in a way; but that “What can I do for
you?” signified as plainly as if he had said it, “What does this fellow
want with me, I wonder?”
There is no enmity so undying as that which dates from the nursery.
There is no dislike so unconquerable as that which exists between people
who are kin but not kind. Had David Broughton been more of a man of the
world he would have known as much; and that while it is true that blood
is thicker than water, it is also true that upon occasion it can be more
bitter than gall.
The undercurrent of suspicion which was unmistakable beneath the smooth
surface of Edward Broughton’s words flicked David on the raw. Perhaps it
was that, perhaps the long chilling wait in the plate-glass ante-room
had something to do with it. For whatever reason, when he opened his
mouth to explain his errand, he found that all his eloquence had
deserted him.
He was going to make a mess of it: he knew it as soon as he began to
speak. Where were all the telling facts, the effective data he had
marshalled so brilliantly as he rode up to the City on the bus?
Gone--all gone; he found himself stammering out his case haltingly,
baldly, unconvincingly. He could feel it in his bones.
Edward Broughton pursed up his lips, as his half-brother’s last phrase
petered out in futility, and blew out his cheeks. He lay back in the
large chair and spread his neat little legs out under the large table,
placing together his finger-tips--the flattened finger-tips of the
money-grubber.
“I--see! I--see! You want me to buy this--er--ship?”
“Well, yes,” David admitted. “I suppose that’s about the length of it,
or--or--as I said just now--lend me the money on the security of the
ship----”
Edward Broughton studied his nails for a few seconds in silence. He used
to bite ’em as a kid, David suddenly remembered, and have bitter aloes
put on to stop him.
Then slowly, solemnly, he shook his head.
“No, no! I’m afraid it’s nothing in my line, David.”
“But, dash it all, man!”--Broughton’s temper was beginning to get the
better of him. He was annoyed with himself because he felt he had
bungled his chances: more because he felt that he had made a mistake in
coming to this fellow at all. Ancient family aversions reared their
forgotten heads. And the intolerant impatience of the autocrat rose in
resentment of opposition. “Dash it all, man, it’s a good investment! I
shouldn’t have thought about mentioning it to you if it hadn’t been.” He
couldn’t help that sly dig.
“What precisely is your idea of a good investment?”
“Well, I should say it would pay a good five per cent--at a low
estimate....”
Edward raised his eyebrows with a superior little smile of indulgent
amusement.
“Five per cent. Why, my dear man, I won’t look at anything that doesn’t
bring in twenty at least. No, I’m very sorry for you. If I could really
see my way to help you I would, for the sake of old times and so on. But
one must keep sentiment out of business. It doesn’t do. And, honestly, I
can see nothing in it. It isn’t even as if this ship were a fairly new
ship. One must move with the times, you know. The late Mr. Featherstone
was a very keen man of business, and as you yourself said just now,
he’d been selling his ships for years. He knew his business, no doubt,
as well as I know mine. And my motto is, ‘Let the cobbler stick to his
last!’ His Elasto, eh? Ha ha--not bad that!... No, I’m awfully sorry! I
quite see your position. I’ve often thought you were making a big
mistake--you ought to have gone in with one of the steamer companies.
But I’ll do what I can for you. I’ll put in a word for you, with
pleasure. I know one or two directors----”
“Sorry! Help you! Put in a word for you!” What did the little blighter
mean? A little snipe whose ear-hole he’d wrung many a time!
Broughton rose, breathing heavily. He restrained with difficulty a
fraternal impulse to reach across the leather-covered table and pull the
little beggar’s nose.
“Damn it all,” he rapped out, “who asked you for your pity or your
advice, I’d like to know? When I want ’em, I won’t forget to ask for
’em, and that’ll be never. I come to you, as I might go to any other
business man, with a business proposition. It doesn’t interest you; very
well, there’s no more to be said. But as for your advice--_and_ your
money--you can keep ’em and be damned to you!”
He passed out between the lines of sniggering, nudging, whispering
clerks, his head held high, though his heart was sick with anger and
humiliation. So that was what the little beast had thought he was after.
Keeping a berth warm for himself. He went hot all over at the thought.
He did not even know that he had--for his voice, which he had raised
considerably in the heat of the moment, had carried to the farthest
corners of the outer office--provided the employees of Elasto, Limited,
with one of the most enjoyable moments of their somewhat dull business
career.
VII
The “Maid of Athens” left Northfleet six weeks later with a cargo of
cement for British Columbia, where she was to load lumber for some port
as yet unspecified, in accordance with a charter made before Old
Featherstone’s death.
The day had dawned grey and melancholy. A mist of fine, drizzling rain
blotted out the low, monotonous shores of the estuary, and the
crew--dull and dispirited, the last night’s drink not yet out of
them--hove the anchor short with hardly a pretence of a shanty. But a
fresh, sharp wind began to blow from the north-east as the light grew,
and presently the ship was romping down Channel with everything set.
Broughton stood on the poop beside the Channel pilot, watching the
familiar coast of so many landfalls slip rapidly by. Like him, the
red-faced, stocky man at his side had watched the ship grow old. His
name figured many a time, in Broughton’s stiff, precise handwriting, in
those shabby, leather-backed volumes which recorded her unconsidered
Odyssey:
“6 a.m. Dull and rainy. Landed Mr. Gardiner, Channel pilot.”
“Start point bearing N. 6 miles. Pilot Gardiner left.”
“Off Dungeness, 3 a.m. Took Mr. Gardiner, pilot, off North
Foreland.”
Bald, unadorned entries, dull statements of plain fact set down by plain
men with no knowledge of phrase-turning; yet there is more eloquence in
them than in all the word-spinnings of literature to those who read
aright. What sagas unsung they stand for! What departures fraught with
hopes and dreams, with remorse and parting and farewell! What landfalls
that were the triumphant climax of long endurance, of patient toil, of
cold, hunger, heat, thirst, not to be told in words! What difficulties
met and surmounted, what battles fought and won!
The ship glistened white and clean in the morning sun. The men were hard
at work washing down decks, ridding her of the last traces of the grime
accumulated during her long period in port. Ah, thought Broughton, it
was good to be at sea again! The doubts and anxieties of the last six
weeks seemed to slip away from him as the river mud slipped from the
ship’s keel into the clean Channel tide. The accustomed sights and
sounds, the familiar lift and quiver of his ship under him, were like a
kind of enchanted circle within which he stood secure against the dark
forces of destruction and change. He was a king again in his own little
kingdom. The very act of entering up the day’s work in the log book--the
taking of sights--all the small duties and ceremonies that make up a
shipmaster’s life--helped to create in him an illusion of security. He
was like a man awakened from a terrifying dream of judgment, reassuring
himself by the sight and touch of common things that the world still
goes on its accustomed way. A strange sense of peace and permanency
wrapped him round--the peace of an ancient and established order of
things seeming so set and rooted that nothing could ever end it. It
seemed incredible that all this microcosm should pass away--that the
uncounted watches should ever go by and the ship’s faithful bells tell
them no more. She appeared to borrow a certain quality of immortality
from the winds and the sea and the stars, the eternal things which had
been the commonplaces of her wandering years.
Most of all, it was the fact of being once more occupied that brought
him solace. By what queer doctrine of theologians, by what sheer
translator’s error, did man’s inheritance of daily labour come to be
accounted as the penalty of his first folly and sin? Work--surely the
one merciful gift vouchsafed to Adam by an angry Deity when he went
weeping forth from Paradise! Work--with its kindly weariness of body,
compelling the weary brain to rest. Work, the everlasting anodyne, the
unfailing salve for man’s most unbearable sorrows--which shall last when
pleasure and lust and wealth are so many Dead Sea apples in the mouth, a
comfort and a refuge when all human loves and loyalties shall fade and
fail.
Five days after the “Maid of Athens” took her departure from the Lizard
it began to breeze up from the north-west. At three bells in the first
watch the royals and topgallantsails had to come in, then the jibs; and
when dark fell she was running before wind and sea under fore and main
topsails and reefed foresail. But she liked rough weather, and under her
reduced canvas she was going along very safely and easily, so Broughton
decided to turn in for an hour’s rest in order to be ready for the
strenuous night he anticipated.
“I am going to turn in for an hour or so,” he said, turning to the mate;
“call me in that time, if I am not awake before. And sooner if anything
out of the way should happen. I think we shall have a dirty night by the
look of it.”
The mate was a poor creature--weak, but with the self-assertiveness that
generally goes with weakness. Broughton felt he would not like to rely
upon him in an emergency.
But he had had very little sleep since the ship sailed--nor, indeed,
during the weeks which had elapsed since Featherstone’s funeral. He
shrank instinctively from being alone. It was then that his anxieties
began to crowd upon him afresh, and that the threat of the future seemed
to touch him like the shadow of some boding wing. But now that sudden
overpowering heaviness of the eyelids which must inevitably, sooner or
later, follow upon a continued sleeplessness, descended upon him. He
felt that he could hardly keep awake--no, not though the very skies
should fall.
He was sound asleep almost as soon as he had lain down--lost in a
labyrinth of ridiculous and confusing dreams in which all sorts of
unexpected people and events kept melting into one another in the most
illogical and inconsequent fashion, which yet seemed, according to that
peculiar fourth-dimensional standard of values which prevails in the
dream-world, perfectly proper and reasonable.
Old Featherstone figured in these dreams: so also did the dining-room at
“Pulo Way.” Only somehow Old Featherstone kept turning into somebody
else; first it was Hobbs the lawyer, then old Mike Brophy the
shipkeeper, then an old mate of his called Peters, whom he hadn’t seen
or thought of even for years. And then the dining-room had become the
cabin of the “Maid of Athens,” and Peters, who had changed into old
Captain Waterhouse, was sitting at the head of the table reading
Featherstone’s will. He was shouting at the top of his voice, and
Broughton was straining his ears to catch what he was saying and
couldn’t make out a word of it because of the roar of the wind. And then
the floor began to heave and slant, and the pictures on the walls--for
the cabin had turned back into a dining-room again--to tumble all about
his ears--and the next moment he was sitting up broad awake, his feet
and back braced to meet the next lurch of the vessel, the wind and sea
making a continuous thunder outside, and a pile of books cascading down
upon him from a shelf over his head.
He knew well enough--his seaman’s instinct told him almost before he was
fully awake--precisely what had happened. It was just the very
possibility which had been in his mind when he turned in. The
mate--aided no doubt by a timorous and inefficient helmsman--had let the
ship’s head run up into the wind and she had promptly broached to. The
“Maid” always carried a good deal of weather helm, and wanted careful
watching with a following wind and sea. He remembered an incident which
had occurred years ago, while he was running down the Easting--a bad
helmsman had lost his head through watching the following seas instead
of his course, and let the ship run away with him. Broughton had been
close to him when it happened. He struck the man a blow that sent him
rolling in the scuppers, and himself seized the spokes and jammed the
helm up. The mate, in the meantime, had let the topsail halyards run
without waiting for the order, and, freed from the weight of her
canvas, the ship paid off and the danger was over.
The memory flashed through his mind and was gone during the few seconds
it took him to grope his way to the door and emerge into the roaring,
thundering darkness beyond.
The ship lay sprawled in the trough of the sea, like a horse fallen at a
fence. Her lee rail was buried four feet deep, and her lower yards were
hidden almost to the slings in the seething, churned-up whiteness which
surrounded her. The night was black as pitch. A pale glimmer showed
faintly from the binnacle, and the sickly red and green of the
side-lights gleamed wan and fitful amid the watery desolation. But
otherwise the only fight was that which seemed to be given by the white
crests of the endless procession of galloping seas which came tearing
out of the night to pour themselves over the helpless vessel.
The wheel appeared to be still intact; in the darkness Broughton thought
he could still make out the hunched figure of the helmsman beside it.
That was so much. If the spars held....
As he emerged from the shelter of the chart-room the full force of the
wind struck him like a steady push from some huge, invisible hand. He
waited for a lull and made a dash for the wheel.
The lull was for a few moments only--a few moments during which the ship
lay in the lee of a tremendous sea, which, towering up fifty feet above
her, held her for a brief space in its perilous and betraying shelter.
The next instant it broke clean over her--a great mass of green marbled
water that filled her decks, carried her boats away like matchboxes
down a flooded gutter, and swept her decks from end to end with a
triumphant trampling as of a conquering army.
“This finishes it!” Broughton thought.
He was swept clean off his feet; rolled over and over; buried in foam;
engulfed in what seemed to him like the whole Atlantic ocean; carried,
as he believed, right down to Davy Jones’s locker, where the light of
day would never reach him again....
The next thing he knew he was lying jammed against the lee rail of the
poop, his legs hanging outboard, his arm hooked round a cleat,
presumably by some subconscious instinct of self-preservation, for he
had no recollection of putting it there. The water was pouring past him
in a green cataract, and dragging at him like clutching fingers. He was
alive. The ship was alive. “Good old girl!” Broughton said to himself.
He began to struggle to his feet. Something moved beside him and clawed
at his ankles.
“Oh, Lord!” said a voice out of the darkness--the mate’s voice. “Oh,
Lord--I thought I was a goner!”
“Oh--you!” said Broughton. “Get off my feet, damn you!”
“Oh, Lord!” said the voice again.
“Pull yourself together!” Broughton rapped out. “What were you doing?
Why didn’t you call me?”
“There wasn’t time,” moaned the mate. “She was going along all right,
and the next minute--oh, Lord, I was nearly overboard!”
“Think you’re at a bloody revival meeting?” snapped Broughton. He shook
him off, and, holding by the rail, fought his way up the slanting deck
to the wheel.
The young second mate came butting head down through the murk.
“Fore upper topsail’s gone out of the bolt-ropes, sir!”
Broughton smiled grimly to himself. Old Featherstone’s skinflint ways
had turned out good policy for once. If that fore upper topsail had
held, as it would have done if it had been the stout Number One canvas
his soul craved, instead of a flimsy patched affair only fit for the
Tropics, they might all have been with Davy Jones by now.
“Take the best hands you can find to the braces,” Broughton ordered. “I
must try to get her away before it. Mister!”--this to the mate, who had
by this time picked himself out of the scuppers and came scrambling up
the deck--“take half a dozen hands down to see to the cargo, and do what
you can to secure it if it looks like shifting.”
The helmsman, a big heavy Swede, was still clinging to the wheel like a
limpet; partly because it appeared to him good to have something to hold
on to, partly because his wits worked so slowly that it hadn’t yet
occurred to him to let go. Broughton grasped the spokes and the two men
threw every ounce of their strength into the task of putting the helm
over.
Gusts of cheery obscenity came out of the darkness forward as the crew
fought to get the spars round. “Good men!” Broughton said between his
teeth. “‘Maid of Athens, ere we part,’ eh? Not yet, old girl--not yet!”
It seemed as if the helpless ship knew the feel of the familiar hand on
her helm, and strove with all her might to respond to it. She struggled;
she almost rose. Then, wind and sea beating her down anew, she slid
down into the trough again.
Again and again she tried to heave herself free from the weight of water
that dragged her down; again and again she slipped back again, like a
fallen horse trying vainly to get a footing on a slippery road. The two
men wrestled with the wheel in grim silence. It kicked and strove in
their grasp like a living thing. But at last, slowly, the ship quivered,
righted herself. She shook the seas impatiently from her flanks as the
reefed foresail filled. Inch by inch the yards came round to windward.
The fight was over.
By daybreak the gale had all but blown itself out. The sea still ran
high, but the wind had fallen, and a watery sun was trying to break
through the hurrying clouds. The hands were already at work bending a
new foretopsail, and their short, staccato cries came on the wind like
the mewings of gulls.
“Life in the old dog yet, Mr. Kennedy!” said Broughton to the second
mate. He struck his hands together, exulting. The struggle seemed to him
a good omen. If she could live through a night like that, surely she
could also survive those obscurer dangers which threatened her. His
shoulders ached like the shoulders of Atlas from the battle with the
kicking wheel. He had not known such physical effort since his
apprentice days. The fight had put new heart into him. By God, it had
been worth it, he told himself. It made a man feel that it was worth
while to be alive....
A few days later the “Maid of Athens” picked up the north-east Trades,
and carried them with her almost down to the Line through a succession
of golden days and star-dusted nights. She loitered through the
doldrums--found her Trades again just south of the Line--wrestled with
the Westerlies off the Horn--and, speeding northward again through the
flying-fish weather, made the Strait of Juan de Fuca a hundred and nine
days out.
VIII
The “Maid of Athens” discharged her cargo of cement at Vancouver, and
went over to the Puget Sound wharf at Victoria to load lumber for Chile.
She was there for nearly a month before she left her berth on a fine
October afternoon, and anchored in the Royal Roads, where the pilot
would board her next morning to take her down to Flattery.
Broughton went ashore in the evening for the last time, and walked up to
his agent’s offices in Wharf Street. He was burningly anxious to be at
sea again. The old restlessness was strong upon him that he had felt
before leaving London River, and a number of small vexatious delays had
whetted his impatience to the breaking point.
“Letter for you, Cap’n,” the clerk hailed him. “I thought maybe you’d be
around, or I’d have sent it over to you.”
Broughton turned the letter in his hands for a minute or two before
opening it. He recognized the prim, clerkly hand at once. It was from
Jenkinson. A cold wave of apprehension flooded over him. Some mysterious
kind of telepathy told him that it contained unwelcome tidings.
He slit the envelope at last, unfolded the sheet, and read it through.
Then he read it again, and still again--uncomprehendingly, as if it were
something in a foreign and unknown language:
“ ...Sorry to say the old ship has now been sold ... firm at Gibraltar
... understand she is to be converted into a coal hulk....”
Broughton crumpled the sheet in his hand with a fierce gesture, staring
out with unseeing eyes into a world aglow with the glory of sunset. It
was the worst--the very worst--he had ever dreamed of! Why hadn’t he let
her go, he wondered, that night in the North Atlantic? Why had he
dragged her back from a decent death for a fate like this? He could have
stuck it if she had gone to the shipbreakers. It would have hurt like
hell, but he could have stuck it. But this; it made him think, somehow,
of those old pitiful horses you saw being shipped across to Belgium with
their bones sticking through their skins. People used to have their old
horses shot when they were past work. They were different now. It was
all money--money--money! They thought nothing of fidelity, of loyalty,
of long service. They cared no more for their ships than for so many
slop pails....
Wasn’t it the old Vikings that used to take their old ships out to sea
and burn them? There was a fine end for a ship now--a fine, clean,
splendid death for a ship that had been a great ship in her day! He
remembered once, years ago, watching a ship burn to the water’s edge in
the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t much more than a nipper at the time, but he
had never forgotten it. The calm night, and the stars, and the ship
flaring up to heaven like a torch. He didn’t think he would have minded,
somehow, seeing his old ship go like that. But this--oh, he had got to
find a way out of it somehow....
“Bad news, Cap’n?” came the clerk’s inquiring voice.
Broughton pulled himself together with an effort.
“No, no, thanks!” Mechanically he made his adieux and passed out into
the street. He didn’t know where he was going. He never remembered how
he found his way to the Outer Wharf where his boat was waiting.
But he must have got there somehow, for now he was sitting in the
stern-sheets and looking out across the water to the ship lying at
anchor, with eyes to which sorrow and the shadow of parting seemed to
have given a strange new apprehension of beauty. How lovely she looked,
he thought, with the little pink clouds seeming to be caught in her
rigging, and the gulls flying and calling all about her! It was queer
that he should notice things like that so much, now that he was going to
lose her. He had known the time when he would have taken it all for
granted. Now, he kept seeing all kinds of little things in a kind of
new, clear light, as if he saw them for the first time----
* * * * *
Let young Kennedy tell the rest of the tale--in his cabin in a Blue
Funnel liner, years afterwards; the unforgettable, indefinable smell of
China drifting up from the Chinese emigrants’ quarters, the gabble of
the stokers at their interminable fan-tan on the forecastle mingling
with the piping of the gulls along the wharf sheds.
“I could see at once” (thus young Kennedy) “that something had gone
wrong with the Old Man. He looked ten years older since I had seen him
a couple of hours before. He came up the ladder very slowly and heavily,
passed me by without speaking--I might have been a stanchion standing
there for all the notice he took of me--and went down into the cabin
almost as if he were walking in his sleep.
“Something--I don’t exactly know what--intuition, perhaps, you’d call
it--made me trump up an excuse to follow him. I didn’t like the looks of
him, somehow.
“I found him sitting in his chair by the table, staring straight before
him with that same fixed look as if he didn’t really see anything.
“He didn’t so much as turn his head when I went in, and at first when I
spoke he didn’t seem to hear me. I spoke again, a little louder, and he
gave a sort of start, as if he had been suddenly roused out of a sleep.
“‘Yes--no!’ he said in a dazed kind of way. ‘Yes--no’ (like that); and
then suddenly, in a very loud, harsh voice, quite different from his
ordinary way of speaking: ‘A hulk! A hulk! They are going to make a coal
hulk of her!’
“The words seemed to be fairly ripped out of him. He didn’t seem to be
speaking to me. It was more as if he were trying to make himself believe
something that was too bad to realize.
“I managed to say something--I forget just what: that it was rotten
luck, perhaps. I doubt if he heard me, anyhow, for he went on in the
same strange voice, like someone talking to himself.
“‘She’s good for twenty years yet!’ And then, in a sort of choking
voice, ‘Mine--mine, by God, mine!’
“Well, I just turned at that and bolted. I felt I couldn’t stand any
more. It seemed like eavesdropping on a man’s soul.
“I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when the tug came
alongside as soon as it was light. He came on deck looking as if nothing
had happened. I never said anything, of course--no more did he; and from
that day to this I don’t really know--though I rather fancy he did--if
he remembered what had passed between us.
“We had a fine passage down to Iquique, where we discharged our lumber
and loaded nitrates for the U.K. The Old Man had got very fussy about
the ship. He had every inch of her teak scraped and oiled while we were
running down the Trades, and everything made as smart as could be aloft;
and while we were lying at Iquique he had her figurehead, which was a
very pretty one, all done over--pure white, of course. I did the best
part of it myself, for I used to be reckoned rather a swell in the
slap-dab business in those days, though I say it myself!
“Well, we finished our loading and left, and all the ships cheered us
down the tier; and I don’t wonder, for the old ship looked a picture.
“The Old Man and I had got to be quite friends. I suppose we were as
near being pals as a skipper and a second mate ever could be. He was
working on a new rail for the poop ladder--all fancy ropework and so
on--and he used to bring it up on deck and yarn away to me about old
times hour by the length. I fancy he rather liked me, but up till then
he had always had a kind of stand-offish, you-keep-your-place-young-man
way with him; and for my part I’d always looked on him with that sort
of mixture of holy awe when he was there and disrespect behind his back
a fellow has for the skipper he’s served his time under. I suppose our
both thinking such a lot of the old barky gave us an interest in common.
You see, I’d served my time in her right from the start, so that
naturally she was the ship of all ships for me--still is, for the matter
of that.... Say what you will, she was a great old ship, and he was a
great old skipper!”
(Kennedy paused. A quiver had crept somehow into his voice, and he had
to get it under control again.)
“The Old Man” (he went on) “had always been what I should call a careful
skipper. Not nervous--nothing of that sort--but cautious; I never knew
him lose a sail but once, and never a spar. In fact, I used to feel a
bit annoyed with him sometimes because he didn’t go out of his way to
take risks. He was a fine seaman; but there’s no denying the fact he
_was_ cautious. He made some fine passages in the ‘Maid of Athens,’ and
never a bad one. But he didn’t really drive her. I believe he was too
damned fond of her.
“So that you may imagine it was a bit of a surprise when we began to get
into the high south latitudes and he started to crack on in a way that
made even me open my eyes a little.
“I well remember the first day I noticed it. It was just on sunset--a
black and red sort of affair with lots of low-hanging clouds, and the
seas came rolling up with that ugly, sickly green on them when the light
caught them that always goes with bad weather.
“It had been blowing pretty hard all day, and the glass dropping fast.
The ship was labouring heavily and shipping quantities of water; she was
loaded nearly to her marks with nitrates. There stood the skipper--I can
just see him now--with his feet planted wide, holding on to the weather
rigging and looking up aloft, as his way always was when it was blowing
up.
“I expected him, of course, to order some of the canvas off her, for she
was carrying a fairish amount considering the weather. So I was fairly
taken aback, as you may imagine, when he turned round and said quite
quietly:
“‘I want the fore upper topsail reefed and set, Mr. Kennedy.’
“I was so surprised that I just stood and gaped for a minute or so. He
looked at me in a sort of a challenging way, and said:
“‘Didn’t you hear the order? What are you waiting for?’
“I pulled myself together, said ‘Fore upper topsail it is, sir!’ and off
I went. And I can tell you that for the next half hour or so I had
plenty to occupy me without worrying my head about what the Old Man was
thinking of.
“Well, we got the sail reefed and set. By this time the ship was ripping
along at a good sixteen knots or more. You could see her wake spread out
a mile behind her like a winding sheet. It was quite dark by this time.
Her lee rail was right under, and making our way aft was like going
through a swimming-bath.
“The Old Man was still standing just as I had left him, holding on with
both hands to the weather rigging, and bracing his feet against the
slant of the deck. I had hardly got my foot on the poop ladder when he
turned his head and called to me. I could see his lips move, but I could
hear nothing for the noise of the wind and sea.
“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.
“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of
it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just
happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.
“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then.
‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur
again!’
“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the
“Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T.
examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet
question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more
sail and chance it!’
“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water
on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then--flop!--would come a
big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives--on
again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and
after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the
braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all
gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we
hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer--at
least I know I did--that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to
fly any more kites just yet.
“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so
before my time--the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the
dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea
ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was
getting all of it I wanted for once!
“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a
youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about,
and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting
in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind
that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed
shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about
details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond
thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work,
and there you are!
“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit--not a
little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little
bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played
the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after
what he called “skirts” and soaking _aguardiente_. The skipper’s
carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went
about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away,
and _he_ wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to
England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start
burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.
“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing
like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t
say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of
being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew
her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did
under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have
been God help her!
“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s
arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him
while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been
imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he
kept in his room--the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.
“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s--he’s m-m-mad,’ he
stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast
in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!
“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more
about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far
as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.
“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a
despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all
the world like a startled penguin.
“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a
little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about
him.
“What _was_ he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing,
sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those
years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister
Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all
over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving
my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet
I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that
he just felt as if things had gone too far for him--so he threw his
cards on the table, and left it to--well, shall we say Providence to
shuffle them!
“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!
“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease
off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just
flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.
“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the
thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out
of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could
judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was
the old bos’n--a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on
the slow side, like most Dutchmen--standing under the break of the poop
with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.
“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’
“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails
were like boards--as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled
them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved,
left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny
experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as
tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else
to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the
‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.
“And ice--there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us,
though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard
it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for
miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises--shrieks and
groans--that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks
like musketry fire--and in the midst of it all the penguins would make
you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.
“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen
image than a man--his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin
resting on them--for hours, never speaking or moving.
“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call
him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he
had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and
frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get
it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and
leave the skin behind.
“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down
on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him,
as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind--it
is nothing,’ and lay down again.
“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was
still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired
he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and
left him.
“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the
ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more
than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my
nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was
something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss
if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne,
what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man
he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this--well, it staggered
me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.
“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had
taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was
safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the
skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare
to-do.
“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with
anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own
ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost
his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and
Board of Trade inquiries.
“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the
big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the
mate.
“And then--something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash
forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.
“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent,
and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling
out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I
don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit
jumpy since we had been among the ice.
“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of
the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh.
Then I saw the Old Man--and the laugh died.
“I shall never forget his face--miserable and yet lifted up both at
once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name--you
know--sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the
poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats,
and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went
back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.
“He sighed once, and looked round--a long look as if he were saying
good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a
minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then
he sighed again, and went in.
“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes--ten minutes. I
began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I
glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see
his grey head--the hair getting a bit thin on top--just as I’d seen it
scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....
“Fifteen minutes--twenty--I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was
waiting....
“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a
stroke--evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for
the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it.
I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.
“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain
to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.
“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite
steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo--she was loaded
right down to her marks--helped to keep her upright. She just settled
quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping
into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked
through. She looked--oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut
down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was
like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from
my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me--a young
fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks
wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him----
“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and
we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old
‘Maid of Athens’ went down.
“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he
thought a lot of the old ship....”
THE END OF AN ARGUMENT
A good solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as
satisfactory as an interest in common--which, in the case of Kavanagh,
the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer
“Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed
none at all.
Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved
before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as
religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.
Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.
Kavanagh was neat in his attire.
Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick
of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket
handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.
Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub
which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of
him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he
couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in
sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being
entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he
should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the
last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He
found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging
about docks and shipping offices--found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”
He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson
wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”
She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d
gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical
rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities
being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and
decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of
which he was inordinately fond.
The argument began something after this fashion:
The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching
forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her
ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted
barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber.
It was a glorious morning--one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings
that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was
bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of
the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they
were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon
ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the
early morning sky.
The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main,
and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in
the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just
laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone
in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted
on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing
for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in
fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:
“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling--o--oh ...
An’ pa--ay Paddy Doyle for his bo--o--ots....”
“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.
“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow--the voice of
Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in
ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”
Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of
feeling to be overheard--least of all to be overheard by Ferguson.
Sneaking about in carpet slippers....
“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he
snapped.
“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.
The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch”
rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and
winds which grew ever more stormy.
The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of
his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she
pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden
and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of
the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin,
with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in
its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.
But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued
without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked
on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of
their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board
for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of
cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin
floor.
And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened
to interrupt them.
In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.
It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning,
when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving
waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his
reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in
harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him
no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic--dreary,
monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a
command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got
into one of the big liner companies. Now----
Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted
ship--now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she
slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.
It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was
yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the
rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute
appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.
“‘Maria’--Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and
built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been
abandoned--I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”
He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the
bridge.
“Aye--she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged
scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her--can’t do anything more. It’s
out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”
He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.
Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like
Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted
by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a
sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision
had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than
the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”
“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising
... in for a night of it....”
Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with
a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.
It was queer. He couldn’t explain it--couldn’t understand it! But there
was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he
_must_ save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than
if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a
knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel
making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and
rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making
signals--personal signals--to him and to no one else: to be saying,
“Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”
“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the
eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot
of money ... if you could spare the hands----”
Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But
Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the
money, and his hopes rose.
“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and
besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if
there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”
“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have
half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”
Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke
out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better
of him again: “Well, have it your own way--your own responsibility,
mind--and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men
away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do
it--oughtn’t to do it----”
There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six
hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen
volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage
crew.
Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a
brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge
they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a
romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain
Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.
Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd
ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He
foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the
duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those
of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’--Genoa.”
Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with
themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly
creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along
the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”
One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance
thrust over the rail.
“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma
precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s
gaun to blaw the nicht!”
His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short,
fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and
Kavanagh heard no more.
A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had
a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up
against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a
stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in
itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was
in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all
intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but
every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of
the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale
had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas,
and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no
attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken
off by some passing vessel.
He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was
able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off
again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the
gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.
Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the
side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men,
a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.
The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man
when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began
to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked
for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an
unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange
voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too,
which he could not at all make out.
There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet--it was a
peculiar sort of voice--a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in
it--unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the
companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must
be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained,
not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again--an
impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth
just behind him helped him to check.
The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which
followed it was worse than the sound.
“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.
“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and
they couldn’t get him away----”
He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the
descent into the saloon.
They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled
with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in
elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany
table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished
mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.
It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke
hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of
the deserted ship was all around--a silence only intensified by the
monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally
spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.
The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible
speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It
was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half
its terrors fled.
“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”
Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.
The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and
imposing stateroom with a big teak bed--evidently the captain’s, a relic
of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a
somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with
him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner
of the voice--a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now
pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever
heard.
It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the
haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled.
Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour
of his new command.
The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit,
mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the
thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce
gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.
Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so,
leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of
getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or
rather the whole) sail in its place.
And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh
forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never
before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had
never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.
Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and
toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last--it seemed like a
miracle--all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The
chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the
ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the
watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been
longing to do--find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.
He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or
Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition,
there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass
on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters
of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance,
while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette,
that he made the great discovery.
This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s
bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been
thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with
dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of
curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with
his knife to see if anything lay beneath.
His first find was a date--1869.
“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter--‘D’--no,
‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’----”
His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder
than ever.
“It _can’t_ be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George,
it _is_!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”
Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which
is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could
understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of
the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To
most laymen--indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school--it would
have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship--a good ship, no doubt,
in her day, a day long since over and done.
But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very
different significance.
Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long
after they themselves are gone--names about which yarns will be spun and
songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship
was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious
“Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and
her forerunner “The Tweed.” And--though perhaps in a lesser degree--such
was also the “Plinlimmon.”
And to Kavanagh she was even more.
She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was
inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first
voyage--those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour
of youth departed.
For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily
eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition.
There had been an old fellow in his first ship--they called him Old
Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was
commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal
honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a
hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he
had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which
belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.
Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many
an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had
thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the
gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully
Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e _set_ it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals
was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes....
‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’
‘Plinlimmon.’...”
Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now,
he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy
and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....
But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to
bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He
turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.
The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind
the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving
a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk--the wind all the
while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.
Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine
weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One
canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.
A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she _shall_ do it!” he
said to the sea and the darkness.
* * * * *
Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days,
Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.
Time--there _was_ no time! There was just a never-ending succession of
low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of
white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim
vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been
days--there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their
coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one
thing, and one thing only--saving that old ship from her old rival the
sea.
How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was
as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to
join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of
sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed
rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath
in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they
dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.
Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace,
only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once
Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone
of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which
had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered
seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade
out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It
just vanished....
But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere
about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what
didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that
Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest--yet at the time
Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that
there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half
a dozen in the whole blessed ship--yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the
time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their
faces--a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he
hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to
anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew.
Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him.
And he needed it before the end!...
At last--at long last--came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds
upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary,
indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!
Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired--dog-tired; that his
wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of
uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids
like lead.
But he had won--he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”!
Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never
rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.
There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came
back out of the grey dawn.
“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”
A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of
familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s”
donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and
being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!
Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a
spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.
“A steamer--a Dago--rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine
sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”
He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:
“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”
Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he
could afford it.
ORANGES
The clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The
gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for
ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away
ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs
which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding
of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to
give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm.
She lay there as still as if she were at anchor. Her sails drooped
against the masts with no more movement than banners slowly dropping to
silent dust in the nave of some great cathedral. Their shadows on the
white deck were clearly defined as shapes cut out of black paper. There
was no sound aloft, not so much as the churring of a rope stirring in
its sheave: only a faint creak by whiles, as the ship lifted
imperceptibly on the long, low swing of the ocean.
A light haze hung over the outlines of the islands and over the horizon
beyond, so that it was impossible to define where sea ended and sky
began. A couple of fruit schooners about half a mile distant hovered
above their own motionless reflections, like butterflies poised above
flowers. So complete was the calm that even they could not catch a
breath sufficient to keep them moving. They looked almost as if they
were suspended in some new element, neither water nor air, yet
partaking of the character of both.
Old “Sails” sat on the forehatch, spectacles on nose, stitching busily
away at the bolt-rope of a royal which had come out second best from an
argument with the stormy westerlies. A tall, thin, old man, he looked as
he sat there with his shanks folded under him like one of those
long-legged crabs the Cornish folk call “Gramfer Jenkins.” He had a
short, white beard stained with chewing tobacco, and as he worked his
jaws moved rhythmically in time with the movements of his active needle.
A boat had pulled out from the nearest island with baskets of fruit, and
its owner, a swarthy negroid Portuguese with a bright handkerchief bound
pirate-wise about his frizzy hair, was driving bargains with the men of
the watch below amid much rough banter and chaff. The men laughed,
called, shouted to one another, threw the fruit from hand to hand, eager
as children.
From the main deck came the steady slish-scrape of holystones; the mate
had taken advantage of the opportunity the calm offered of bringing the
“Parisina’s” already bone-white planking nearer to that unattainable
perfection of immaculate cleanliness which only exists in the dreams of
New England housewives and particular-minded mates of sailing vessels.
Mr. Billing, the mate, was an insignificant little man with sandy hair
and a peculiar habit of sniffing to himself like a beetle-hunting
hedgehog. He sniffed now as he hovered with a perpetual fussy
watchfulness among the humped figures of his watch, squatting over their
task like worshipping bronzes. Mr. Billing was of the housewifely type
of mate. A man secretly of little courage and no initiative, he disliked
the “Parisina’s” paces intensely. He was nervous of ships as some
lifelong horsemen are nervous of horses. Calms, on the other hand, with
the consequent time they afforded for ritual scouring and painting of
wood and metal, he delighted in much as a house-proud woman of the
suburbs delights in spring cleaning.
The men growled among themselves, sailor fashion, as they worked. “Gimme
ol’ Stiff afore this ’ere bloody scrubbin’,” said one. “Same ’ere,” said
another. “Why can’t it blow up ag’in, I says? A year an’ a ’arf’s
bloomin’ pay I’ve got comin’ to me at Green’s ’Ome, an’ if it wasn’t for
this ’ere blessed calm I’d be six ’undred mile nearer spendin’ of it by
now.” “Sailorizin’s all right,” grumbled a third. “It’s this ’ere darned
’ouse-maidin’ as gets my goat.”
Up in the “Parisina’s” tiny chart-room Captain Fareweather--he was known
through all the ports of the Southern Hemisphere, for good and
sufficient reasons, as “Old Foul-weather”--carefully wetted his finger,
and with a furrowed brow turned a leaf and prepared to make a fresh
entry in the “Parisina’s” log-book.
Old Foul-weather was not fond of his pen, a fact to which the crabbed
and painful handwriting which filled the preceding pages bore eloquent
testimony. Spelling was an anguish to him; and indeed it is doubtful
whether the hours of endurance and anxiety which the entries in the book
represented were one half as irksome to him as the labour of recording
them. But there were on this occasion other reasons for his look of
depression.
Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It
might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He
lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps,
that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth
living, if she didn’t, it was not. Certainly it was not for those
unfortunate beings who happened to be his shipmates for the time being.
“’Tain’t good reading,” said Old Foul-weather to himself, as he
carefully blotted the new entry--it consisted of one word, “Same”--and
replaced ink and pen.
He traced the lines of the uncongenial record with a stumpy forefinger.
“‘Winds puffey and varible. Ship scarcely moveing.’
“‘Very light airs.’
“‘Dead calm.’
“Wonder where old Jones and his blooming ‘Alcazar’ are,” he reflected.
He sighed and closed the book.
No faintest air entered the stuffy little room. The voices of the men as
they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through
the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink
of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.
Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the
wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely
gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. It was
not always so, for, though the “Parisina,” rightly handled, steered like
a lamb, she needed humouring as much as a horse with a fine mouth. He
was a handsome fellow, swarthy and black-eyed; under the thick growth of
hair on his broad chest showed faintly some tattooed device in red and
blue, a relic of his younger and less hirsute years.
A barefooted apprentice padded up the poop ladder and struck one bell: a
mellow note that hung trembling on the still air, till it quivered away
into silence high up among the sleeping royals. The boy wore a patched
shirt and ragged dungaree trousers, and his arms and legs were burned
black as mahogany by the tropic sun. He was a tall lad, with the lanky
grace of adolescence; a faint down was just showing on his upper lip,
and the sun gleaming upon the growth of fair hair on his arms and chest
made him look as if powdered with gold dust.
Captain Fareweather sighed, put the log-book by, and descended to the
cabin. McAllister, the second mate, a big-boned Aberdonian, perennially
hungry, was already there, with one eye on the hash the steward had just
set before the Old Man’s chair. He composed his features into an
appropriate cast of pious decorum as the captain took his seat and
placed his hand before his eyes for his customary grace. This rite was
silent and lengthy; but Captain Fareweather’s officers knew better than
to betray impatience or inattention while it lasted. Legend said that a
second mate, greatly daring, had once begun to nibble his bread before
the captain had finished, and at once there had come a voice from the
behind the hand, like the voice of Mitche Manitou the Mighty, “Ye
irreverential devil, can’t ye see I’m sayin’ grace?”
It was an uncomfortable meal. The skipper was moody, and McAllister was
horribly nervous in consequence. The few small pebbles of conversation
he cast into the silence fell with an appalling splash which instantly
covered him with scarlet confusion to the tips of his large red ears,
and it was with profound thankfulness that he welcomed the appearance of
the mate with a basket of oranges.
“I thought you’d like a few,” explained Mr. Billing, “for dinner.
They’re good. A bumboat feller brought ’em alongside.”
“Bluid oranges,” exclaimed McAllister. He dug his strong square teeth
into the glistening rind, and the red juice squirted over his bony
knuckles. “They’ve ay the best flavour.”
They seemed to light up the cabin like golden lamps, warm, glowing,
still with the sunlight glory about them. Their fragrance filled the
place, aromatic, pungent, cloying.
“I don’t care for ’em,” said the Captain suddenly. “The smell of
’em--too strong.”
He pushed back his chair as he spoke.
“Stuffy,” he muttered; “glad when we can get way on her again.”
He stumped off up the companion ladder: a square, stocky figure of a
man, short-necked, broad of shoulder. The two mates looked at each other
significantly.
“What bug’s bit the auld deevil now?” said McAllister in a
conspiratorial whisper.
“God knows!” returned Mr. Billing. “He’s always this way when he can’t
be at his cracking on. Old madman!”
“He’s a fine seaman, though,” replied McAllister. “I’ll say that for
him.”
“Fine seaman!” breathed Mr. Billing bitterly. “You wait till he shakes
the sticks out of her one fine night. That’s all.”
Old Foul-weather stood leaning on the poop railing, looking out across
the still expanse of the waters with eyes which did not see the
haze-dimmed islands or the motionless schooners poised above their
reflected selves. Strange--something had stirred in its sleep a little
while since at the sight of those very schooners--something had turned
in its sleep and sighed at the sight of the young apprentice in his
sunburned youth. And just now, with the scent of the oranges, it had
stirred, turned again, sighed again, awakened--the memory of Conchita!
* * * * *
Conchita--why, he hadn’t thought of her for years. He wouldn’t like to
say how many years. He had had plenty of other things to occupy his
mind. Work, for one thing. And ships. Plenty of other women had come
into his life and gone out of it, too, since then. Queer, how things
came back to you; so that they seemed all of a sudden to have happened
no longer ago than yesterday....
He was in just such a schooner as one of those yonder at the time. The
“John and Jane” her name was--a pretty little thing, sailed like a
witch, too. Lost, he had heard, a year or two ago on a voyage over to
Newfoundland with a cargo of salt. It had been his first voyage South.
He had been in nothing but billyboys and Geordie brigs until then. He
had run his last ship in London. The skipper was a hard-mouthed old
ruffian, the mate a trifle worse. Between them the boy Jim had a tough
time of it. Then one day the captain caught him in the act of purloining
the leg of a duck destined for his own dinner; and, pursuing him with a
short length of rope with the amiable intention of flaying hell out of
him, fell head foremost on the top of his own ballast and lay for dead.
He wasn’t dead: far from it. But young Jim thought he was. So he pulled
himself ashore in the dinghy and set off along Wapping High Street with
only the vaguest idea where he was going.
He stuck to the water-side as a hunted fox sticks to cover. The Tower he
passed quickly by: it looked too much like a lock-up, he thought.
Presently he came to a church, and a big clock sticking out over the
roadway; and close by a wharf where schooners were loading, and among
them the “John and Jane.”
He liked the looks of her. She was clean and fresh and sweet-smelling.
And the mate, who was superintending the lowering of some cases into the
hold, had a red, jolly face that took his fancy.
The boy Jim peered down into the hold. It was full almost to the
hatch-coamings. She must be going to sail soon.
The red-faced mate had given his last order, and was coming down the
gangway with the virtuous and anticipatory look of one at ease with his
own conscience after a spell of arduous toil, and about to reward
himself for the same with liquid refreshment.
Young Fareweather stepped forward, his heart thumping.
“Was you wanting a hand, mister?”
The red-faced man looked at him consideringly.
“A hand? A s’rimp, you mean!” He guffawed slapping his hands on his fat
thighs, a man well pleased with his own joke.
“Ah con do a mon’s work, though,” the youngster insisted.
“Ye can, can ye? Can ye steer.”
“Aye, Ah con that.”
“Can ye reef an’ furl, splice a rope-yarn, peel potatoes and cook the
cabin dinner of a Sunday?”
“Ah con that.”
The mate roared.
“Sort of a admirayble bright ’un, I can see,” he said. “Well, I tell you
what. Here’s the skipper comin’ down the wharf. We’ll see what he says.”
The captain, a fierce-looking little man with bushy eyebrows, indulged
in a smile at the recital of Jim’s reputed accomplishments.
“Take him if ye like,” he said, “and, listen, you, boy” (bending the
bushy brows on Jim), “if you’re tellin’ lies, it’s the rope’s-end you’ll
taste, my lad.”
He spent the night curled up on a box in the corner of the galley,
listening with one ear to the yarns of the old one-eyed shipkeeper, the
other cocked for the ominous tread of the dreaded policeman. But dawn
came, and brought no policeman, and by noon the “John and Jane” was
dropping downstream with the tide.
It seemed to the boy Jim like a foretaste of Heaven. The captain was a
kindly man for all his appearance of ferocity, the mate easier still. No
one got kicked; nobody went without his grub--incidentally he was
relieved to find that nothing further was said about cooking the cabin
dinner; wonder of wonders, nobody was so much as sworn at seriously.
True, the amiable mate was the most foul-mouthed man he had ever come
across before or since. But then, hard words break no bones, especially
on board ship, and the mate’s repertoire was generally looked on as
something in the nature of a polite accomplishment: something like
conjuring tricks or making pictures out of ink blots.
It was all a wonder to him, just as Oporto, whither the “John and Jane”
was bound, was a wonder to him after the cold stormy North Sea, the
bleak streets of Newcastle and Wapping which so far had been his only
idea of seaports. The schooner, as has already been said, was an easy
ship, and in port the hands had plenty of time to themselves. He liked
the sun, the light, the warmth, the colour. He liked the laughing, lazy,
careless children of the South. He liked the many-coloured houses that
climbed the steep streets of the old town--and the bathing in the great
river--and the little stuffy wineshops with their mixed smell of sour
wine and sawdust and stale cigar-smoke and onions--and the bells that
chimed day long, night long, from hidden convents in green gardens
behind high walls. And the oranges----
The day he first saw Conchita, he had gone off for a walk by himself,
and, the day being hot, had lain down by the roadside to rest. And as he
lay there half asleep, lulled by the shrill song of the cicalas in the
grass all round him, plop! something bounced on to his chest, rolled a
little way, and lay still.
He reached out his hand and picked it up. An orange! Its skin was still
warm with the sun, and it had that indefinable bloom on it that belongs
to all fruit newly gathered. And then he looked round to see where it
had come from, and saw--Conchita!
Conchita with her dark, vivacious little face, her eyes black as sloes,
her red lips open in a wide laugh that showed a row of perfect
teeth--Conchita with her full white sleeves under her stiff embroidery
jacket, her wide gay-coloured petticoats, her dainty white-stockinged
ankles and little slippered feet; why, she was almost like a talking
doll, Jim thought, that he had seen in a big toyshop in Newcastle, and
wished he had the money to buy for his sister! He felt as awkward, as
clumsy with her as a boy with a doll. Goodness knows how they understood
one another, those two young things! There is a sort of freemasonry,
somehow or other, among young things that laughs at such difficulties as
language. She knew a little broken English, which she was immensely
proud of. She had picked it up at school from an English playmate. But
Jim knew nothing but his own East Coast brand of his native speech.
However, understand one another they did, somehow or other. He learnt
her name, of course, and how she laughed at his attempts to say it as
she said it! He learned, also, that she was sixteen, and that she was to
be married some day to old João the muleteer, but that she did not like
him because of “ees faze--o-ah, long, lak’ dees!” And she stretched out
her arms to their full extent to indicate it. But she “lak’ Ing-lees
sailor, o-ah ver-ree, ver-ree much”--and she “giv’ you--o-ah, ever so
many orange--lak’ dees!” And she made a wide circle with her arms to
show their number.
The boy went back to his ship in a kind of dream. Her warm Southern
nature was riper far than his. He was swept clean off his feet by the
fervour of her unashamed yet innocent lovemaking--by the feel of her
warm body, of her warm lips, of her rounded cheeks soft and glowing, as
sun-warmed oranges. Of course he went again--and many times again--and
then there came the last night before the “John and Jane” was to sail.
It had been arranged that for once he was not to go alone. Perhaps
Conchita, strange little blend of impulse and sophistication, had judged
it best that their leave-taking should not be an _affaire à deux_. Jim
was to bring some of his shipmates along: and Conchita would bring also
some of the other girls. And it would “be fon--o-ah, yees, soch fon!”
He remembered the queer feeling of shrinking that came over him as they
set out on that fatal expedition. What had happened he never really
knew. Perhaps one of his shipmates had blabbed about it in the little
wineshop on the quay; perhaps one of the other girls. What mattered was
that somehow the jealous João, with the “faze long, lak’ dees,” had
heard of it!
They went stumbling and whispering up the lane that led out of the town.
He could remember the warm scent of that autumn night and the way the
wind went sighing through the broad, dark leaves of the orange groves
and the gnarled cork trees that bordered the stony mule-track by which
they climbed. They passed a little inn by the wayside, where a man was
playing a guitar and singing an interminable ballad full of wailing,
sobbing notes, in the melancholy minor key common to folk-melodies the
world over.
The moon was shining through the trees when they came to the rendezvous.
They had brought sacks with them, and the girls shook the fragrant
globes down while they gathered them into heaps.
And then, suddenly, all was changed. It was like a nightmare. There were
lights, and people shouting. The girls screamed. Conchita cried out,
“Run, run!” She clung round his neck, fondling his face, weeping. There
was a fierce face, a lifted hand, something that sang as it fled. And
Conchita was all of a sudden limp in his arms, her face, with a look of
hurt surprise in its wide eyes and fallen mouth, drooping backward like
a flower broken on its stalk. She seemed to be sinking, sinking away
from him, like a drowned thing sinking into deep water....
He did not know who dragged that limp thing from his numb arms. He did
not know who hustled him away, shouting in his ear, “Run, ye damned
fool, run! Them bloody Dagoes’ll knife the lot of us.” He remembered
being hurried down the lane, and past the lighted inn where the man was
still at his interminable wailing songs. And then--no more, until he
came to himself under the smelly oil lamp in the familiar forecastle.
The “John and Jane” sailed at dawn....
* * * * *
Captain Fareweather sighed, shifted his elbows on the rail, stiffened
himself suddenly, and stood erect. The look of the sea had changed. Its
surface was blurred as if a hand had been drawn gently across it.
One after the other the two schooners began to steal slowly, very slowly
across his line of vision. He cast an eye aloft. There was a slight
tremor in the hitherto motionless clew of the main royal.
He sniffed the coming wind as a dog sniffs the scent of its accustomed
quarry; then he walked briskly across to the break of the poop and,
leaning his hands on the rail, called to the mate.
“Mister!”
“Sir?”
“Stand by to square away your main yard! I think we’ll get a breeze
afore two bells.”
He walked the poop fore and aft, rubbing his hands and whistling a
little tune.
There was a scamper of bare feet on the planking. Men sang out as they
hauled on the braces, “Yo-heu-yoi-hee!” Blocks sang shrill as fifes,
reef points beat a tattoo on the tautened canvas. The sails filled with
loud clappings. Out of the north-east came the wind--shattering the calm
mirror of the sea into a million splinters--filling the royals like the
cheeks of the trumpeting angels of the Judgment--burying under its
mounded confusion the very memory of the vanished calm, even as the
years lay mounded over the dead face of Conchita, whom the gods loved
too well....
“We’ll beat that bloody ‘Alcazar’ yet, mister,” said Captain
Fareweather.
SEATTLE SAM SIGNS ON
“It’s what I’m always tellin’ you, Mike,” said Captain Bascomb severely,
“you’re too rough with ’em.”
Mr. Michael Doyle, mate of the skysail yarder “Bride of Abydos,” was
usually nearly as handy with his tongue as he was with his fists, which
was saying a good deal. But on this occasion he was, for once in his
life, fairly stumped. He opened and shut his mouth several times like a
landed fish, but, like a fish, remained speechless.
“Too rough with ’em, that’s what you are,” pursued the skipper. “You
should use a bit o’ tact. You shouldn’t keep kickin’ ’em. I’m a humane
man myself, and I tell you I take it very hard--very hard indeed I
do--to have my ship avoided as if we’d got plague on board just because
I’ve got a rip-roarin’ great gazebo of a mate from the County Cork that
doesn’t know when to keep his feet to himself. When I was a nipper they
learned me to count ten before I kicked. That’s what you want to do.
Twenty for the matter o’ that.”
Captain Bascomb was a hard case, though anyone overhearing the foregoing
remarks might have thought otherwise. He was also a tough nut. Men who
spoke from personal experience said, and said with deep emotion, that he
was both these things, as well as other things less fitted for polite
mention: so presumably it was true.
Now, while there are undeniably times and seasons when it is a valuable
asset for a shipmaster to have the character of a tough nut and a hard
case, there are equally conceivable circumstances when such a reputation
may be a decidedly inconvenient possession. And it was precisely such a
set of circumstances which had arisen on the day in late autumn when the
conversation just recorded took place.
The “Bride of Abydos” lay alongside the lumber mill wharf at Victoria.
Her cargo of lumber was all on board. And she would have been ready to
sail for home on the next morning’s tide but for one trifling and
inconvenient particular--namely, that she was without a crew.
This regrettable discrepancy was due to two principal reasons. In the
first place, the rumour of a discovery of gold, or copper, or aluminium,
or something of a metallic nature up in the Rocky Mountains had had the
inevitable effect of inducing the ship’s company of the “Bride of
Abydos” to abandon as one man their nautical calling, and depart for the
interior of British Columbia with an unbounded enthusiasm which would
only be surpassed by the enthusiasm with which they would doubtless
return to it in less than three months’ time.
But it would be useless to deny that Captain Bascomb’s fame as a tough
nut--a fame to which the ungrudging tributes of his late crew had given
a considerable local fillip--was the outstanding cause for the coyness
manifested by eligible substitutes about coming forward to fill the
vacant berths in the “Bride of Abydos’s” forecastle.
Hence it was that gloom sat upon Captain Bascomb’s brow, and a
reflected gloom upon that of Mr. Michael Doyle--a gloom which was
graphically expressed by the steward when he imparted to the black
doctor in confidence the news that the Old Man was lookin’ about as
pleasant as a calf’s daddy.
Mr. Doyle delicately brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat, and cleared
his throat cautiously by way of preparing the ground for another
conversational opening.
“What do you keep making that row for?” demanded the skipper. “You put
me in mind of a cock chicken that’s just learnin’ to crow! If you do it
again I’ll mix you some cough stuff--and I’ll see you swallow it too.”
“I was only goin’ to say----” began Mr. Doyle in aggrieved tones.
“Goin’ to say, were you? Well, if you’ve got anything to say that’ll
show me how to make a crew that can work the ‘Bride of Abydos’ out of a
nigger grub sp’iler and a hen-faced boob of an eavesdropping Cockney
steward”--here he paused to relieve his feelings by adroitly launching a
cuspidor at the inquiring countenance of Cockney George as it protruded
from the pantry door--“you can say it,” continued the skipper; “if not,
you needn’t! I’m in no mood for polite conversation, and that’s a fact.”
Silence and profound gloom descended once again upon the cabin and its
occupants, while the fluttered and indignant George, still palpitating
at the recollection of his narrow escape from the captain’s unexpected
projectile, slippered gingerly off to enjoy a growl with the black cook,
who was sitting in his galley crooning the songs of Zion in a discreet
undertone to the carefully muted strains of his concertina.
And just at that moment the gangway creaked loudly beneath a heavy
tread, and a stranger stepped on board.
He was a large man with a large, flabby face, in which a large cigar was
carelessly stuck as if to indicate the approximate position of the
mouth: a loose-lipped mouth which looked, if possible, even more
unpleasant when it smiled than when it scowled.
“Say, looks like someone’s feelin’ kinder peeved,” observed the
new-comer, pushing the skipper’s late missile with his toe. “Cap’n
aboard, stooard?”
“Ho, yus, he’s on board right enough,” responded George. “Frowed this
’ere at me ’ead just now, ’e did. Whatcher want?” he inquired
suspiciously. “’Cos if it’s tracks or anyfink o’ that, I ain’t goin’ to
let you in, not on your sweet life I ain’t! Ever see a blinkin’ gorilla
wiv the toofache? ’Cos that’s ’im--see! Just abart as safe to go near as
wot ’e is--see! You take my tip and ’op it! Beat it for the tall
timbers! Go while the goin’s good!”
“That’s right all right,” responded the stranger cordially. “I guess
I’ll just walk right in and introdooce myself.”
He stepped briskly along the alleyway and tapped on the cabin door.
A growl like that of a wounded jaguar was the only response, but, taking
this as a permission to enter, the visitor projected his head, not
without caution, round the edge of the door.
“G’ mornin’, Cap’n--g’ mornin’, mister,” he said heartily. “Pardon me
breezin’ along this way, but I’ve a hunch you and me might be able to
do business. I understand you’re in a bit of a difficulty regardin’ a
crew.”
Captain Bascomb regarded him for a few seconds without speaking. A
remarkable variety of emotions might have been seen chasing one another
across his countenance as he did so--surprise, incredulity, and joy
chief among them.
“I am,” he said slowly. “I am, and that’s a fact, Mr.---- I didn’t quite
get your name.”
“Grover--Samuel Grover--Seattle Sam to most folks around these parts,”
replied the stranger, making bold to enter and take a seat. “Fine ship
you’ve got here, Cap’n!”
“Ship’s all right,” responded the skipper curtly.
He didn’t seem able to take his eyes off Mr. Grover’s face. It wasn’t a
beautiful face, either; to be quite candid, it verged upon the
repulsive. But Captain Bascomb gazed at it as if it had been the face of
his first love. Seattle Sam flattered himself he was making a good
impression.
“See here, Cap’n,” he went on, “I’ve a vurry nice bunch of b’ys up at my
li’l’ place on Cormorant Street. Prime sailormen every one of ’em. And
I’d just love to ship ’em along with you. But”--he leaned forward and
tapped his fat finger on the table--“here’s the snag! Speakin’ as man to
man, Cap’n, you ain’t asackly parpular.”
“Oh, I’m not, ain’t I?” said Captain Bascomb, bristling. “Well, if
that’s all you’ve come to say, the sooner you beat it out of here the
better! As I was saying to my mate here only just now, I’m in no mood
for polite conversation--not to say personal remarks of an offensive
nature----”
“Not so fast, Cap’n, not so fast,” said Seattle Sam hastily, taking the
precaution to hook towards him the companion to the captain’s earlier
missile, ostensibly that he might put it to the purpose for which it was
designed, but really in the interests of disarmament. “What I was just
leadin’ up to was this. I guess I can fix things for you good. But I
guess I can’t do it without a sort of a li’l’ frameup.”
At this point Mr. Doyle reluctantly withdrew, in obedience to a simple
wireless message from his superior, and strain his ears as he might from
his post at the head of the companion he could hear no more than a
mumble of voices drifting up from below.
The conference was a lengthy one, so much so that Mr. Doyle had long
grown tired of waiting when the tinkle of glasses indicated that it was
drawing to a close.
“Well, here’s towards ye, Cap’n,” came the slightly raised voice of
Seattle Sam, “an’ to our li’l’ trip together!”
The captain’s guest had hardly got out of the alleyway before Mr. Doyle
came clattering down the companion with his eyes bulging.
“Is that big stiff goin’ to sign on wid us?” he inquired in a
reverential whisper, his native Munster more honeyed than ever, as
always in moments of deep emotion.
“He is, Mike,” returned the skipper, in accents broken by feeling.
“Can I have him in my watch?” asked Mr. Doyle.
“Mike, you can.”
“And can I--can I kick him whenever I like?” pursued the mate in the
supplicating tones of a reciter giving an impersonation of a little
child asking Santa Claus for a toy drum.
But at this point Captain Bascomb’s feelings overcame him altogether,
and, leaping from his seat, he seized his astonished second in command
firmly yet gracefully round the middle, and proceeded to give a highly
spirited rendering of the Tango Argentina as performed in that country.
George, who was observing matters from his usual point of vantage, flew
to describe the portent to his crony in the galley.
“Dat’s a bery dangerous man,” said the doctor, “a bery biolent,
uncontrollabous kin’ of a man, sonny! Ah jus’ done drop mah ol’ pipe in
de cabin soup one mawnin’, an’ Ah tell you Ah wuz skeered for mah life.
An’ Ah tell you what, bo’--Ah’se skeered o’ dat man when he’s lookin’
ugly, but Ah’se ten times, twenty times, hundred times skeereder when
he’s lookin’ pleased.... An’ when he gits dancin’----” And he rolled his
woolly head till it nearly fell off his shoulders.
Meanwhile Mr. Samuel Grover was stepping out briskly in the direction of
his boarding-house for seamen in the pleasant thoroughfare known as
Cormorant Street. The name was a singularly appropriate one, for Mr.
Grover and his like had long gorged there upon sailormen. He hummed
pleasantly to himself as he walked, and the rapidity with which he
twirled his cigar round his large loose mouth indicated to those who
knew the man that he was feeling on unusually good terms with himself
and the world.
“Now, b’ys,” he cried, rubbing his fat hands together as he surveyed the
dozen or so of depressed-looking sailormen who were playing draw poker
for Chinese stinkers in the bar of his modest establishment, “now, b’ys,
I’ve gotten a real fine ship for the lot o’ ye.”
The old habitués of his place looked at one another with dawning
suspicion. They had encountered this air of extravagant geniality
before.
“W-w-wot’s name-of-er?” inquired Billy Stutters, so called by reason of
a slight impediment in his speech. It never took him less than a minute
to get up steam, but as soon as he was under way the words came with a
rush, like water from a stopped-up drain whence the obstruction has been
suddenly removed.
“The ‘Bride of Abbeydoes,’” said Mr. Grover, “and a damn fine ship too.”
You could have heard a pin drop for a minute or two while his audience
digested this news. Ginger Jack, who was an old man-of-war’s man, and as
hard a case as any of the King’s bad bargains who ever drifted under the
Red Duster, was heard to observe that he warn’t goin’ to sign in no
blinkin’ “Abbeydoes,” nor “Abbeydon’t” neither for the matter o’ that.
Billy Stutters, after a mighty effort, was understood to second the
amendment.
“Ho, you ain’t, ain’t you?” said Mr. Grover with scathing irony. “An’
wot makes your Royal ‘Ighnesses that bloomin’ partic’lar, may I ask?”
“B-b-b-becos-I’ve-bin-in-’er-afore,” said Billy, sulkily, “an’ the
sk-k-kipper-kicked-me!”
“Did he so?” commented Mr. Grover facetiously. “I thought maybe you was
goin’ to say he kissed you.... Now, look ’ere, b’ys,” he continued,
assuming all the powers of persuasion he could muster; “I guess you’ve
gotten cold feet about the ‘Bride of Abbeydoes.’ You take it from me,
she ain’t so black as what she’s painted. Not by a jugful. I don’t mind
admittin’, man to man, Captain Bascomb’s a hard case. And Mister Doyle,
well, I reckon he’s another. But they’re all right with a crowd of
smart, handy boys like yourselves. You ain’t a bunch o’ greasers or
sodbusters from way back that don’t know a deadeye from a fourfold
purchase. You’re the sort o’ crowd as a skipper won’t find no fault
with, as he’ll be proud to see about his ship. And just to show I’m in
earnest, I’m goin’ to sign on in the ‘Bride of Abbeydoes’ myself. Fair
an’ square. I’m about doo to run across and see the home-folks in
London, England. I’ve a fancy to take a turn at sailorizin’ again. An’ I
like a fast ship. Now then, b’ys, is it a go? That’s the style. The
drinks are on the house!”
“Nice sort o’ state of affairs,” observed Mr. Grover a little later to
his factotum in the privacy of the den he called his office. “A lot of
ungrateful swabs I’ve been keepin’--keepin’, mind you--for best part of
two weeks, and they ups with their ‘Won’t sign ’ere’ ’n’ ‘Ain’t goin’ to
sail there’ as if they was bloomin’ lords. Well, well! I’ll learn ’em.
Don’t I hope Mr. Bucko Doyle’ll put it across ’em good and hard, that’s
all!
“Why, in the old days in ’Frisco,” he continued dreamily, “you could
ship a corp and no questions asked. And as for sailormen--well, you
didn’t consult ’em. And quite right too. A lot they know about what’s
good for ’em--a bunch of idle, extravagant swine! Warn’t it all for
their good to get ’em shipped off to sea sharp afore they’d got time to
get into trouble and go fillin’ up the jail, I ask you? And then you get
a lot of meddlin’ psalm-singin’ idjits as don’t know the first thing
about the class o’ men people like me ’ave got to deal with. Psha!”
And Mr. Grover set about filling a sea-chest with an assortment of old
newspapers and empty bottles which would have struck his future
shipmates, had they been there to see, as a curious outfit for a Cape
Horn passage.
The next day bright and early he attended with his crowd at the shipping
office, where, having duly heard the ship’s articles mumbled over, the
party appended their signatures and marks thereto and became duly
members of the crew of the “Bride of Abydos.” The morning was fine and
sunny, and every one was in high good-humour. Captain Bascomb’s face was
wreathed in smiles, and the wink to which Seattle Sam treated him when
no one was looking elicited an even huger one in reply.
All the same, a joke is a joke, and Mr. Grover considered that it was
carrying the joke a bit too far when the third mate, a big apprentice
just out of his time, ordered him to tail on to the topsail halyards or
he’d wonder what hit him. However, he complied with the order with as
good a grace as he could muster, and even went the length of joining
with some heartiness in the time-honoured strains of “Reuben Ranzo.”
“After all,” he reflected, “may as well do the thing properly while
you’re about it.”
Still, he wasn’t sorry when the time drew near for the little comedy to
come to an end. Dropping, with a sigh of relief, the rope on which he
had been hauling he walked quickly off towards the poop, rubbing his
fat palms tenderly as he went. They had so long been strangers to
anything resembling a job of work that they were already beginning to
blister.
“Well, Skipper,” he cried gaily, “time to square our li’l’ account and
say so long, I guess!”
The captain gave him rather a peculiar glance, and led the way in
silence down into the cabin.
Seattle Sam hesitated a moment. Time was getting short. But a drink was
a drink, after all, and it would have meant going back on the tradition
of a lifetime to refuse one.
He had hardly entered the saloon before he became vaguely conscious of a
certain lack of cordiality in the atmosphere. The pilot’s dirty glass
was still on the table, but there was no other sign of liquid
refreshment. He could not keep a note of uneasiness out of his voice.
“Well, Skipper,” he repeated, “so long, and a pleasant voyage!”
The captain’s eyes met his in a cold stare of absolute repudiation.
Seattle Sam’s extended hand dropped slowly to his side, and the
self-satisfied smirk faded from his face. The captain had taken up a
position between him and the companion. Instinctively he turned towards
the alleyway which led to the main deck. It was blocked by the
substantial form of Mr. Michael Doyle.
Too late the ghastly truth began to dawn.
“Talking about squarin’ accounts,” said the skipper slowly, “I’ve got a
little account to square. It’s been waiting a long time too. Matter o’
fifteen years or so. Take a good look at me! Ever seen me before? Just
cast your mind back a bit to the time when you were ’Frisco Brown’s
runner, and shipped a big husky apprentice out o’ the Golden Gate in a
Yankee blood boat that the ‘Bride of Abydos’ is a day-nursery to!...
I’ve got the scars of that trip about me yet, soul and body, Mister
Seattle Sam, and you’re goin’ to pay for ’em, and compound interest
too!”
As he spoke, three long wails from the tug’s hooter rent the air,
answered by round after round of cheering from the ship.
The skipper stood back, while Seattle Sam dashed up on to the poop with
a low howl of rage and terror.
The tug’s hawser trailed dripping through the water, and she was turning
her nose for home with a mighty churning of her paddles. The crimp
rushed to the rail, waving his arms frantically above his head, and a
yell of derision greeted him from the crew lined along her bulwarks.
They were all in it, then! He was alone, alone, with a man he had
shanghaied, a crew he had tried to swindle, and a sea-chest full of
waste paper wherewith to face the bitter days and nights off the Horn.
“Bos’n!” yelled the skipper. “Call all hands aft!”
“Lay aft all hands!” roared the bos’n, and soon a throng of interested
faces looked up at the captain as he stood with his hands planted on the
poop rail.
His words were few but to the point.
“Boys, you’ve heard I’m a hard man to sail under. Maybe I am. That’s for
you to find out. I won’t have back chat. I won’t stand for any sojering
or shinaniking. If you’re decent sailormen, and know your work, and do
it, we’ll get on all right. If you’re not, me and my mates are here to
knock ruddy hell out of you.
“One word more. This man here”--he indicated the trembling form of
Seattle Sam--“came on board my ship yesterday to sell you. I’ll give you
his words. ‘I’ll fool ’em I’m goin’ to sign on myself, and they’ll come
like lambs. Twenty dollars apiece and the men are yours. And I don’t
care if you give ’em ruddy hell!’ Now I say to you, ‘This man’s yours!
Take him, and I wish you joy of your shipmate!’”
And, grasping Seattle Sam by the collar of his coat and the scruff of
his pants, he propelled him to the top of the poop ladder and gave him a
skilful hoist which dropped him full in the midst of the expectant group
below.
* * * * *
The tug’s smoke was a grey feather on the skyline; Flattery a grey cloud
on the port bow.
The song of the wind in his royals was sweet music in Captain Bascomb’s
ears. So was the rush and gurgle of the waves under the clipper’s keel.
So were all the little noises that a ship makes in a seaway.
But, oh, sweeter far than them all was a confused turmoil which ever and
anon came vaguely to his hearing--a sound made up of thuds, of cries, of
curses--which indicated beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mr. Samuel
Grover, some time of ’Frisco, and late of Cormorant Street, Victoria,
was undergoing the decidedly painful process of being ground exceeding
small!
PADDY DOYLE’S BOOTS
A FORECASTLE YARN
You know that junk store on the Sandoval waterfront? A Chink keeps
it--Charley Something or other, don’t remember the rest of his name. If
you don’t know the place I mean, you know plenty more just like it. The
sort of place where you can buy pretty well anything under the sun,
everything second-hand, that is; any mortal thing in the seagoing line
that you can think of, and then some. That’s Charley’s!
Well, once Larry Keogh (every one used to call him Mike, because his
name wasn’t Michael), and Sandy MacGillivray from Glasgow, and a
Dutchman called Hank were in want of one or two things for a Cape Horn
passage. Their ship was the old “Isle of Skye.” Did you ever meet with
any of them “Isle” barques? They were very fine ships. There was the
“Isle of Skye,” “Isle of Arran,” “Isle of Man,” and a whole lot more I
just forget--all “Isles.” You wouldn’t find any of them now. Some were
lost, some broken up, some went under the Russian or Chilian flag, and
the firm that owned them (MacInnis, the name was) went out of business
at the finish. And as for the old “Isle of Skye” herself, she piled up
on Astoria a little more than a year ago--foreign-owned then, of course.
Round these three chaps I was speaking about went to Charley’s joint.
Larry and Hank got what they wanted soon enough. At least, they got
what they had money for, which wasn’t very much, Charley not being in
the humour to treat Larry as handsome over some lumps of coral Larry
wanted to trade for clothes.
This Sandy MacGillivray I mentioned, however, was a bit of a capitalist,
and he was also of an economical disposition; and what with wanting to
lay out his money the best way and not being able to bear the feel of
parting with the cash when he’d found what he wanted to buy, he had his
pals with the one thing and the other teetering about first on one foot
and then on the other, and sick to death of him and his
shilly-shallying.
At long last he got through; and then nothing would fit but Charley must
give him something in for his bargain.
“No good, no good!” says the Chink, looking ugly the way only a Chink
can. “You pay me, you go ’long!... P’laps I give you somet’ing you no
like.”
He grinned and showed his dirty yellow teeth.
“Ut’s not possible,” said Larry. “Sandy’s the one that’ll take it, if
it’s neither too hot nor too heavy.”
“All light,” says the Chink, sulky-like. “I give you velly good pair o’
boots.”
Hank’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and so did Larry’s, when they
saw what Sandy had got through just having the gall to ask.
A beautiful pair of sea-boots they were, and brand-new, or very near it,
by the look of them. Sandy thought the old fellow was joshing him; but
it was all right. He was nearly beside himself with delight. He stopped
outside a saloon once on the way to the ship, and stood turning over his
money in his pocket so long that the boys began to think he was going to
celebrate his good fortune in a fitting manner.
But all he said at the finish was, “It’s a peety to change a five spot.
Once change your money an’ it fair melts awa’”
Larry sighed. If he’d known about those boots he might have had a bid
for them. And now Sandy had got them for nothing. Larry made him a
sporting offer of his coral in exchange for them, but it was no go.
“To hell wid ye for a skin-louse!” says Larry, who was getting a bit
nasty by this time. He had a great thirst on him, and no money to
gratify it, and that was the way it took him. “Ye’d take the pennies off
your own father’s eyes, so you would, and he lying dead.”
Sandy showed the boots to the rest of the crowd, and of course every one
had something to say. But there could be no doubt he had got a wonderful
fine bargain.
“I wouldn’t wonder but they have a hole in them,” said Larry. The notion
seemed to brighten him up a whole lot. “The water will run in and out of
them boots the way you’ll wish you never saw them. I know no more
uncomfortable thing than a pair of boots and they letting in water on
you.”
Sandy was a bit upset by this idea of Larry’s, so he filled the boots
with water to see if there was anything in it. Leak--not they!
“It would be a good thing,” said Larry with a sigh, he was that
disappointed, “if the old drogher herself was as seaworthy as them
boots. As good as new they are, and devil a leak is there in ayther one
of them. But maybe,” he went on, cheering up again a bit, “maybe some
person has been wearing them that died of the plague. It is not a very
pleasant thing, now, to die of the plague. I would not care to be
wearing a pair of boots and I not knowing who had them before me.”
“Hee-hee,” sniggers Sandy in a mean little way he had. “Hee, hee--ye’ll
no hae the chance o’ wearin’ these.”
And then it was that old Balto the Finn--he was an old sailorman, this
Balto, and he could remember the real ancient days, the Baltimore
clippers and the East Indiamen--spoke for the first time.
“From the dead to the dead!” says Balto. “From a dead corpse were they
taken, and to a dead corpse will they go.”
They are great witches, are Finns, as every one knows. And it seemed
likely enough that the first part of the saying, at least, was true, for
old Charley hadn’t the best of names for the way he got hold of his
stuff.
Sandy was one of those chaps who go about in fear and trembling of being
robbed; so, after he saw how all the crowd admired the boots, he took to
wearing them all the time ashore and afloat. He went ashore in them the
night before the “Isle of Skye” was to sail.
He came aboard in them, too, that same night....
The tide drifted him against the hawser, and the anchor watch saw him
and hauled him in. Dead as nails, was poor Sandy, and no one knew just
how it came about. It was thought he’d slipped on the wet wharf--it was
a very bad wharf, with a lot of holes and rough places in it. And of
course a man can’t swim in heavy boots....
There was a man in the “Isle of Skye” at that time, a Dago. His name was
Tony, short for Antonio. He bought Sandy’s boots very cheap, no one else
seeming to care for them.
That was a cruel cold passage, and the “Isle of Skye” being loaded right
down to her marks, she was a very wet ship indeed. So that the time came
when more than one in the starboard watch wished they were in that
Dago’s boots after all, and the fanciful feeling about poor Sandy began
to wear off.
The Old Man was a holy terror for cracking on: he had served his time in
one of the fast clippers in the Australian wool trade, and he never
could get it out of his head that he had to race everything else in the
nitrate fleet. He would sooner see a sail carry away any day than reef
it, and this passage he was worse than ever.
However, it came on to blow so bad, just off the pitch of the Horn, that
the mate went down and dug the hoary old scoundrel out of his sweet
slumbers, he having dared anybody to take a stitch off her before
turning in. He cursed and he swore; but the end of it was that the watch
laid aloft to reef the fore upper-topsail, and it was then that this
Dago Tony, who was swanking it in the boots as usual, put his foot on a
rotten ratline, and down he came, boots and all.
There was a lot of talk, and no wonder, about the things which had
happened since Sandy MacGillivray got those boots from the Chink; and
the Old Man getting wind of it, he told Sails to stitch up Tony boots
and all, so as to stop the talk for good.
“Mind ye,” said the Old Man, “Ah dinna hold wi’ Papish suppersteetions,
but there’s no denyin’ the sea’s a queer place.”
* * * * *
Nobody ever expected to see or hear any more of Sandy Mac’s boots. But
there was a man in the starboard watch that nobody liked--a sort of
soft-spoken, soft-handed chap we called Ikey Mo; because he was so fond
of stowing away stuff in his chest every one thought he had a bit of the
Jew in him.
The day we sighted the Fastnet this fellow showed up in a pair of
sea-boots.
“Where had ye them boots, Ikey, and we rowling off the pitch of the
Horn?” asked Larry when he saw them. “It’s a queer thing ye never wore
them sooner.”
“If I’d wore ’em sooner,” says Ikey, “like as not you’d have borrowed
the lend of ’em, an’ maybe got drowned in ’em,” he says, “and then where
should I have been?”
“I would not,” says Larry. “I would not borrow the lend of the fill of a
tooth from a dirty Sheeny like yourself. ’Tis my belief you took them
boots off the poor dead corpse they belonged to; and by the same token,
if they walk off with you to the same place he’s gone to, it’s no more
than you deserve.”
The tale soon got round that Ikey had stolen the boots off the dead
Dago, and it made a lot of feeling against him. But he only laughed and
sneered when folks looked askance at him, and at last he left off making
any secret of the thing he’d done.
“Call yourselves men!” says he. “And scared of a little dead rat of an
Eyetalian that was no great shakes of a man when he was livin’!”
“Let the fool have his way!” says old Balto the Finn. “From a dead
corpse were they taken, to a dead corpse will they go.”
* * * * *
Very, very foggy it was in the Mersey when we run the mudhook out. I
don’t think I ever saw it worse.
Ikey didn’t care. He was singing at the top of his voice as the shore
boat pushed off:
“We’ll furl up the bunt with a fling, oh ...
To pay Paddy Doyle for his boo-oots....”
“Who said ‘boots’?” he shouted, standing up in the boat with his hands
to his mouth. “Where’s the dead corpse now?”
The fog swallowed up the boat whole, but we could hear his voice coming
through it a long while, all thick and muffled:
“We’ll all drink brandy and gin, oh ...
And pay Paddy Doyle for his boots....”
The tug that cut the boat in two picked up five men of the six that were
in her. And the one that was missing was a good swimmer, too.
But then ... a man can’t swim ... in heavy boots....
THE UNLUCKY “ALTISIDORA”
I
When first the legend of the Unlucky “Altisidora” began to take its
place in the great unwritten book of the folk-lore of the sea, old
shellbacks (nodding weather-beaten heads over mugs and glasses in a
thousand sailortown taverns from Paradise Street to Argyle Cut) were
wont to put forward a variety of theories accounting for her character,
according to the particular taste, creed, or nationality of the
theorizer for the time being.
Her keel was laid on a Friday.... Someone going to work on her had met a
red-haired wumman, or a wumman as skenned (this if the speaker were a
Northumbrian) and hadn’t turned back.... Someone had chalked “To Hell
with the Pope” (this if he were a Roman Catholic) or, conversely, “To
Hell with King William” (in the case of a Belfast Orangeman) on one of
her deck beams.... There was a stiff ’un hid away somewheres inside her,
same as caused all the trouble with the “Great Eastern.”... And so on,
and so forth, usually finishing up with the finely illogical assertion
that you couldn’t expect nothink better, not with a jaw-crackin’ name
like that!
Anyhow, unlucky she was, you couldn’t get away from it! Didn’t she
drownd her first skipper, when he was going on board one night in
’Frisco Bay? Didn’t her second break his neck in Vallipo, along of
tumbling down an open hatch in the dark? Come to that, didn’t she kill a
coupler chaps a week when she was buildin’ over in Wilson’s Yard,
Rotherhithe? Didn’t she smash up a lumper or two every blessed trip she
made? Hadn’t she got a way of slipping fellers overboard that sneaky and
sly-like no one knowed they was gone until it come coffee time and they
wasn’t there?... Say the skipper was drunk--well, ain’t skippers gone on
board canned up afore now and _not_ been drownded?... Say it was
somebody’s business to see that there hatch was covered or else a light
left alongside of it--well, ain’t hatches been left open in other ships
without folks walkin’ into ’em into the dark?... Say it was only two
fellers as was killed workin’ on her--well, ain’t there been plenty o’
ships built what _nobody_ got killed workin’ on? Answer me that!...
So the Unlucky “Altisidora” she became from London River to the
Sandheads--a legend to endure in many an ancient memory long after her
bones were rust.
* * * * *
It was in the South-West India Dock that Anderton first set eyes on
her--the sun going down behind Limehouse Church tower in a great flaming
splendour, and lighting up the warehouses, and the dock, and the huddle
of shipping, with an almost unearthly glory.
Anderton was in great spirits. He had waited a long and weary while for
a ship; haunting the docks and the shipping offices by day, and
spending his evenings--for he had no friends in London and no money to
spare for the usual shore diversions--in the dark little officers’
messroom at the Sailors’ Home in Well Street and the uninspiring society
of a morose mate from Sunderland, who passed the time toasting lumps of
cheese over the fire in order--so he confided to Anderton in a rare
burst of eloquence--to get his money’s worth out of the damn place. So
that when there dropped suddenly, as it were out of the summer heavens,
the chance of going as second mate in the “Altisidora” he fairly trod on
air.
It happened in this wise. He had spent a desolating morning tramping
round the docks, offering his valuable services to shipmasters who were
sometimes indifferent, sometimes actively offensive, but without
exception entirely unappreciative. He was beginning to feel as if the
new second mate’s ticket of which he had been so inordinately proud were
a possession slightly less to his credit than a convict’s
ticket-of-leave. Two yards of bony Nova Scotian, topped by a sardonic
grin, had asked him if he had remembered to bring his titty-bottle
along; and a brawny female, with her hands on her hips, bursting forth
upon him from a captain’s cabin, inquired if he took the ship for an
adjectived day nursery.
He had just beaten a hasty retreat after this last devastating encounter
with what dignity he could muster, and was all but resolved to give up
the fruitless quest and ship before the mast, when he heard a voice
behind him shouting “Mister! Hi, mister!”
At first Anderton took no notice. For one thing, he was far too much
taken up with his own concerns to be much interested in the outside
world; for another, he was not long enough out of his apprenticeship to
recognize at once the appellation of “Mister” as one likely to apply to
himself. And in any case there seemed no reason at all why the hail
should be intended for him. It was not, therefore, until it had been
repeated several times, each time a shade more insistently, until,
moreover, he realized that there was no one else in sight or earshot for
whom it could conceivably be intended, that the fact forced itself upon
his consciousness that he was the “Mister” concerned, and he stopped to
let the caller come up with him. He did so puffing and blowing. He was a
round, insignificant little man, whom Anderton remembered now having
seen talking to the mate of one of the ships he had visited earlier in
the day.
“I say,” he gasped, as soon as he was within speaking distance, “aren’t
you--I mean to say, don’t you want a second mate’s berth?”
Did he want a second mate’s berth, indeed? Did he want the moon out of
the sky--or the first prize in the Calcutta Sweep--or the Cullinan
diamond--or any other seemingly unattainable thing? He retained
sufficient presence of mind, however, not to say so, and (he hoped) not
to look it either, admitting, with a creditable attempt not to sound too
keen on it, that he did in fact happen to be on the look out for such an
opening.
“Ah, that’s good,” said the stranger, “because, as a matter of fact,
I--it’s most unfortunate, but my second mate’s met with an accident, and
the ship sails to-morrow. Could you join to-night?”
Manage it? Anderton repressed an impulse to execute a double shuffle on
the edge of the dock, to fling his arms round the little man’s neck and
embrace him, to cast his cap upon the stones and leap upon it. Instead,
he said, with the air of one conferring a favour, that he rather thought
he might.
“All right, then ... ship ‘Altisidora’ ... South-West India Dock ... ask
for Mr. Rumbold ... tell him you’ve seen me ... Captain Carter.”
Anderton stood staring after his new captain for several minutes after
his stubby figure had disappeared among the sheds. The thing was
incredible. It was impossible. It must be a dream. Here, only two
minutes before, he had been walking along seriously meditating the
desirability of taking a plunge into the murky waters of the London
Docks, and in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the whole aspect of
life had been changed by a total stranger offering him--more, positively
thrusting upon him--the very thing he had trudged the docks in search of
until his boot-soles were nearly through.
If he had had time to reflect upon this bewildering gift thrown at him
by wayward fortune it might have occurred to him that--like so many of
that freakish dame’s bounties--there was a catch in it somewhere. He
might have thought, for example, that it was, to say the least, a
surprising fact that--at a time when he knew from bitter personal
experience that the supply of highly qualified and otherwise eminently
desirable second mates evidently greatly exceeded the demand--a
distracted skipper should be rushing round the docks looking for one.
But no such idea as yet damped the first fine flush of his triumph. Why,
indeed, should it? The ship’s name conveyed no sinister meaning to his
mind. He had never heard of her reputation; if he had, he wouldn’t have
cared a button.
He was, as it happened, destined to get the first hint of it within a
very few minutes. Just outside the dock gates he ran into Dick Charnock,
who had been senior apprentice in the old “Araminta” when Anderton was a
first voyager. Charnock was now mate--chief officer he called
himself--of a stinking little tub of a steam tramp plying to the
Mediterranean ports; and Anderton, remembering the airs he had been wont
to give himself in bygone days, took a special pleasure in announcing
his good fortune.
Charnock blew his cheeks out and said:
“O-oh--_her_!”
“Well?” said Anderton a trifle huffily. “What about her?”
No one likes to have cold water poured upon an exultant mood. “Beast!”
he thought. “Jealous--that’s what’s the matter with him!”
“Oh, nothing--nothing!” Charnock replied hastily. “I was just thinking
about something else, that’s all!”
This was so obviously a lie that it only made matters worse, and they
parted a trifle coolly; Anderton refusing an invitation to enjoy the
pleasures of London that evening, as displayed at Wilson’s Music Hall,
at which he would fairly have jumped less than an hour ago.
The morose mate was still sitting in the messroom, surrounded by his
customary aura of “frizzly dick,” when he got back to Well Street and
burst in upon him with his news.
He withdrew the fork from the fire, carefully inspected its burden and
after an interval of profound thought remarked:
“O-oh--_her_!”
His “O-oh--_her_” was, if anything, more pregnant with meaning than
Charnock’s.
“Well?” snapped Anderton. He was by now getting thoroughly exasperated.
“Well? What about ‘Oh--her ‘? What’s wrong with her anyway?”
The mate thoughtfully blew the ashes off his latest culinary triumph and
thrust it into his mouth.
“She’s no’ got a gude name!” he said, indistinctly, but none the less
darkly.
“Not a good name--what’s that mean, pray?” demanded Anderton angrily.
“Just that,” said the mate laconically, and went on toasting cheese.
Anderton flung out of the room in a rage. By this time his first
enthusiasm over his unexpected good fortune had received a decided
check, and it was with distinctly mixed feelings that he made his way
Poplar-wards to make personal acquaintance with his new ship.
What was the meaning behind all these dark hints? Was this mysterious
“Altisidora” a tough ship--a hell-ship? Her skipper didn’t look like it,
though, of course, one had heard of captains who had the Jekyll-and-Hyde
touch about them--butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths ashore, but they
turned into raging devils as soon as they were out of soundings. Anyhow,
he was ready enough for such contingencies. He had been reckoned the
best boxer in the ship as an apprentice, and he would rather welcome
than otherwise an opportunity of displaying his prowess with his
fists.... Was she perhaps a hungry ship? He reflected with a grin that
he had received ample training in the art of tightening his belt in the
old “Araminta.” ... Slow--well, a slow ship had her compensations in the
way of a thumping pay-roll. He remembered the long faces the crew of his
old ship had pulled when the dead horse was not out before she was on
the Line.... Ah, well, he supposed he should know soon enough. One thing
was certain, if she were the most unseaworthy tub in the world, he had
no intention of turning back. His situation had been desperate enough to
call for a desperate remedy.
There was some kind of a small disturbance--a street row of some
sort--in progress just outside the dock gate, and, despite his
impatience to see his new ship, Anderton stopped to see what was
happening.
A queer little scarecrow of a man was standing in the roadway, shaking
his clenched fists in denunciation towards the soaring spars of a lofty
clipper, whose poles, rising above the roofs of the warehouses, seemed
to stab the sunset sky.
“Oh, ye beauty! Oh, ye murdhering bitch!” he shouted. “Lovely ye look,
don’t ye? Who’d think to see ye that ye had it in ye to kill the bes’
shipmate ever a man had?”
A passing policeman, thumbs in belt, casting a kindly Olympian eye on
the little man, tapped him on the shoulder.
“All right--all right now--move on! Never mind about that now, Johnny!
Can’t do with you making your bother ’ere!”
The little man whirled round on him furiously.
“Johnny! Johnny is it? Isn’t it Johnny I’m talkin’ about, the bes’
shipmate ever a man had--smashed like a rotten apple, and no cause at
all for him to fall--oh, ye villain--oh, ye----”
Olympus grew slightly impatient.
“Come now, move on! Can’t do with you creatin’ no bother! Move on, I
tell you, if you don’t want me to appre’end you!”
The little man shuffled off, still muttering to himself, and pausing now
and again in his zigzag progress along the road to flourish his fists at
those contemptuous spars stabbing the sunset. The policeman, catching
Anderton’s eye, tapped his forehead significantly.
“Case o’ Dhoolallie tap, as we used to say in Injer,” he observed.
“Round ’ere nearly every day, ’e is, carryin’ on same as you saw.
Chronic!”
Anderton asked him where the “Altisidora” was berthed. A look--was it of
surprise?--flitted across his stolid countenance. Anderton could have
sworn he was going to say “O-oh--her!” But he didn’t. He only said,
“Right straight a’ead--can’t miss ’er----”
There were quite a number of ships in the dock, of which in those days a
fair proportion were still sailing ships--ships from the Baltic with
windmills sticking up amidships, Dagoes with brightly painted
figureheads and Irish pennants everywhere, Frenchmen with their look of
Gallic smartness and their standing rigging picked out in black and
white; she was none of these anyway.
Anderton’s eye dwelt longingly on the tall clipper whose spars he had
already seen soaring above the sheds. There, now, was the very ship of
his dreams! He thought life could hold no higher bliss for a sailorman
than to stand upon her poop--to control her, to guide her, to see the
whole of her lovely height and grace moving in obedience to his
commands. He sighed a little at the thought, as he continued to scan the
vista of moored shipping with eyes that hoped and yet feared to find
what they sought.
“Right straight ahead.” She couldn’t be far off now--why, his ship must
be lying at the very next berth to the beautiful clipper.
But there wasn’t a next berth: the tall beauty was lying in the very
corner of the dock. Already the straggle of letters among the gilt
scrollwork on her bow had begun to suggest a wild hope he daren’t let
himself entertain. But now it wasn’t a hope--it was a certainty! This
_was_ his ship--this dream, this queen, this perfect thing among ships!
Why, her name was like a song--why hadn’t it struck him before?--and she
was like a song ... the loveliest thing, Anderton thought, he had ever
seen ... rising up there so proud and stately above them all ... her
bare slender skysail poles soaring up, up until the little rosy dapple
in the evening sky seemed almost like a flight of tropical birds resting
on her spars. She dwarfed everything else in the dock. Anderton had
thought his last ship, the ship in which he had served his time, lofty
enough; yet now she seemed almost stumpy by comparison.
He climbed the gangway and stepped on board. The steward, a hoarse
Cockney with a drooping moustache under a pendulous red nose, and an
expression of ludicrous melancholy which would have been worth a fortune
to a music-hall artist, came out of his little kennel of a pantry to
show him his room, and lingered a while, exuding onions and
conversation.
“Nice room, sir, ain’t it? Orl been done right froo.... ’Ard lines on
the ovver young feller, weren’t it? Coo! Cargo slings giv’ way when he
was right underneaf--a coupler ’underweight bung on top of ’im! Coo!
Didn’t it jus’ make a mess of ’im? Not ’arf....”
So that was what had happened to his mysterious predecessor! Well, it
was an ill wind that blew nobody good, Anderton reflected. Poor beggar
... still he couldn’t help it ... and after all----
And it _was_ a nice room--no denying that! Heaps of room for his things,
he thought, remembering the little cramped half-deck of the “Araminta”
which he had shared with five other apprentices three short months ago.
The ship belonged to a period which had not yet learned the art of
cutting down its accommodation to the very last possible inch. Her
saloon was a grand affair, with a carved sideboard and panelling of
bird’s-eye maple, and a skylight with stained glass in it, and all the
rest of her fittings were to match. It looked as if he were going to be
in clover!
A series of tremendous crashes, accompanied by the falling of a heavy
body, broke in upon the steward’s remarks, and he started and looked
round, his toothpick poised in mid-mouth.
“Coo!” he exclaimed. “’Ere comes our Mister Rumbold--and ain’t he
pickled, too?... Not ’arf!”
He vanished discreetly into his pantry as the originator of the
disturbance came ricochetting along the alleyway, finally bringing up
against the door-jamb of Anderton’s room, where he came to a precarious
stand.
He was a man on the shady side of middle age, with a nose which had once
been aquiline and a sandy-white moustache yellowed with tobacco. The
impression he gave--of a dissipated cockatoo--was heightened by the
rumpled crest of stiff hair which protruded from beneath the shore-going
straw hat which he wore halo-fashion, like a saint on the spree, pushed
well back from his forehead.
“’Lo!” he observed with owl-like gravity. “You--comin’ shee long’f us?”
Anderton said he believed he was.
The mate reflected a minute and then said succinctly:
“Gorrelpyou!”
Not being able on the spur of the moment to think of a really
satisfactory answer to this rather surprising remark, Anderton took
refuge in silence, and went on stowing his gear.
“I said ‘Gorrelpyou!’” repeated Mr. Rumbold presently, with a decided
touch of pugnacity in his tone.
Anderton supposed it was up to him to say something, so he said:
“Yes, I know. But why?”
“’Cos--thiship--thishipsh--unlucky--‘Alshdora’!” replied the
mate. “Thashwy. Unlucky--‘Alshdora’! ’N if any man shaysh I’m
drunk--then I shay--my lorshangemmen, I shmit if I can shay
unlucky--unlucky--‘Alshdora’--I’m perfec’ly shober.... I’m perfec’ly
shober--‘n I’m goin’ bed!”
At this point he let go of the door-jamb to which he had been holding,
and proceeded with astonishing velocity on a diagonal course along the
alleyway, concluding by sprawling all his length on the floor of the
saloon.
“Wash marry thiship,” he enunciated gravely, sitting up and rubbing his
head. “Furnishershall over blushop. Tablesh--chairsh--sho on. Mush make
inquirations into thish--morramomin’!”
Here he again collapsed on to the floor, from which he had been slowly
raising himself as he spoke; then, apparently deciding to abandon the
attempt to resume the perpendicular, he set off at a surprising pace on
all fours, and Anderton’s last glimpse of him was the soles of his boots
as he vanished into his cabin.
He finished stowing his possessions, and then went ashore to make one or
two small purchases. The sun was not quite gone, and the greater part of
the dock was still flooded with rosy light. But the Unlucky “Altisidora”
lay now all in shadow, except for the gilt vane at her main truck which
flashed back the last rays of sunset. She looked aloof, alone, cut off
from her fellows by some mysterious and unmerited doom--a ship under a
dark star.
II
It wasn’t long before she began to live up to her reputation. She
started in quite a small way by fouling her anchor off Gravesend, and
giving every one a peck of trouble clearing it. Incidentally, it was Mr.
Mate’s morning-after head that was responsible for the mess. But that
didn’t matter: it went down to the ship’s account all the same. Her
next exploit was to cut a hay barge in two in the estuary. It was foggy
at the time, the barge’s skipper was drunk, and the “crew”--a boy of
sixteen or so--lost his head when the ship loomed suddenly up right on
top of him, and put his helm up instead of down. But what of that? She
was the Unlucky “Altisidora,” or very likely the barge wouldn’t have
been there at all. Down went another black mark against her name.
The captain, in the meantime, had apparently gone into retreat like an
Anglican parson. He had dived below as soon as he came on board, and
there he remained, to all intents and purposes as remote and
inaccessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet, until the ship was well to
westward of the Lizard. This, Anderton learned, was his invariable
custom when nearing or leaving land. Mr. Rumbold, the mate, defined his
malady briefly and scornfully as “soundings-itis.” “No nerve--that’s
what’s the matter with him: as much use as the ship’s figurehead and a
damn sight less ornamental!”
Not that it seemed to make much difference whether he was there or not.
He was a singularly colourless little man, whose very features were so
curiously indeterminate that his face made no more impression on the
mind than if it had been a sheet of blank paper. It seemed to be a
positive agony to him to give an order. Even in ordinary conversation he
was never quite sure which word to put first. He never finished a
sentence or even a phrase straight ahead, but dropped it and made a
fresh start, only to change his mind a second time and run back to pick
up what he had discarded. And this same painful uncertainty was evident
in all he did. His fingers were constantly busy--fiddling with his
beard, smoothing his tie, twiddling the buttons of his coat. Even his
eyes were irresolute--wandering hither and thither as if they couldn’t
decide to look at the same thing two minutes together. He had the look
of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, in point of fact,
he was. He had jockeyed himself somehow into the command of the
“Altisidora,” through family influence or something of the kind, and had
lived ever since in momentary dread of his unfitness for his position
being discovered.
Anderton, for his part, owed to the skipper’s invisibility one of the
most unforgettable moments of his whole life. The pilot had just gone
ashore. The mate was below. To all intent Anderton had the ship to
himself.
A glorious moment--a magnificent moment! He was nineteen--not six months
out of his time--and he was in sole charge of a ship--and such a ship.
The veriest cockboat might well have gained a borrowed splendour in the
circumstances; but here was no need for the rose-coloured spectacles of
idealizing youth. Tier on tier, her canvas rose rounding and dimpling
against the blue of the sky. She curtseyed, bowed, dipped, and rose on
the long lift of the seas. Her hull quivered like a thing alive. Oh, she
was beautiful! beautiful! Whatever life might yet hold for him of
happiness or success, it could bring again no moment quite so splendid
as this.
Mr. Rumbold, after a few days of the most appalling moroseness while the
drink was working out of his system, developed, rather to Anderton’s
surprise, into a quite entertaining companion, possessed of the relics
of a good education, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of unprintable
stories, and a pretty if slightly bitter wit. He was perfectly conscious
of the failing that had made a mess of his career. Anderton guessed from
a hint he let drop one day that he had once had a command and had lost
it, probably through over-indulgence in the good old English pastime
known as “lifting the elbow.” “A sailor’s life would be all right if it
was all like this,” he broke out one day--it was one of those glorious
exhilarating days in the Trades when the whole world seems full of
rejoicing--“it’s the damned seaports that play hell with a fellow,
Anderton, you take my word for it! Drink, my boy, that’s what does
it--drink and little dirty sluts of women--that’s what we risk our lives
every day earning money for! It’s all a big joke--a big bloody joke, my
son--and the only thing to do is to laugh at it!” And off he went again
on one of his Rabelaisian stories.
The ship fought her way to the southward against a succession of
baffling airs and head winds where the Trades should have been, and a
few degrees north of the Line ran into a belt of flat calm which bade
fair to keep her there until the crack of doom. It wasn’t a case of the
usual unreliable, irritating Doldrum weather. It was a dead flat calm in
which day after day came and went while the sails drooped lifeless
against the masts, and men’s nerves got more and more on edge, and
Anderton began to have visions of the months and the years passing by,
and the weed growing long and green on the “Altisidora’s” hull like the
whiskers of some marine deity, and himself returning, one day, old and
white-haired and toothless, to a world which had forgotten his
existence. To crown all, the melancholy steward at this time suffered a
sad bereavement. His cat was missing--a ginger-and-white specimen,
gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s
cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all
the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost,
making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected
places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The
steward had only to murmur “P’sss--p’sss--p’sss!” under his breath, and
out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying
roar of “Damn you--shishing that infernal cat again! If I hear any more
of it I’ll wring your neck!”
But good and bad times and all times pass over--and there came at last a
day when the “Altisidora’s” idle sails once more filled to a heartening
breeze, and the seas slipped bubbling under her keel, and she sped
rejoicing on her way as if no dark star brooded over her.
The steward poked his head out of his pantry that morning as Anderton
passed, with a smile that was like a convulsion of nature.
“Ol’ Ginger’s turned up again, sir!... What do you think of ’er?”
He indicated a small box in the corner in which a gently palpitating
mass of kittenhood explained how Ginger had been spending her time. The
prodigal in the meantime was parading proudly round the steward’s legs,
thrumming to the end of her thin tail with the cat’s ever-recurring
surprise and delight over the miracle of maternity.
“Artful, ain’t she?” said the steward. “Right down in the lazareet, she
was! Must ’ave poked ’erself down there w’en I was gettin’ up some
stores las’ week. That’s ’cos I drahned ’er last lot--see? Wot, drahn
these ’ere! No blinkin’ fear! W’y, they’re _black_ ’uns--ketch me
drahnin’ a black cat!”
Whether the advent of the black kittens had anything to do with it or
not, it certainly seemed for a time as if the luck had turned. Day after
day the ship reeled the knots off behind her at a steady fifteen. Every
one’s spirits rose. “Wot price the hunlucky ‘Altisidora’ now?” said Bill
Green to the man next him on the yard. They were tarring down, their
tar-pots slung round their necks as they worked. “There you go, you
ruddy fool, askin’ for trouble!” replied Mike, the ancient shellback,
wise in the lore of the sea. “Didn’t I tell ye now?” Bill’s tar-pot had
given an unexpected tilt and spread its contents impartially over Bill’s
person and the deck below. “If you was in the Downeaster ‘Elias K.
Slocum’ wot I sailed in once, you’d git a dose o’ belayin’ pin soup for
supper over that, my son, as’d learn you to play tricks with luck.”
The luck didn’t last long. Possibly a hatful of blind black kittens had
not the efficacy as mascots of a full-grown black Tom. Ginger’s progeny
undeniably looked very small, helpless, squirming morsels to contend
successfully against the Dark Gods.
The ship was by now getting into the high latitudes, and sail had to be
gradually shortened until she was running down the Easting under lower
topsails and foresail. Anderton had been keeping the middle watch, and
had gone below, tired out, after a night of “All hands on deck.” It
seemed to him that his eyes were no sooner closed than once again the
familiar summons beat upon the doors of his consciousness, and he
stumbled on deck, still only half roused from sleep, to find a scene of
the wildest confusion.
A sudden shift of wind had caught the ship aback. Both the foremast and
mainmast were hanging over the side in a raffle of rigging, only the
mizen, with the rags of the lower topsail still clinging to the yard,
being left standing. The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen
no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea,
under the grey light of the dreary dawn--a sight to daunt the stoutest
heart.
It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto
unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a
drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining
companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its
more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. But now
he recognized in him a fine and resourceful seaman and a determined and
indomitable leader of men in the face of instant danger. The suddenness
and completeness of the disaster which might well have induced the
numbness of despair, only seemed to arouse in him a spirit in proportion
to the needs of the moment. During the long hours while the ship fought
for her life--during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept
going incessantly to free her from the volume of water that had flooded
her hold--when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient
sail to keep her going before the wind--he it was who continually urged,
encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who
thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. He it was who
worked hardest of all, and who, when things seemed at their worst and
blackest, brought a grin to haggard, worn-out faces with a shanty stave
of an irresistible humour and--be it added--a devastating
unprintableness.
The ship managed to hobble into Cape Town under her jury rig, where Mr.
Rumbold promptly vanished into his customary haunts, to reappear just
before the ship sailed after her refit, the same sprawling and
disreputable wreck he had been when Anderton first saw him. He never
again showed that side of himself that had come to the surface on the
night of disaster; but Anderton never quite forgot it, and because of
the memory of it he spent many a patient hour in port tracking the mate
to his favourite unsavoury resorts, and dragging him, maudlin, riotous,
or quarrelsome, back again to the ship.
The “Altisidora” arrived in Sydney a hundred and forty days out. Her
fame had gone before her, and she attracted quite an amount of attention
in the capacity of a nautical curiosity. Moreover, the legend grew
apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the
beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed
her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t
she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in
her!”
And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of
herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She
lost spars--she lost sails--she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows
what! She scraped bits off wharves; she lost her sheer in open
roadsteads and barged into other ships. She ran short of food and had to
supplicate passing ships for help. When she couldn’t think of anything
else to do she even tried to run down her own tug. And yet in spite of
it all--perhaps, for sailormen are queer beings, because of it all--her
men liked her. They cursed her, they chid her, kindly, without rancour,
as one might chide a charming but erring woman; but they stuck by her
all the same. The old sailmaker, a West Country man who had lost all his
teeth on hard tack, had been with her for years. “You don’t mind sailing
in an unlucky ship, then, Sails,” said Anderton to him one day, when he
was helping him to cut a new upper topsail to replace one of the ship’s
casual losses.
The old man pushed his spectacles up on to his bald head, and looked out
over the sea with eyes flattened by age and faded to the remote blue of
an early morning sky when mist is clearing.
“I rackon’t ain’t no use worryin’ ’bout luck, sir,” he said, “so long’s
there’s a job o’ work wants doin’.”
From Sydney she went over to Newcastle to load coal for Chile, then on
to ’Frisco with nitrates, ’Frisco to Caleta Buena again, over again to
Newcastle, and last of all to Sydney once more to load wool for home.
III
Sixty miles west of St. Agnes Light the Unlucky “Altisidora” leaned to
the gentle quartering breeze, homeward bound on the last lap of her
three years’ voyage.
Anderton stood on the poop, gazing out into the starry darkness that
held England folded to its heart. Above him sail piled on sail rose up
in the moonlight, like some tall, fantastic shrine wrought in ebony and
silver to an unknown and mysterious god. The water slipped past her
silently as a swimming seal, with a faint delicate hiss like the tearing
of silk as the clipper’s bow cleft it. His mind ran now forward, now
backward, as men’s minds do when they are nearing one of the milestones
of life.
He remembered almost with a pang of regret the heady exultation which
had been his when he stood on this poop alone for the first time,
realizing that something had slipped away from him unnoticed which he
could never hope to recapture this side the grave. Three years is a long
while, especially to the young; but it was not in point of actual time,
but in experience, that so wide and deep a gulf yawned between himself
and the boy who three years since had left these shores he was now
approaching. She had taught him many things, that old ship--more,
perhaps, than he himself knew....
Rumbold wandered up on to the poop and began to tell smutty tales. The
restlessness which always consumed him when the ship was nearing land
was strong on him. Anderton felt a great pity for him. It would be the
old tale, he supposed, as soon as the ship was made fast: this man, who
had it in him to fight a losing game with death with a laugh on his
lips, would become to the casual observer, a lewd, drunken blackguard,
wallowing in the lowest gutters of Sailortown. What would become of him,
he wondered--picturing him dropping steadily lower and lower on the
ladder, driven to take a second mate’s berth, thence dropping to bos’n,
last to seaman--so on until some final pit of degradation should swallow
him up for ever?
The man was in so queer a mood that Anderton hesitated about leaving the
deck to him. But he reflected that he would have little chance of rest
when she was fairly in the Channel, and decided to go down for a stretch
off the land, so as to have his wits about him when they were most
needed.
He did not know how long he had been asleep when he woke with a start.
The ship’s bells were just striking. He counted the strokes--three
double, one single--seven bells. He might as well go on deck now. She
must have made a landfall by now.
An inexplicable premonition had come over him, which he refused to admit
even to himself, that all was not well. He listened: the ship still held
on her course. There was no sound but the restless chirp of a block
somewhere aloft, the creak of a yard moving against the parrals, the
constant “hush-hush” of the waves as they hastened under the keel. He
slipped into his coat and passed out into the saloon.
The lamp over the table was still burning smokily, mingling its light
with the cold grey light of morning, and giving to the scene that air of
desolation which perhaps nothing else can impart so completely. The
place reeked of drink. Under the lamp, sprawling half across the table,
was Rumbold. One whisky bottle lay on the floor, another on the table
beside his hand, from which the last dregs spattered lazily to the
floor.
The swine--the drunken swine! Anderton seized him by the arm and shook
him furiously.
Rumbold lifted his ravaged face from the table and stared at him
stupidly.
“Thish bockle’sh--water o’ knowledge--good’n’ evil,” he said inanely.
“Mush make--inquirations--morramornin’!”
His head dropped on his arms again.
Anderton took the companion in a couple of bounds.
It was like stepping out into wet cotton-wool. The stars were gone. The
sky was gone, but for one pale high blue patch right overhead. The ship
disappeared into the fog forward of the after hatch as completely as if
she had been cut in two. There wasn’t a soul to be seen but the man at
the wheel, a stolid young Finn who would go on steering the course that
had been given him until the skies fell.
Anderton started to run forward, shouting as he went; and his voice,
tossed back at him out of the dimness, hit him in the face like a stone.
The next moment, the ship had struck.
She took the ground, so it seemed at the time, quite gently: with hardly
a jar, hardly a tremor, only with a little delicate contented shiver all
through her graceful being, like someone settling down well pleased to
rest. You might almost fancy that she said to herself:
“There--I have done with it all at last--done with bearing the blame of
your sins and follies, your weakness, your incapacity, your drunkenness,
your indecision. I have been your scapegoat too long. Henceforward, bear
your own burdens!”
And just then the mist rolled off like a curtain. She was right under
the land, in the midst of a great jagged confusion of rocks that reached
out to sea for nearly a quarter of a mile. The wonder was she had not
struck sooner. You could see the pink tufts of thrift clinging to the
cliff face, the streaks of green and yellow lichen on the rock, the thin
line of soil crested with grass at the top. Above, sheep were grazing,
and there came the faint querulous cry of young lambs. A scene to fill a
sailor’s heart with sentimental delight under any conditions but these!
There was nothing to be done. The Unlucky “Altisidora” had paid her last
tribute to the Dark Gods. The ship lay jammed hard and fast on a sunken
reef, and was making water rapidly.
They left the ship at sunset. The skipper took his seat in the boat
without a word or a backward glance; the mate--sobered for once--hung
his head like a beaten dog. The melancholy steward carried the faithful
Ginger in a basket.
“Ain’t been such a bad ol’ gal, ’as she?” That was the gist of the
crew’s valedictions. They set off in single file up the narrow path that
led to the top of the cliff--an oddly incongruous little procession in
that rural setting.
Anderton came last of all. One by one his shipmates topped the crest and
vanished. But still he lingered. He wanted just for a minute to be
alone with this old ship that had come so strangely into his life and
was now to go out of it as strangely.
From where he stood he looked down upon her, lying almost at his feet.
He could see all her decks, the poop, the galley, the forecastle
head--everything that had grown so familiar to him through years of ship
incident and ship routine. How friendly it all looked, now that he was
leaving it! He wondered how he could ever have thought her the agent of
Dark Gods--this patient, lovely, and enduring thing that had done man’s
bidding so long--like him, the instrument of forces beyond her knowing
or his. How good it had all been--how good! The dangers, the hardships,
the toil, the rest, the rough and the smooth of it ... the voices of his
shipmates, the courage and humour of them, their homely faces....
She was part of his life, part of himself, for ever! He would remember
in years to come a hundred little things that now he did not even know
he remembered, yet which lay safely folded away in the treasure-house of
memory, till some chance word, some trick of sun or shade, some smell,
some sound, should bring them to light ... and he would say, “Aye, that
was in the old ‘Altisidora,’” ... and perhaps be silent a little, and be
a little happy and sad together, as men are when they think upon their
youth....
Was that what the old ship had been trying to tell him all the time--the
secret that had fled before him round the world, for ever near, yet for
ever just out of reach, like the many-coloured arch of spray that hung
gleaming before her bows? That the hard things of life were the things
best worth having in the end?... A big green wave that flooded over
you, that took the breath out of you, that went clean over your
head--life was like that. Run away from it and it would sweep you off
your feet, smash you up against things, drown you, very likely, at the
finish.... You had got to hang on to something, no matter what--a job of
work, an idea, anything so long as you could get a grip on it--hang on
like grim death, and the wave would go over you and leave you safe and
sound....
The sky was full of windy plumes of cloud. A long swell had begun to
thunder in from the west, grinding and pounding her with leisurely
irresistible strokes like blows from a giant hammer. The sea, the
breaker of ships, was already at his work of destruction. Soon there
would be a roaring as of a thousand chariots along all the headlands,
and the whole coast would be one thunder and confusion of blown foam.
A call came to him from the cliff-top. It was time to be going--time for
him to leave her! Presently he too topped the crest, and, when he next
looked back, he could see the ship no longer. The Unlucky “Altisidora”
had passed from his sight for ever.
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