Part 8

The next day bright and early he attended with his crowd at the shipping office, where, having duly heard the ship’s articles mumbled over, the party appended their signatures and marks thereto and became duly members of the crew of the “Bride of Abydos.” The morning was fine and sunny, and every one was in high good-humour. Captain Bascomb’s face was wreathed in smiles, and the wink to which Seattle Sam treated him when no one was looking elicited an even huger one in reply.

All the same, a joke is a joke, and Mr. Grover considered that it was carrying the joke a bit too far when the third mate, a big apprentice just out of his time, ordered him to tail on to the topsail halyards or he’d wonder what hit him. However, he complied with the order with as good a grace as he could muster, and even went the length of joining with some heartiness in the time-honoured strains of “Reuben Ranzo.” “After all,” he reflected, “may as well do the thing properly while you’re about it.”

Still, he wasn’t sorry when the time drew near for the little comedy to come to an end. Dropping, with a sigh of relief, the rope on which he had been hauling he walked quickly off towards the poop, rubbing his fat palms tenderly as he went. They had so long been strangers to anything resembling a job of work that they were already beginning to blister.

“Well, Skipper,” he cried gaily, “time to square our li’l’ account and say so long, I guess!”

The captain gave him rather a peculiar glance, and led the way in silence down into the cabin.

Seattle Sam hesitated a moment. Time was getting short. But a drink was a drink, after all, and it would have meant going back on the tradition of a lifetime to refuse one.

He had hardly entered the saloon before he became vaguely conscious of a certain lack of cordiality in the atmosphere. The pilot’s dirty glass was still on the table, but there was no other sign of liquid refreshment. He could not keep a note of uneasiness out of his voice.

“Well, Skipper,” he repeated, “so long, and a pleasant voyage!”

The captain’s eyes met his in a cold stare of absolute repudiation. Seattle Sam’s extended hand dropped slowly to his side, and the self-satisfied smirk faded from his face. The captain had taken up a position between him and the companion. Instinctively he turned towards the alleyway which led to the main deck. It was blocked by the substantial form of Mr. Michael Doyle.

Too late the ghastly truth began to dawn.

“Talking about squarin’ accounts,” said the skipper slowly, “I’ve got a little account to square. It’s been waiting a long time too. Matter o’ fifteen years or so. Take a good look at me! Ever seen me before? Just cast your mind back a bit to the time when you were ’Frisco Brown’s runner, and shipped a big husky apprentice out o’ the Golden Gate in a Yankee blood boat that the ‘Bride of Abydos’ is a day-nursery to!... I’ve got the scars of that trip about me yet, soul and body, Mister Seattle Sam, and you’re goin’ to pay for ’em, and compound interest too!”

As he spoke, three long wails from the tug’s hooter rent the air, answered by round after round of cheering from the ship.

The skipper stood back, while Seattle Sam dashed up on to the poop with a low howl of rage and terror.

The tug’s hawser trailed dripping through the water, and she was turning her nose for home with a mighty churning of her paddles. The crimp rushed to the rail, waving his arms frantically above his head, and a yell of derision greeted him from the crew lined along her bulwarks. They were all in it, then! He was alone, alone, with a man he had shanghaied, a crew he had tried to swindle, and a sea-chest full of waste paper wherewith to face the bitter days and nights off the Horn.

“Bos’n!” yelled the skipper. “Call all hands aft!”

“Lay aft all hands!” roared the bos’n, and soon a throng of interested faces looked up at the captain as he stood with his hands planted on the poop rail.

His words were few but to the point.

“Boys, you’ve heard I’m a hard man to sail under. Maybe I am. That’s for you to find out. I won’t have back chat. I won’t stand for any sojering or shinaniking. If you’re decent sailormen, and know your work, and do it, we’ll get on all right. If you’re not, me and my mates are here to knock ruddy hell out of you.

“One word more. This man here”--he indicated the trembling form of Seattle Sam--“came on board my ship yesterday to sell you. I’ll give you his words. ‘I’ll fool ’em I’m goin’ to sign on myself, and they’ll come like lambs. Twenty dollars apiece and the men are yours. And I don’t care if you give ’em ruddy hell!’ Now I say to you, ‘This man’s yours! Take him, and I wish you joy of your shipmate!’”

And, grasping Seattle Sam by the collar of his coat and the scruff of his pants, he propelled him to the top of the poop ladder and gave him a skilful hoist which dropped him full in the midst of the expectant group below.

* * * * *

The tug’s smoke was a grey feather on the skyline; Flattery a grey cloud on the port bow.

The song of the wind in his royals was sweet music in Captain Bascomb’s ears. So was the rush and gurgle of the waves under the clipper’s keel. So were all the little noises that a ship makes in a seaway.

But, oh, sweeter far than them all was a confused turmoil which ever and anon came vaguely to his hearing--a sound made up of thuds, of cries, of curses--which indicated beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mr. Samuel Grover, some time of ’Frisco, and late of Cormorant Street, Victoria, was undergoing the decidedly painful process of being ground exceeding small!

PADDY DOYLE’S BOOTS

A FORECASTLE YARN

You know that junk store on the Sandoval waterfront? A Chink keeps it--Charley Something or other, don’t remember the rest of his name. If you don’t know the place I mean, you know plenty more just like it. The sort of place where you can buy pretty well anything under the sun, everything second-hand, that is; any mortal thing in the seagoing line that you can think of, and then some. That’s Charley’s!

Well, once Larry Keogh (every one used to call him Mike, because his name wasn’t Michael), and Sandy MacGillivray from Glasgow, and a Dutchman called Hank were in want of one or two things for a Cape Horn passage. Their ship was the old “Isle of Skye.” Did you ever meet with any of them “Isle” barques? They were very fine ships. There was the “Isle of Skye,” “Isle of Arran,” “Isle of Man,” and a whole lot more I just forget--all “Isles.” You wouldn’t find any of them now. Some were lost, some broken up, some went under the Russian or Chilian flag, and the firm that owned them (MacInnis, the name was) went out of business at the finish. And as for the old “Isle of Skye” herself, she piled up on Astoria a little more than a year ago--foreign-owned then, of course.

Round these three chaps I was speaking about went to Charley’s joint. Larry and Hank got what they wanted soon enough. At least, they got what they had money for, which wasn’t very much, Charley not being in the humour to treat Larry as handsome over some lumps of coral Larry wanted to trade for clothes.

This Sandy MacGillivray I mentioned, however, was a bit of a capitalist, and he was also of an economical disposition; and what with wanting to lay out his money the best way and not being able to bear the feel of parting with the cash when he’d found what he wanted to buy, he had his pals with the one thing and the other teetering about first on one foot and then on the other, and sick to death of him and his shilly-shallying.

At long last he got through; and then nothing would fit but Charley must give him something in for his bargain.

“No good, no good!” says the Chink, looking ugly the way only a Chink can. “You pay me, you go ’long!... P’laps I give you somet’ing you no like.”

He grinned and showed his dirty yellow teeth.

“Ut’s not possible,” said Larry. “Sandy’s the one that’ll take it, if it’s neither too hot nor too heavy.”

“All light,” says the Chink, sulky-like. “I give you velly good pair o’ boots.”

Hank’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, and so did Larry’s, when they saw what Sandy had got through just having the gall to ask.

A beautiful pair of sea-boots they were, and brand-new, or very near it, by the look of them. Sandy thought the old fellow was joshing him; but it was all right. He was nearly beside himself with delight. He stopped outside a saloon once on the way to the ship, and stood turning over his money in his pocket so long that the boys began to think he was going to celebrate his good fortune in a fitting manner.

But all he said at the finish was, “It’s a peety to change a five spot. Once change your money an’ it fair melts awa’”

Larry sighed. If he’d known about those boots he might have had a bid for them. And now Sandy had got them for nothing. Larry made him a sporting offer of his coral in exchange for them, but it was no go.

“To hell wid ye for a skin-louse!” says Larry, who was getting a bit nasty by this time. He had a great thirst on him, and no money to gratify it, and that was the way it took him. “Ye’d take the pennies off your own father’s eyes, so you would, and he lying dead.”

Sandy showed the boots to the rest of the crowd, and of course every one had something to say. But there could be no doubt he had got a wonderful fine bargain.

“I wouldn’t wonder but they have a hole in them,” said Larry. The notion seemed to brighten him up a whole lot. “The water will run in and out of them boots the way you’ll wish you never saw them. I know no more uncomfortable thing than a pair of boots and they letting in water on you.”

Sandy was a bit upset by this idea of Larry’s, so he filled the boots with water to see if there was anything in it. Leak--not they!

“It would be a good thing,” said Larry with a sigh, he was that disappointed, “if the old drogher herself was as seaworthy as them boots. As good as new they are, and devil a leak is there in ayther one of them. But maybe,” he went on, cheering up again a bit, “maybe some person has been wearing them that died of the plague. It is not a very pleasant thing, now, to die of the plague. I would not care to be wearing a pair of boots and I not knowing who had them before me.”

“Hee-hee,” sniggers Sandy in a mean little way he had. “Hee, hee--ye’ll no hae the chance o’ wearin’ these.”

And then it was that old Balto the Finn--he was an old sailorman, this Balto, and he could remember the real ancient days, the Baltimore clippers and the East Indiamen--spoke for the first time.

“From the dead to the dead!” says Balto. “From a dead corpse were they taken, and to a dead corpse will they go.”

They are great witches, are Finns, as every one knows. And it seemed likely enough that the first part of the saying, at least, was true, for old Charley hadn’t the best of names for the way he got hold of his stuff.

Sandy was one of those chaps who go about in fear and trembling of being robbed; so, after he saw how all the crowd admired the boots, he took to wearing them all the time ashore and afloat. He went ashore in them the night before the “Isle of Skye” was to sail.

He came aboard in them, too, that same night....

The tide drifted him against the hawser, and the anchor watch saw him and hauled him in. Dead as nails, was poor Sandy, and no one knew just how it came about. It was thought he’d slipped on the wet wharf--it was a very bad wharf, with a lot of holes and rough places in it. And of course a man can’t swim in heavy boots....

There was a man in the “Isle of Skye” at that time, a Dago. His name was Tony, short for Antonio. He bought Sandy’s boots very cheap, no one else seeming to care for them.

That was a cruel cold passage, and the “Isle of Skye” being loaded right down to her marks, she was a very wet ship indeed. So that the time came when more than one in the starboard watch wished they were in that Dago’s boots after all, and the fanciful feeling about poor Sandy began to wear off.

The Old Man was a holy terror for cracking on: he had served his time in one of the fast clippers in the Australian wool trade, and he never could get it out of his head that he had to race everything else in the nitrate fleet. He would sooner see a sail carry away any day than reef it, and this passage he was worse than ever.

However, it came on to blow so bad, just off the pitch of the Horn, that the mate went down and dug the hoary old scoundrel out of his sweet slumbers, he having dared anybody to take a stitch off her before turning in. He cursed and he swore; but the end of it was that the watch laid aloft to reef the fore upper-topsail, and it was then that this Dago Tony, who was swanking it in the boots as usual, put his foot on a rotten ratline, and down he came, boots and all.

There was a lot of talk, and no wonder, about the things which had happened since Sandy MacGillivray got those boots from the Chink; and the Old Man getting wind of it, he told Sails to stitch up Tony boots and all, so as to stop the talk for good.

“Mind ye,” said the Old Man, “Ah dinna hold wi’ Papish suppersteetions, but there’s no denyin’ the sea’s a queer place.”

* * * * *

Nobody ever expected to see or hear any more of Sandy Mac’s boots. But there was a man in the starboard watch that nobody liked--a sort of soft-spoken, soft-handed chap we called Ikey Mo; because he was so fond of stowing away stuff in his chest every one thought he had a bit of the Jew in him.

The day we sighted the Fastnet this fellow showed up in a pair of sea-boots.

“Where had ye them boots, Ikey, and we rowling off the pitch of the Horn?” asked Larry when he saw them. “It’s a queer thing ye never wore them sooner.”

“If I’d wore ’em sooner,” says Ikey, “like as not you’d have borrowed the lend of ’em, an’ maybe got drowned in ’em,” he says, “and then where should I have been?”

“I would not,” says Larry. “I would not borrow the lend of the fill of a tooth from a dirty Sheeny like yourself. ’Tis my belief you took them boots off the poor dead corpse they belonged to; and by the same token, if they walk off with you to the same place he’s gone to, it’s no more than you deserve.”

The tale soon got round that Ikey had stolen the boots off the dead Dago, and it made a lot of feeling against him. But he only laughed and sneered when folks looked askance at him, and at last he left off making any secret of the thing he’d done.

“Call yourselves men!” says he. “And scared of a little dead rat of an Eyetalian that was no great shakes of a man when he was livin’!”

“Let the fool have his way!” says old Balto the Finn. “From a dead corpse were they taken, to a dead corpse will they go.”

* * * * *

Very, very foggy it was in the Mersey when we run the mudhook out. I don’t think I ever saw it worse.

Ikey didn’t care. He was singing at the top of his voice as the shore boat pushed off:

“We’ll furl up the bunt with a fling, oh ... To pay Paddy Doyle for his boo-oots....”

“Who said ‘boots’?” he shouted, standing up in the boat with his hands to his mouth. “Where’s the dead corpse now?”

The fog swallowed up the boat whole, but we could hear his voice coming through it a long while, all thick and muffled:

“We’ll all drink brandy and gin, oh ... And pay Paddy Doyle for his boots....”

The tug that cut the boat in two picked up five men of the six that were in her. And the one that was missing was a good swimmer, too.

But then ... a man can’t swim ... in heavy boots....

THE UNLUCKY “ALTISIDORA”

I

When first the legend of the Unlucky “Altisidora” began to take its place in the great unwritten book of the folk-lore of the sea, old shellbacks (nodding weather-beaten heads over mugs and glasses in a thousand sailortown taverns from Paradise Street to Argyle Cut) were wont to put forward a variety of theories accounting for her character, according to the particular taste, creed, or nationality of the theorizer for the time being.

Her keel was laid on a Friday.... Someone going to work on her had met a red-haired wumman, or a wumman as skenned (this if the speaker were a Northumbrian) and hadn’t turned back.... Someone had chalked “To Hell with the Pope” (this if he were a Roman Catholic) or, conversely, “To Hell with King William” (in the case of a Belfast Orangeman) on one of her deck beams.... There was a stiff ’un hid away somewheres inside her, same as caused all the trouble with the “Great Eastern.”... And so on, and so forth, usually finishing up with the finely illogical assertion that you couldn’t expect nothink better, not with a jaw-crackin’ name like that!

Anyhow, unlucky she was, you couldn’t get away from it! Didn’t she drownd her first skipper, when he was going on board one night in ’Frisco Bay? Didn’t her second break his neck in Vallipo, along of tumbling down an open hatch in the dark? Come to that, didn’t she kill a coupler chaps a week when she was buildin’ over in Wilson’s Yard, Rotherhithe? Didn’t she smash up a lumper or two every blessed trip she made? Hadn’t she got a way of slipping fellers overboard that sneaky and sly-like no one knowed they was gone until it come coffee time and they wasn’t there?... Say the skipper was drunk--well, ain’t skippers gone on board canned up afore now and _not_ been drownded?... Say it was somebody’s business to see that there hatch was covered or else a light left alongside of it--well, ain’t hatches been left open in other ships without folks walkin’ into ’em into the dark?... Say it was only two fellers as was killed workin’ on her--well, ain’t there been plenty o’ ships built what _nobody_ got killed workin’ on? Answer me that!...

So the Unlucky “Altisidora” she became from London River to the Sandheads--a legend to endure in many an ancient memory long after her bones were rust.

* * * * *

It was in the South-West India Dock that Anderton first set eyes on her--the sun going down behind Limehouse Church tower in a great flaming splendour, and lighting up the warehouses, and the dock, and the huddle of shipping, with an almost unearthly glory.

Anderton was in great spirits. He had waited a long and weary while for a ship; haunting the docks and the shipping offices by day, and spending his evenings--for he had no friends in London and no money to spare for the usual shore diversions--in the dark little officers’ messroom at the Sailors’ Home in Well Street and the uninspiring society of a morose mate from Sunderland, who passed the time toasting lumps of cheese over the fire in order--so he confided to Anderton in a rare burst of eloquence--to get his money’s worth out of the damn place. So that when there dropped suddenly, as it were out of the summer heavens, the chance of going as second mate in the “Altisidora” he fairly trod on air.

It happened in this wise. He had spent a desolating morning tramping round the docks, offering his valuable services to shipmasters who were sometimes indifferent, sometimes actively offensive, but without exception entirely unappreciative. He was beginning to feel as if the new second mate’s ticket of which he had been so inordinately proud were a possession slightly less to his credit than a convict’s ticket-of-leave. Two yards of bony Nova Scotian, topped by a sardonic grin, had asked him if he had remembered to bring his titty-bottle along; and a brawny female, with her hands on her hips, bursting forth upon him from a captain’s cabin, inquired if he took the ship for an adjectived day nursery.

He had just beaten a hasty retreat after this last devastating encounter with what dignity he could muster, and was all but resolved to give up the fruitless quest and ship before the mast, when he heard a voice behind him shouting “Mister! Hi, mister!”

At first Anderton took no notice. For one thing, he was far too much taken up with his own concerns to be much interested in the outside world; for another, he was not long enough out of his apprenticeship to recognize at once the appellation of “Mister” as one likely to apply to himself. And in any case there seemed no reason at all why the hail should be intended for him. It was not, therefore, until it had been repeated several times, each time a shade more insistently, until, moreover, he realized that there was no one else in sight or earshot for whom it could conceivably be intended, that the fact forced itself upon his consciousness that he was the “Mister” concerned, and he stopped to let the caller come up with him. He did so puffing and blowing. He was a round, insignificant little man, whom Anderton remembered now having seen talking to the mate of one of the ships he had visited earlier in the day.

“I say,” he gasped, as soon as he was within speaking distance, “aren’t you--I mean to say, don’t you want a second mate’s berth?”

Did he want a second mate’s berth, indeed? Did he want the moon out of the sky--or the first prize in the Calcutta Sweep--or the Cullinan diamond--or any other seemingly unattainable thing? He retained sufficient presence of mind, however, not to say so, and (he hoped) not to look it either, admitting, with a creditable attempt not to sound too keen on it, that he did in fact happen to be on the look out for such an opening.

“Ah, that’s good,” said the stranger, “because, as a matter of fact, I--it’s most unfortunate, but my second mate’s met with an accident, and the ship sails to-morrow. Could you join to-night?”

Manage it? Anderton repressed an impulse to execute a double shuffle on the edge of the dock, to fling his arms round the little man’s neck and embrace him, to cast his cap upon the stones and leap upon it. Instead, he said, with the air of one conferring a favour, that he rather thought he might.

“All right, then ... ship ‘Altisidora’ ... South-West India Dock ... ask for Mr. Rumbold ... tell him you’ve seen me ... Captain Carter.”

Anderton stood staring after his new captain for several minutes after his stubby figure had disappeared among the sheds. The thing was incredible. It was impossible. It must be a dream. Here, only two minutes before, he had been walking along seriously meditating the desirability of taking a plunge into the murky waters of the London Docks, and in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the whole aspect of life had been changed by a total stranger offering him--more, positively thrusting upon him--the very thing he had trudged the docks in search of until his boot-soles were nearly through.

If he had had time to reflect upon this bewildering gift thrown at him by wayward fortune it might have occurred to him that--like so many of that freakish dame’s bounties--there was a catch in it somewhere. He might have thought, for example, that it was, to say the least, a surprising fact that--at a time when he knew from bitter personal experience that the supply of highly qualified and otherwise eminently desirable second mates evidently greatly exceeded the demand--a distracted skipper should be rushing round the docks looking for one. But no such idea as yet damped the first fine flush of his triumph. Why, indeed, should it? The ship’s name conveyed no sinister meaning to his mind. He had never heard of her reputation; if he had, he wouldn’t have cared a button.

He was, as it happened, destined to get the first hint of it within a very few minutes. Just outside the dock gates he ran into Dick Charnock, who had been senior apprentice in the old “Araminta” when Anderton was a first voyager. Charnock was now mate--chief officer he called himself--of a stinking little tub of a steam tramp plying to the Mediterranean ports; and Anderton, remembering the airs he had been wont to give himself in bygone days, took a special pleasure in announcing his good fortune.

Charnock blew his cheeks out and said:

“O-oh--_her_!”

“Well?” said Anderton a trifle huffily. “What about her?”