Part 10

"I am not. My two mates can navigate. Get ready quickly, or she may die while you're talking."

Bill threw off his coat and rolled up his sleeve, showing an arm as big as an ordinary leg. The doctor rushed for his instruments, and while he was gone the owner asked brokenly of Bill how it happened.

"I do not know, sir," he answered, resolved not to describe the scene to her disadvantage. "I did not see her fall. I think nobody saw her fall."

"God grant that she lives!" said the old man, all the austerity gone from his face. "I can do nothing, willing as I am, for I am old and feeble; but you are young and strong. You see, there is much at stake beside by own grief and suffering. She is my daughter, and the real owner of this yacht, and every bond, and share, and mortgage that I control. Should she die, I would die myself--from poverty and want, while her relatives would obtain control. Still," and the old man stiffened up, "why should I speak of this? She is my daughter. I love her, for she is all I have left. Save her life, and while I live I am at your command."

"The hell you say!" said Bill. "I thought she was your ward."

"My daughter by my second wife," said the old gentleman, with dignity. "My first wife, with all her relations, is still alive and fighting me."

"I think," said Bill reflectively, "that I understand. Well," and here the doctor appeared with his appurtenances, "you don't love this little girl any more than I do, and I'll do my part."

"Lie down beside her quickly," ordered the doctor. Bill did so.

"Can you stand pain?" asked the doctor of Bill. "Or do you want an anæsthetic?"

"Go ahead," growled Bill, between his teeth. "Work quickly."

"I am going to sever a vein in both your arms, and connect them by this tube. Miss Mayhew is unconscious, and will feel no pain. But _you_ will."

"Go ahead," yelled Bill. "What do I care for pain? Use your surgical skill, and save her life, or, by God, I'll toss you overboard. Quickly, now. Go ahead, before she dies."

"I will," answered the doctor grimly, as he picked up his lancet.

Bill felt pain; he felt that his arm was being torn from his shoulder, as the doctor severed a large vein, and dragged the upper end out from the bleeding wound. He gritted his teeth, however, and closed his eyes tightly, while the doctor ligatured the vein and bound its end around the tube; then, shivering in every muscle of his body, he waited while the same operation was performed on the arm of the girl. Then the ligatures were removed, and Bill slowly went to sleep, the pain and distress, love of the girl, and interest in life leaving him as the somnolence increased.

He awakened a few years later, as he thought, lying in his own berth abaft the pilot house, his arm bound to his side, and the black kitten nestling upon his chest. He looked at the little creature, and an ungovernable hatred overcame him. He could barely lift his free arm, but with this arm and hand he brushed the kitten off to the floor. Then he tried to pull himself together, but did not succeed; things were obscure, he could not remember, and all he felt was hatred of the cat, now glaring at him from under the chart table. There was a nautical almanac in the berth, and Bill flung it at the cat; but she dodged, and ran out on deck. Then she came back in the arms of Miss Mayhew, or, rather, in one arm, for the right was strapped to her side, as was his left; she was not exactly rosy of face, still there was color in it, and a soft light in her eyes, and a sweet smile on her lips, that robbed Bill of his resentment toward the cat. She fondled the small creature, and came toward his couch; then, bending over him, she deposited the kitten on his chest and kissed him on the lips. Bill choked and gasped.

"You mustn't mind," she said, rosy now, "if I kiss you. The doctor told me. You gave me most of your blood, and I lived. I was well in a day."

Before Bill could formulate an answer the father came in.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "you've waked up, have you? Good! We had our doubts about it; for it took three days. We're almost to Gibraltar, as the mate says."

"That's good," said Bill wearily, "but--is Miss Mayhew all right?"

"Got a hole in her side," answered the father, "and a hole in her arm; but, tell me, you folks. Something happened, and I want to know."

"It was all my fault, daddy," said the girl. "This little cat frightened me, and I think I went crazy again."

"I see," said the father, his face clouding. "I told you, Mr. Flanders, to have no cats on board. Why is this?"

"Why," said Bill, "I'm sorry now, of course, but I found the brute being tormented by a gang of toughs, and brought it with me. I never dreamed that there would be any unpleasant consequences."

"But I knew," said the owner warmly. "This little girl of mine was marked by her mother, who was frightened into insanity by a mad cat. She has gone crazy several times at the sight of a cat."

"But not any more," said the smiling girl. "Come here, kitty, and let me love you." She picked up the kitten, and fondled it. Then the doctor appeared, and looked them all over with a stern, scientific eye.

The girl placed the kitten on Bill's chest, close to his chin, and smilingly bade him pat it. But Bill, with a furious, though not profane, exclamation, struck his former pet from him. The girl picked it up, and consoled it, looking down on Bill with mild disapproval.

"Please pardon me," he said weakly, "but I hate the thing. I cannot stand it."

"Don't worry, young man," said Doctor Calkins. "You'll come around all right, and be as merciful to dumb animals as you have been, while our little girl here is relieved from the obsession of her life. It has never before come into my experience, but I have read about it in my studies--transfusion of blood carries with it transference of psychic qualities. This girl, in taking into her veins some of your blood, has taken your love of cats--I know all about it, because I talked with the mess boy--and you, in giving your blood to her, took something of her obsession. But you will both get over it. Come, Mr. Mayhew, and leave these people alone with the cat."

They went out, and the girl sat beside the weak and helpless man, stroking his face and caressing him for an hour before he spoke a vital word.

"Say," he said, at last. "Tell me, what is your first name?"

"Kitty," she answered.

THE TWINS

My acquaintance with them began, I may say, about fifteen years before their birth; for I had played marbles with their father, made mud pies with their mother, thrashed the former through his school-days, and loved the latter from the beginning to the end--which is not yet. Finally, I had officiated as best man at the wedding.

The twins were as like as two peas, and to preserve their identity the usual expedient was tried of decorating them with ribbons of different hue. But when, at three years of age, they were detected in the very natural act of swapping ribbons, I, as the family physician, was called in; then Jack's identity was fixed with a tattooed dot of india ink on his left arm, and Jim's with a corresponding dot on his right. Their mother was mostly concerned with their pain and protesting squalls, their father with my wonderful ingenuity, and I with the rebellious, yet imperious, thought that, according to the eternal fitness of things, I should have been the father of these two beautiful boys.

Their father was about my age, twenty-five, and a weakling; one who, as a boy, could never catch a ball nor throw one straight; who never learned to swim, and preferred girls for playmates; who, as a youth, could not dress himself without assistance; who never, in his whole lackadaisical life, had an original thought or took the initiative in any proceeding; and why that splendid, healthy-minded, dark-eyed girl of seventeen should choose him out of a host of suitors was beyond my comprehension at the time. Later, I understood; somewhat weakly sexed at that age, but largely endowed with the maternal instinct (she played with dolls until within a year of her marriage), she pitied his helplessness and married him to mother and protect him. And from this pair, so utterly diverse, Mother Nature produced two perfect specimens of humanity, and rested. After their arrival the parents drifted apart, and from sheer incompatibility were divorced when the boys were seven years old. They went to their original homes at opposite sides of the town, each taking a twin; for the asinine judge, unable to decide in favor of either, had, Solomon-like, so conditioned the divorce.

Their grief was heart-rending--equaled only by that of the mother, as I, in my professional relation to each home, had full opportunity to judge. But time softened this grief in all of them, and brought about in the mother a state of mind exceedingly valuable and gratifying to me. In a year from the divorce she became my wife. So far I had observed the development of the twins as a physician, noting that the measles, mumps, croup, and other childhood ailments came to both at the same time, and, as a physician, ascribing it to bodily contagion. But now, still a physician to each, I took note of other concurrent happenings that spoke of mental contagion as well. I was called to Jim late one afternoon by the agitated father, and found him in a strange mental condition, crying and laughing, and again storming in an ecstasy of rage at the house-dog, a gentle, harmless collie and a former pet, against whom he had conceived a violent hatred. He had attacked and nearly killed him with a club.

When I reached home that evening I was regaled by the joyous Jack with an account of his successful battle that afternoon with a mad dog that had attacked him. It was a large, black mongrel, and he had brained it with his ball club. I sounded his emotions. Frightened? Of course; who would not be with a huge mad brute, frothing at the mouth, charging at him? But he had staggered the animal with the first blow, and then had come his courage, his anger, and his furious desire to kill, and save his life. Yes, he had cried, afterward, and was much ashamed of the weakness. But I reassured him on this point, convinced him that strong, brave men sometimes cried under extreme excitement, and in my desire to make the most of the incident in his development, almost overshot the mark. His self-respect became abnormal, and neighboring dogs and small boys suffered, until he was stopped by an experience more salutary than would have been the strapping which his mother and I were seriously contemplating. He attacked another dog, but a sane dog of small size and attending to his business. This dog met the assault bravely and, though suffering keenly from Jack's first blow and unable to injure any living thing larger than a rabbit, offered a strong protest of growls and barks, the moral effect of which was to send the small boy fleeing for home with the small dog snapping at his heels. The neighbors rejoiced, and it was a month before Jack recovered from the humiliation. He did not understand, nor did I until the following day, when his father informed me on the street that the collie, recovered in mind and body, had revenged himself by attacking and biting Jim, who was badly frightened and needed my attention. I could not learn that there was concomitance of time, but I knew that the twins, a mile apart, _shared each other's emotions_.

After a fruitless attempt to get legal transfer of Jim to my own household, I fell back on my growing faith in this sympathy of mind, trusting that a careful training of Jack might have a corresponding influence upon Jim. But in this I hoped too much. No such sympathy is ever as strong as daily and personal contact, and the direct and weakening example of that father's life and words worked powerfully upon the character of the boy. His individuality lessened, and as though this lessening were an invitation, the apparently fortuitous incidents and influences of his life became such as to lessen it still further. He seemed to be looking for trouble, and would attempt feats that he failed to perform, while Jack attempted such as were just within his increasing powers. A boy that Jack had pummeled came around and took revenge on Jim. He would yield to pressure that Jack would resist.

And so they grew farther and farther apart in face, form, and disposition, Jack into a tall, straight, handsome and high-minded young gentleman, Jim into a shifty, cowardly, stoop-shouldered and cad-like sort of a youth, without friends, ambition, or ideals, whose backwardness in study brought him into the lowest class of the town's one high school as Jack entered the highest. In this year of schooling they met for the first time since the separation, but they met as strangers. They knew they were brothers, of course, but carefully avoided reference to the fact, and soon avoided each other. Between them there was no outward sympathy nor community of interest, the unwise but cast-iron pride of the mother finding expression in Jack's attitude, and the cowardice of the negative father in Jim's.

Jack graduated with honor, and, confronted with another four years of study at college, yet ardent, ambitious, anxious to begin life's battle as a man, chose a career that satisfied both conditions--a life in the navy. He arranged matters himself, secured an appointment to the Naval Academy, and left us. And on that day, Jim, friendless in school and stubborn, was dismissed from school for negligence in his studies. Then, as though his evil star were now at its zenith, his father, having lost all his inherited property in unwise speculation, took him away, where I could not learn; but a year later we read the list of lost in a coasting-steamship wreck, and in this list were the names of these two.

I now had to deal with a half-crazed woman, who spoke little and did not weep, but whose strained face and whitening hair told of the strength of that misplaced pride and outraged mother-love, suppressed for so many years. Nothing that I could say or do availed against the aroused craving for the neglected boy. She resisted my oft-repeated suggestions that Jim was gone, and that there was nothing to do but to make the best of it. She refused to be resigned, for she could not bring herself to believe that he was dead. She insisted that he was alive, and that some day he would come back.

This continued through the years, while her hair became whiter and her voice nearly silent, while Jack finished his course and sea term, to be then retired against his will because of the preponderance of officers in a wooden navy too small for them, and while my practice and my health left me under the strain of caring for the queenly woman I loved. Then Jack, a born free-lance who would have entered any navy in the world had a war been on, did the next best thing for him; he secured command of a large, new merchant ship, and made a successful voyage, perhaps the youngest and probably the best educated master in the merchant marine. When he returned my nerves were as bad as his mother's, my practice was gone, my future uncertain; and so we accepted his invitation to make a voyage with him, I with the listlessness of all neurasthenics, my wife with an avidity which surprised us. She brightened at once.

And now this story really begins.

II

She was a two-thousand-ton, double topgallant and skysail yard ship--one of the larger, slower type that succeeded the old Cape Horn clippers, but a ship that even a naval officer might feel proud to command; and Jack was certainly proud of her. And as we--his mother and myself--watched him pacing the poop-deck as sail was being made, giving an occasional quiet order to the helmsman or sending a brazen roar forward to the mate on the forecastle, we were frankly proud of him. Six feet tall to an inch, straight as a man may be, with a chest almost as deep as his shoulders were broad, sunburned and brown-eyed, with only a well-kept mustache to relieve the boyishness of his face, he presented a picture that brought light into the eyes and a smile to the face of that mother as she stood beside me. But a contrasting look of pain followed, and I knew the thought behind was of the other boy, of whom we never spoke.

The first mate was a huge, hairy, brutal sort of man, uneducated beyond the mechanical formulas of navigation, but with a large and healthy conception of his own value to the ship and her people. The second mate was like him to a lesser extent--not quite so big, nor brutal, nor profane, and with less of the art of navigation.

At eight bells of that first evening out the men were chosen into watches by the two mates much as boys choose sides in a ball game, and my wife and I drew amidships to witness the scene. They were an unkempt lot in the moonlight, mostly foreigners, and clad in greasy and tarry garments of nondescript pattern and shape. Each called out his name as he was chosen, moving to starboard or port, according to the watch he now belonged to, and when the job was half done Jack, smoking a cigar, joined us and critically scanned his crew.

"Relieve the wheel and lookout," said the mate, when the last man was chosen. "That'll do the watch."

"Wait!" said Jack sharply, tossing away his cigar and stepping toward the dispersing men. "I've something to say to you."

They halted and drew together.

"This is my second voyage in the merchant marine," he continued. "The last was my first. Before that I was in the navy, with the power of the law and the Charlestown prison behind me in every order I gave to a man. As a consequence of this condition no man-o'-war's man ever refuses to obey an order, and few of them ever get to that prison. But I brought such ideas with me when I took command of this ship. I spoke kindly to my men and treated them well. I forbade my mates to bully or strike them, and even ironed my second mate for ignoring my wishes. I took sick and injured men aft and nursed them. But I found that I had made a mistake. Merchant sailors can be jailed as easily as man-o-war's men, but they don't know it. Knowing nothing, they fear nothing until it comes to them. Orders were disobeyed on that voyage, and each man was his own boss; ropes were never coiled up without an argument, gear was rove off wrong, earings were passed farm-fashion, canvas was lost, marlinespikes, capstan-bars, and draw-buckets went overboard, tar-pots were dropped from aloft on a clean deck, and a paint-brush came down on my head. Discipline went to the dogs, and I nearly lost my ship. Now there'll be none of that here. As I won't have time nor inclination to appeal to the law if you make trouble I mean to forestall it. I've shipped mates that'll break your heads on the first provocation, and they have my instructions to do it. So watch out. You'll get plenty of grub while you deserve it, but when you don't it'll be all hands in the afternoon and the government allowance. That'll do."

"That's all right, Cappen," said a big Irishman in a voice of rage. "This is a Yankee ship, an' ye needn't ha' said all that. But I tell ye, if ye'll pick out able seamen yerself in the shippin'-office, 'stid o' lettin' a shippin'-master gi' ye barbers an' waiters that don't know port from sta'board ye'll ha' no throuble wi' yer min. Luk at this ye've gi'n us for a watchmate." He seized a man standing near, swung him at arm's length, and flung him, spinning on his feet, full against the first mate. That worthy, shocked out of his better judgment, instead of rebuking the Irishman, drew back his mighty fist and struck the staggering man in the face, sending him reeling back toward the place he had come from. He slipped, stumbled, and fell, his head striking the corner of the main hatch. They he lay quiet on the deck.

But a strange thing happened--strange and inconsistent with regard to Jack's just-uttered declaration of his position. No sooner had the mate struck the man than Jack, with a muttered curse, launched himself toward his first officer, and knocked him against the fife-rail, where he clung, choking and clucking. Jack struck him twice, once in the face, once in the body. And now a stranger thing happened. It all occurred so quickly that I could hardly take note, shaky of nerve as I was and hampered by the distressed woman on my arm; but Jack, having struck the mate, and before the still erect victim of the mate and the Irishman had stumbled, had immediately bounded toward the Irishman. But as the luckless fellow's head struck the hatch combing, Jack brought up, and with a low, inarticulate whimper and a face like that of a frightened child looked this way and that, then sped aft toward the poop steps. We followed, while the second mate dispersed the men, and found Jack in a strange condition of terror, unnatural to him, or to any man of his type. His agitated mother endeavored to soothe him, but between her motherly admonitions to Jack came wifely admonitions to me to attend to the poor man who had been so brutally maltreated.

So I went forward, passing on the way the two mates, the one assisting the other. As I passed, the second mate called out that the other's jaw-bone and some ribs were broken, and that my services were needed; but, feeling enough of indignation to make the brutal first mate the last on my list of patients, I went on, and found the mistreated sailor in the port forecastle, where he had been carried by his shipmates. He was sitting on a chest, just recovering his senses, and looking about in a dazed manner out of swollen and blackened eyes. As the men parted to make way for me Jack's mighty voice sounded from amidships: "Weather main-brace, here. Where's the watch? Where's the second mate? Attend to your yards, sir." Obviously, Jack was himself again.

"I didn't mean to hit the mate wi' him, sorr," said the big Irishman deferentially, "an' it was a dom shame for the mate to slug him like that, even if he was no sailor. But the skipper's a brick. Be-gob, he'll 'tind to that bunco mate."

"Are you hurt much?" I asked of the victim. He looked into my face, then, rising, burst forth:

"Doctor, doctor, take me away from here. Take me out of this place. They hit me and curse me because I don't know things. I don't know why I am here--I don't know where I am." The broken voice became a wail. "I'm on the water again and I'll drown, I know I'll drown. Oh, doctor"--he seized my arm--"I'm Jim; don't you know me, doctor?"

"Jim?" I queried. "Jim who?" and turned him to the light.

"Look, doctor. You did this, they told me, when I was a baby." He pulled up the right sleeve of a ragged, filthy shirt, and showed me a dot of india ink just below the elbow.

"For God's sake, are you Jim, the twin brother of Jack? We all thought you were dead--drowned with your father."

"He was drowned, doctor. I floated on a piece of board and was saved. I went crazy for a while, and then--I never could get along. I couldn't get work, and things got worse and worse, and then I took to the road, and then I came to New York, and--I guess I got drunk, and got here."

"Shanghaied, that's what ye were," grunted the Celt.

I looked closely at Jim's face. Aside from the facial angle and the color of his eyes there was no resemblance to the brother who, at seven years of age, had been his counterpart. A badly kept beard added to the discrepancy, no doubt, but the whole atmosphere of the man was different. There was a slight reminder of Jack in the lower tones of the voice, but its usual note was a whine, and in his whole bearing was the slinking aspect of a vagrant of the worst kind. Certainly, I could not take this human wreck into the presence of that mother and brother.