Part 6

“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.

“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and they couldn’t get him away----”

He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the descent into the saloon.

They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.

It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of the deserted ship was all around--a silence only intensified by the monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.

The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half its terrors fled.

“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”

Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.

The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and imposing stateroom with a big teak bed--evidently the captain’s, a relic of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner of the voice--a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever heard.

It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled. Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour of his new command.

The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit, mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.

Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so, leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or rather the whole) sail in its place.

And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.

Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last--it seemed like a miracle--all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been longing to do--find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.

He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition, there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance, while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette, that he made the great discovery.

This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with his knife to see if anything lay beneath.

His first find was a date--1869.

“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter--‘D’--no, ‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’----”

His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder than ever.

“It _can’t_ be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George, it _is_!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”

Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To most laymen--indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school--it would have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship--a good ship, no doubt, in her day, a day long since over and done.

But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very different significance.

Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long after they themselves are gone--names about which yarns will be spun and songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious “Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and her forerunner “The Tweed.” And--though perhaps in a lesser degree--such was also the “Plinlimmon.”

And to Kavanagh she was even more.

She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first voyage--those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour of youth departed.

For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition. There had been an old fellow in his first ship--they called him Old Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.

Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e _set_ it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes.... ‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’ ‘Plinlimmon.’...”

Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now, he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....

But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.

The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk--the wind all the while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.

Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.

A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she _shall_ do it!” he said to the sea and the darkness.

* * * * *

Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days, Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.

Time--there _was_ no time! There was just a never-ending succession of low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been days--there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one thing, and one thing only--saving that old ship from her old rival the sea.

How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.

Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace, only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It just vanished....

But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest--yet at the time Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half a dozen in the whole blessed ship--yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their faces--a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew. Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him. And he needed it before the end!...

At last--at long last--came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary, indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!

Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired--dog-tired; that his wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids like lead.

But he had won--he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”! Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.

There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came back out of the grey dawn.

“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”

A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s” donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!

Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.

“A steamer--a Dago--rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”

He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:

“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”

Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he could afford it.

ORANGES

The clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm.

She lay there as still as if she were at anchor. Her sails drooped against the masts with no more movement than banners slowly dropping to silent dust in the nave of some great cathedral. Their shadows on the white deck were clearly defined as shapes cut out of black paper. There was no sound aloft, not so much as the churring of a rope stirring in its sheave: only a faint creak by whiles, as the ship lifted imperceptibly on the long, low swing of the ocean.

A light haze hung over the outlines of the islands and over the horizon beyond, so that it was impossible to define where sea ended and sky began. A couple of fruit schooners about half a mile distant hovered above their own motionless reflections, like butterflies poised above flowers. So complete was the calm that even they could not catch a breath sufficient to keep them moving. They looked almost as if they were suspended in some new element, neither water nor air, yet partaking of the character of both.

Old “Sails” sat on the forehatch, spectacles on nose, stitching busily away at the bolt-rope of a royal which had come out second best from an argument with the stormy westerlies. A tall, thin, old man, he looked as he sat there with his shanks folded under him like one of those long-legged crabs the Cornish folk call “Gramfer Jenkins.” He had a short, white beard stained with chewing tobacco, and as he worked his jaws moved rhythmically in time with the movements of his active needle.

A boat had pulled out from the nearest island with baskets of fruit, and its owner, a swarthy negroid Portuguese with a bright handkerchief bound pirate-wise about his frizzy hair, was driving bargains with the men of the watch below amid much rough banter and chaff. The men laughed, called, shouted to one another, threw the fruit from hand to hand, eager as children.

From the main deck came the steady slish-scrape of holystones; the mate had taken advantage of the opportunity the calm offered of bringing the “Parisina’s” already bone-white planking nearer to that unattainable perfection of immaculate cleanliness which only exists in the dreams of New England housewives and particular-minded mates of sailing vessels. Mr. Billing, the mate, was an insignificant little man with sandy hair and a peculiar habit of sniffing to himself like a beetle-hunting hedgehog. He sniffed now as he hovered with a perpetual fussy watchfulness among the humped figures of his watch, squatting over their task like worshipping bronzes. Mr. Billing was of the housewifely type of mate. A man secretly of little courage and no initiative, he disliked the “Parisina’s” paces intensely. He was nervous of ships as some lifelong horsemen are nervous of horses. Calms, on the other hand, with the consequent time they afforded for ritual scouring and painting of wood and metal, he delighted in much as a house-proud woman of the suburbs delights in spring cleaning.

The men growled among themselves, sailor fashion, as they worked. “Gimme ol’ Stiff afore this ’ere bloody scrubbin’,” said one. “Same ’ere,” said another. “Why can’t it blow up ag’in, I says? A year an’ a ’arf’s bloomin’ pay I’ve got comin’ to me at Green’s ’Ome, an’ if it wasn’t for this ’ere blessed calm I’d be six ’undred mile nearer spendin’ of it by now.” “Sailorizin’s all right,” grumbled a third. “It’s this ’ere darned ’ouse-maidin’ as gets my goat.”

Up in the “Parisina’s” tiny chart-room Captain Fareweather--he was known through all the ports of the Southern Hemisphere, for good and sufficient reasons, as “Old Foul-weather”--carefully wetted his finger, and with a furrowed brow turned a leaf and prepared to make a fresh entry in the “Parisina’s” log-book.

Old Foul-weather was not fond of his pen, a fact to which the crabbed and painful handwriting which filled the preceding pages bore eloquent testimony. Spelling was an anguish to him; and indeed it is doubtful whether the hours of endurance and anxiety which the entries in the book represented were one half as irksome to him as the labour of recording them. But there were on this occasion other reasons for his look of depression.

Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps, that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth living, if she didn’t, it was not. Certainly it was not for those unfortunate beings who happened to be his shipmates for the time being.

“’Tain’t good reading,” said Old Foul-weather to himself, as he carefully blotted the new entry--it consisted of one word, “Same”--and replaced ink and pen.

He traced the lines of the uncongenial record with a stumpy forefinger.

“‘Winds puffey and varible. Ship scarcely moveing.’

“‘Very light airs.’

“‘Dead calm.’

“Wonder where old Jones and his blooming ‘Alcazar’ are,” he reflected. He sighed and closed the book.

No faintest air entered the stuffy little room. The voices of the men as they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.

Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. It was not always so, for, though the “Parisina,” rightly handled, steered like a lamb, she needed humouring as much as a horse with a fine mouth. He was a handsome fellow, swarthy and black-eyed; under the thick growth of hair on his broad chest showed faintly some tattooed device in red and blue, a relic of his younger and less hirsute years.

A barefooted apprentice padded up the poop ladder and struck one bell: a mellow note that hung trembling on the still air, till it quivered away into silence high up among the sleeping royals. The boy wore a patched shirt and ragged dungaree trousers, and his arms and legs were burned black as mahogany by the tropic sun. He was a tall lad, with the lanky grace of adolescence; a faint down was just showing on his upper lip, and the sun gleaming upon the growth of fair hair on his arms and chest made him look as if powdered with gold dust.

Captain Fareweather sighed, put the log-book by, and descended to the cabin. McAllister, the second mate, a big-boned Aberdonian, perennially hungry, was already there, with one eye on the hash the steward had just set before the Old Man’s chair. He composed his features into an appropriate cast of pious decorum as the captain took his seat and placed his hand before his eyes for his customary grace. This rite was silent and lengthy; but Captain Fareweather’s officers knew better than to betray impatience or inattention while it lasted. Legend said that a second mate, greatly daring, had once begun to nibble his bread before the captain had finished, and at once there had come a voice from the behind the hand, like the voice of Mitche Manitou the Mighty, “Ye irreverential devil, can’t ye see I’m sayin’ grace?”

It was an uncomfortable meal. The skipper was moody, and McAllister was horribly nervous in consequence. The few small pebbles of conversation he cast into the silence fell with an appalling splash which instantly covered him with scarlet confusion to the tips of his large red ears, and it was with profound thankfulness that he welcomed the appearance of the mate with a basket of oranges.

“I thought you’d like a few,” explained Mr. Billing, “for dinner. They’re good. A bumboat feller brought ’em alongside.”

“Bluid oranges,” exclaimed McAllister. He dug his strong square teeth into the glistening rind, and the red juice squirted over his bony knuckles. “They’ve ay the best flavour.”

They seemed to light up the cabin like golden lamps, warm, glowing, still with the sunlight glory about them. Their fragrance filled the place, aromatic, pungent, cloying.

“I don’t care for ’em,” said the Captain suddenly. “The smell of ’em--too strong.”

He pushed back his chair as he spoke.

“Stuffy,” he muttered; “glad when we can get way on her again.”

He stumped off up the companion ladder: a square, stocky figure of a man, short-necked, broad of shoulder. The two mates looked at each other significantly.

“What bug’s bit the auld deevil now?” said McAllister in a conspiratorial whisper.

“God knows!” returned Mr. Billing. “He’s always this way when he can’t be at his cracking on. Old madman!”

“He’s a fine seaman, though,” replied McAllister. “I’ll say that for him.”

“Fine seaman!” breathed Mr. Billing bitterly. “You wait till he shakes the sticks out of her one fine night. That’s all.”

Old Foul-weather stood leaning on the poop railing, looking out across the still expanse of the waters with eyes which did not see the haze-dimmed islands or the motionless schooners poised above their reflected selves. Strange--something had stirred in its sleep a little while since at the sight of those very schooners--something had turned in its sleep and sighed at the sight of the young apprentice in his sunburned youth. And just now, with the scent of the oranges, it had stirred, turned again, sighed again, awakened--the memory of Conchita!

* * * * *

Conchita--why, he hadn’t thought of her for years. He wouldn’t like to say how many years. He had had plenty of other things to occupy his mind. Work, for one thing. And ships. Plenty of other women had come into his life and gone out of it, too, since then. Queer, how things came back to you; so that they seemed all of a sudden to have happened no longer ago than yesterday....

He was in just such a schooner as one of those yonder at the time. The “John and Jane” her name was--a pretty little thing, sailed like a witch, too. Lost, he had heard, a year or two ago on a voyage over to Newfoundland with a cargo of salt. It had been his first voyage South. He had been in nothing but billyboys and Geordie brigs until then. He had run his last ship in London. The skipper was a hard-mouthed old ruffian, the mate a trifle worse. Between them the boy Jim had a tough time of it. Then one day the captain caught him in the act of purloining the leg of a duck destined for his own dinner; and, pursuing him with a short length of rope with the amiable intention of flaying hell out of him, fell head foremost on the top of his own ballast and lay for dead. He wasn’t dead: far from it. But young Jim thought he was. So he pulled himself ashore in the dinghy and set off along Wapping High Street with only the vaguest idea where he was going.

He stuck to the water-side as a hunted fox sticks to cover. The Tower he passed quickly by: it looked too much like a lock-up, he thought. Presently he came to a church, and a big clock sticking out over the roadway; and close by a wharf where schooners were loading, and among them the “John and Jane.”

He liked the looks of her. She was clean and fresh and sweet-smelling. And the mate, who was superintending the lowering of some cases into the hold, had a red, jolly face that took his fancy.

The boy Jim peered down into the hold. It was full almost to the hatch-coamings. She must be going to sail soon.