there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half
a dozen in the whole blessed ship--yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the
time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their
faces--a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he
hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to
anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew.
Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him.
And he needed it before the end!...

At last--at long last--came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds
upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary,
indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!

Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired--dog-tired; that his
wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of
uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids
like lead.

But he had won--he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”!
Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never
rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.

There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came
back out of the grey dawn.

“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”

A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of
familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s”
donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and
being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!

Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a
spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.

“A steamer--a Dago--rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine
sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”

He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:

“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”

Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he
could afford it.

ORANGES

The clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The
gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for
ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away
ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs
which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding
of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to
give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm.

She lay there as still as if she were at anchor. Her sails drooped
against the masts with no more movement than banners slowly dropping to
silent dust in the nave of some great cathedral. Their shadows on the
white deck were clearly defined as shapes cut out of black paper. There
was no sound aloft, not so much as the churring of a rope stirring in
its sheave: only a faint creak by whiles, as the ship lifted
imperceptibly on the long, low swing of the ocean.

A light haze hung over the outlines of the islands and over the horizon
beyond, so that it was impossible to define where sea ended and sky
began. A couple of fruit schooners about half a mile distant hovered
above their own motionless reflections, like butterflies poised above
flowers. So complete was the calm that even they could not catch a
breath sufficient to keep them moving. They looked almost as if they
were suspended in some new element, neither water nor air, yet
partaking of the character of both.

Old “Sails” sat on the forehatch, spectacles on nose, stitching busily
away at the bolt-rope of a royal which had come out second best from an
argument with the stormy westerlies. A tall, thin, old man, he looked as
he sat there with his shanks folded under him like one of those
long-legged crabs the Cornish folk call “Gramfer Jenkins.” He had a
short, white beard stained with chewing tobacco, and as he worked his
jaws moved rhythmically in time with the movements of his active needle.

A boat had pulled out from the nearest island with baskets of fruit, and
its owner, a swarthy negroid Portuguese with a bright handkerchief bound
pirate-wise about his frizzy hair, was driving bargains with the men of
the watch below amid much rough banter and chaff. The men laughed,
called, shouted to one another, threw the fruit from hand to hand, eager
as children.

From the main deck came the steady slish-scrape of holystones; the mate
had taken advantage of the opportunity the calm offered of bringing the
“Parisina’s” already bone-white planking nearer to that unattainable
perfection of immaculate cleanliness which only exists in the dreams of
New England housewives and particular-minded mates of sailing vessels.
Mr. Billing, the mate, was an insignificant little man with sandy hair
and a peculiar habit of sniffing to himself like a beetle-hunting
hedgehog. He sniffed now as he hovered with a perpetual fussy
watchfulness among the humped figures of his watch, squatting over their
task like worshipping bronzes. Mr. Billing was of the housewifely type
of mate. A man secretly of little courage and no initiative, he disliked
the “Parisina’s” paces intensely. He was nervous of ships as some
lifelong horsemen are nervous of horses. Calms, on the other hand, with
the consequent time they afforded for ritual scouring and painting of
wood and metal, he delighted in much as a house-proud woman of the
suburbs delights in spring cleaning.

The men growled among themselves, sailor fashion, as they worked. “Gimme
ol’ Stiff afore this ’ere bloody scrubbin’,” said one. “Same ’ere,” said
another. “Why can’t it blow up ag’in, I says? A year an’ a ’arf’s
bloomin’ pay I’ve got comin’ to me at Green’s ’Ome, an’ if it wasn’t for
this ’ere blessed calm I’d be six ’undred mile nearer spendin’ of it by
now.” “Sailorizin’s all right,” grumbled a third. “It’s this ’ere darned
’ouse-maidin’ as gets my goat.”

Up in the “Parisina’s” tiny chart-room Captain Fareweather--he was known
through all the ports of the Southern Hemisphere, for good and
sufficient reasons, as “Old Foul-weather”--carefully wetted his finger,
and with a furrowed brow turned a leaf and prepared to make a fresh
entry in the “Parisina’s” log-book.

Old Foul-weather was not fond of his pen, a fact to which the crabbed
and painful handwriting which filled the preceding pages bore eloquent
testimony. Spelling was an anguish to him; and indeed it is doubtful
whether the hours of endurance and anxiety which the entries in the book
represented were one half as irksome to him as the labour of recording
them. But there were on this occasion other reasons for his look of
depression.

Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It
might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He
lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps,
that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth
living, if she didn’t, it was not. Certainly it was not for those
unfortunate beings who happened to be his shipmates for the time being.

“’Tain’t good reading,” said Old Foul-weather to himself, as he
carefully blotted the new entry--it consisted of one word, “Same”--and
replaced ink and pen.

He traced the lines of the uncongenial record with a stumpy forefinger.

“‘Winds puffey and varible. Ship scarcely moveing.’

“‘Very light airs.’

“‘Dead calm.’

“Wonder where old Jones and his blooming ‘Alcazar’ are,” he reflected.
He sighed and closed the book.

No faintest air entered the stuffy little room. The voices of the men as
they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through
the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink
of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.

Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the
wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely
gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. It was
not always so, for, though the “Parisina,” rightly handled, steered like
a lamb, she needed humouring as much as a horse with a fine mouth. He
was a handsome fellow, swarthy and black-eyed; under the thick growth of
hair on his broad chest showed faintly some tattooed device in red and
blue, a relic of his younger and less hirsute years.

A barefooted apprentice padded up the poop ladder and struck one bell: a
mellow note that hung trembling on the still air, till it quivered away
into silence high up among the sleeping royals. The boy wore a patched
shirt and ragged dungaree trousers, and his arms and legs were burned
black as mahogany by the tropic sun. He was a tall lad, with the lanky
grace of adolescence; a faint down was just showing on his upper lip,
and the sun gleaming upon the growth of fair hair on his arms and chest
made him look as if powdered with gold dust.

Captain Fareweather sighed, put the log-book by, and descended to the
cabin. McAllister, the second mate, a big-boned Aberdonian, perennially
hungry, was already there, with one eye on the hash the steward had just
set before the Old Man’s chair. He composed his features into an
appropriate cast of pious decorum as the captain took his seat and
placed his hand before his eyes for his customary grace. This rite was
silent and lengthy; but Captain Fareweather’s officers knew better than
to betray impatience or inattention while it lasted. Legend said that a
second mate, greatly daring, had once begun to nibble his bread before
the captain had finished, and at once there had come a voice from the
behind the hand, like the voice of Mitche Manitou the Mighty, “Ye
irreverential devil, can’t ye see I’m sayin’ grace?”

It was an uncomfortable meal. The skipper was moody, and McAllister was
horribly nervous in consequence. The few small pebbles of conversation
he cast into the silence fell with an appalling splash which instantly
covered him with scarlet confusion to the tips of his large red ears,
and it was with profound thankfulness that he welcomed the appearance of
the mate with a basket of oranges.

“I thought you’d like a few,” explained Mr. Billing, “for dinner.
They’re good. A bumboat feller brought ’em alongside.”

“Bluid oranges,” exclaimed McAllister. He dug his strong square teeth
into the glistening rind, and the red juice squirted over his bony
knuckles. “They’ve ay the best flavour.”

They seemed to light up the cabin like golden lamps, warm, glowing,
still with the sunlight glory about them. Their fragrance filled the
place, aromatic, pungent, cloying.

“I don’t care for ’em,” said the Captain suddenly. “The smell of
’em--too strong.”

He pushed back his chair as he spoke.

“Stuffy,” he muttered; “glad when we can get way on her again.”

He stumped off up the companion ladder: a square, stocky figure of a
man, short-necked, broad of shoulder. The two mates looked at each other
significantly.

“What bug’s bit the auld deevil now?” said McAllister in a
conspiratorial whisper.

“God knows!” returned Mr. Billing. “He’s always this way when he can’t
be at his cracking on. Old madman!”

“He’s a fine seaman, though,” replied McAllister. “I’ll say that for
him.”

“Fine seaman!” breathed Mr. Billing bitterly. “You wait till he shakes
the sticks out of her one fine night. That’s all.”

Old Foul-weather stood leaning on the poop railing, looking out across
the still expanse of the waters with eyes which did not see the
haze-dimmed islands or the motionless schooners poised above their
reflected selves. Strange--something had stirred in its sleep a little
while since at the sight of those very schooners--something had turned
in its sleep and sighed at the sight of the young apprentice in his
sunburned youth. And just now, with the scent of the oranges, it had
stirred, turned again, sighed again, awakened--the memory of Conchita!

Conchita--why, he hadn’t thought of her for years. He wouldn’t like to
say how many years. He had had plenty of other things to occupy his
mind. Work, for one thing. And ships. Plenty of other women had come
into his life and gone out of it, too, since then. Queer, how things
came back to you; so that they seemed all of a sudden to have happened
no longer ago than yesterday....

He was in just such a schooner as one of those yonder at the time. The
“John and Jane” her name was--a pretty little thing, sailed like a
witch, too. Lost, he had heard, a year or two ago on a voyage over to
Newfoundland with a cargo of salt. It had been his first voyage South.
He had been in nothing but billyboys and Geordie brigs until then. He
had run his last ship in London. The skipper was a hard-mouthed old
ruffian, the mate a trifle worse. Between them the boy Jim had a tough
time of it. Then one day the captain caught him in the act of purloining
the leg of a duck destined for his own dinner; and, pursuing him with a
short length of rope with the amiable intention of flaying hell out of
him, fell head foremost on the top of his own ballast and lay for dead.
He wasn’t dead: far from it. But young Jim thought he was. So he pulled
himself ashore in the dinghy and set off along Wapping High Street with
only the vaguest idea where he was going.

He stuck to the water-side as a hunted fox sticks to cover. The Tower he
passed quickly by: it looked too much like a lock-up, he thought.
Presently he came to a church, and a big clock sticking out over the
roadway; and close by a wharf where schooners were loading, and among
them the “John and Jane.”

He liked the looks of her. She was clean and fresh and sweet-smelling.
And the mate, who was superintending the lowering of some cases into the
hold, had a red, jolly face that took his fancy.

The boy Jim peered down into the hold. It was full almost to the
hatch-coamings. She must be going to sail soon.

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

Young Fareweather stepped forward, his heart thumping.

“Was you wanting a hand, mister?”

The red-faced man looked at him consideringly.

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

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

“Ye can, can ye? Can ye steer.”

“Aye, Ah con that.”

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

“Ah con that.”

The mate roared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mister!”

“Sir?”

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

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

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

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

SEATTLE SAM SIGNS ON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mike, you can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

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?”

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’.”

From Sydney she went over to Newcastle to load coal for Chile, then on
to ’Frisco with nitrates, ’Frisco to Caleta Buena again, over again to
Newcastle, and last of all to Sydney once more to load wool for home.

Sixty miles west of St. Agnes Light the Unlucky “Altisidora” leaned to
the gentle quartering breeze, homeward bound on the last lap of her
three years’ voyage.

Anderton stood on the poop, gazing out into the starry darkness that
held England folded to its heart. Above him sail piled on sail rose up
in the moonlight, like some tall, fantastic shrine wrought in ebony and
silver to an unknown and mysterious god. The water slipped past her
silently as a swimming seal, with a faint delicate hiss like the tearing
of silk as the clipper’s bow cleft it. His mind ran now forward, now
backward, as men’s minds do when they are nearing one of the milestones
of life.

He remembered almost with a pang of regret the heady exultation which
had been his when he stood on this poop alone for the first time,
realizing that something had slipped away from him unnoticed which he
could never hope to recapture this side the grave. Three years is a long
while, especially to the young; but it was not in point of actual time,
but in experience, that so wide and deep a gulf yawned between himself
and the boy who three years since had left these shores he was now
approaching. She had taught him many things, that old ship--more,
perhaps, than he himself knew....

Rumbold wandered up on to the poop and began to tell smutty tales. The
restlessness which always consumed him when the ship was nearing land
was strong on him. Anderton felt a great pity for him. It would be the
old tale, he supposed, as soon as the ship was made fast: this man, who
had it in him to fight a losing game with death with a laugh on his
lips, would become to the casual observer, a lewd, drunken blackguard,
wallowing in the lowest gutters of Sailortown. What would become of him,
he wondered--picturing him dropping steadily lower and lower on the
ladder, driven to take a second mate’s berth, thence dropping to bos’n,
last to seaman--so on until some final pit of degradation should swallow
him up for ever?

The man was in so queer a mood that Anderton hesitated about leaving the
deck to him. But he reflected that he would have little chance of rest
when she was fairly in the Channel, and decided to go down for a stretch
off the land, so as to have his wits about him when they were most
needed.

He did not know how long he had been asleep when he woke with a start.
The ship’s bells were just striking. He counted the strokes--three
double, one single--seven bells. He might as well go on deck now. She
must have made a landfall by now.

An inexplicable premonition had come over him, which he refused to admit
even to himself, that all was not well. He listened: the ship still held
on her course. There was no sound but the restless chirp of a block
somewhere aloft, the creak of a yard moving against the parrals, the
constant “hush-hush” of the waves as they hastened under the keel. He
slipped into his coat and passed out into the saloon.

The lamp over the table was still burning smokily, mingling its light
with the cold grey light of morning, and giving to the scene that air of
desolation which perhaps nothing else can impart so completely. The
place reeked of drink. Under the lamp, sprawling half across the table,
was Rumbold. One whisky bottle lay on the floor, another on the table
beside his hand, from which the last dregs spattered lazily to the
floor.

The swine--the drunken swine! Anderton seized him by the arm and shook
him furiously.

Rumbold lifted his ravaged face from the table and stared at him
stupidly.

“Thish bockle’sh--water o’ knowledge--good’n’ evil,” he said inanely.
“Mush make--inquirations--morramornin’!”

His head dropped on his arms again.

Anderton took the companion in a couple of bounds.

It was like stepping out into wet cotton-wool. The stars were gone. The
sky was gone, but for one pale high blue patch right overhead. The ship
disappeared into the fog forward of the after hatch as completely as if
she had been cut in two. There wasn’t a soul to be seen but the man at
the wheel, a stolid young Finn who would go on steering the course that
had been given him until the skies fell.

Anderton started to run forward, shouting as he went; and his voice,
tossed back at him out of the dimness, hit him in the face like a stone.

The next moment, the ship had struck.

She took the ground, so it seemed at the time, quite gently: with hardly
a jar, hardly a tremor, only with a little delicate contented shiver all
through her graceful being, like someone settling down well pleased to
rest. You might almost fancy that she said to herself:

“There--I have done with it all at last--done with bearing the blame of
your sins and follies, your weakness, your incapacity, your drunkenness,
your indecision. I have been your scapegoat too long. Henceforward, bear
your own burdens!”

And just then the mist rolled off like a curtain. She was right under
the land, in the midst of a great jagged confusion of rocks that reached
out to sea for nearly a quarter of a mile. The wonder was she had not
struck sooner. You could see the pink tufts of thrift clinging to the
cliff face, the streaks of green and yellow lichen on the rock, the thin
line of soil crested with grass at the top. Above, sheep were grazing,
and there came the faint querulous cry of young lambs. A scene to fill a
sailor’s heart with sentimental delight under any conditions but these!

There was nothing to be done. The Unlucky “Altisidora” had paid her last
tribute to the Dark Gods. The ship lay jammed hard and fast on a sunken
reef, and was making water rapidly.

They left the ship at sunset. The skipper took his seat in the boat
without a word or a backward glance; the mate--sobered for once--hung
his head like a beaten dog. The melancholy steward carried the faithful
Ginger in a basket.

“Ain’t been such a bad ol’ gal, ’as she?” That was the gist of the
crew’s valedictions. They set off in single file up the narrow path that
led to the top of the cliff--an oddly incongruous little procession in
that rural setting.

Anderton came last of all. One by one his shipmates topped the crest and
vanished. But still he lingered. He wanted just for a minute to be
alone with this old ship that had come so strangely into his life and
was now to go out of it as strangely.

From where he stood he looked down upon her, lying almost at his feet.
He could see all her decks, the poop, the galley, the forecastle
head--everything that had grown so familiar to him through years of ship
incident and ship routine. How friendly it all looked, now that he was
leaving it! He wondered how he could ever have thought her the agent of
Dark Gods--this patient, lovely, and enduring thing that had done man’s
bidding so long--like him, the instrument of forces beyond her knowing
or his. How good it had all been--how good! The dangers, the hardships,
the toil, the rest, the rough and the smooth of it ... the voices of his
shipmates, the courage and humour of them, their homely faces....

She was part of his life, part of himself, for ever! He would remember
in years to come a hundred little things that now he did not even know
he remembered, yet which lay safely folded away in the treasure-house of
memory, till some chance word, some trick of sun or shade, some smell,
some sound, should bring them to light ... and he would say, “Aye, that
was in the old ‘Altisidora,’” ... and perhaps be silent a little, and be
a little happy and sad together, as men are when they think upon their
youth....

Was that what the old ship had been trying to tell him all the time--the
secret that had fled before him round the world, for ever near, yet for
ever just out of reach, like the many-coloured arch of spray that hung
gleaming before her bows? That the hard things of life were the things
best worth having in the end?... A big green wave that flooded over
you, that took the breath out of you, that went clean over your
head--life was like that. Run away from it and it would sweep you off
your feet, smash you up against things, drown you, very likely, at the
finish.... You had got to hang on to something, no matter what--a job of
work, an idea, anything so long as you could get a grip on it--hang on
like grim death, and the wave would go over you and leave you safe and
sound....

The sky was full of windy plumes of cloud. A long swell had begun to
thunder in from the west, grinding and pounding her with leisurely
irresistible strokes like blows from a giant hammer. The sea, the
breaker of ships, was already at his work of destruction. Soon there
would be a roaring as of a thousand chariots along all the headlands,
and the whole coast would be one thunder and confusion of blown foam.

A call came to him from the cliff-top. It was time to be going--time for
him to leave her! Presently he too topped the crest, and, when he next
looked back, he could see the ship no longer. The Unlucky “Altisidora”
had passed from his sight for ever.

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