Part 5

“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about, and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work, and there you are!

“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit--not a little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after what he called “skirts” and soaking _aguardiente_. The skipper’s carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away, and _he_ wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.

“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have been God help her!

“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he kept in his room--the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.

“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s--he’s m-m-mad,’ he stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!

“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.

“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all the world like a startled penguin.

“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about him.

“What _was_ he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that he just felt as if things had gone too far for him--so he threw his cards on the table, and left it to--well, shall we say Providence to shuffle them!

“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!

“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.

“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was the old bos’n--a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on the slow side, like most Dutchmen--standing under the break of the poop with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.

“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’

“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails were like boards--as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved, left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the ‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.

“And ice--there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us, though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises--shrieks and groans--that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks like musketry fire--and in the midst of it all the penguins would make you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.

“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen image than a man--his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin resting on them--for hours, never speaking or moving.

“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and leave the skin behind.

“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him, as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind--it is nothing,’ and lay down again.

“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and left him.

“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne, what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this--well, it staggered me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.

“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare to-do.

“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and Board of Trade inquiries.

“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the mate.

“And then--something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.

“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent, and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit jumpy since we had been among the ice.

“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh. Then I saw the Old Man--and the laugh died.

“I shall never forget his face--miserable and yet lifted up both at once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name--you know--sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats, and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.

“He sighed once, and looked round--a long look as if he were saying good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then he sighed again, and went in.

“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes--ten minutes. I began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see his grey head--the hair getting a bit thin on top--just as I’d seen it scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....

“Fifteen minutes--twenty--I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was waiting....

“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a stroke--evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it. I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.

“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.

“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo--she was loaded right down to her marks--helped to keep her upright. She just settled quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked through. She looked--oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me--a young fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him----

“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old ‘Maid of Athens’ went down.

“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he thought a lot of the old ship....”

THE END OF AN ARGUMENT

A good solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as satisfactory as an interest in common--which, in the case of Kavanagh, the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer “Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed none at all.

Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.

Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.

Kavanagh was neat in his attire.

Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.

Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging about docks and shipping offices--found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”

He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”

She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of which he was inordinately fond.

The argument began something after this fashion:

The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber. It was a glorious morning--one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the early morning sky.

The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main, and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:

“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling--o--oh ... An’ pa--ay Paddy Doyle for his bo--o--ots....”

“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.

“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow--the voice of Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”

Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of feeling to be overheard--least of all to be overheard by Ferguson. Sneaking about in carpet slippers....

“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he snapped.

“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.

The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch” rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and winds which grew ever more stormy.

The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin, with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.

But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin floor.

And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened to interrupt them.

In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.

It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning, when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic--dreary, monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got into one of the big liner companies. Now----

Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted ship--now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.

It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.

“‘Maria’--Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been abandoned--I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”

He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the bridge.

“Aye--she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her--can’t do anything more. It’s out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”

He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.

Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”

“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising ... in for a night of it....”

Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.

It was queer. He couldn’t explain it--couldn’t understand it! But there was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he _must_ save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making signals--personal signals--to him and to no one else: to be saying, “Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”

“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot of money ... if you could spare the hands----”

Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the money, and his hopes rose.

“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”

“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”

Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better of him again: “Well, have it your own way--your own responsibility, mind--and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do it--oughtn’t to do it----”

There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage crew.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.

Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’--Genoa.”

Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”

One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance thrust over the rail.

“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s gaun to blaw the nicht!”

His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short, fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and Kavanagh heard no more.

A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas, and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken off by some passing vessel.

He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.

Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men, a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.

The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too, which he could not at all make out.

There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet--it was a peculiar sort of voice--a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in it--unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained, not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again--an impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth just behind him helped him to check.

The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which followed it was worse than the sound.