“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling—o—oh ...An’ pa—ay Paddy Doyle for his bo—o—ots....”
“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling—o—oh ...An’ pa—ay Paddy Doyle for his bo—o—ots....”
“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 deeplyladen 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 crestof 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, hemustsave 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 toask 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 awayon 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 isremoved 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, itsspotted 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 remainsof 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 miscellaneousjunk 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.
“Itcan’tbe,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George, itis!... 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 aship 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, ’esetit.... 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, sheshalldo 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—therewasno 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 therehauling 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.
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 typeof 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, sheneeded 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 untilthen. 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 wassaid 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, andit 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 anaffaire 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.
“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 dobusiness. 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 Samhastily, 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 areciter 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 couldmuster; “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 gottime 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 thetime 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 allright. 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!