Part 7

"I don't sleep very well, cap; so I decided to keep this bit of sinful splendor for my own use. Bathroom, you see." He opened a tiny door near the bed and showed the compact room, with its white bath-tub let into the floor. This was too much for the German officer.

"Where do you keep your confidential papers?" he bellowed, leveling a revolver at the maddeningly complacent American, while three of his men closed up behind him, ready for action.

"Better not shoot, admiral, for you won't find them without my help; and I'm going to hand you the goods in half a minute. I can't quite remember where I put them. There's some confidential stuff in here, I think."

He unlocked a drawer and pulled out a bundle of papers. A small white object dropped from the bundle and lay on the floor between him and the German. It was a baby's shoe. Hudson nodded at it as he looked through the papers.

"Got any kids, cap? That came from Queenstown. Ah, this looks like your chart. No. Came from Queenstown, I say. It was a little girl belonging to a friend of mine in the City of Brotherly Love. Lots of 'em on the _Lusitania_, you know. We collect souvenirs in America, and I asked him for this as a keepsake when I came on this gunning expedition. He kept the other for himself. She was a pretty little thing. Only six! Used to call me Uncle Jack."

He stole a look through the porthole and drew another document from the drawer.

"Ah! Now I remember. Here's the stuff you want--some of it, anyhow. Tied round with yaller ribbon. Take it, cap. I wish I hadn't seen that little shoe; but you've got the drop on me this time and I suppose it's my duty to save the lives of the men. There's a good bit of information there about the mine fields."

The German hurriedly examined the papers, while Hudson hummed to himself as he stared through the porthole:

_Around her little neck she wore a yaller ribbon; She wore it in December and the merry month of May. And when, oh, when they asked her why in hell she wore it, She said she loved a sailor, a sailor, a sailor; But he was wrecked and drownded in Mississippi Bay._

"This is very good," said the German, "and very useful. I think we shall not require more of you; though it will be necessary to destroy your ship and make you prisoners."

"Why, certainly! I didn't suppose you could keep your contract in war-time. You can't leave traces of a deal like this. But while you're about it, you may as well have all the confidential stuff."

"Good! Good!" said the German, strutting toward him. "So there's more to come! I am glad you see the advantage in being too proud to fight, my friend, eh?"

Matthew Hudson's eye twinkled. His slouch began to slip away from him like a loose coat, leaving once more the quiet upstanding member of the Century Club.

"Of course," he said, "you would make that mistake. The British made it. They forgot that it was said about Mexico, at a time when you wanted us to be kept busy down there. There are times, also, when for diplomatic reasons it is necessary to talk." He had resumed his natural voice. "When you are getting ready, for instance. This is where we keep the real stuff."

He crossed the cabin; and the German watched him closely with a puzzled expression, covering him with his revolver.

"No treachery!" he said. "What does this mean? You are not the man you were pretending to be."

Hudson laughed, and tossed him a little scrap of bunting, which he had been holding crumpled up in his hand.

"Ever seen that flag before?" he said.

The German stared at it, his eyes growing round with amazement.

"The Kaiser's flag has flown on this yacht at the Kiel Regatta many a time," said Hudson. "His Majesty used to come and lunch with me. I don't advise you to shoot me. He might remember some of my cigars. He gave me that flag himself. Of course I shan't use it again--not till it's been sprinkled with holy water. But I thought you might like a brief exhibition of shirt-sleeve navalism, as I suppose you'd call it.

"Most Europeans like us to live up to their ideas of us. The British do. Ever hear of Senator Martin? Whenever he's in London and goes to see his friends in the House of Commons, he wears a sombrero and a red cowboy shirt. He says they expect it and like it. He wouldn't care to do it in New York. As a fact, you know, we invented the electric telegraph and the submarine, and a lot of little things that you fellows have been stealing from us. Do you hear that?"

There were two sharp clicks in the bows, followed by a faint sound like the whirring of an electric fan under water; and Hudson pulled open the door that led into the fore part of the ship.

"_Gott! Gott!_" cried the German, and his men echoed it inarticulately; for there, in the semidarkness of the bows of the _Morning Glory_, they saw the dim shapes of seamen crouching beside two gleaming torpedo tubes. The torpedoes had just been discharged.

"You're too late to save your ship," said Matthew Hudson. "If you want to save your own skins you'd better keep still and listen for a moment."

Then came a concussion that rocked the _Morning Glory_ like a child's cradle and sent her German visitors lurching and sprawling round the brass bedstead. When they recovered they found a dozen revolvers gleaming in front of their noses.

"Before we say anything more about this," said Hudson, "let's go on deck and look.

"Do you mind giving me that little shoe at your feet there?"

The officer turned a shade whiter than the shoe.

Then, stooping, he picked it up and handed it to Hudson, who thrust it into his breast pocket.

"Thank you!" he said. "Now if you will all leave your guns on this bed we'll go on deck and see the traces."

When they reached the deck there was something that looked like an enormous drowning cockroach trying to crawl out of the water four hundred yards away. Round it there seemed to be a mass of drowning flies.

"It's not a pleasant sight, is it?" said Hudson. "But it's good to know they were all fighting men, ready to kill or be killed. No women and children among them! The _Lusitania_ must have looked much worse."

"My brother is on board! Are you not trying to save them?" gasped the officer.

Hudson took out the little shoe again and looked at it. Then he turned to the German boat's crew, where they huddled, sick with fear, amidships.

"Take your boat and pick up as many as you can," he said.

"It is not safe--not till she sinks," a guttural voice replied.

Almost on the word the cruiser went down with a rush. The sleek waters and the white mists closed above her, while the _Morning Glory_ rocked again like a child's cradle.

"That is true," said Matthew Hudson to the shivering figure beside him. "And we've got as many as we can handle on the ship. If we took more of you aboard, according to the laws laid down in your text-books, you'd cut our throats and call us idiotic Yankees for trusting you.

"Please don't weep. We sent out a call a minute ago for the _Betsey Barton_ and the _Dusty Miller_ and the _Christmas Day_. I'm not an effete humanitarian myself; but the men on these trawlers aren't bad sorts. I hope they'll pick up your brother."

V

THE _LUSITANIA_ WAITS

On a stormy winter's night three skippers--averaging three score years and five--were discussing the news, around a roaring fire, in the parlor of the White Horse Inn. Five years ago they had retired, each on a snug nest-egg. They were looking forward to a mellow old age in port and a long succession of evenings at the White Horse, where they gathered to debate the politics of their district. The war had given them new topics; but Captain John Kendrick--who had become a parish councilor and sometimes carried bulky blue documents in his breast-pocket, displaying the edges with careful pride--still kept the local pot a-boiling. He was mainly successful on Saturday nights, when the _Gazette_, their weekly newspaper, appeared. It was edited by a Scot named Macpherson, who had learned his job on the _Arbroath Free Press_.

"Macpherson will never be on the council now," said Captain Kendrick. "There's a rumor that he's a freethinker. He says that Christianity has been proved a failure by the war."

"Well, these chaps of ours now," said Captain Davidson, "out at sea on a night like this, trying to kill Germans. It's necessary, I know, because the Germans would kill our own folks if we gave 'em a chance. But don't it prove that there's no use for Christianity? In modern civilization, I mean."

"Macpherson's no freethinker," said Captain Morgan, who was a friend of the editor, and inclined on the strength of it to occupy the intellectual chair at the White Horse. "Macpherson says we'll have to try again after the war, or it will be blood and iron all round."

"He's upset by the war," said Captain Davidson, "and he's taken to writing poytry in his paper. He'd best be careful or he'll lose his circulation."

"Ah!" said Kendrick. "That's what 'ull finish him for the council. What we want is practical men. Poytry would destroy any man's reputation. There was a great deal of talk caused by his last one, about our trawler chaps. 'Fishers of Men,' he called it; and I'm not sure that it wouldn't be considered blasphemious by a good many."

Captain Morgan shook his head. "Every Sunday evening," he said, "my missus asks me to read her Macpherson's pome in the _Gazette_, and I've come to enjoy them myself. Now, what does he say in 'Fishers of Men'?"

"Read it," said Kendrick, picking the _Gazette_ from the litter of newspapers on the table and handing it to Morgan. "If you know how to read poytry, read it aloud, the way you do to your missus. I can't make head or tail of poytry myself; but it looks blasphemious to me."

Captain Morgan wiped his big spectacles while the other two settled themselves to listen critically. Then he began in his best Sunday voice, very slowly, but by no means unimpressively:

_Long, long ago He said, He who could wake the dead, And walk upon the sea-- "Come, follow Me._

"_Leave your brown nets and bring Only your hearts to sing, Only your souls to pray, Rise, come away._

"_Shake out your spirit-sails, And brave those wilder gales, And I will make you then Fishers of men._"

_Was this, then, what He meant? Was this His high intent, After two thousand years Of blood and tears?_

_God help us, if we fight For right and not for might. God help us if we seek To shield the weak._

_Then, though His heaven be far From this blind welter of war, He'll bless us on the sea From Calvary._

"It seems to rhyme all right," said Kendrick. "It's not so bad for Macpherson."

"Have you heard," said Davidson reflectively, "they're wanting more trawler skippers down at the base?"

"I've been fifty years, man and boy, at sea," said Captain Morgan; "that's half a century, mind you."

"Ah, it's hard on the women, too," said Davidson. "We're never sure what boats have been lost till we see the women crying. I don't know how they get the men to do it."

Captain John Kendrick stabbed viciously with his forefinger at a picture in an illustrated paper.

"Here's a wicked thing now," he said. "Here's a medal they've struck in Germany to commemorate the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Here's a photograph of both sides of it. On one side, you see the great ship sinking, loaded up with munitions which wasn't there; but not a sign of the women and children that was there. On the other side you see the passengers taking their tickets from Death in the New York booking office. Now that's a fearful thing. I can understand 'em making a mistake, but I can't understand 'em wanting to strike a medal for it."

"Not much mistake about the _Lusitania_," growled Captain Davidson.

"No, indeed. That was only my argyment," replied the councilor. "They're a treacherous lot. It was a fearful thing to do a deed like that. My son's in the Cunard; and, man alive, he tells me it's like sinking a big London hotel. There was ladies in evening dress, and dancing in the big saloons every night; and lifts to take you from one deck to another; and shops with plate-glass windows, and smoking-rooms; and glass around the promenade deck, so that the little children could play there in bad weather, and the ladies lay in their deck-chairs and sun themselves like peaches. There wasn't a soldier aboard, and some of the women was bringing their babies to see their Canadian daddies in England for the first time. Why, man, it was like sinking a nursing home!"

"Do you suppose, Captain Kendrick, that they ever caught that submarine?" asked Captain Morgan. They were old friends, but always punctilious about their titles.

"Ah, now I'll tell you something! Hear that?"

The three old men listened. Through the gusts of wind that battered the White Horse they heard the sound of heavy floundering footsteps passing down the cobbled street, and a hoarse broken voice bellowing, with uncanny abandonment, a fragment of a hymn:

"_While shepherds watched their flocks by night, All seated on the ground._"

"That's poor old Jim Hunt," said Captain Morgan. He rose and drew the thick red curtains from the window to peer out into the blackness.

"Turn the lamp down," said the councilor, "or we'll be arrested under the anti-aircraft laws."

Davidson turned the lamp down and they all looked out of the window. They saw the figure of a man, black against the glimmering water of the harbor below. He walked with a curious floundering gait that might be mistaken for the effects of drink. He waved his arms over his head like a windmill and bellowed his hymn as he went, though the words were now indistinguishable from the tumult of wind and sea.

Captain Morgan drew the curtains, and the three sat down again by the fire without turning up the lamp. The firelight played on the furrowed and bronzed old faces and revealed them as worthy models for a Rembrandt.

"Poor old Jimmy Hunt!" said Captain Kendrick. "You never know how craziness is going to take people. Jimmy was a terror for women and the drink, till he was taken off the _Albatross_ by that German submarine. They cracked him over the head with an iron bolt, down at the bottom of the sea, because he wouldn't answer no questions. He hasn't touched a drop since. All he does is to walk about in bad weather, singing hymns against the wind. But there's more in it than that."

Captain Kendrick lighted his pipe thoughtfully. The wind rattled the windows. Outside, the sign-board creaked and whined as it swung.

"A man like Jim Hunt doesn't go crazy," he continued, "through spending a night in a 'U' boat, and then floating about for a bit. Jimmy won't talk about it now; won't do nothing but sing that blasted hymn; but this is what he said to me when they first brought him ashore. They said he was raving mad, on account of his experiences. But that don't explain what his experiences _were_. Follow me? And this is what he said. '_I been down_,' he says, half singing like. '_I been down, down, in the bloody submarine that sank the Lusitania. And what's more_,' he says,'_I seen 'em!_'

"'Seen what?' I says, humoring him like, and I gave him a cigarette. We were sitting close together in his mother's kitchen. 'Ah!' he says, calming down a little, and speaking right into my ear, as if it was a secret. 'It was Christmas Eve the time they took me down. We could hear 'em singing carols on shore; and the captain didn't like it, so he blew a whistle, and the Germans jumped to close the hatchways; and we went down, down, down, to the bottom of the sea.

"'I saw the whole ship,' he says; and he described it to me, so that I knew he wasn't raving then. 'There was only just room to stand upright,' he says, 'and overhead there was a track for the torpedo carrier. The crew slept in hammocks and berths along the wall; but there wasn't room for more than half to sleep at the same time. They took me through a little foot-hole, with an air-tight door, into a cabin.

"'The captain seemed kind of excited and showed me the medal he got for sinking the _Lusitania_; and I asked him if the Kaiser gave it to him for a Christmas present. That was when he and another officer seemed to go mad; and the officer gave me a blow on the head with a piece of iron.

"'They say I'm crazy,' he says, 'but it was the men on the "U" boat that went crazy. I was lying where I fell, with the blood running down my face, but I was watching them,' he says, 'and I saw them start and listen like trapped weasels. At first I thought the trawlers had got 'em in a net. Then I heard a funny little tapping sound all round the hull of the submarine, like little soft hands it was, tapping, tapping, tapping.

"'The captain went white as a ghost, and shouted out something in German, like as if he was calling "Who's there?" and the mate clapped his hand over his mouth, and they both stood staring at one another.

"'Then there was a sound like a thin little voice, outside the ship, mark you, and sixty fathom deep, saying, "_Christmas Eve, the Waits, sir!_" The captain tore the mate's hand away and shouted again, like he was asking "_Who's there!_" and wild to get an answer, too. Then, very thin and clear, the little voice came a second time, "_The Waits, sir. The Lusitania, ladies!_" And at that the captain struck the mate in the face with his clenched fist. He had the medal in it still between his fingers, using it like a knuckle-duster. Then he called to the men like a madman, all in German, but I knew he was telling 'em to rise to the surface, by the way they were trying to obey him.

"'The submarine never budged for all that they could do; and while they were running up and down and squealing out to one another, there was a kind of low sweet sound all round the hull, like a thousand voices all singing together in the sea:

"_Fear not, said he, for mighty dread Had seized their troubled mind. Glad tidings of great joy I bring To you and all mankind._"

"'Then the tapping began again, but it was much louder now; and it seemed as if hundreds of drowned hands were feeling the hull and loosening bolts and pulling at hatchways; and--all at once--a trickle of water came splashing down into the cabin. The captain dropped his medal. It rolled up to my hand and I saw there was blood on it. He screamed at the men, and they pulled out their life-saving apparatus, a kind of air-tank which they strapped on their backs, with tubes to rubber masks for clapping over their mouths and noses. I watched 'em doing it, and managed to do the same. They were too busy to take any notice of me. Then they pulled a lever and tumbled out through a hole, and I followed 'em blindly. Something grabbed me when I got outside and held me for a minute. Then I saw 'em, Captain Kendrick, I saw 'em, hundreds and hundreds of 'em, in a shiny light, and sixty fathom down under the dark sea--they were all waiting there, men and women and poor little babies with hair like sunshine....

"'And the men were smiling at the Germans in a friendly way, and unstrapping the air-tanks from their backs, and saying, "Won't you come and join us? It's Christmas Eve, you know."

"'Then whatever it was that held me let me go, and I shot up and knew nothing till I found myself in Jack Simmonds's drifter, and they told me I was crazy.'"

Captain Kendrick filled his pipe. A great gust struck the old inn again and again till all the timbers trembled. The floundering step passed once more, and the hoarse voice bellowed away in the darkness against the bellowing sea:

_A Savior which is Christ the Lord, And this shall be the sign._

Captain Davidson was the first to speak.

"Poor old Jim Hunt!" he said. "There's not much Christ about any of this war."

"I'm not so sure of that neither," said Captain Morgan. "Macpherson said a striking thing to me the other day. 'Seems to me,' he says, 'there's a good many nowadays that are touching the iron nails.'"

He rose and drew the curtains from the window again.

"The sea's rattling hollow," he said; "there'll be rain before morning."

"Well, I must be going," said Captain Davidson. "I want to see the naval secretary down at the base."

"About what?"

"Why, I'm not too old for a trawler, am I?"

"My missus won't like it, but I'll come with you," said Captain Morgan; and they went through the door together, lowering their heads against the wind.

"Hold on! I'm coming, too," said Captain Kendrick; and he followed them, buttoning up his coat.

VI

THE LOG OF THE _EVENING STAR_

We were sitting in the porch of a low white bungalow with masses of purple bougainvillea embowering its eaves. A ruby-throated humming-bird, with green wings, flickered around it. The tall palms and the sea were whispering together. Over the water, the West was beginning to fill with that Californian sunset which is the most mysterious in the world, for one is conscious that it is the fringe of what Europeans call the East, and that, looking westward across the Pacific, our faces are turned towards the dusky myriads of Asia. All along the Californian coast there is a tang of incense in the air, as befits that silent orchard of the gods where dawn and sunset meet and intermingle; and, though it is probably caused by some gardener, burning the dead leaves of the eucalyptus trees, one might well believe that one breathed the scent of the joss-sticks, wafted across the Pacific, from the land of paper lanterns.

A Japanese servant, in a white duck suit, marched like a ghostly little soldier across the lawn. The great hills behind us quietly turned to amethysts. The lights of Los Angeles ten miles away to the north began to spring out like stars in that amazing air beloved of the astronomer; and the evening star itself, over the huge slow breakers crumbling into lilac-colored foam, looked bright enough to be a companion of the city lights.

"I should like to show you the log of the _Evening Star_," said my visitor, who was none other than Moreton Fitch, president of the insurance company of San Francisco. "I think it may interest you as evidence that our business is not without its touches of romance. I don't mean what you mean," he added cheerfully, as I looked up smiling. "The _Evening Star_ was a schooner running between San Francisco and Tahiti and various other places in the South Seas. She was insured in our company. One April, she was reported overdue. After a search had been made, she was posted as lost in the maritime exchanges. There was no clue to what had happened, and we paid the insurance money, believing that she had foundered with all hands.

"Two months later, we got word from Tahiti that the _Evening Star_ had been found drifting about in a dead calm, with all sails set, but not a soul aboard. Everything was in perfect order, except that the ship's cat was lying dead in the bows, baked to a bit of sea-weed by the sun. Otherwise, there wasn't the slightest trace of any trouble. The tables below were laid for a meal and there was plenty of water aboard."

"Were any of the boats missing?"

"No. She carried only three boats and all were there. When she was discovered, two of the boats were on deck as usual; and the third was towing astern. None of the men has been heard of from that day to this. The amazing part of it was not only the absence of anything that would account for the disappearance of the crew, but the clear evidence that they had been intending to stay, in the fact that the tables were laid for a meal, and then abandoned. Besides, where had they gone, and how? There are no magic carpets, even in the South Seas.