Part 7

He couldn't talk; he couldn't get to his feet. His C.P.O. friend--a game one, too--shook his fist at me across his body. "Only a week out of the hospital and you had to beat him up. But, beaten or not beaten--go ahead, smash me again if you want to, you big brute--he's still a better man than you are or ever will be!"

A score of people had found their way in under the seats. None who cared to know but would hear a word of every blow that was passed in that fight. Going home after the fight it was borne in on me that less than ever was I the hero I was wishful to make myself out to be.

I slept little that night, and in the morning--nothing within the four walls of a house suited me any more--I slipped out into the sun and walked along the docks; and walking the docks I reached the gates to the navy-yard. I went in.

A ship!--'tis like nothing else in the world. Ships! In the romances I'd been reading since ever I could read, there had been tales of ships and of the sea. Phoenician galleys, Roman triremes, the high-prowed boats of the Vikings, carved Spanish caravels--they had carried the men who made history. Great ships were they, and yet here were ships that could take--any one of them here--could take a score, a hundred, of the ancient craft with all their shielded men at arms and stand off--a mile, two miles, ten miles off--and with one broadside blow them from the face of the waters. Dreams of what had been and what might be--what use were they? Things as they are--that was it!

What most people, maybe, would call common sense was coming to me; and maybe something finer than all the common sense in the world was flying from me. So I've often thought since of that morning.

I enlisted in the navy. And it was good for me. To look out on the wide 'waters--day or night--'tis to calm a man's soul, to widen his thought.

I had no ambition to rise. The blazing life of the four quarters of the world was soaking into me. My eyes, perhaps, were seeing too much, and my mind pondering on what I saw too much, to be breaking any ship records for efficiency.

But I was getting my rating when it was time and I was forgetting old shore troubles, when there was a warrant-officer came to our ship. His name--no matter his name--he's no longer in the navy. He was the-- But you've seen the little man on the big job?--the sure sign of it being the pompous manner and the arrogant word. There he was, licking the boots of those above him and setting his own boots on the necks of those below! He strutted like a governor-general. Maybe you know what sort of talk is passed along the gun-decks when such a one is parading by!

The ridiculousness of him was too wide a target for any man with an eye in his head to miss. I was never short of an eye, nor oil for the trunnions of my tongue, and no ship's company ever lacked a messenger to carry the disturbing word. For the fun I poked at him my bold superior had me spotted for his own target later.

There was a chest of alcohol on the lower flag bridge and there was a marine sentry standing by it night and day. As much for the devilment as for the drink, four or five of the lads in our gun crew one night rushed the ladder to the bridge, stood the sentry on his head, broke open the chest, grabbed the alcohol, and got away.

My warrant-officer says he saw me among 'em. 'Twas a hot night, like to-night, and in the tropics too, and he couldn't sleep, he said, and had to leave his room and come on deck. And so it was he happened to be where he could see me. He couldn't name the others. Indeed, he would not care to name others when he was not positive, and so do possibly innocent men an injustice, and so on. But he was positive about me.

I was called. The sentry looked me over. He wouldn't swear it was me, but there was one man in the party about my height and build, and, like me, he was a very active man, judging by the way he went down the bridge ladder.

Now, I knew who did it--I had been invited to be of the party, and I wasn't a bit too good for it; but I didn't feel like going and I didn't go. The man the sentry took for me was the man who had been the heavyweight slugger of the ship before I was drafted to her. We had already had the gloves on, and I had beaten him at a ship's smoker long before this. I waited to see would he speak up. He didn't, and I took my sentence--disratement and thirty days in the brig, ten of it on bread and water.

I didn't mind the disrating, nor the brig and the bread and water; but I did mind being made out a liar.

The first liberty I made after that--in Hong Kong--I caught my boxing rival ashore. I gave him a proper beating. He took it as something coming to him, without complaint. The next liberty I made--in Nagasaki it was--I caught my warrant-officer ashore.

He was not on duty and so not in uniform, and, pretending to mistake him for somebody else, I gave him a grand beating. Six or eight of their little ju-jutsu policemen clung to my legs and back, but that didn't stop me from finishing my job on him. I left him in such a ridiculous fix that he was ashamed to complain, but the Japanese authorities weren't satisfied. I spent a night in one of their jails, and aboard ship next day I was masted and once more disrated--this time with a sermon from the captain on my disorderly ways.

I didn't mind the captain's lecture--I had rated that--but I did mind being drafted to another ship with a record as a disturber. I had not taken more than four or five drinks in my time up to then, and then more out of curiosity than desire, but on my next liberty--in Manila--I took a drink. I didn't like the taste of it--I don't yet--but there's never any use in half-doing a thing--I took another, and more than another. From then on I began making liberty records.

Officers were good to me. It is only a skunk of an officer who will take pride in crowding an enlisted man, and I've met few skunks among our officers. So long as I could hold my feet coming over the gang-plank, a friendly shipmate buckled to either side of me and I able to answer "Here!" to the roll-call--so long as I could do that, there were deck officers who looked no further. 'Twas a friendly way, but bringing no cure to me.

By and by Meagher was assigned to our ship. He had married Mary, and this was maybe a year later. He was a warrant-officer--had been for five years--a chief gunner, wearing his sword and being called Mister. And wearing it with credit--all the gun crews spoke well of him.

He never let on that he remembered me, until one day the handling-room was cleared of all but the two of us, and then it was me who spoke to him. "I'd like to have a word with you, Mr. Meagher," I said, "if you don't bear too much of a grudge."

"Why should I bear you a grudge?" he said. "You licked me, and licked me good. You left no argument as to who won that fight. If I ever bear you any grudge, it will be for the drinking and brawling record you're making, with never a thought of the manhood you're wasting."

"It's easy for you to talk so--you that won what I'd die ten times over to get."

"Die? You die? Give up your life? Why, you haven't even the courage to give up your consuming pride!"

He looked at me and I at him. I was all but leaping for him. "Go ahead," he says, "beat me up again!"

"You're my officer," I said.

"Cut the officer stuff!" He threw his cap on the deck. He took off his coat and threw that on the deck. "Now I bear no mark of the officer--come on now and beat me up! And you'll have to beat me till I can't speak or see again--and then you can leave me here, and I'm telling you now no one will ever know who did it. You're many pounds heavier and half as strong again as when you licked me before, but go ahead and turn yourself loose at me. There's no alibi left you now--go ahead, turn yourself loose at me!"

I was all that he said--a brute that felt equal to ripping the three-inch planking off the quarterdeck, and he wasn't himself near the man he had been when I fought him before--he had never got well over the burning in the handling-room fire; but he stood there telling me what some one should have told me long before.

"Jack Meagher," I said, "Mary Riley made no mistake--you're a better man than I am." And I left him and ran up the ladder--up to where winds were blowing and seas singing and the stars rolling their eternal circles. All night long I walked the deck.

It did me good--what he had said to me. But a man doesn't change his ways overnight. I stopped maybe to have a backward look more often than I used to, and friendly deck officers maybe didn't have so often to look hard at the liberty lists; but being in the same ship with Meagher did me good.

I used to take to watching him, to studying his ways--the ways of the man Mary Riley had married.

He used to come out of the after turret and look out on the sea, when maybe he'd finished up his work for the afternoon. He was there one afternoon late; and we were in the China Sea, a division of us, bound up to Cheefoo for a liberty. A monsoon was blowing, and there we were, pitching into it, taking plenty of water over ourselves forward, but so far very little aft.

Meagher was in rain-coat and rubber boots, leaning against a gypsy-head, when this big sea rolled up over our quarter-deck. She had a low quarter, our ship, and the solid water of this sea rolled turret-high. When it had passed on, Meagher and four others were gone.

I was in the lee of the superstructure. I ran onto her quarter-deck. I saw an officer's cap and took a running high jump over the rail. While I was still in the air I said to myself: "You're gone! Her starb'd propeller will get you--you're gone! ...

"And if I am, what of it?" I recalled later saying to myself; but before my head was fairly under I was kicking out hard from the ship's side.

Meagher was the only man of the five to come up. When I saw him he was struggling to unhook the metal clasps of his rain-coat. I reached him and kicked out for the life-buoy that the marine sentry had heaved over. We made the buoy and I shoved him up on it--he still trying to clear himself of his heavy rain-coat.

"I kicked off my rubber boots right away, but the buckles of this thing they don't come so easy." That was Meagher's first word, and--heavy-spoken because of weariness--he said it by way of apology for causing so much trouble. "But I'd never got clear in time--you saved me from going, that's sure." Not till then did he have a chance to look at me. When he saw who it was he went quiet.

"You're surprised, Jack Meagher?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You doubted my courage, maybe?" I asked.

"No," he said to that, "not your courage--never your courage. But your good intentions--yes."

We were lying with our chests across the buoy, and we could easily see the ship, and we knew that the ship could see us so long as our buoy light kept burning--her whistles were blowing regularly to let us know that. But she would have to have a care in manoeuvring because of the other ships so near, and it was too rough to lower a boat for us.

Then at last the blue light of our buoy burned itself out, for which we were almost thankful--it smelled so. And then night came, and darkness.

Tossing high up and then down, like a swing in the sea, we went, lying on our chests across the buoy one time and hanging on by a grip of our fingers another time. And when the sea wasn't washing over my head I would shout; though I doubt if, in the hissing of the sea and the roaring of the wind, my voice carried ten feet beyond the buoy.

By and by a search-light burned through the dark onto us. Meagher was by then in tough shape. For the last half-hour I'd been holding him onto the buoy, and it was another half-hour before they could launch a boat. We had been three hours in the water, and I was glad to be back aboard. It is one thing not to mind dying; it is another thing to fight and fight and have to keep on fighting after your strength is gone. When a man's strength goes a lot of his courage goes with it.

Meagher's courage was still with him. He protested against being taken to the sick bay, but there they took him; and when he left the sick bay, it was to take a ship for home. I went to see him the last day. On my leaving him, he said: "I'm taking back a lot I said to you. If you had been washed over I doubt if I'd gone after you."

He would have gone after me--or anybody else. And I told him so, my heart thumping as I said it, for I'd come to have a great liking for him.

"I still doubt it," he said. "Anyway, I owe my life--what there is left of it--to you."

"If you think you owe me anything," I said, "then don't tell your wife anything about me. Don't tell her where I am or what my name is now."

"I won't tell her or anybody else where you are or what your name is, but I will tell her how you saved my life."

I never saw him again. I heard they gave him a shore billet when he was discharged from the hospital; I heard, too, that within a year he was retired on a pension. But that he was dead--I never knew that till you told me to-night.

Killorin had come to a full stop.

Carlin recalled the last time he had seen Meagher--when they both knew he had not long to live. "She has been a wonderful wife to me. Not much happiness I have had that she has not made for me," Meagher had said.

"I don't doubt he told her of my going over the side after him in the gale--he wasn't a man to lie," said Killorin.

"He told her," said Carlin. "And he told me something more. That night you passed them on the steps he had proposed to her. He thought she was going to say yes. She had stuck his rose into her hair and was about to say the word--so he thought--and then you came by. And it was six years again before she said the word. If you had not left home----"

"Thank God," said Killorin, "I left home! Thank God on her account. The consuming pride--it had to burn itself out in me."

It was still dark night, but ahead of the ship a cluster of pale yellow lights could be seen.

"Veracruz?" asked Carlin.

"Veracruz, yes--the port ahead. And how was she when you saw her last?"

"A lonesome woman--more lonesome and weary than a good woman should be at her age. Her eyes are still violet and her cheeks like ivory, but the color doesn't come and go in them now."

"I had to leave home to learn," said Killorin, "that the bright color coming and going like a flood means the blood running high in the heart. Men should have a care for such. Such natures feel terribly--either joy or sorrow."

It had been night. In a moment the red sun rose up from the oily sea, and it was day. There was a moment of haze and vapor, and then emerged a city ahead--a pink-and-white city, with here and there a touch of cream and blue.

"Beautiful!" murmured Carlin.

"They're all beautiful," said Killorin, "in the dawn."

A faint breeze was stealing over the Gulf. Through the black sea little crests of white were breaking--pure white they were, and a whiff of pure air was coming from them. The sleepers around the deck began to stir, to roll over, to sit up, and, with thankful sighs, to inhale the fresh, sweet air.

"The breath o' dawn!" murmured Killorin--"like a breath o' heaven after the hot tropic night.... As you say, that port ahead is beautiful. But when that port is astern and some other one ahead! That will be the sight, man--New York harbor after all these years! The breath and the color o' dawn then--'twill be like a bride's blush and her whisper stealing over the waters o' New York Bay."

Peter Stops Ashore

The Pentle place had been closed up and the servants were gone; but Mrs. Pentle's car was still waiting at the gate, and Mrs. Pentle herself--old John Ferguson, on his way to the lookout, could see Mrs. Pentle perched up on her flat rock and looking out on Gloucester harbor and the sea.

There was a fishing-schooner sailing out. John put his glasses on her and was entering her in his book when he heard some one's step on the ladder leading to his tower, and then the hatch sliding back. It was Mrs. Pentle.

"I've heard of your book, John. May I look at it?"

"Surely, ma'am, surely." He passed it to her. "For seventeen years now I've been keeping it--the account o' the fishing-vessels sailin' out o' Gloucester, ma'am. A column for the day o' departure, one for the name o' the vessel, one for the master, and one for the day she comes back home."

She was turning the pages.

"So many never come back home, do they?"

"Nacherally--they bein' fishermen, ma'am."

"Ah-h, here's the year!" She ran her finger down the page. "And here!" and read: "'_Valorous_--sailed December seventeenth--and never returned.'"

"I mind her, ma'am, with the proud name--George's handlin'."

"I know. My father was one of her crew.... But here"--she stopped in her turning of the pages--"isn't this the entry of one they've just given up for lost?"

"That's her, ma'am--the _Conqueror_. It's queer what bad luck goes with those proud names, ma'am. Peter Crudden was master of her."

"Peter Crudden! I played with Peter Crudden when we were children together. And he's lost?"

"When they print the names o' the crew in the Gloucester papers, it's a hundred to one they're gone, ma'am. A married sister o' Peter's is a neighbor o' my married daughter's up in Boston, and they're cryin' their heart out a'ready, she writes me--Peter's sister an' her children."

Mrs. Pentle closed the book.

"We live such sheltered lives here ashore, most of us, don't we, John? And we complain at the smallest little discomfort--many of us, I mean. And those brave men sail out to the dangerous waters in their little boats, where the best of it is hardship and death comes so often. It must be born in me--I just can't help feeling different toward those fishermen from what I do toward the men I meet in my business in the city."

She left; and, watching her swing down the ladder, John Ferguson was thinking that for a woman of her build--full-bosomed and no slimling--she was cert'nly light on her feet, and wondering why a young and good-looking widow as she was--dang good-looking--why more o' those wealthy young men she must know hadn't hooked her afore that. "Must be," mused John, "none of 'em's used the right bait."

John turned, just naturally to have another look out to sea, and--"Well, you old gadabout!" muttered John and hurried to point his glasses at what he saw wabbling in.

"Dang me if she c'n be!" cried John. "Dang me, but she is!"

It was the _Conqueror_--her foremast gone half-way to the deck, her mainmast gone clean to the deck, and her bowsprit broken off at the knight-heads. And she was a foot thick, or more, in ice; and in her jury-rigging was her flag--at half-mast.

"That's one, ye ravenous sea, dang ye, ye didn't get!" muttered John. "And she'll have a tale to tell!" And wondering how many of 'em were gone, and who they were, he entered the month and day of her return.

The _Conqueror_ had fitted out at Duncan's; and Duncan's wharf and store had not changed in twenty years. Mr. Duncan did not like changes.

The old shelves of canned goods in Duncan's, the long packages of blue-papered macaroni, the little green cartons of fish-hooks, the piled-up barrels of flour and boxes of hardtack--they were all of the same old reliable brands. And the woollen mitts in strings! And in back was an area of kegs of red lead and hanks of tarred ground-line and coils of stout rope, and oilskins and sou'-westers, and rubber boots and the heavy leather redjacks--the smell of them was all over Duncan's.

Fred Lichens, who had kept books for thirty years for Mr. Duncan, was looking down the wharf at the _Conqueror_ warping into the slip when Mrs. Pentle arrived in her car. Her arrival was not surprising. She had half a dozen small charities in Gloucester, and she came regularly to Mr. Duncan's for advice about them.

Fred knew all this exactly, because he kept the books for the Gloucester end of these things--drawing a few extra dollars a month therefor--and he had known Mrs. Pentle since she was a little girl and used to come with her mother, and without her as she grew older, to Mr. Duncan's to draw, against whatever would be her father's share, the stores which the family needed to keep them alive while the father was out to sea.

Fred remembered when the girl who was now Mrs. Pentle left high school to go to work in Boston. She was a bouncingly pretty girl, and within two years married Pentle, the millionaire department-store man.

Fred dusted a chair for Mrs. Pentle and set it in her favorite spot, which was beside a window in Mr. Duncan's own office looking out on the harbor. Sitting there, she saw an iced-up wreck of a vessel and some of her crew leaping up onto the wharf, where a crowd was surrounding them. She asked what vessel it was, and Fred told her--the _Conqueror_, Peter Crudden; and she said No! and Fred said Yes, ma'am, it was.

"I wonder if I should know him now," she said; and then: "Which is Peter Crudden?"

"Captain Crudden," said Fred, "is the one Mr. Duncan is bending toward to hear better."

The crowd was moving up toward the store. Mrs. Pentle jumped up on her chair so as to be able to look over the glazed lights of glass between the private office and the store as they came in.

Peter Crudden was a hard-looking figure of a man, coming into Duncan's store that day. He had not shaved for days, and his thick hair looked enormous--it was so tangled. He had not slept in a week; and when he took his seat on the long store bench and let his head settle wearily back against the wall he looked old.

He was telling about the big gale coming on and how her spars went, which maybe saved her from going into the shoals and being lost right there, and how they worked her way clear o' the shoals under jury-rig, how they were lookin' for a little ease and comfort, when aboard comes this unlucky sea, with no more warning than a shooting star out of the sky, and sweeps--cleaner than ever you could sweep the floor o' the store--her deck and all, everything. And atop o' that a sea to fill her cabin full. Four of 'em makin' for the deck were thrown back into the cabin again--smashed afoul o' the stove one, and atop o' the lockers and into a looard bunk another; and how they picked themselves up and made the deckhand when they got there--as if a clean-swept deck warn't hard luck enough--there was Dave Elwell that was to the wheel, his breast smashed again' the wheel spokes and he dead.

"And the two on the deck gone--gone, sir, so quick that we never even got a sight o' them or a smothered hail from them goin'," concluded Peter. "An' cold! And ice! And--" But once more he let his head fall back against the wall.

Fred was so wrapped up in Peter's story that he forgot Mrs. Pentle till he found her beside him and heard her saying in a low voice:

"When I was a little girl I listened to fishermen on that same bench, with their stories of toil and death. And I remember how I would linger, making believe to retie my packages into a tighter bundle, to hear more of what they had to say. It was a man sitting on that bench, Mr. Lichens, in just that way, not knowing who I was, who brought word of my father's vessel gone down--and all hands with her."

"I cal'late the hard tales told from that same bench would fill more books than was ever writ about Gloucester, an' there's been a many--an' some foolish ones among 'em," said Fred.

"Those two men washed overboard"--Peter was speaking again--"some one has got to tell their people how they come to be lost. And poor Dave in the ice-house aboard the vessel--some one has got to 'tend to him."

"I'll 'tend to Dave," said Mr. Duncan.