Part 9

No one likes to have cold water poured upon an exultant mood. “Beast!” he thought. “Jealous--that’s what’s the matter with him!”

“Oh, nothing--nothing!” Charnock replied hastily. “I was just thinking about something else, that’s all!”

This was so obviously a lie that it only made matters worse, and they parted a trifle coolly; Anderton refusing an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of London that evening, as displayed at Wilson’s Music Hall, at which he would fairly have jumped less than an hour ago.

The morose mate was still sitting in the messroom, surrounded by his customary aura of “frizzly dick,” when he got back to Well Street and burst in upon him with his news.

He withdrew the fork from the fire, carefully inspected its burden and after an interval of profound thought remarked:

“O-oh--_her_!”

His “O-oh--_her_” was, if anything, more pregnant with meaning than Charnock’s.

“Well?” snapped Anderton. He was by now getting thoroughly exasperated. “Well? What about ‘Oh--her ‘? What’s wrong with her anyway?”

The mate thoughtfully blew the ashes off his latest culinary triumph and thrust it into his mouth.

“She’s no’ got a gude name!” he said, indistinctly, but none the less darkly.

“Not a good name--what’s that mean, pray?” demanded Anderton angrily.

“Just that,” said the mate laconically, and went on toasting cheese.

Anderton flung out of the room in a rage. By this time his first enthusiasm over his unexpected good fortune had received a decided check, and it was with distinctly mixed feelings that he made his way Poplar-wards to make personal acquaintance with his new ship.

What was the meaning behind all these dark hints? Was this mysterious “Altisidora” a tough ship--a hell-ship? Her skipper didn’t look like it, though, of course, one had heard of captains who had the Jekyll-and-Hyde touch about them--butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths ashore, but they turned into raging devils as soon as they were out of soundings. Anyhow, he was ready enough for such contingencies. He had been reckoned the best boxer in the ship as an apprentice, and he would rather welcome than otherwise an opportunity of displaying his prowess with his fists.... Was she perhaps a hungry ship? He reflected with a grin that he had received ample training in the art of tightening his belt in the old “Araminta.” ... Slow--well, a slow ship had her compensations in the way of a thumping pay-roll. He remembered the long faces the crew of his old ship had pulled when the dead horse was not out before she was on the Line.... Ah, well, he supposed he should know soon enough. One thing was certain, if she were the most unseaworthy tub in the world, he had no intention of turning back. His situation had been desperate enough to call for a desperate remedy.

There was some kind of a small disturbance--a street row of some sort--in progress just outside the dock gate, and, despite his impatience to see his new ship, Anderton stopped to see what was happening.

A queer little scarecrow of a man was standing in the roadway, shaking his clenched fists in denunciation towards the soaring spars of a lofty clipper, whose poles, rising above the roofs of the warehouses, seemed to stab the sunset sky.

“Oh, ye beauty! Oh, ye murdhering bitch!” he shouted. “Lovely ye look, don’t ye? Who’d think to see ye that ye had it in ye to kill the bes’ shipmate ever a man had?”

A passing policeman, thumbs in belt, casting a kindly Olympian eye on the little man, tapped him on the shoulder.

“All right--all right now--move on! Never mind about that now, Johnny! Can’t do with you making your bother ’ere!”

The little man whirled round on him furiously.

“Johnny! Johnny is it? Isn’t it Johnny I’m talkin’ about, the bes’ shipmate ever a man had--smashed like a rotten apple, and no cause at all for him to fall--oh, ye villain--oh, ye----”

Olympus grew slightly impatient.

“Come now, move on! Can’t do with you creatin’ no bother! Move on, I tell you, if you don’t want me to appre’end you!”

The little man shuffled off, still muttering to himself, and pausing now and again in his zigzag progress along the road to flourish his fists at those contemptuous spars stabbing the sunset. The policeman, catching Anderton’s eye, tapped his forehead significantly.

“Case o’ Dhoolallie tap, as we used to say in Injer,” he observed. “Round ’ere nearly every day, ’e is, carryin’ on same as you saw. Chronic!”

Anderton asked him where the “Altisidora” was berthed. A look--was it of surprise?--flitted across his stolid countenance. Anderton could have sworn he was going to say “O-oh--her!” But he didn’t. He only said, “Right straight a’ead--can’t miss ’er----”

There were quite a number of ships in the dock, of which in those days a fair proportion were still sailing ships--ships from the Baltic with windmills sticking up amidships, Dagoes with brightly painted figureheads and Irish pennants everywhere, Frenchmen with their look of Gallic smartness and their standing rigging picked out in black and white; she was none of these anyway.

Anderton’s eye dwelt longingly on the tall clipper whose spars he had already seen soaring above the sheds. There, now, was the very ship of his dreams! He thought life could hold no higher bliss for a sailorman than to stand upon her poop--to control her, to guide her, to see the whole of her lovely height and grace moving in obedience to his commands. He sighed a little at the thought, as he continued to scan the vista of moored shipping with eyes that hoped and yet feared to find what they sought.

“Right straight ahead.” She couldn’t be far off now--why, his ship must be lying at the very next berth to the beautiful clipper.

But there wasn’t a next berth: the tall beauty was lying in the very corner of the dock. Already the straggle of letters among the gilt scrollwork on her bow had begun to suggest a wild hope he daren’t let himself entertain. But now it wasn’t a hope--it was a certainty! This _was_ his ship--this dream, this queen, this perfect thing among ships! Why, her name was like a song--why hadn’t it struck him before?--and she was like a song ... the loveliest thing, Anderton thought, he had ever seen ... rising up there so proud and stately above them all ... her bare slender skysail poles soaring up, up until the little rosy dapple in the evening sky seemed almost like a flight of tropical birds resting on her spars. She dwarfed everything else in the dock. Anderton had thought his last ship, the ship in which he had served his time, lofty enough; yet now she seemed almost stumpy by comparison.

He climbed the gangway and stepped on board. The steward, a hoarse Cockney with a drooping moustache under a pendulous red nose, and an expression of ludicrous melancholy which would have been worth a fortune to a music-hall artist, came out of his little kennel of a pantry to show him his room, and lingered a while, exuding onions and conversation.

“Nice room, sir, ain’t it? Orl been done right froo.... ’Ard lines on the ovver young feller, weren’t it? Coo! Cargo slings giv’ way when he was right underneaf--a coupler ’underweight bung on top of ’im! Coo! Didn’t it jus’ make a mess of ’im? Not ’arf....”

So that was what had happened to his mysterious predecessor! Well, it was an ill wind that blew nobody good, Anderton reflected. Poor beggar ... still he couldn’t help it ... and after all----

And it _was_ a nice room--no denying that! Heaps of room for his things, he thought, remembering the little cramped half-deck of the “Araminta” which he had shared with five other apprentices three short months ago. The ship belonged to a period which had not yet learned the art of cutting down its accommodation to the very last possible inch. Her saloon was a grand affair, with a carved sideboard and panelling of bird’s-eye maple, and a skylight with stained glass in it, and all the rest of her fittings were to match. It looked as if he were going to be in clover!

A series of tremendous crashes, accompanied by the falling of a heavy body, broke in upon the steward’s remarks, and he started and looked round, his toothpick poised in mid-mouth.

“Coo!” he exclaimed. “’Ere comes our Mister Rumbold--and ain’t he pickled, too?... Not ’arf!”

He vanished discreetly into his pantry as the originator of the disturbance came ricochetting along the alleyway, finally bringing up against the door-jamb of Anderton’s room, where he came to a precarious stand.

He was a man on the shady side of middle age, with a nose which had once been aquiline and a sandy-white moustache yellowed with tobacco. The impression he gave--of a dissipated cockatoo--was heightened by the rumpled crest of stiff hair which protruded from beneath the shore-going straw hat which he wore halo-fashion, like a saint on the spree, pushed well back from his forehead.

“’Lo!” he observed with owl-like gravity. “You--comin’ shee long’f us?”

Anderton said he believed he was.

The mate reflected a minute and then said succinctly:

“Gorrelpyou!”

Not being able on the spur of the moment to think of a really satisfactory answer to this rather surprising remark, Anderton took refuge in silence, and went on stowing his gear.

“I said ‘Gorrelpyou!’” repeated Mr. Rumbold presently, with a decided touch of pugnacity in his tone.

Anderton supposed it was up to him to say something, so he said:

“Yes, I know. But why?”

“’Cos--thiship--thishipsh--unlucky--‘Alshdora’!” replied the mate. “Thashwy. Unlucky--‘Alshdora’! ’N if any man shaysh I’m drunk--then I shay--my lorshangemmen, I shmit if I can shay unlucky--unlucky--‘Alshdora’--I’m perfec’ly shober.... I’m perfec’ly shober--‘n I’m goin’ bed!”

At this point he let go of the door-jamb to which he had been holding, and proceeded with astonishing velocity on a diagonal course along the alleyway, concluding by sprawling all his length on the floor of the saloon.

“Wash marry thiship,” he enunciated gravely, sitting up and rubbing his head. “Furnishershall over blushop. Tablesh--chairsh--sho on. Mush make inquirations into thish--morramomin’!”

Here he again collapsed on to the floor, from which he had been slowly raising himself as he spoke; then, apparently deciding to abandon the attempt to resume the perpendicular, he set off at a surprising pace on all fours, and Anderton’s last glimpse of him was the soles of his boots as he vanished into his cabin.

He finished stowing his possessions, and then went ashore to make one or two small purchases. The sun was not quite gone, and the greater part of the dock was still flooded with rosy light. But the Unlucky “Altisidora” lay now all in shadow, except for the gilt vane at her main truck which flashed back the last rays of sunset. She looked aloof, alone, cut off from her fellows by some mysterious and unmerited doom--a ship under a dark star.

II

It wasn’t long before she began to live up to her reputation. She started in quite a small way by fouling her anchor off Gravesend, and giving every one a peck of trouble clearing it. Incidentally, it was Mr. Mate’s morning-after head that was responsible for the mess. But that didn’t matter: it went down to the ship’s account all the same. Her next exploit was to cut a hay barge in two in the estuary. It was foggy at the time, the barge’s skipper was drunk, and the “crew”--a boy of sixteen or so--lost his head when the ship loomed suddenly up right on top of him, and put his helm up instead of down. But what of that? She was the Unlucky “Altisidora,” or very likely the barge wouldn’t have been there at all. Down went another black mark against her name.

The captain, in the meantime, had apparently gone into retreat like an Anglican parson. He had dived below as soon as he came on board, and there he remained, to all intents and purposes as remote and inaccessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet, until the ship was well to westward of the Lizard. This, Anderton learned, was his invariable custom when nearing or leaving land. Mr. Rumbold, the mate, defined his malady briefly and scornfully as “soundings-itis.” “No nerve--that’s what’s the matter with him: as much use as the ship’s figurehead and a damn sight less ornamental!”

Not that it seemed to make much difference whether he was there or not. He was a singularly colourless little man, whose very features were so curiously indeterminate that his face made no more impression on the mind than if it had been a sheet of blank paper. It seemed to be a positive agony to him to give an order. Even in ordinary conversation he was never quite sure which word to put first. He never finished a sentence or even a phrase straight ahead, but dropped it and made a fresh start, only to change his mind a second time and run back to pick up what he had discarded. And this same painful uncertainty was evident in all he did. His fingers were constantly busy--fiddling with his beard, smoothing his tie, twiddling the buttons of his coat. Even his eyes were irresolute--wandering hither and thither as if they couldn’t decide to look at the same thing two minutes together. He had the look of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, in point of fact, he was. He had jockeyed himself somehow into the command of the “Altisidora,” through family influence or something of the kind, and had lived ever since in momentary dread of his unfitness for his position being discovered.

Anderton, for his part, owed to the skipper’s invisibility one of the most unforgettable moments of his whole life. The pilot had just gone ashore. The mate was below. To all intent Anderton had the ship to himself.

A glorious moment--a magnificent moment! He was nineteen--not six months out of his time--and he was in sole charge of a ship--and such a ship. The veriest cockboat might well have gained a borrowed splendour in the circumstances; but here was no need for the rose-coloured spectacles of idealizing youth. Tier on tier, her canvas rose rounding and dimpling against the blue of the sky. She curtseyed, bowed, dipped, and rose on the long lift of the seas. Her hull quivered like a thing alive. Oh, she was beautiful! beautiful! Whatever life might yet hold for him of happiness or success, it could bring again no moment quite so splendid as this.

Mr. Rumbold, after a few days of the most appalling moroseness while the drink was working out of his system, developed, rather to Anderton’s surprise, into a quite entertaining companion, possessed of the relics of a good education, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of unprintable stories, and a pretty if slightly bitter wit. He was perfectly conscious of the failing that had made a mess of his career. Anderton guessed from a hint he let drop one day that he had once had a command and had lost it, probably through over-indulgence in the good old English pastime known as “lifting the elbow.” “A sailor’s life would be all right if it was all like this,” he broke out one day--it was one of those glorious exhilarating days in the Trades when the whole world seems full of rejoicing--“it’s the damned seaports that play hell with a fellow, Anderton, you take my word for it! Drink, my boy, that’s what does it--drink and little dirty sluts of women--that’s what we risk our lives every day earning money for! It’s all a big joke--a big bloody joke, my son--and the only thing to do is to laugh at it!” And off he went again on one of his Rabelaisian stories.

The ship fought her way to the southward against a succession of baffling airs and head winds where the Trades should have been, and a few degrees north of the Line ran into a belt of flat calm which bade fair to keep her there until the crack of doom. It wasn’t a case of the usual unreliable, irritating Doldrum weather. It was a dead flat calm in which day after day came and went while the sails drooped lifeless against the masts, and men’s nerves got more and more on edge, and Anderton began to have visions of the months and the years passing by, and the weed growing long and green on the “Altisidora’s” hull like the whiskers of some marine deity, and himself returning, one day, old and white-haired and toothless, to a world which had forgotten his existence. To crown all, the melancholy steward at this time suffered a sad bereavement. His cat was missing--a ginger-and-white specimen, gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost, making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The steward had only to murmur “P’sss--p’sss--p’sss!” under his breath, and out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying roar of “Damn you--shishing that infernal cat again! If I hear any more of it I’ll wring your neck!”

But good and bad times and all times pass over--and there came at last a day when the “Altisidora’s” idle sails once more filled to a heartening breeze, and the seas slipped bubbling under her keel, and she sped rejoicing on her way as if no dark star brooded over her.

The steward poked his head out of his pantry that morning as Anderton passed, with a smile that was like a convulsion of nature.

“Ol’ Ginger’s turned up again, sir!... What do you think of ’er?”

He indicated a small box in the corner in which a gently palpitating mass of kittenhood explained how Ginger had been spending her time. The prodigal in the meantime was parading proudly round the steward’s legs, thrumming to the end of her thin tail with the cat’s ever-recurring surprise and delight over the miracle of maternity.

“Artful, ain’t she?” said the steward. “Right down in the lazareet, she was! Must ’ave poked ’erself down there w’en I was gettin’ up some stores las’ week. That’s ’cos I drahned ’er last lot--see? Wot, drahn these ’ere! No blinkin’ fear! W’y, they’re _black_ ’uns--ketch me drahnin’ a black cat!”

Whether the advent of the black kittens had anything to do with it or not, it certainly seemed for a time as if the luck had turned. Day after day the ship reeled the knots off behind her at a steady fifteen. Every one’s spirits rose. “Wot price the hunlucky ‘Altisidora’ now?” said Bill Green to the man next him on the yard. They were tarring down, their tar-pots slung round their necks as they worked. “There you go, you ruddy fool, askin’ for trouble!” replied Mike, the ancient shellback, wise in the lore of the sea. “Didn’t I tell ye now?” Bill’s tar-pot had given an unexpected tilt and spread its contents impartially over Bill’s person and the deck below. “If you was in the Downeaster ‘Elias K. Slocum’ wot I sailed in once, you’d git a dose o’ belayin’ pin soup for supper over that, my son, as’d learn you to play tricks with luck.”

The luck didn’t last long. Possibly a hatful of blind black kittens had not the efficacy as mascots of a full-grown black Tom. Ginger’s progeny undeniably looked very small, helpless, squirming morsels to contend successfully against the Dark Gods.

The ship was by now getting into the high latitudes, and sail had to be gradually shortened until she was running down the Easting under lower topsails and foresail. Anderton had been keeping the middle watch, and had gone below, tired out, after a night of “All hands on deck.” It seemed to him that his eyes were no sooner closed than once again the familiar summons beat upon the doors of his consciousness, and he stumbled on deck, still only half roused from sleep, to find a scene of the wildest confusion.

A sudden shift of wind had caught the ship aback. Both the foremast and mainmast were hanging over the side in a raffle of rigging, only the mizen, with the rags of the lower topsail still clinging to the yard, being left standing. The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea, under the grey light of the dreary dawn--a sight to daunt the stoutest heart.

It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. But now he recognized in him a fine and resourceful seaman and a determined and indomitable leader of men in the face of instant danger. The suddenness and completeness of the disaster which might well have induced the numbness of despair, only seemed to arouse in him a spirit in proportion to the needs of the moment. During the long hours while the ship fought for her life--during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept going incessantly to free her from the volume of water that had flooded her hold--when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient sail to keep her going before the wind--he it was who continually urged, encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. He it was who worked hardest of all, and who, when things seemed at their worst and blackest, brought a grin to haggard, worn-out faces with a shanty stave of an irresistible humour and--be it added--a devastating unprintableness.

The ship managed to hobble into Cape Town under her jury rig, where Mr. Rumbold promptly vanished into his customary haunts, to reappear just before the ship sailed after her refit, the same sprawling and disreputable wreck he had been when Anderton first saw him. He never again showed that side of himself that had come to the surface on the night of disaster; but Anderton never quite forgot it, and because of the memory of it he spent many a patient hour in port tracking the mate to his favourite unsavoury resorts, and dragging him, maudlin, riotous, or quarrelsome, back again to the ship.

The “Altisidora” arrived in Sydney a hundred and forty days out. Her fame had gone before her, and she attracted quite an amount of attention in the capacity of a nautical curiosity. Moreover, the legend grew apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in her!”

And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She lost spars--she lost sails--she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows what! She scraped bits off wharves; she lost her sheer in open roadsteads and barged into other ships. She ran short of food and had to supplicate passing ships for help. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do she even tried to run down her own tug. And yet in spite of it all--perhaps, for sailormen are queer beings, because of it all--her men liked her. They cursed her, they chid her, kindly, without rancour, as one might chide a charming but erring woman; but they stuck by her all the same. The old sailmaker, a West Country man who had lost all his teeth on hard tack, had been with her for years. “You don’t mind sailing in an unlucky ship, then, Sails,” said Anderton to him one day, when he was helping him to cut a new upper topsail to replace one of the ship’s casual losses.

The old man pushed his spectacles up on to his bald head, and looked out over the sea with eyes flattened by age and faded to the remote blue of an early morning sky when mist is clearing.

“I rackon’t ain’t no use worryin’ ’bout luck, sir,” he said, “so long’s there’s a job o’ work wants doin’.”