Part 7

The red-faced mate had given his last order, and was coming down the gangway with the virtuous and anticipatory look of one at ease with his own conscience after a spell of arduous toil, and about to reward himself for the same with liquid refreshment.

Young Fareweather stepped forward, his heart thumping.

“Was you wanting a hand, mister?”

The red-faced man looked at him consideringly.

“A hand? A s’rimp, you mean!” He guffawed slapping his hands on his fat thighs, a man well pleased with his own joke.

“Ah con do a mon’s work, though,” the youngster insisted.

“Ye can, can ye? Can ye steer.”

“Aye, Ah con that.”

“Can ye reef an’ furl, splice a rope-yarn, peel potatoes and cook the cabin dinner of a Sunday?”

“Ah con that.”

The mate roared.

“Sort of a admirayble bright ’un, I can see,” he said. “Well, I tell you what. Here’s the skipper comin’ down the wharf. We’ll see what he says.”

The captain, a fierce-looking little man with bushy eyebrows, indulged in a smile at the recital of Jim’s reputed accomplishments.

“Take him if ye like,” he said, “and, listen, you, boy” (bending the bushy brows on Jim), “if you’re tellin’ lies, it’s the rope’s-end you’ll taste, my lad.”

He spent the night curled up on a box in the corner of the galley, listening with one ear to the yarns of the old one-eyed shipkeeper, the other cocked for the ominous tread of the dreaded policeman. But dawn came, and brought no policeman, and by noon the “John and Jane” was dropping downstream with the tide.

It seemed to the boy Jim like a foretaste of Heaven. The captain was a kindly man for all his appearance of ferocity, the mate easier still. No one got kicked; nobody went without his grub--incidentally he was relieved to find that nothing further was said about cooking the cabin dinner; wonder of wonders, nobody was so much as sworn at seriously. True, the amiable mate was the most foul-mouthed man he had ever come across before or since. But then, hard words break no bones, especially on board ship, and the mate’s repertoire was generally looked on as something in the nature of a polite accomplishment: something like conjuring tricks or making pictures out of ink blots.

It was all a wonder to him, just as Oporto, whither the “John and Jane” was bound, was a wonder to him after the cold stormy North Sea, the bleak streets of Newcastle and Wapping which so far had been his only idea of seaports. The schooner, as has already been said, was an easy ship, and in port the hands had plenty of time to themselves. He liked the sun, the light, the warmth, the colour. He liked the laughing, lazy, careless children of the South. He liked the many-coloured houses that climbed the steep streets of the old town--and the bathing in the great river--and the little stuffy wineshops with their mixed smell of sour wine and sawdust and stale cigar-smoke and onions--and the bells that chimed day long, night long, from hidden convents in green gardens behind high walls. And the oranges----

The day he first saw Conchita, he had gone off for a walk by himself, and, the day being hot, had lain down by the roadside to rest. And as he lay there half asleep, lulled by the shrill song of the cicalas in the grass all round him, plop! something bounced on to his chest, rolled a little way, and lay still.

He reached out his hand and picked it up. An orange! Its skin was still warm with the sun, and it had that indefinable bloom on it that belongs to all fruit newly gathered. And then he looked round to see where it had come from, and saw--Conchita!

Conchita with her dark, vivacious little face, her eyes black as sloes, her red lips open in a wide laugh that showed a row of perfect teeth--Conchita with her full white sleeves under her stiff embroidery jacket, her wide gay-coloured petticoats, her dainty white-stockinged ankles and little slippered feet; why, she was almost like a talking doll, Jim thought, that he had seen in a big toyshop in Newcastle, and wished he had the money to buy for his sister! He felt as awkward, as clumsy with her as a boy with a doll. Goodness knows how they understood one another, those two young things! There is a sort of freemasonry, somehow or other, among young things that laughs at such difficulties as language. She knew a little broken English, which she was immensely proud of. She had picked it up at school from an English playmate. But Jim knew nothing but his own East Coast brand of his native speech. However, understand one another they did, somehow or other. He learnt her name, of course, and how she laughed at his attempts to say it as she said it! He learned, also, that she was sixteen, and that she was to be married some day to old João the muleteer, but that she did not like him because of “ees faze--o-ah, long, lak’ dees!” And she stretched out her arms to their full extent to indicate it. But she “lak’ Ing-lees sailor, o-ah ver-ree, ver-ree much”--and she “giv’ you--o-ah, ever so many orange--lak’ dees!” And she made a wide circle with her arms to show their number.

The boy went back to his ship in a kind of dream. Her warm Southern nature was riper far than his. He was swept clean off his feet by the fervour of her unashamed yet innocent lovemaking--by the feel of her warm body, of her warm lips, of her rounded cheeks soft and glowing, as sun-warmed oranges. Of course he went again--and many times again--and then there came the last night before the “John and Jane” was to sail.

It had been arranged that for once he was not to go alone. Perhaps Conchita, strange little blend of impulse and sophistication, had judged it best that their leave-taking should not be an _affaire à deux_. Jim was to bring some of his shipmates along: and Conchita would bring also some of the other girls. And it would “be fon--o-ah, yees, soch fon!”

He remembered the queer feeling of shrinking that came over him as they set out on that fatal expedition. What had happened he never really knew. Perhaps one of his shipmates had blabbed about it in the little wineshop on the quay; perhaps one of the other girls. What mattered was that somehow the jealous João, with the “faze long, lak’ dees,” had heard of it!

They went stumbling and whispering up the lane that led out of the town. He could remember the warm scent of that autumn night and the way the wind went sighing through the broad, dark leaves of the orange groves and the gnarled cork trees that bordered the stony mule-track by which they climbed. They passed a little inn by the wayside, where a man was playing a guitar and singing an interminable ballad full of wailing, sobbing notes, in the melancholy minor key common to folk-melodies the world over.

The moon was shining through the trees when they came to the rendezvous. They had brought sacks with them, and the girls shook the fragrant globes down while they gathered them into heaps.

And then, suddenly, all was changed. It was like a nightmare. There were lights, and people shouting. The girls screamed. Conchita cried out, “Run, run!” She clung round his neck, fondling his face, weeping. There was a fierce face, a lifted hand, something that sang as it fled. And Conchita was all of a sudden limp in his arms, her face, with a look of hurt surprise in its wide eyes and fallen mouth, drooping backward like a flower broken on its stalk. She seemed to be sinking, sinking away from him, like a drowned thing sinking into deep water....

He did not know who dragged that limp thing from his numb arms. He did not know who hustled him away, shouting in his ear, “Run, ye damned fool, run! Them bloody Dagoes’ll knife the lot of us.” He remembered being hurried down the lane, and past the lighted inn where the man was still at his interminable wailing songs. And then--no more, until he came to himself under the smelly oil lamp in the familiar forecastle.

The “John and Jane” sailed at dawn....

* * * * *

Captain Fareweather sighed, shifted his elbows on the rail, stiffened himself suddenly, and stood erect. The look of the sea had changed. Its surface was blurred as if a hand had been drawn gently across it.

One after the other the two schooners began to steal slowly, very slowly across his line of vision. He cast an eye aloft. There was a slight tremor in the hitherto motionless clew of the main royal.

He sniffed the coming wind as a dog sniffs the scent of its accustomed quarry; then he walked briskly across to the break of the poop and, leaning his hands on the rail, called to the mate.

“Mister!”

“Sir?”

“Stand by to square away your main yard! I think we’ll get a breeze afore two bells.”

He walked the poop fore and aft, rubbing his hands and whistling a little tune.

There was a scamper of bare feet on the planking. Men sang out as they hauled on the braces, “Yo-heu-yoi-hee!” Blocks sang shrill as fifes, reef points beat a tattoo on the tautened canvas. The sails filled with loud clappings. Out of the north-east came the wind--shattering the calm mirror of the sea into a million splinters--filling the royals like the cheeks of the trumpeting angels of the Judgment--burying under its mounded confusion the very memory of the vanished calm, even as the years lay mounded over the dead face of Conchita, whom the gods loved too well....

“We’ll beat that bloody ‘Alcazar’ yet, mister,” said Captain Fareweather.

SEATTLE SAM SIGNS ON

“It’s what I’m always tellin’ you, Mike,” said Captain Bascomb severely, “you’re too rough with ’em.”

Mr. Michael Doyle, mate of the skysail yarder “Bride of Abydos,” was usually nearly as handy with his tongue as he was with his fists, which was saying a good deal. But on this occasion he was, for once in his life, fairly stumped. He opened and shut his mouth several times like a landed fish, but, like a fish, remained speechless.

“Too rough with ’em, that’s what you are,” pursued the skipper. “You should use a bit o’ tact. You shouldn’t keep kickin’ ’em. I’m a humane man myself, and I tell you I take it very hard--very hard indeed I do--to have my ship avoided as if we’d got plague on board just because I’ve got a rip-roarin’ great gazebo of a mate from the County Cork that doesn’t know when to keep his feet to himself. When I was a nipper they learned me to count ten before I kicked. That’s what you want to do. Twenty for the matter o’ that.”

Captain Bascomb was a hard case, though anyone overhearing the foregoing remarks might have thought otherwise. He was also a tough nut. Men who spoke from personal experience said, and said with deep emotion, that he was both these things, as well as other things less fitted for polite mention: so presumably it was true.

Now, while there are undeniably times and seasons when it is a valuable asset for a shipmaster to have the character of a tough nut and a hard case, there are equally conceivable circumstances when such a reputation may be a decidedly inconvenient possession. And it was precisely such a set of circumstances which had arisen on the day in late autumn when the conversation just recorded took place.

The “Bride of Abydos” lay alongside the lumber mill wharf at Victoria. Her cargo of lumber was all on board. And she would have been ready to sail for home on the next morning’s tide but for one trifling and inconvenient particular--namely, that she was without a crew.

This regrettable discrepancy was due to two principal reasons. In the first place, the rumour of a discovery of gold, or copper, or aluminium, or something of a metallic nature up in the Rocky Mountains had had the inevitable effect of inducing the ship’s company of the “Bride of Abydos” to abandon as one man their nautical calling, and depart for the interior of British Columbia with an unbounded enthusiasm which would only be surpassed by the enthusiasm with which they would doubtless return to it in less than three months’ time.

But it would be useless to deny that Captain Bascomb’s fame as a tough nut--a fame to which the ungrudging tributes of his late crew had given a considerable local fillip--was the outstanding cause for the coyness manifested by eligible substitutes about coming forward to fill the vacant berths in the “Bride of Abydos’s” forecastle.

Hence it was that gloom sat upon Captain Bascomb’s brow, and a reflected gloom upon that of Mr. Michael Doyle--a gloom which was graphically expressed by the steward when he imparted to the black doctor in confidence the news that the Old Man was lookin’ about as pleasant as a calf’s daddy.

Mr. Doyle delicately brushed the crumbs from his waistcoat, and cleared his throat cautiously by way of preparing the ground for another conversational opening.

“What do you keep making that row for?” demanded the skipper. “You put me in mind of a cock chicken that’s just learnin’ to crow! If you do it again I’ll mix you some cough stuff--and I’ll see you swallow it too.”

“I was only goin’ to say----” began Mr. Doyle in aggrieved tones.

“Goin’ to say, were you? Well, if you’ve got anything to say that’ll show me how to make a crew that can work the ‘Bride of Abydos’ out of a nigger grub sp’iler and a hen-faced boob of an eavesdropping Cockney steward”--here he paused to relieve his feelings by adroitly launching a cuspidor at the inquiring countenance of Cockney George as it protruded from the pantry door--“you can say it,” continued the skipper; “if not, you needn’t! I’m in no mood for polite conversation, and that’s a fact.”

Silence and profound gloom descended once again upon the cabin and its occupants, while the fluttered and indignant George, still palpitating at the recollection of his narrow escape from the captain’s unexpected projectile, slippered gingerly off to enjoy a growl with the black cook, who was sitting in his galley crooning the songs of Zion in a discreet undertone to the carefully muted strains of his concertina.

And just at that moment the gangway creaked loudly beneath a heavy tread, and a stranger stepped on board.

He was a large man with a large, flabby face, in which a large cigar was carelessly stuck as if to indicate the approximate position of the mouth: a loose-lipped mouth which looked, if possible, even more unpleasant when it smiled than when it scowled.

“Say, looks like someone’s feelin’ kinder peeved,” observed the new-comer, pushing the skipper’s late missile with his toe. “Cap’n aboard, stooard?”

“Ho, yus, he’s on board right enough,” responded George. “Frowed this ’ere at me ’ead just now, ’e did. Whatcher want?” he inquired suspiciously. “’Cos if it’s tracks or anyfink o’ that, I ain’t goin’ to let you in, not on your sweet life I ain’t! Ever see a blinkin’ gorilla wiv the toofache? ’Cos that’s ’im--see! Just abart as safe to go near as wot ’e is--see! You take my tip and ’op it! Beat it for the tall timbers! Go while the goin’s good!”

“That’s right all right,” responded the stranger cordially. “I guess I’ll just walk right in and introdooce myself.”

He stepped briskly along the alleyway and tapped on the cabin door.

A growl like that of a wounded jaguar was the only response, but, taking this as a permission to enter, the visitor projected his head, not without caution, round the edge of the door.

“G’ mornin’, Cap’n--g’ mornin’, mister,” he said heartily. “Pardon me breezin’ along this way, but I’ve a hunch you and me might be able to do business. I understand you’re in a bit of a difficulty regardin’ a crew.”

Captain Bascomb regarded him for a few seconds without speaking. A remarkable variety of emotions might have been seen chasing one another across his countenance as he did so--surprise, incredulity, and joy chief among them.

“I am,” he said slowly. “I am, and that’s a fact, Mr.---- I didn’t quite get your name.”

“Grover--Samuel Grover--Seattle Sam to most folks around these parts,” replied the stranger, making bold to enter and take a seat. “Fine ship you’ve got here, Cap’n!”

“Ship’s all right,” responded the skipper curtly.

He didn’t seem able to take his eyes off Mr. Grover’s face. It wasn’t a beautiful face, either; to be quite candid, it verged upon the repulsive. But Captain Bascomb gazed at it as if it had been the face of his first love. Seattle Sam flattered himself he was making a good impression.

“See here, Cap’n,” he went on, “I’ve a vurry nice bunch of b’ys up at my li’l’ place on Cormorant Street. Prime sailormen every one of ’em. And I’d just love to ship ’em along with you. But”--he leaned forward and tapped his fat finger on the table--“here’s the snag! Speakin’ as man to man, Cap’n, you ain’t asackly parpular.”

“Oh, I’m not, ain’t I?” said Captain Bascomb, bristling. “Well, if that’s all you’ve come to say, the sooner you beat it out of here the better! As I was saying to my mate here only just now, I’m in no mood for polite conversation--not to say personal remarks of an offensive nature----”

“Not so fast, Cap’n, not so fast,” said Seattle Sam hastily, taking the precaution to hook towards him the companion to the captain’s earlier missile, ostensibly that he might put it to the purpose for which it was designed, but really in the interests of disarmament. “What I was just leadin’ up to was this. I guess I can fix things for you good. But I guess I can’t do it without a sort of a li’l’ frameup.”

At this point Mr. Doyle reluctantly withdrew, in obedience to a simple wireless message from his superior, and strain his ears as he might from his post at the head of the companion he could hear no more than a mumble of voices drifting up from below.

The conference was a lengthy one, so much so that Mr. Doyle had long grown tired of waiting when the tinkle of glasses indicated that it was drawing to a close.

“Well, here’s towards ye, Cap’n,” came the slightly raised voice of Seattle Sam, “an’ to our li’l’ trip together!”

The captain’s guest had hardly got out of the alleyway before Mr. Doyle came clattering down the companion with his eyes bulging.

“Is that big stiff goin’ to sign on wid us?” he inquired in a reverential whisper, his native Munster more honeyed than ever, as always in moments of deep emotion.

“He is, Mike,” returned the skipper, in accents broken by feeling.

“Can I have him in my watch?” asked Mr. Doyle.

“Mike, you can.”

“And can I--can I kick him whenever I like?” pursued the mate in the supplicating tones of a reciter giving an impersonation of a little child asking Santa Claus for a toy drum.

But at this point Captain Bascomb’s feelings overcame him altogether, and, leaping from his seat, he seized his astonished second in command firmly yet gracefully round the middle, and proceeded to give a highly spirited rendering of the Tango Argentina as performed in that country.

George, who was observing matters from his usual point of vantage, flew to describe the portent to his crony in the galley.

“Dat’s a bery dangerous man,” said the doctor, “a bery biolent, uncontrollabous kin’ of a man, sonny! Ah jus’ done drop mah ol’ pipe in de cabin soup one mawnin’, an’ Ah tell you Ah wuz skeered for mah life. An’ Ah tell you what, bo’--Ah’se skeered o’ dat man when he’s lookin’ ugly, but Ah’se ten times, twenty times, hundred times skeereder when he’s lookin’ pleased.... An’ when he gits dancin’----” And he rolled his woolly head till it nearly fell off his shoulders.

Meanwhile Mr. Samuel Grover was stepping out briskly in the direction of his boarding-house for seamen in the pleasant thoroughfare known as Cormorant Street. The name was a singularly appropriate one, for Mr. Grover and his like had long gorged there upon sailormen. He hummed pleasantly to himself as he walked, and the rapidity with which he twirled his cigar round his large loose mouth indicated to those who knew the man that he was feeling on unusually good terms with himself and the world.

“Now, b’ys,” he cried, rubbing his fat hands together as he surveyed the dozen or so of depressed-looking sailormen who were playing draw poker for Chinese stinkers in the bar of his modest establishment, “now, b’ys, I’ve gotten a real fine ship for the lot o’ ye.”

The old habitués of his place looked at one another with dawning suspicion. They had encountered this air of extravagant geniality before.

“W-w-wot’s name-of-er?” inquired Billy Stutters, so called by reason of a slight impediment in his speech. It never took him less than a minute to get up steam, but as soon as he was under way the words came with a rush, like water from a stopped-up drain whence the obstruction has been suddenly removed.

“The ‘Bride of Abbeydoes,’” said Mr. Grover, “and a damn fine ship too.”

You could have heard a pin drop for a minute or two while his audience digested this news. Ginger Jack, who was an old man-of-war’s man, and as hard a case as any of the King’s bad bargains who ever drifted under the Red Duster, was heard to observe that he warn’t goin’ to sign in no blinkin’ “Abbeydoes,” nor “Abbeydon’t” neither for the matter o’ that. Billy Stutters, after a mighty effort, was understood to second the amendment.

“Ho, you ain’t, ain’t you?” said Mr. Grover with scathing irony. “An’ wot makes your Royal ‘Ighnesses that bloomin’ partic’lar, may I ask?”

“B-b-b-becos-I’ve-bin-in-’er-afore,” said Billy, sulkily, “an’ the sk-k-kipper-kicked-me!”

“Did he so?” commented Mr. Grover facetiously. “I thought maybe you was goin’ to say he kissed you.... Now, look ’ere, b’ys,” he continued, assuming all the powers of persuasion he could muster; “I guess you’ve gotten cold feet about the ‘Bride of Abbeydoes.’ You take it from me, she ain’t so black as what she’s painted. Not by a jugful. I don’t mind admittin’, man to man, Captain Bascomb’s a hard case. And Mister Doyle, well, I reckon he’s another. But they’re all right with a crowd of smart, handy boys like yourselves. You ain’t a bunch o’ greasers or sodbusters from way back that don’t know a deadeye from a fourfold purchase. You’re the sort o’ crowd as a skipper won’t find no fault with, as he’ll be proud to see about his ship. And just to show I’m in earnest, I’m goin’ to sign on in the ‘Bride of Abbeydoes’ myself. Fair an’ square. I’m about doo to run across and see the home-folks in London, England. I’ve a fancy to take a turn at sailorizin’ again. An’ I like a fast ship. Now then, b’ys, is it a go? That’s the style. The drinks are on the house!”

“Nice sort o’ state of affairs,” observed Mr. Grover a little later to his factotum in the privacy of the den he called his office. “A lot of ungrateful swabs I’ve been keepin’--keepin’, mind you--for best part of two weeks, and they ups with their ‘Won’t sign ’ere’ ’n’ ‘Ain’t goin’ to sail there’ as if they was bloomin’ lords. Well, well! I’ll learn ’em. Don’t I hope Mr. Bucko Doyle’ll put it across ’em good and hard, that’s all!

“Why, in the old days in ’Frisco,” he continued dreamily, “you could ship a corp and no questions asked. And as for sailormen--well, you didn’t consult ’em. And quite right too. A lot they know about what’s good for ’em--a bunch of idle, extravagant swine! Warn’t it all for their good to get ’em shipped off to sea sharp afore they’d got time to get into trouble and go fillin’ up the jail, I ask you? And then you get a lot of meddlin’ psalm-singin’ idjits as don’t know the first thing about the class o’ men people like me ’ave got to deal with. Psha!”

And Mr. Grover set about filling a sea-chest with an assortment of old newspapers and empty bottles which would have struck his future shipmates, had they been there to see, as a curious outfit for a Cape Horn passage.