“Maid of Athens, ere we part——”
“Maid of Athens, ere we part——”
“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——”
“Maid of Athens, ere we part——”
“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. Davidremembered 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 youyourself 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—andyour 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.
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.”
“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 ofphrase-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 thismicrocosm 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 hadbecome 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 forthe 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; shealmost 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 successionof 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.
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; andfor 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 hewascautious. 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 weatherrigging, 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 soakingaguardiente. 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, andhewasn’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 ofmy 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.
“Whatwashe driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after allthose 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, uncannyexperience ... 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....”
AGOOD 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: