Chapter 5

They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence. It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm thrust the gate open, and there advanced into the sunlight, coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway Joan! Her round baby face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep sigh it sounded like that and in a moment she was kneeling on the ground with her arms round the baby.

"Joan, Joan," she said over and over again. "My little, little baby!"

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free, and then rubbed her eyes drowsily.

"Hallo!" she said.

"But where have you been?" cried Mother. "Baby-girl, where have you been all this time?"

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm towards the wood, the wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. "In there," she answered carelessly. "Wiv the wood-ladies. I'm hungry!"

"My darling!" said Mother, and picked her up and carried her into the house.

In the dining-room, with Mother at her side and Joyce opposite to her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workmanlike fashion, and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to darken the mystery of her absence.

"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated Mother.

"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I wouldn't stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry."

"But," began Mother. "Where did they take you to?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"

"Yes," said Mother. "What else?"

"There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce.

"'Cause I didn't want to be a wood-lady," replied Joan.

"Listen to me, darling," said Mother. "Didn't these people whom you call wood-ladies take you away out of the wood? We searched the whole wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."

"I was," said Joan. "I was there all the time, an' I heard Walter an' Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed like leaves rustling."

"But where did you sleep last night?"

"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very sleepy now."

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.

"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.

IV

A MAN BEFORE THE MAST

In Tom Mowbray's boarding-house, the sailors who sat upon the narrow benches round the big room ceased their talk as the door opened and Tom Mowbray himself entered from the street. The men in the room, for all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude of their bodies, the ineradicable hall-mark of the sea which was the arena of their lives; they salted the barren place with its vigor and pungency. Pausing within the door, Tom Mowbray sent his pale inexpressive glance flickering along the faces they turned towards him.

"Well, boys," he said; "takin' it easy fer a spell?"

There was a murmur of reply from the men; they watched him warily, knowing that he was not genial for nothing. He was a man of fifty or more, bloated in body, with an immobile grey face and a gay white moustache that masked his gross and ruthless mouth. He was dressed like any other successful merchant, bulging waistcoat, showy linen and all; the commodity in which he dealt was the flesh and blood of seamen, and his house was eminent among those which helped the water-front of San Francisco "the Barbary Coast," as sailors call it to its unholy fame. He stood among the sunburnt, steady-eyed seamen like a fungus in fresh grass.

"An' now, who's for a good ship?" he inquired. There was a sort of mirth in his voice as he spoke. "Good wages, good grub, an' a soft job. Don't all of ye speak at once."

The sailors eyed him warily. From the end of the room a white-haired American looked up wryly.

"What's her name?" he asked.

"Name?" Tom Mowbray kept his countenance, though the name was the cream of the joke. He paused, watching the faces of those who had been ashore a week and were due to ship again when he should give the word. "Oh, you don't want to be scared of her name; her name's all right. She's the Etna."

Somebody laughed, and Tom Mowbray gave him an approving glance; the others interchanged looks. The Etna had a reputation familiar to seamen and a nickname too; they called her the "Hell-packet." Of all the tall and beautiful ships which maintained their smartness and their beauty upon the agony of wronged and driven seamen, the Etna was the most terrible, a blue-water penitentiary, a floating place of torment. To enhance the strange terror of her, the bitter devil who was her captain carried his wife on board; the daily brutalities that made her infamous went on under the eyes and within the hearing of a woman; it added a touch of the grotesque to what was otherwise fearful enough.

Tom Mowbray stood enjoying the dumb consternation of his victims.

"Well, who's for it?" he inquired. "Ain't there none of you that wants a good ship like that Noo York an' back here, an' eighteen dollars a month? Well, I s'pose I'll have to take my pick of yer."

They knew he had proposed the matter to them only in mockery of their helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee, with his pipe in his mouth, spoke with assurance.

"I'm not goin' aboard of her," he said.

Tom Mowbray's heavy brows lowered a little; he surveyed the speaker. It was a young man, sitting remote from the windows, whose face, in the shadows of the big, bare room, showed yet a briskness of coloring. His name Tom remembered it with an effort was Goodwin, Daniel Goodwin; he had been paid off from a "limejuicer" little more than a week before.

"Oh, you're not goin' aboard of her?" he queried slowly.

"No," answered the young man calmly. "I'm not."

It was defiance, it was insult; but Tom Mowbray could stand that. He smoothed out his countenance, watching while the young man's neighbor on the bench nudged him warningly.

"Well, I gotta find a crowd for her," he said in tones of resignation. "I dunno how I'm goin' to do it, though."

He sighed, the burlesque sigh of a fat man pitying himself, and passed through the room to the door at the far end. Not till it had closed behind him did talk resume. A man who had been three weeks ashore leant back against the wall and let his breath escape in a sigh, which was not burlesque. For him there was no hope; he was as much doomed as if a judge had pronounced sentence on him.

"Oh, hell!" he said. "Wonder if he'll let me have a dollar to get a drink 'fore I go aboard of her?"

The others turned their eyes on him curiously; whatever happened to them, he was a man who would sail in the Etna; already he was isolated and tragic.

The neighbor who had nudged young Goodwin nudged him again.

"Come out," he breathed into the ear that the young man bent towards him. "Come out; I want to speak t' ye."

In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently.

"Say, ain't ye got no sense?" he demanded. "Talkin' like that to Tom Mowbray! Don't ye know that's the way to fix him to ship ye aboard the 'Hell-packet?'"

"He can't ship me aboard any 'Hell-packet,'" answered Goodwin serenely. "When I ship, I ship myself, an' I pay my board in cash. There ain't any advance note to be got out o' me."

The other halted and drew Goodwin to halt, facing him at the edge of the sidewalk, where a beetle-browed saloon projected its awning above them. Like Goodwin, he was young and brown; but unlike Goodwin there was a touch of sophistication, of daunting experience, in the seriousness of his face. The two had met and chummed after the fashion of sailors, who make and lose their friends as the hazard of the hour directs.

"You don't know Tom Mowbray," he said in a kind of affectionate contempt. "He's, he's a swine an' he's cute! Didn't you hear about him shippin' a corpse aboard o' the Susquehanna, an' drawin' three months' advance for it? Why, you ain't got a show with him if he's got a down on ye."

Goodwin smiled. "Maybe I don't know Tom Mowbray," he said; "but it's a sure thing Tom Mowbray don't know me. Come on an' have a drink, Jim. This thing of the Etna it's settled. Come on!"

He led the way into the saloon beside them; Jim, growling warningly, followed him.

At twenty-six, it was Goodwin's age, one should be very much a man. One's moustache is confirmed in its place; one has the stature and muscle of a man, a man's tenacity and resistance, while the heart of boyishness still pulses in one's body. It is the age at which capacity is the ally of impulse, when heart and hand go paired in a perfect fraternity. One is as sure of oneself as a woman of thirty, and with as much and as little reason. Goodwin, when he announced that he, at any rate, would not be one of the crew of the Etna, spoke out of a serene confidence in himself. He knew himself for a fine seaman and a reasonably fine human being; he had not squandered his wages, and he did not mean to be robbed of his earnings when he shipped himself again. It was his first visit to San Francisco; the ports he knew were not dangerous to a man who took care of himself, who was not a drunkard, and would fight at need. He showed as something under six feet tall, long in the limb and moving handily, with eyes of an angry blue in a face tanned russet by wind and sun.

In the saloon he laughed down Jim's instances of Tom Mowbray's treachery and cunning, lounging with an elbow on the bar, careless and confident under the skeptical eyes of the white-jacketed barman.

"I reckon Tom Mowbray knows when he's safe," he said. "Why, if he was to do any o' them things to me I'd get him if I had to dig for him. Yes, sir!"

From thence the course of events ran as anyone familiar with the Barbary Coast might have prophesied. They returned to the boarding-house for supper and joined their fellows at the long table in the back room, and were waited on by Tom Mowbray's "runners." Mowbray himself, with his scared, lean wife and his wife's crippled brother, had a table apart from the men; as he ate he entertained himself by baiting the unhappy cripple, till the broken man stammered tearfully across the table at him, shaking and grimacing in a nervous frenzy, which Tom Mowbray always found comical. The woman between them sat with her eyes downcast and her face bitter and still; they made a picture of domesticity at which the sailors stared in a fascination of perplexity, while the hard-faced "runners" in their shirt-sleeves carried the plates to and from the kitchen, and the ritual of the evening meal proceeded to its finish.

If there was in Goodwin a quality more salient than his youthful force and his trust in his own capacity, it was the manner he had of seeing absorbedly the men and things that presented themselves to his eyes, so that even in dull and trivial matters he gathered strong impressions and vivid memories. The three people at the little table made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his cup with coffee winked across his head to one of the others as though in mirth at his abstraction.

In the ordinary way he would have gone for a walk up-town with his friend after supper; but he was not in a mood for company that evening and found himself sleepy besides. He went upstairs to the bedroom he shared with two other men to get some tobacco he had there, and discovered in himself so strong an inclination to slumber that he decided to go to bed forthwith. He lit his pipe and sat down on his bed to take his boots off. He had one boot unlaced but still on his foot when his pipe dropped from his lips. Across his drugged and failing brain there flickered for an instant the blurred shape of a suspicion.

"What's the matter with me?" he half cried; and tried to rise to his feet.

He knew he had failed to stand up and had fallen back on the bed. With his last faculties he resisted the tides of darkness that rushed in upon him; then his grasp upon consciousness loosened and his face, which had been knitted in effort, relaxed. When half an hour later Tom Mowbray and two of his "runners" came to find him, he lay, scarcely breathing, in the appearance of a profound and natural sleep.

It was thirty-six hours later when a vague consciousness of pain, growing upon his poisoned nerves, sharpened to a climax, and he opened his eyes, lying where he found himself without moving. It took him some minutes before he brought his mind into co-ordination with his senses to realize what he saw. Then it was plain to him that he was lying upon the bare slats of a bunk in the narrow forecastle of a ship. Its door, hooked open, made visible a slice of sunlit deck and a wooden rail beyond it, from which the gear of the foremast slanted up. Within the forecastle only three of the bunks contained mattresses and blankets, and there was no heave and sway under him to betoken a ship under sail in a seaway.

Slowly the sailor within him asserted itself. "This hooker's at anchor!"

By degrees he began to account for himself. Recollection returned: he had waked in a bare and bedless bunk, but it was at Tom Mowbray's he had fallen asleep. He remembered going up to his room and the sleepiness that had pressed itself upon him there. And there was a thought, a doubt, that had been with him at the last. It eluded him for a moment; then he remembered and sat up, in an access of vigor and anger as he recalled it.

"Knock-out drops," he said. "Yes, by God! Tom Mowbray's shanghaied me!"

His head ached, his skin and his mouth were parched as if by a fever. Stiffly he swung himself over the edge of his bunk and went on feet that were numb and uncertain through the door to the deck. He was sore all over from lying on the bare slats of the bunk, and the dregs of the drug still clogged his mind and muscles; but like the flame in a foul lantern there burned in him the fires of anger.

"Shanghaied!" he repeated as he reeled to the rail and caught at a backstay to steady himself. "Well, the man that did it wants to hide when I get ashore again."

He cast his eyes aft over the ship on which he found himself, summing her up with an automatic expertness. An American ship, it was plain, and a three-skysail-yarder at that, with a magnificent stature and spread of spars. Abeam of her San Francisco basked along its shore; she was at an anchor well out in the bay. What ship was it that he had viewed from a dock-head lying just there? The answer was on his lips even before his eyes discovered the boat she carried on top of the fo'c'sle, with her name lettered upon it. Tom Mowbray had proved his power by shanghaiing him aboard the Etna!

He said nothing: the situation was beyond mere oaths, but wrath surged in him like a flood.

Around the for'ard house, walking with measured steps, came Mr. Fant, the mate of the Etna, and accosted him.

"Sobered up, have ye?" said Mr. Fant.

"Yes, sir," said Goodwin.

"That's right," said Mr. Fant, smiling, surveying him with an appearance of gentle interest. "Knock-out drops?" he inquired.

"Yes, sir," answered Goodwin again, watching him.

"Ah!" Mr. Fant shook his head. "Well, you're all right now," he said. "Stick yer head in a bucket an' ye'll be ready to turn to."

Mr. Fant had his share in the fame of the Etna; he was a part of her character. Goodwin, though his mind still moved slowly, eyed him intently, gauging the man's strange and masked quality, probing the mildness of his address for the thing it veiled. He saw the mate of the Etna as a spare man of middle-age, who would have been tall but for the stoop of his shoulders. His shaven face was constricted primly; he had the mouth of an old maid, and stood slack-bodied with his hands sunk in the pockets of his jacket. Only the tightness of his clothes across his chest and something sure and restrained in his gait as he walked hinted of the iron thews that governed his lean body; and, while he spoke in the accents of an easy civility, his stony eyes looked on Goodwin with an unblinking and remorseless aloofness. It was not hard to imagine him, when the Etna, with her crew seduced or drugged to man her, should be clear of soundings and the business of the voyage put in shape, when every watch on deck would be a quaking ordeal of fear and pain, and every watch below an interval for mere despair.

The vision of it made Goodwin desperate.

"I haven't signed on, sir," he protested. "I've been shanghaied here. This ain't."

He paused under the daunting compulsion of Mr. Fant's eye.

"You've signed on all right," said Mr. Fant. "Your name's John Smith an' you signed on yesterday. You don't want to make any mistake about that, Smith."

He spoke as mildly as ever and yet was menacing and terrible. But Goodwin was insistent.

"My name's Goodwin," he persisted. "Tom Mowbray drugged me and shoved me on board. I want to go ashore."

Mr. Fant turned to go aft. "You get yer head into a bucket," he counselled. "Hurry up, now. There's work waitin' to be done."

"I won't!" shouted Goodwin.

"Eh!" Mr. Fant's voice was still mild as he uttered the exclamation, but before Goodwin could repeat himself he had moved. As if some spring in him had been released from tension, the mild and prim Mr. Fant whirled on his heel, and a fist took Goodwin on the edge of the jaw and sent him gasping and clucking on to his back; while, with the precision of a movement rehearsed and practiced, Mr. Fant's booted foot swung forward and kicked him into the scuppers. He lay there on his back, looking up in an extremity of terror and astonishment at the unmoved face of the mate.

"Get up, Smith," commanded Mr. Fant. Goodwin obeyed, scarcely conscious of the pain in his face and flank in the urgency of the moment. "Now you get the bucket, same as I told you, and when you've freshened yourself come aft an' I'll start you on a job. See?"

"Aye, aye, sir," responded Goodwin mechanically, and started for-ard. The Etna had absorbed him into her system; he was initiated already to his role of a driven beast; but tenacious as an altar fire there glowed yet within him the warmth of his anger against Tom Mowbray. It was secret, beyond the reach of Mr. Fant's fist; the fist was only another item in Tom Mowbray's debt.

From his place on the crossjack-yard, to which Mr. Fant sent him, Goodwin had presently a view of the captain's wife. She came to the poop from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills, dwarfed by the distance. It was when she turned to go down again that Goodwin had a full view of her face, bleak and rigid, with greying hair drawn tightly back from the temples, as formal and blank as the face of a clock. It was told of her that she would sit knitting in her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a miserable man was being trodden and beaten out of the likeness of humanity and never lift her head nor shift her attitude for all his cries and struggles. It was her presence aboard that touched the man-slaughtering Etna with her quality of the macabre.

"But she won't see me broken up," swore Goodwin to himself as her head vanished in the hood of the companion. "No not if I've got to set the damn ship alight!"

He made the acquaintance, when work was over for the day, of his fellows in ill-fortune, the owners of the three occupied bunks in the forecastle. As if the Etna had laid herself out to starve him of every means of comfort, they proved to be "Dutchmen" that is to say, Teutons of one nationality or another and therefore, by sea-canons, his inferiors, incapable of sharing his feelings and not to be trusted with his purpose. One question, however, they were able to answer satisfactorily. It had occurred to him that since even Tom Mowbray could only get men for the Etna by drugging them, her officers would probably take special precautions to guard against desertion.

"Do they lock us in here at night?" he asked of the three of them when they sat at supper in the port fo'c'sle.

They stared at him uncomprehendingly. For them, helots of the sea, the Etna's terrors were nothing out of the way; all ships used them harshly; life itself was harsh enough. Their bland blond faces were stupid and amiable.

"Log us in!" answered one of them. "No! For what shall they log us in?"

"That's all right, then," said Goodwin and let them continue to stare at him, ruminating his reasons for the question.

There was a fourth "Dutchman" who slumbered through the day in the starboard fo'c'sle and sat all night in the galley, in the exercise of his functions as night-watchman. His lamp shed a path of light from the galley door to the rail when, his fellows in the fo'c'sle being, audibly asleep, Goodwin rose from his bunk and came forth to the deck. Far away, across the level waters of the great bay, the lights of the city made an illumination against the background of the night; overhead there was a sky bold with stars; the Etna floated mute in a rustle of moving waters. There were no ships near her; only now and again a towboat racing up from the Golden Gates went by with the noise of a breaking wave on a steep shore. In the break of the poop there showed the light of Mr. Fant's window, where he lay in his bunk, relaxing his grisly official personality with a book and a cigar.