TALES OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS

                  [Illustration: THE “MAID OF ATHENS”

  “LIKE SOME LOVELY BUT WILFUL LADY FALLEN AMONG EVIL COMPANIONS” (p. 22)]

                             TALES OF THE
                             CLIPPER SHIPS

                                  BY
                             C. FOX SMITH

                        WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY
                             PHIL W. SMITH

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                                 1926

                       PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

                               CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF ATHENS”                                3

THE END OF AN ARGUMENT                                                71

ORANGES                                                               91

SEATTLE SAM SIGNS ON                                                 107

PADDY DOYLE’S BOOTS                                                  123

THE UNLUCKY “ALTISIDORA”                                             133

     “The End of an Argument” and “Seattle Sam Signs On” have appeared
     in the “Blue Peter,” to whose Editor the customary acknowledgments
     are hereby made.

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID
OF ATHENS”

TALES OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF ATHENS”

Old Thomas Featherstone was dead: he was also buried.

The knot of frowsy females--that strange and ghoulish sisterhood which
frequents such dismal spots as faithfully as dramatic critics the first
nights of theatres--who stood monotonously rocking perambulators on
their back wheels outside the cemetery gates, were unanimously of
opinion that it had been a skinny show. Indeed, Mrs. Wilkins, who was by
way of considering herself what reporters like to call the “doyenne” of
the gathering, said as much by way of consolation to her special crony
Mrs. Pettefer, coming up hot and breathless, five minutes too late for
the afternoon’s entertainment.

“No flars” (thus Mrs. Wilkins), “not one! Not so much as a w’ite
chrysant’! You ’aven’t missed much, me dear, I tell you.”

Mrs. Pettefer, her hand to her heaving bosom, said there was some called
it waste, to be sure, but she did like to see flars ’erself.

“You’d otter’ave seen ’em when they buried the lickle girl yesterday,”
pursued Mrs. Wilkins.

“I _was_ put out, missin’ that, but there, I ’ad to take ar Florence to
the ’orspittle for ’er aneroids,” sighed Mrs. Pettefer, glancing
malevolently at “ar Florence” as if she would gladly have buried her,
without flars, too, by way of paying her out. “I do love a lickle
child’s fruneral.”

“Mask o’ flars, the corfin was,” went on Mrs. Wilkins. “The harum lilies
was lovely. And one big reaf like an ’arp. W’ite ribbinks on the ’orses,
an’ all....”

The connoisseurs in grief dispersed. The driver of the hearse replaced
the black gloves of ceremony by the woollen ones of comfort, for the day
was raw and promised fog later: pulled out a short clay and lit it,
climbed to his box and, whipping up his horses (bays with black
points--“none of your damned prancing Belgians for me,” had been one of
Old Featherstone’s last injunctions), set off at a brisk trot, he to tea
and onions over the stables, they to the pleasant warmth of their stalls
and their waiting oats and hay. Four of old Thomas’s nearest relatives
piled into the first carriage, four more of his remoter kindred into the
second, and the lawyer--Hobbs, Senior, of Hobbs, Keating & Hobbs, of
Chancery Lane--who had lingered behind to settle accounts with the
officiating clergyman, came hurrying down the path between ranks of
tombstones, glimmering pale and ghostly in the greying November
afternoon, to make up a mixed bag in the third and last with Captain
David Broughton, master of the deceased’s ship “Maid of Athens,” and Mr.
Jenkinson, the managing clerk from the office in Billiter Square.

The lawyer was a small, spare man, halting a little from sciatica.
Given a pepper-and-salt coat with wide tails, and a straw in his mouth,
he would have filled the part of a racing tipster to perfection; but in
his sombre funeral array, with his knowing, birdlike way of holding his
head, and his sharp, darting, observant glance, he resembled nothing so
much as a lame starling; and he chattered like a starling, too, as the
carriage rattled away in the wake of the others through the darkening
streets towards the respectable northern suburb where old Featherstone
had lived and died.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,” he said, settling himself in his
place as the coachman slammed the door on the party. “Well, well ...
everything’s passed off very nicely, don’t you think?”

Both Captain Broughton and Mr. Jenkinson, after due consideration,
agreed that “it” had passed off very nicely indeed; though, to be sure,
it would be hard to say precisely what conceivable circumstance might
have occurred to make it do otherwise.

Little Jenkinson sat with his back to the horses. He was the kind of
person who sits with his back to the horses all through life: the kind
of neat, punctual little man to be found in its thousands in the
business offices of the City. He carried, as it were, a perpetual pen
behind his ear. A clerk to his finger-tips--say that of him, and you
have said all; unless perhaps that in private life he was very likely a
bit of a domestic tyrant in some brick box of a semi-detached villa
Tooting or Balham way, who ran his finger along the sideboard every
morning to see if his wife had dusted it properly.

Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the
carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals--that
indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp
horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands,
cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white
split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees.
“Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time,
contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of
half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his
hands into ’em?”

A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once
fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which
suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well.
A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a
safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or
the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause,
and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain
circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become
no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an
uncomfortable one.

“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer;
“depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for
business, though--our business and doctors’ business, what! More people
get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes
to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing
on damp ground. Nothing worse--nothing! And then no hats. That’s where
our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles--eh, Mr. Jenkinson?
If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it?
Ever hear the story about the feller--Spurgeon, was it--or Dr.
Parker--Spurgeon, I think--one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much
matter, really--and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was
preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon--yes, I’m
pretty sure it was Spurgeon--‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I
should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young
Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in _my_
synagogue’--ha ha ha--good, wasn’t it?...

“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little
secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a
body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh,
you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I
came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my
back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron--_you_ know. Hot as
you can bear it. Best thing going--ab-so-lutely....”

He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their
breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.

“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old
gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t
wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton,
don’t you agree?”

Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be
taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really,
whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who
was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if
anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were
feverishly busy with your own thoughts.

“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the
way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The
sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been
thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the
best of ’em. But not now--not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old
dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....

“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old
gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept--fine cellar! ‘I
don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but
I like what I have _good_....’”

II

Old Featherstone’s home was a dull, ugly, solid, inconvenient Victorian
house in a dull crescent of similar houses. It stands there still--it
has been more fortunate than Featherstone’s Wharf in Limehouse and the
little dark office in Billiter Square with “T. Featherstone” on its
dusty wire blinds and the half model of the “Parisina” facing you as you
went in. They are gone; but the house I saw only the other day--its
rhododendrons perhaps a shade dingier, a trifle more straggly, and
“bright young society” (for the place is a select boarding
establishment for City gents nowadays) gyrating to the blare of a
loudspeaker in what was aforetime old Thomas Featherstone’s dining-room.
And the legend “Pulo Way,” in tarnished gilt on black, still gleams in
the light of the street lamp opposite on the two square stone
gateposts--bringing a sudden momentary vision of dark seas and strange
stars, of ships becalmed under the lee of the land, of light puffs of
warm, spicy air stealing out from unseen shores as if they breathed
fragrance in their sleep; so that the vague shapes of “Lyndhurst” and
“Chatsworth” and “Bellavista” seem the humped outlines of islands
sheltering one knows not what of wonder and peril and romance....

A maidservant had come in and lighted the gas in the dining-room,
lowered the drab venetian blinds in the bay window, and drawn the heavy
stamped plush curtains which hung stiffly under the gilt cornice.
Broughton sipped his glass of wine and ate a sandwich, surveying the
familiar room with that curious illogical sense of surprised resentment
which humanity always feels in the presence of the calm indifference of
inanimate things to its own transiency and mortality.

He knew it well, that rather gloomy apartment with its solid Victorian
air of ugly, substantial comfort. He had been there before many times.
It had been one of Thomas Featherstone’s unvarying customs to invite his
skippers to a ceremonial dinner whenever their ships were in London
River. An awful sort of business, Broughton had always secretly thought
these functions; and, like the lawyer on the present occasion, had been
heartily glad when they were over. The bill of fare never varied--roast
beef, baked potatoes, some kind of a boiled pudding, almonds and
raisins, and a bottle of port to follow. “Special Captain’s port,” that
turbulent Irishman, Pat Shaughnessy, of the “Mazeppa,” irreverently
termed it: adding, with his great laugh, “You bet the old divvle don’t
fetch out his best vintage for hairy shellbacks like us!”

Thirteen--no, it must be fourteen--of those dinners Broughton could
remember. They had been annual affairs so long as the “Maid of Athens”
could hold her own against the steamers in the Australian wool trade.
Latterly, since she had been driven to tramping the world for charters,
they had become movable feasts, and between the last two there had been
a gap of nearly three years.

Broughton’s eyes travelled slowly from one detail to another--the
mahogany chairs ranged at precise intervals against the dull red of the
flock-papered walls; the round table whose gleaming brass toes peeped
modestly from beneath the voluminous tapestry table cover; the “lady’s
and gent’s easies” sitting primly on opposite sides of the vast yawning
cavern of the fire-place; the mantelpiece where the black marble clock
ticked leisurely between its flanking Marly horses and the pair of
pagoda vases, with their smirking ladies and fierce bewhiskered
warriors, that one of the old man’s captains had brought years ago from
Foochow; the mahogany sideboard whose plate-glass mirror gave back every
minutest detail of the room in reverse; the inlaid glass-fronted
bookcase with its smug rows of gilt-tooled, leather-bound books--the
Waverley Novels, Falconer’s “Shipwreck,” Byron’s poems.

Thomas Featherstone seldom used any other room but this. He possessed a
drawing-room: a bleak chill shrine of the middle-class elegancies where
the twittering Victorian niece who kept house for him--a characterless
worthy woman with the red nose which bespeaks a defective digestion--was
wont to dispense tepid tea and flabby muffins on her periodical “At
Home” days. He had no study: he had his office for his work, he said,
and that was enough for him. He had been brought up to sit in the
dining-room at home in his father’s, the ship-chandler’s, house in
Stepney, and he had carried the custom with him into the days of his
prosperity.

So there he had sat, evening after evening, with his gold spectacles
perched on his high nose, reading “Lloyd’s List” and the commercial
columns of “The Times,” the current issues of which were even now in the
brass newspaper rack by his empty chair: occasionally playing a hand of
picquet with the twittering niece. He was a man of an almost inhuman
punctuality of habit. People had been known to set their watches by Old
Featherstone. At nine o’clock every morning of the week round came the
brougham to drive him into the City. At twelve o’clock he sallied forth
from Billiter Square to the “London Tavern,” and the table that he
always occupied there. At half-past one, back to the office; or, if one
of his ships were due, to the West India Docks, where they generally
berthed. At five the brougham appeared in Billiter Square to transport
him to “Pulo Way” again.

A strange, colourless, monotonous sort of life, one would think; and one
which had singularly little in common with the wider aspects of the
business in which his money had been made. Of the romantic side of
shipping, or indeed of its human side, he seemed to have no conception
at all. A consignment of balas rubies, of white elephants, of Manchester
goods, of pig iron, they were all one to him--so many items in a bill of
lading, no more, no less. Ships carried his house-flag to the four
corners of the earth: no one of them had ever carried him farther than
the outward-bound pilot. No matter what outlandish ports they visited,
it stirred his blood not a whit. Perhaps it was one of the secrets of
his success: for imagination, nine times out of ten, is a dangerous sort
of commodity, commercially considered; and if Old Featherstone had gone
a-gallivanting off to Tuticorin or Amoy or Punta Arenas or Penang or
Port au Prince or any other alluringly-named place with which his ships
trafficked, instead of sitting in Billiter Square and looking after his
business--why, no doubt his business would have been vastly the
sufferer! And, indeed, since he found such adventure as his soul needed
no farther afield than between the marbled covers of his own ledgers,
there would have been no sense in looking for it elsewhere.

You saw the old man’s portrait yonder over the mantelpiece, behind the
marble clock and the Marly horses--keen eyes under bushy eyebrows, side
whiskers, Gladstone collar, slightly sardonic smile. Broughton indulged
in a passing speculation as to what they did with his glass eye when
they buried him. The picture was the work of an unknown artist. “If I’d
been fool enough to pay for a big name,” old Thomas had been wont to
say, “I’d have got a worse picture for three times the money”; and the
old man had not forgotten to drive a hard bargain, the recollection of
which had perhaps a little coloured the artist’s mood. The unknown had
caught his sitter in a characteristic attitude: sitting erect and rigid,
his hands clasped one above the other on the silver knob of his
favourite Malacca walking-stick. A shrewd old man, you would say, a
shrewd, hard, narrow old man, and not have been far wrong in your
estimate; though, as even his enemies were bound to admit, he was not
without his moments of vision, his odd surprising streaks of generosity.

A man of but little education--he had run as a child daily to a little
school in Stepney, kept by the widow and daughters of a shipmaster, and
later had gone for a year or two to an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen
somewhere off the East India Dock Road--he was wont to say, and to say
as if it were something to boast of, that he had never read but two
books in his life--Falconer’s “Shipwreck” and Byron’s poems, both of
which he knew from cover to cover. For the latter he had a profound and
astonishing admiration, so much so that all his ships were named after
Byronic heroes and heroines.

The “junk store” some wag once called the Featherstone fleet: and the
gibe was not far wide of the mark. Anyone who has the patience and the
curiosity to search the pages of a fifty-or sixty-year-old “Lloyd’s
Register” will find in that melancholy record of human achievement and
human effort blown like dead leaves on the winds of time and change
sufficient reason for the nickname. Everywhere it is the same
tale--“Mazeppa” _ex_ “Electric Telegraph,” “Bride of Abydos” _ex_
“Navarino,” “Zuleika” _ex_ “Roderick Random,” “Thyrza” _ex_ “Rebel
Maid.” Old Featherstone had at one time more than fifty ships under his
house-flag, not one of which had been built to his order. “The man who
succeeds,” was one of his sayings, “is the man who knows best how to
profit by other men’s mistakes.”

The doctrine was one which he put very effectively into practice. He had
an almost uncanny nose for bargains; but, what was more than that, he
was gifted in a most amazing degree with that peculiar and indefinable
quality best described as “ship sense”--an ability amounting well-nigh
to a genius for knowing a good ship from a bad one which is seldom found
but in seamen, and is rare even among them.

Someone once asked him the secret of his gift, but I doubt if he got
much satisfaction out of the answer.

“Ask me another,” snapped out the old man in his dry, staccato fashion.
“I’ve got a brother can waggle his ears like a jackass. How does _he_ do
that? _I_ don’t know. _He_ don’t know. Same thing in my case, exactly.”

And certainly where he got it is something of a mystery. But since there
had been Featherstones buried for generations where time and grime
combine to make a hallowed shade in the old parish church of Stepney,
there may well have been seafaring blood in the family, and likely
enough the founder of the little bow-windowed shop in Wapping Wall was
himself a retired ship’s carpenter.

Whatever the explanation, there was undeniably the fact. He bought
steamers that didn’t pay and had never paid and that experts said never
would pay: ripped the guts out of them, and in a couple of years they
had paid for themselves. He bought unlucky ships, difficult ships, ships
with a bad name of every sort and kind. Ships that broke their captains’
hearts and their owners’ fortunes, ships that wouldn’t steer, that
wouldn’t wear, that wouldn’t stay. And never once did his bargain turn
out a bad one.

From Old Featherstone’s portrait, and that painted ironical smile which
still had the power to call up in him a feeling of vague discomfort,
Broughton’s eyes travelled on to the portraits of ships which--Old
Featherstone excepted--were the room’s sole artistic adornment.

Over there in the corners--one each side of the portrait--were the old
“Childe Harold” and “Don Juan.” They were the first ships Old
Featherstone bought, in the distant days when he was still young
Featherstone, a smart young clerk in Daly’s office, whose astonishing
rise to fortune was yet on the knees of the gods.

They were old frigate-built East Indiamen, both of them, the “General
Bunbury” and “Earl Clapham,” from some Bombay or Moulmein dockyard: teak
through and through, but as leaky as sieves with sheer age and years of
labouring in seaways. Young Featherstone bought them for a song: gutted
them, packed their roomy ’tween-decks with emigrants like herrings in a
barrel, and hurried them backwards and forwards as fast as he dared
between London and Australia while the gold rush of the ’sixties was at
its hottest. He was in too big a hurry even to give them new figureheads
to match their new names, with the result that a portly British general
and a highly respectable peer of Evangelistic tendencies had to endure
the indignity of an enforced masquerade, the one as the wandering
“Childe,” the other as the disreputable “Don” of many amours.

Goodness knows how these two old ships’ venerable ribs managed to stick
together running down the Easting: nor indeed how it was that they
didn’t carry their freight of hopeful fortune seekers to the bottom
before they were well clear of the Channel. However, by hook or by
crook, stick together they did, long enough at any rate to lay the
foundation of Featherstone’s success. The “Childe Harold”--she who was
the “General Bunbury”--created a bit of a sensation in the last lap of
her third voyage by sinking, poor old soul, in the West India Dock
entrance at the head of a whole fleet of shipping crowding in on the
tide. The “Don Juan”--the backsliding “Earl Clapham”--came to grief, by
a stroke of luck, just off the Mauritius, and her old bones (it must
have taken a small forest of teak to build her) fetched double what
Featherstone had paid for her for building material. But they had served
their purpose. Thereafter, Featherstone never looked behind him.

The old “Giaour”--_she_ started life as a steamer, in the days when
steam was suffering from over-inflation, and a good many speculators
were scalding their fingers badly with it. The “Cottonopolis,” of the
defunct “Spreadeagle” Line--that was how she began. Her accommodation
was the talk of the town, said to be the most lavish ever seen--a wash
basin to every six cabins--but she devoured such quantities of fuel, as
well as turning out such a brute in a seaway that her passenger list was
never more than half full, that the shareholders were glad to get rid of
her at a loss. There she was--an ugly great lump of a ship, with masts
that had a peculiar rake to them, something after the style of a Chinese
junk. Sail, too ... like a witch, she did!... Then the little
“Thyrza”--_she_ was a pretty little butterfly of a thing; but she was as
near being a mistake as any purchase Featherstone ever made. He had
bought her, so it was believed, with the intention at the back of his
mind of winning the China tea race; but the tea trade petering out, he
put her into the wool fleet instead. Broughton had seen the dainty
little ship many a time: a regular picture she used to look, beating up
to the Heads just as old Captain Winter had painted her. Rare hand with
a paint-brush that old chap was, and no mistake! Give him one good look
at a ship, and he’d get her likeness to a gantline ... notice things
about her, too, sometimes, that even her own skipper hadn’t found
out....

There was the “Manfred”--the unluckiest ship, surely, that ever left the
ways! The “Young Tamlin” was the name she used to go by, in the days
when she used to kill two or three men every trip. That was before Old
Featherstone got hold of her, of course: and her owners--she belonged to
a little one-ship company--got the jumps about it and sold her. Sold her
cheap, too ... but, bless you, that stopped her gallop all right! She
drowned no more men afterwards.

And--last of all--the “Maid of Athens.” ...

Broughton’s own ship--the pride of his heart, the apple of his eye, the
guiding motive, the absorbing interest of his life for more than
twenty-five years.

Broughton didn’t care much about that picture--never had done, though he
didn’t trouble to tell the old man so. No use asking for trouble: and he
was a contrary old devil if you crossed him! A Chinese ship-chandler’s
affair, it was, and moreover it showed the “Maid” with a spencer at the
main which she never carried: at least, not in Broughton’s time. A good
long time that meant, too ... ah well! They had grown old together, his
ship and he!

He remembered the day he got command of her as clearly as if it were
yesterday. He was chief officer of the “Haidée” at the time--getting
along in years, too, and beginning to wonder if he would ever have the
luck to get a ship of his own. She was a nice little ship, the “Haidée,”
the last of Daly’s fleet, and Featherstone bought her after old Daly,
who had given him a stool in his office years before, shot himself in
that very office in Fenchurch Street when the news came of the wreck of
the “Allan-a-Dale,” his favourite ship, on the Calf of Man. Quite a nice
little ship, but nothing out of the common about her: nothing a man
could take to particularly, somehow. And yet at the time he had wanted
nothing better than to be her skipper.

Old Captain Philpot had been queerish all that voyage; he used to nip
brandy on the quiet a lot, and take drugs when he could get them as
well. Soon after they left the Coromandel coast he went out of his mind
altogether, and Broughton found him one day, when he went down to
dinner, crawling round the cabin on all fours and complaining that he
was King Nebuchadnezzar and couldn’t find any grass to eat.

Good Lord! that was a time, too ... made a man sweat to think of it,
even after all these years! Hurricane after hurricane right through the
Indian Ocean: on deck most of the time, and sitting on the Old Man’s
head when he got rumbustious during the watch below. However, the poor
old chap died as quiet as a child, when he smelt the Western Islands,
and Broughton as chief officer took the vessel into port.

Old Featherstone came on board, as his custom was, as soon as she was
fairly berthed, and Broughton--tongue-tied and stammering as he always
was on important occasions of the kind--gave an account of his
stewardship. The old man listened with never a word, only just a grunt
or a brusque nod now and again; and when the tale was told made no
comment whatever beyond a curt “Humph! Well, you can’t have command of
this ship. She’s promised to Allinson. Can’t go back on him. Besides,
he’s senior to you.”

Then, with one foot on the gangway, he turned back and barked out:

“I’ve bought a new ship. ‘Philopena’ or some such outlandish name. She’s
at Griffin’s Wharf, Millwall. Better go and look at her. You can have
her if you fancy her.”

Half-way down the gangway he turned again.

“Come and dine with me at Blackheath on Thursday. Seven o’clock. And
don’t keep me waiting, mind! I’m a punctual man, or I shouldn’t be where
I am.”

That invitation--invitation? it was more like a Royal command--as
Broughton well knew, set the seal on his promotion.

The ship was the “Maid of Athens.”

IV

Broughton went in search of her as soon as he had finished up on board
the “Haidée” and turned her over to the care of the old lame shipkeeper.

He didn’t feel particularly excited; his feeling, naturally enough, was
one of pleasurable anticipation of an improvement in his material
circumstances--no more than that, as he realized with that wistful sense
of flatness and disappointment which inevitably accompanies the
discovery that some long-desired consummation has lost through the lapse
of time its power to excite and to intoxicate the mind. “If this had
happened ten years ago,” he thought rather sadly, “Lord, how full of
myself I should have been!” forgetting that middle age, when it does
make acquaintance with passion, seldom does it by halves.

He found the “Philopena” in a derelict, melancholy wet dock somewhere
among vacant lots and chemical works down in the Isle of Dogs, along
with a couple of dilapidated coasting colliers and a broken-down tug--a
smoky Thames-side sunset burning like a banked fire behind the
cynical-looking sheds of a shadowy and problematical Griffin--and he
fell in love with her on the instant.

There is--or perhaps one should rather say was, since it is doubtful if
the Age of Steam has cognizance of such sentimental weaknesses--a
certain kind of thrill, not to be satisfactorily defined in words,
which runs through a man’s whole being when first his eyes fall upon the
one ship which, out of all the thousands which sail the seas, seems
especially made to be the complement of his own being, as surely as a
woman is made for her mate. It is a feeling to which first love is
perhaps the thing most nearly comparable--it can make the most
commonplace of men into a poet; and even that lacks one of its
qualities--its pure and sexless virginity. Other ships there may be more
beautiful; but they leave him cold. They are not for him as she is for
him....

That thrill it was--that awakening of two of the root instincts of
mankind, the instinct to cherish, and the instinct to possess--which ran
(surprising even himself) through that most matter-of-fact and
unimaginative of men, David Broughton, when he first set eyes on the
ship that for twenty-odd years to come was destined to provide the main
interest and object of his existence.

There seemed to be nobody about the wharf, but Broughton untied a leaky
dinghy that he found moored under the piles and pulled out to her. The
nearer he got to her the better he liked her. Stern a bit on the heavy
side, he fancied--with too much weight aft she’d be inclined to run up
into the wind if you didn’t watch her. She’d want some handling, all
right, but it wouldn’t do to be afraid of her, either. Her lines were a
dream! He pulled all round her, viewing her from every angle; and as he
rowed under her keen bow he caught himself fancying that her little
dainty figurehead looked down upon him with a kind of wistful appeal--a
sort of “You won’t go away and leave me, will you?” look that won his
heart on the spot.

He made the boat fast to the crazy Jacob’s ladder and swung himself on
board. She was filthily dirty, appallingly neglected, with that
unspeakably forlorn and abandoned look which ships seem to get after a
long lay-up in port. The grime and litter everywhere made his heart
ache. The Dagoes had had her for the last year or two, and her little
cabin reeked of garlic and stale cigar smoke. The shipkeeper, a
drink-sodden old ruffian with a horrible red-running eye, who was
probably none too pleased at the prospect of losing his job now his
temporary home was sold, followed Broughton round grumbling and
croaking. Lor’ bless you, _she_ wouldn’t sail, not she! No more’n a
mule’ll go if he don’t want to! There was plenty had had a try at her,
and they all told the same tale. Somethink wrong with the way she was
built, must be ... or else they’d laid her keel of a Friday or
summat....

Broughton smiled to himself. Somehow, he thought, that ship was going to
sail for him! He couldn’t have explained the feeling for the life of
him, but there it was.

And so, in point of fact, things turned out. Just as a horse which is an
unmanageable fiend in the hands of a crack jockey will let some snip of
a stable lad do what he will with him--just as a dog made savage by
ill-usage will attach himself for life (and perhaps--who knows?--beyond)
to someone who first masters him and then shows him kindness--so did
this little wild “Philopena” under her new name of “Maid of Athens” show
no sign of the tricks and vices, whatever they might be, which had
brought her, like some lovely but wilful lady fallen among evil
companions, to the obscene desolation of that forlorn Millwall wet
dock. Twenty-five years ago ... ah, well, they had been happy years, on
the whole! A reserved and rather lonely man, not over fond of company,
Broughton had drifted into a negatively disastrous sort of marriage in
his young days with a woman considerably older than himself. With the
best will in the world to do so, he had been unable to feel any but a
superficial grief at her death a few years later; and in the house where
his married stepdaughter now lived he always felt like a stranger on
sufferance during his brief periods ashore. But he had found an abiding
content in the daily routine of his life at sea. He gave himself up to
his ship without grudging. She was his one interest in life, his hobby,
his love. He laid out his spare cash on little items of personal
adornment for her as for a loved woman, and on the new gear of which Old
Featherstone stinted her as his natural tendency to stinginess increased
with age.

It was a brother skipper, Tom Pellatt, of Maclean’s pretty little
clipper “Phoebe Maclean”--a silly, noisy chap Broughton privately
thought him--who had first put the idea into his head that the “Maid of
Athens” might one day become his own property in name as she already was
in spirit.

Pellatt had been dining on board when both ships were in Sydney Harbour,
and just as he was going he said:

“Tell you what, Broughton, you’ve been the making of this ship; and if
old Nethermillstone don’t leave her to you in his will he damn well
ought to, that’s all!”

Broughton put the suggestion aside with a laugh. Pellatt, who was one of
those people who, as the phrase goes, “talk as they warm,” and simply
said it out of a desire to say something complimentary and pleasing to
his host--Broughton’s absorption in his ship being something of a
standing joke among his fellow-captains when his back was
turned--probably forgot he had ever said it before he got back to his
own ship. But the words had sown their seed.

At first Broughton only played with the idea at odd moments: he would do
this, he would do that, if the ship were his--treating it as a pleasant
kind of game of make-believe wherewith to beguile an idle minute; but
always with the mental proviso that, of course, no one but a silly
gabbling ass like Pellatt would ever have thought of such a thing.

Then, gradually, he began to wonder if it really was such a ridiculous
notion, after all. Old Featherstone’s business would die with him, that
was very certain. Hadn’t he said as much himself, the last time
Broughton dined at Blackheath, about the time young Daly, whose father
Featherstone had worked for in his clerking days, came such a holy
mucker in the Bankruptcy Court?

“I don’t intend to leave my house-flag to be trailed through the mire!”
he had said.

And hadn’t he said, too, not once but many times:

“I shall never sell the ‘Maid of Athens’!”

Presently, from being a desirable but remote possibility, he began to
consider it in the light of a probability; and from that it was but a
short step to take to begin to look upon it as a right. Who, he asked
himself, had a stronger claim to the ship than he--if, indeed, half so
strong?

He began by degrees to make his plans more definitely. It was no longer
“if the ship were mine,” but “when she is mine.” He hugged the thought
to him, fed upon it, lived with it night and day. He hoped he could
honestly say he had never wished Old Featherstone’s death; but when the
news of his death had come he had not been able to repress a thrill of
exultation as the thought rose to the surface of his mind, “Now, at
last, she will surely be mine!”

It had been the old man himself who had finally turned what had until
then been no more than a vague hope into a virtual certainty.

It was on the occasion of that last dinner at Blackheath, a matter of
six weeks ago, just before the attack of bronchitis that had finished
the old fellow off. There he had sat in his big easy-chair by the fire,
looking incredibly frail and shrunken, his eyes, for all that, as keen
as ever in their sunken caves as they wandered from Broughton’s face to
the counterfeit presentment of the “Maid of Athens” riding proudly on
her painted sea.

“Well, Broughton,” he had snapped out, suddenly, for a moment almost
like his old self again, “you’ve thought a lot of the old ship, haven’t
you?”

Broughton, taken by surprise, and feeling, no doubt, just a little
guilty about those secret aircastles of his, said, stammering, well,
yes, he supposed he had.

And there the matter stopped. Not much, perhaps; but straws show which
way the wind blows. Broughton thought he was justified in reading a
certain significance into the incident.

And again, on the way up to the funeral that morning, he had looked in
at a little club he belonged to, and met half a dozen skippers of his
acquaintance: always the same tale--“Hello, Broughton! Off to plant old
Feathers, I suppose! Hope he’s come down handsome in his will.”

“Bless you, I’m not expecting anything!” had been Broughton’s answer, as
much to the jealous Fates as to them.... Well, it would soon be settled
now one way or the other. He didn’t really, in his heart of hearts,
believe in the possibility of that other way at all; but he included
it in his mind as a matter of form--again with that vague
half-superstitious notion of propitiating some watchful and sardonic
Destiny.

He was surprised to find himself so little excited now that the great
moment had arrived. He had had to keep a tight hand on himself on the
way up from the cemetery, lest he should betray his fever of nervous
impatience to his companions, and he had been relieved when the lawyer’s
constant flow of chatter obviated the necessity of his taking any share
in the conversation. Now, he was glad to find, he had got himself well
under control. He was even able to derive a certain quiet interest from
observing the suppressed eagerness on the decorous countenances of Old
Featherstone’s relations. A so-so lot, on the whole! Broughton thought
by the looks of ’em that old Thomas must have had the lion’s share of
the family wits.

Funny that a man should spend all his life piling money up, and then
have no one to leave it to that he really cared for! “My brother’s
children’ll get my money when I’m gone,” Old Featherstone used to say;
“don’t think much of ’em, but there it is! I hope they’ll enjoy
spending it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it.” ...

The little lawyer sipped the last of his port, drew his chair up to the
table, and rummaged in the depths of his shabby brown bag with the air
of grave importance of a conjurer about to produce rabbits from a hat.

Ah, here was the rabbit--a blue, folded paper which he unfolded,
flattened with immense deliberation, and began to read in the dead
silence which had suddenly fallen on the room.

By George, thought Broughton, the old fellow was warm and no mistake!
Houses here, houses there, shares in this railway, that bank, the other
mine. It didn’t interest him much personally, but it was as good as a
play to see the pale gooseberry eyes of that grocer-looking chap bulging
with excitement until they bade fair to drop out of his head.

“The house ‘Pulo Way’ and the contents thereof (with the exception of
certain items specified elsewhere),” droned on the lawyer’s unmusical,
monotonous voice, “to Rosina Barratt for her life.” ... Rosina
Barratt--that was the dyspeptic niece. Broughton felt glad to know he’d
done the proper thing by her. She deserved it. A decent woman: and he
must have been a crotchety old devil to live with in his latter days!

Good Lord, what an interminable rigmarole this legal business was!
Broughton moved restlessly in his seat. The ships--the ships! Was he
never coming to them?

His own name, starting at him out of the midst of the formal
phraseology, made his heart miss a beat. Here it was at last: but
no--not yet----

“To Captain David Broughton my oil painting of the clipper ship ‘Maid of
Athens’ in gold frame, knowing his regard for the ship and that he will
value the painting on that account....”

Broughton just managed to bite back a laugh in time. If the old chap had
known what he really thought about that picture!

The lawyer droned on. Somebody got that black clock on the
mantelpiece--somebody else the old man’s Malacca cane--two hundred
pounds to little Jenkinson--a hundred to the lawyer. The little clerk
sat up and smirked like a Sunday School kid that hears its name read out
for a prize; but the lawyer, Broughton thought not without a touch of
amusement, didn’t look any too well pleased with his.

The ships--the ships--what about the ships?...

“I desire that my two ships, ‘Maid of Athens’ and ‘Thyrza,’ shall be
sold within twelve months after my decease, and the proceeds of the sale
divided amongst the legatees aforesaid in the same proportion as the
rest of my estate.”

It seemed to Broughton that the lawyer’s respectfully modulated tones
went roaring and echoing round the room, with a note of derision in them
like the ironical laughter of fiends. A black mist swam before his eyes
for a minute or two, obscuring the prim Victorian dining-room and its
familiar contents--a mist through which the three lit gas-globes on the
brass chandelier shone large, round, and haloed like sun-dogs in the Far
North.

The mist, clearing, left everything distinct again. The thundering voice
subsided again to its former dry monotone. The lawyer brought his
reading to a close, folded his eyeglasses, and replaced his documents
in his bag. A discreet murmur of excited talk broke out among the
relatives.

The dyspeptic niece, important in the consciousness of her legacy, came
twittering up to Broughton as he rose to go.

“_So_ kind of you to come, Captain Broughton! My uncle would have
appreciated your being here. And you’ll let me know where to send your
picture, won’t you? I’m so glad it’s going to you. One likes to think
things are going to those who will appreciate them.”

The picture! Broughton nearly laughed in the woman’s face--nearly told
her to keep the damned picture. But he thought better of it--it wasn’t
the poor silly creature’s fault, after all!

The lawyer hailed him as he stood on the steps, buttoning his overcoat,
while he waited for his hansom.

“Can’t I give you a lift anywhere, Captain Broughton? Going to be a
foggy night, I fancy.”

Broughton shook his head with a curt “No, thanks--walking!”

The little lawyer, who was a shrewd observer of men and, like most
chatterboxes, a kindly soul, and who was, moreover, none too pleased
with his own legacy, shook his head and sighed as he watched the
square-set figure disappear into the fog and darkness.

“That man’s had a bit of a knock,” he reflected. “Wonder if he’s got
anything to live on? Not much, I dare say. Wouldn’t have hurt that
stingy old devil to leave him a hundred or two.... Ah well....”

V

Broughton strode away through the foggy suburban streets. He was afraid
he’d been a bit offhand with that lawyer chap. Well, he couldn’t help
that! He felt he couldn’t stand his gabble--not at present.

He wanted above everything else to be alone. He didn’t feel as if he
could face the well-meant curiosity and the equally well-meant sympathy
of those men who had wished him luck that morning. His wound had struck
too deep for such superficial salves to be other than an added
irritation. Normally inclined to err on the side of amiability, he felt
just now at odds with all the rest of humankind. He could fancy the
whispers that would follow him--“There goes poor Broughton--feeling
pretty sickish, you bet!”

The first staggering sensation of blank and bewildered disappointment
had passed away, and in its place there surged up within him a cold tide
of black anger against Old Featherstone.

So the old devil had been laughing at him in his sleeve that night--even
as he was laughing at him now, very likely, in whatever unholy place he
was gone to! He had guessed his thoughts, he supposed, in that damned
uncanny way he had. If the dead face now lying under the cold cemetery
mould had lain in Broughton’s pathway now he would have ground his heel
into the sardonic smile that still curled its stiff and silent lips.

Him and his blasted picture!... A thing that wasn’t worth giving
wall-space to! A damned ship-chandler’s daub! Why, give him a few
splashes of ship’s paint and a brush and he’d make a better fist at it
himself!

He strode blindly on, through interminable crescents of smug villas,
their pavements greasy with fallen leaves, along dreary streets of
shabby “semis,” without noticing or caring where he was going: swinging
his neatly rolled umbrella regardless of the fine rain which had begun
to fall and was gathering in a million glistening drops on his black
coat. His mood cried aloud for the relief of physical effort, of
physical discomfort. Now and then he was brought up short by a blank
wall that drove him back upon his traces; now and then he cannoned
unnoticing into passing pedestrians, who turned, conscious of something
unusual in his manner, to watch him out of sight, then continued their
way wondering if he were drunk or mad.

Presently the streets of dull “semis” gave place to streets of seedy
rows, with here and there a corner off-licence or a fried-fish shop
discharging its warm oily odours upon the chill air; and at last,
turning a corner, he found himself suddenly in a wide road whose greasy
pavements were lined with stalls and flares, yelling salesmen, and
groups of draggle-tailed women.

He looked about him stupidly, uncertain of his bearings, though the
blare of a ship’s syren striking on his ear told him that he was not far
from the river. He was suddenly aware that he was wet and hungry and
very tired, and that his feet in his best boots hurt him abominably, for
he was no better a walker than most sailormen. He asked a passing
pedestrian where he was.

“Lower Road, Deptford.”... Why, he was less than a quarter of an
hour’s walk from the Surrey Commercial Docks, where the “Maid of Athens”
was even now lying, having just finished discharging the cargo of
linseed she had loaded at the River Plate. He couldn’t do better than
get on to the ship, he decided; he had been knocked out of time, and no
mistake, and there he would be able to sit down quietly and think things
over.

The fog, which had been comparatively light on the higher ground, had
been steadily growing denser as he neared the river. There were haloes
round the flares that roared above the street stalls, and the lighted
shop windows were mere luminous blurs in the surrounding murk.

“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman
hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no
mistake--thick as ever I see it!”

Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the
road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel--a solid mass of
clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand,
getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. You
couldn’t see your hand before your face.

Broughton groped his way along the narrow, slimy causeway which lay
between the stacks of piled-up lumber, exuding their sharp, damp,
resinous fragrance, and the intense darkness, broken occasionally by a
vague tremulous reflection where some ship’s lights contrived to pierce
it, which brooded over the unseen waters of the dock. Lights showed
forlornly here and there at the openings of the lanes which led away
between the piled deals--abysses of blackness as dark as the Magellanic
nebulæ. Ship’s portholes gleamed round and watchful as the eyes of huge
monsters of the slime. Bollards started up suddenly out of the fog like
menacing figures, and cranes straddled the path like black Apollyons in
some marine Pilgrim’s Progress. Once Broughton pulled himself up only
just in time to save himself from stepping over the edge of a yawning
pit of nothingness in which the water lipped unseen against the slimy
piles. The thought involuntarily crossed his mind that perhaps he might
have done worse; but he put it from him resolutely. His code, a simple
one, did not admit suicide as a permissible solution of the problems of
life.

All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted
as the grave--nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain,
once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock,
and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up
river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older
basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned
smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley
which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his
memories.

Old Mike came hobbling out at the sound of Broughton’s step on the
plank.

“’Strewth, Cap’n,” he exclaimed in astonishment, “you’ve chose a grand
night to come down an’ no fatal error! Will I make a bit o’ fire in the
cabin an’ brew ye a cup o’ tea? Sure you’re wet to the skin!”

“Poor old chap!” Broughton thought, as he watched him busying himself
about his fire-lighting with the gnarled and shaking hands that had
hauled on so many a tackle-fall in their day. It would be a hard blow
for him when he knew that ship was to be sold. He had served in
Featherstone’s ships many years as A.B. and latterly as bos’n, until a
fall from aloft put an end to his seagoing days; and this little job of
shipkeeping was one of the very few planks between him and the
workhouse.

The world was none too kind to old men who had outlived their
usefulness. What was it that old flintstone had said: “You can’t teach
an old dog new tricks”? Well, that was true enough, anyway!

He called to mind an incident that had happened in Sydney his last
voyage there. An old man had come up to him begging for a job. He didn’t
care what--night watchman, anything; and he had opened his coat to show
that he had neither waistcoat nor shirt beneath it.

“You don’t remember me, Broughton,” the old fellow had said; and,
looking closer, he had recognized in that incredibly seedy wreck one of
his own old skippers--before whose almost godlike aloofness and majesty
he had once trembled in mingled fear and awe. It was a pitiful tale he
had to tell. He had been thrown out of a berth at sixty-five, through
his ship being lost by no fault of his own, and couldn’t get in
anywhere. That proud, arrogant old man, full of small vanities!...
Broughton had had little enough cause in the past to think of him over
kindly; but the memory of the encounter had remained with him for weeks
at the time, and returned to trouble him now with an added
significance.

Old Mike’s bit o’ fire smouldered a little and went out, leaving
nothing but an acrid stink to mark its passing. The well-stewed
tea in the enamel cup at his elbow, with the two ragged slices of
margarine-plastered bread beside it in the slopped saucer, grew cold
unheeded. Outside, the rain dripped down like slow tears. And there he
sat, with his clenched hands before him on the table, staring into the
Past.

There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t
mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for
her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing
more than he could help. But he--what had he given to her? Money--well,
he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though
his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was
neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of,
sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin.

The years of his life had gone into her--affection, understanding,
ungrudging service, sleepless nights and anxious days. What wonder that
she seemed almost like a part of himself? What wonder that to a man of
his rigid, slow-moving type of mind a future in which she had no part
was a thing unthinkable?

His memory passed on to all the mates and second mates who had
faced him at meals over that very cabin. A regular procession of
them--Marston--Reid--what was the name of that chap with the light
eyelashes?--Barnes, was it?--Digby--he was a decent chap, now--went into
steam years ago and was chief officer in one of the B. I. ships last
time Broughton heard of him. That was what _he_ ought to have done. He
had known it at the back of his mind all along. But he couldn’t leave
her--he couldn’t leave her!

Well, well, there was no use meeting trouble half-way! What was it old
Waterhouse, his first skipper in his brassbound days, used to say? “If
you’re jammed on a lee shore and can’t stay, why, then try wearing. If
that don’t work, try boxing her off. But whatever you do, do something!
Don’t sit down and howl!”

They used to laugh at him and mimic him behind his back, cheeky young
devils; but it was damned good advice for all that. He was on a lee
shore now right enough; but there was bound to be a way out somewhere if
he kept his head.

An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him--just
such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin
many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and
seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a
blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay
down on the cabin settee.

A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the
rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out
... if he could only think of it ... somewhere....

VI

He awoke to a flood of bright sunshine streaming in through the
skylight. The wind had driven fog and rain before it, leaving a virginal
and new-washed world under a sky of pale, remote blue.

Broughton heaved himself off the settee, catching a glimpse of
himself--haggard, rumpled, and unkempt--in the mirror over the
sideboard, as he did so.

“By George!” he said to himself, viewing his reflection, “Marianne would
have looked down her nose at me if I’d turned up at Sibella Road like
this. She’d have thought I’d been having a thick night, and small blame
to her!”

There was no doubt that he presented a sorry spectacle. His trousers
were still damp and splashed with mud-stains; his collar was creased and
black with fog. He was stiff and tired in body; but his mind, naturally
resilient, was infinitely refreshed by the long hours of sleep.

His spirits rose every minute. He whistled to himself as he rummaged out
a blue suit from his cabin, washed, and shaved. He even indulged in a
smile as he recalled the little lawyer and his two singlets.

After all, looked at in the light of day, things might have been a whole
lot worse. There was always a chance that one of the three or four
British firms who still owned sailing ships might buy the old girl. She
had a great name; and people were beginning to be a bit sentimental
about sailing ships now they were mostly gone. Or one of the big
steamship lines might take her on for training purposes. If either of
those things happened, it wasn’t likely they would want to put anyone
else in command. It was common knowledge, though he said it himself,
that no one could get what he could out of her. They would very likely
put her into the nitrate trade. Of course it would be a bit of a
come-down, still--any port in a storm! He remembered how sick he had
been about it the first time she loaded coal at Newcastle. He had felt
like going down on his knees and apologizing to her for the outrage! Or,
again, there was lumber--plenty of charters were to be had up the West
Coast. True, her size was against her; with her reputation and twice her
tonnage she wouldn’t have had to wait long for a purchaser. But she
would be a good investment, for all that. Why, damn it all, if he had
the money loose he’d buy her himself without thinking twice about it!
But twenty pounds a month doesn’t leave much margin for such luxuries as
buying ships.

He paused half in and half out of his coat, struck by a sudden idea.

His half-brother Edward! Why, he was the very man--just the very man!
Rolling in money that he made at that warehouse where he sold staylaces
or something up in the City! The blighter was as sharp as a
needle--always had been from the time when he used to drive bargains
over blood alleys with the other kids at school. He’d see the advantage
of a proposition like this fast enough! He could either lend the money
on reasonable interest on the security of the ship, or if he liked he
could buy her himself and let Broughton manage her for him.

He hurried over the rest of his toilet, swallowed a cup of tea and a
rasher old Mike had got ready for him, and started off for the City, all
on fire with his new project.

How did that piece of poetry go that Old Featherstone got the ship’s
name from? He had read it once, but he wasn’t much at poetry: he
couldn’t make much of it.

    “Maid of Athens, ere we part----”

That was it! He repeated the line once or twice under his breath,
finding in it a new and surprising significance. He ran his hand
caressingly along the smoothness of her teak rail, sleek and glossy and
warm in the sun as a living thing.

    “Maid of Athens, ere we part----”

“There’s a deuce of a lot of water to go under the bridge before it
comes to that, old lady!” he said aloud.

By the time he reached the dock gates the proposition had grown so rosy
that his only fear was lest someone else should discover its
attractiveness and get in ahead of him. By the time he got off the bus
in Saint Paul’s Churchyard it seemed to him that he was doing his
half-brother a really good turn in allowing him the first chance of so
advantageous a business opportunity.

The spruce-looking master mariner who gave in his name at a little hole
marked “Inquiries” on the ground-floor of a warehouse just behind the
Church of Saint Sempronius Without was a very different person from the
haggard being who had glared back at him from the glass an hour ago.

Edward Broughton’s place of business was a large, modern edifice each of
whose many ground-floor windows displayed a device representing a nude
youth running like hell over the surface of a miniature globe, holding
in his extended hand a suit of Elasto Underwear--“Fits where it Hits.”
This famous slogan it was which had made Elasto Underwear and Edward
Broughton’s fortune; for he was by way of doing very well indeed, was
Edward, and had even been spoken of as a possible Lord Mayor. David
remembered him in the old days, when he was at home from sea, as a pert
little snipe of a youngster with red cheeks and sticking-out eyes.

A stylish youth, looking like a clothed edition of the young gentleman
on the placards, ushered him into a small, glass-sided compartment and
left him alone there with two little plaster images wearing miniature
suits of Elasto Underwear. One was after--a long way after--Michael
Angelo’s David, the other (also a long way) after the Venus of Milo.

Broughton looked round him with all the sailorman’s lordly contempt of
the ways of traders. He looked out through the glass sides of his cage
on long vistas of desks where girls sat at typewriters and between which
there scurried young exquisites with sleek hair and champagne-coloured
socks--dozens of them, presumably engaged on the one all-important task
of distributing Elasto Underwear to the civilized and uncivilized world.

So this was where brother Edward made all his money! Rum sort of
show--“Fits where it Hits,” indeed--what a darned silly idea! And how
much longer were they going to keep him waiting?

His eyes wandered for the twentieth time to the clock. Half-past
eleven--he had been here half an hour. The two underclothed statuettes
were beginning to get on his nerves. He should smash ’em if he stopped
there much longer.

Issuing forth fuming from his plate-glass seclusion, he stopped one of
the hurrying exquisites.

“Does Mr. Broughton know I am here?” he asked.

“Y-yes, sir!” The youth could not have said what made him tack that
“sir” on. “You see, he’s very busy in a morning, if you haven’t an
appointment. And this week the auditors are here. Could you leave your
name and call again?”

“I see. No, I’m afraid I can’t. Will you have the goodness to tell him
again, please? Say that Captain Broughton would like to see him--on
business--important business.”

The lad hesitated for a moment between dread of his employer and a sense
of something masterful, something which demanded obedience, about this
brown-faced, quiet stranger. The stranger won, and with a “Very good,
sir,” the messenger disappeared among the desks.

Presently he returned. Mr. Broughton would see his visitor now.

David’s half-brother sat in a vast lighted room behind a vast
leather-covered table. He still had the round red cheeks and prominent
eyes of his youth, but he was almost bald and showed an incipient
corporation.

A youth laden with two huge ledgers backed out of the presence as David
entered. Like the King, by Jove! Brother Edward was getting into no end
of a big pot.

“Oh, good morning, David!” He waved his caller graciously to a seat.
“This is quite an unaccustomed honour. I’m afraid you’ve come at rather
a busy time--the auditors, and so forth. I hardly ever see anybody
except by appointment. But I can give you ten minutes. And now--what can
I do for you?”

The words were pleasant enough in a way; but that “What can I do for
you?” signified as plainly as if he had said it, “What does this fellow
want with me, I wonder?”

There is no enmity so undying as that which dates from the nursery.
There is no dislike so unconquerable as that which exists between people
who are kin but not kind. Had David Broughton been more of a man of the
world he would have known as much; and that while it is true that blood
is thicker than water, it is also true that upon occasion it can be more
bitter than gall.

The undercurrent of suspicion which was unmistakable beneath the smooth
surface of Edward Broughton’s words flicked David on the raw. Perhaps it
was that, perhaps the long chilling wait in the plate-glass ante-room
had something to do with it. For whatever reason, when he opened his
mouth to explain his errand, he found that all his eloquence had
deserted him.

He was going to make a mess of it: he knew it as soon as he began to
speak. Where were all the telling facts, the effective data he had
marshalled so brilliantly as he rode up to the City on the bus?
Gone--all gone; he found himself stammering out his case haltingly,
baldly, unconvincingly. He could feel it in his bones.

Edward Broughton pursed up his lips, as his half-brother’s last phrase
petered out in futility, and blew out his cheeks. He lay back in the
large chair and spread his neat little legs out under the large table,
placing together his finger-tips--the flattened finger-tips of the
money-grubber.

“I--see! I--see! You want me to buy this--er--ship?”

“Well, yes,” David admitted. “I suppose that’s about the length of it,
or--or--as I said just now--lend me the money on the security of the
ship----”

Edward Broughton studied his nails for a few seconds in silence. He used
to bite ’em as a kid, David suddenly remembered, and have bitter aloes
put on to stop him.

Then slowly, solemnly, he shook his head.

“No, no! I’m afraid it’s nothing in my line, David.”

“But, dash it all, man!”--Broughton’s temper was beginning to get the
better of him. He was annoyed with himself because he felt he had
bungled his chances: more because he felt that he had made a mistake in
coming to this fellow at all. Ancient family aversions reared their
forgotten heads. And the intolerant impatience of the autocrat rose in
resentment of opposition. “Dash it all, man, it’s a good investment! I
shouldn’t have thought about mentioning it to you if it hadn’t been.” He
couldn’t help that sly dig.

“What precisely is your idea of a good investment?”

“Well, I should say it would pay a good five per cent--at a low
estimate....”

Edward raised his eyebrows with a superior little smile of indulgent
amusement.

“Five per cent. Why, my dear man, I won’t look at anything that doesn’t
bring in twenty at least. No, I’m very sorry for you. If I could really
see my way to help you I would, for the sake of old times and so on. But
one must keep sentiment out of business. It doesn’t do. And, honestly, I
can see nothing in it. It isn’t even as if this ship were a fairly new
ship. One must move with the times, you know. The late Mr. Featherstone
was a very keen man of business, and as you yourself said just now,
he’d been selling his ships for years. He knew his business, no doubt,
as well as I know mine. And my motto is, ‘Let the cobbler stick to his
last!’ His Elasto, eh? Ha ha--not bad that!... No, I’m awfully sorry! I
quite see your position. I’ve often thought you were making a big
mistake--you ought to have gone in with one of the steamer companies.
But I’ll do what I can for you. I’ll put in a word for you, with
pleasure. I know one or two directors----”

“Sorry! Help you! Put in a word for you!” What did the little blighter
mean? A little snipe whose ear-hole he’d wrung many a time!

Broughton rose, breathing heavily. He restrained with difficulty a
fraternal impulse to reach across the leather-covered table and pull the
little beggar’s nose.

“Damn it all,” he rapped out, “who asked you for your pity or your
advice, I’d like to know? When I want ’em, I won’t forget to ask for
’em, and that’ll be never. I come to you, as I might go to any other
business man, with a business proposition. It doesn’t interest you; very
well, there’s no more to be said. But as for your advice--_and_ your
money--you can keep ’em and be damned to you!”

He passed out between the lines of sniggering, nudging, whispering
clerks, his head held high, though his heart was sick with anger and
humiliation. So that was what the little beast had thought he was after.
Keeping a berth warm for himself. He went hot all over at the thought.
He did not even know that he had--for his voice, which he had raised
considerably in the heat of the moment, had carried to the farthest
corners of the outer office--provided the employees of Elasto, Limited,
with one of the most enjoyable moments of their somewhat dull business
career.

VII

The “Maid of Athens” left Northfleet six weeks later with a cargo of
cement for British Columbia, where she was to load lumber for some port
as yet unspecified, in accordance with a charter made before Old
Featherstone’s death.

The day had dawned grey and melancholy. A mist of fine, drizzling rain
blotted out the low, monotonous shores of the estuary, and the
crew--dull and dispirited, the last night’s drink not yet out of
them--hove the anchor short with hardly a pretence of a shanty. But a
fresh, sharp wind began to blow from the north-east as the light grew,
and presently the ship was romping down Channel with everything set.

Broughton stood on the poop beside the Channel pilot, watching the
familiar coast of so many landfalls slip rapidly by. Like him, the
red-faced, stocky man at his side had watched the ship grow old. His
name figured many a time, in Broughton’s stiff, precise handwriting, in
those shabby, leather-backed volumes which recorded her unconsidered
Odyssey:

     “6 a.m. Dull and rainy. Landed Mr. Gardiner, Channel pilot.”

     “Start point bearing N. 6 miles. Pilot Gardiner left.”

     “Off Dungeness, 3 a.m. Took Mr. Gardiner, pilot, off North
     Foreland.”

Bald, unadorned entries, dull statements of plain fact set down by plain
men with no knowledge of phrase-turning; yet there is more eloquence in
them than in all the word-spinnings of literature to those who read
aright. What sagas unsung they stand for! What departures fraught with
hopes and dreams, with remorse and parting and farewell! What landfalls
that were the triumphant climax of long endurance, of patient toil, of
cold, hunger, heat, thirst, not to be told in words! What difficulties
met and surmounted, what battles fought and won!

The ship glistened white and clean in the morning sun. The men were hard
at work washing down decks, ridding her of the last traces of the grime
accumulated during her long period in port. Ah, thought Broughton, it
was good to be at sea again! The doubts and anxieties of the last six
weeks seemed to slip away from him as the river mud slipped from the
ship’s keel into the clean Channel tide. The accustomed sights and
sounds, the familiar lift and quiver of his ship under him, were like a
kind of enchanted circle within which he stood secure against the dark
forces of destruction and change. He was a king again in his own little
kingdom. The very act of entering up the day’s work in the log book--the
taking of sights--all the small duties and ceremonies that make up a
shipmaster’s life--helped to create in him an illusion of security. He
was like a man awakened from a terrifying dream of judgment, reassuring
himself by the sight and touch of common things that the world still
goes on its accustomed way. A strange sense of peace and permanency
wrapped him round--the peace of an ancient and established order of
things seeming so set and rooted that nothing could ever end it. It
seemed incredible that all this microcosm should pass away--that the
uncounted watches should ever go by and the ship’s faithful bells tell
them no more. She appeared to borrow a certain quality of immortality
from the winds and the sea and the stars, the eternal things which had
been the commonplaces of her wandering years.

Most of all, it was the fact of being once more occupied that brought
him solace. By what queer doctrine of theologians, by what sheer
translator’s error, did man’s inheritance of daily labour come to be
accounted as the penalty of his first folly and sin? Work--surely the
one merciful gift vouchsafed to Adam by an angry Deity when he went
weeping forth from Paradise! Work--with its kindly weariness of body,
compelling the weary brain to rest. Work, the everlasting anodyne, the
unfailing salve for man’s most unbearable sorrows--which shall last when
pleasure and lust and wealth are so many Dead Sea apples in the mouth, a
comfort and a refuge when all human loves and loyalties shall fade and
fail.

Five days after the “Maid of Athens” took her departure from the Lizard
it began to breeze up from the north-west. At three bells in the first
watch the royals and topgallantsails had to come in, then the jibs; and
when dark fell she was running before wind and sea under fore and main
topsails and reefed foresail. But she liked rough weather, and under her
reduced canvas she was going along very safely and easily, so Broughton
decided to turn in for an hour’s rest in order to be ready for the
strenuous night he anticipated.

“I am going to turn in for an hour or so,” he said, turning to the mate;
“call me in that time, if I am not awake before. And sooner if anything
out of the way should happen. I think we shall have a dirty night by the
look of it.”

The mate was a poor creature--weak, but with the self-assertiveness that
generally goes with weakness. Broughton felt he would not like to rely
upon him in an emergency.

But he had had very little sleep since the ship sailed--nor, indeed,
during the weeks which had elapsed since Featherstone’s funeral. He
shrank instinctively from being alone. It was then that his anxieties
began to crowd upon him afresh, and that the threat of the future seemed
to touch him like the shadow of some boding wing. But now that sudden
overpowering heaviness of the eyelids which must inevitably, sooner or
later, follow upon a continued sleeplessness, descended upon him. He
felt that he could hardly keep awake--no, not though the very skies
should fall.

He was sound asleep almost as soon as he had lain down--lost in a
labyrinth of ridiculous and confusing dreams in which all sorts of
unexpected people and events kept melting into one another in the most
illogical and inconsequent fashion, which yet seemed, according to that
peculiar fourth-dimensional standard of values which prevails in the
dream-world, perfectly proper and reasonable.

Old Featherstone figured in these dreams: so also did the dining-room at
“Pulo Way.” Only somehow Old Featherstone kept turning into somebody
else; first it was Hobbs the lawyer, then old Mike Brophy the
shipkeeper, then an old mate of his called Peters, whom he hadn’t seen
or thought of even for years. And then the dining-room had become the
cabin of the “Maid of Athens,” and Peters, who had changed into old
Captain Waterhouse, was sitting at the head of the table reading
Featherstone’s will. He was shouting at the top of his voice, and
Broughton was straining his ears to catch what he was saying and
couldn’t make out a word of it because of the roar of the wind. And then
the floor began to heave and slant, and the pictures on the walls--for
the cabin had turned back into a dining-room again--to tumble all about
his ears--and the next moment he was sitting up broad awake, his feet
and back braced to meet the next lurch of the vessel, the wind and sea
making a continuous thunder outside, and a pile of books cascading down
upon him from a shelf over his head.

He knew well enough--his seaman’s instinct told him almost before he was
fully awake--precisely what had happened. It was just the very
possibility which had been in his mind when he turned in. The
mate--aided no doubt by a timorous and inefficient helmsman--had let the
ship’s head run up into the wind and she had promptly broached to. The
“Maid” always carried a good deal of weather helm, and wanted careful
watching with a following wind and sea. He remembered an incident which
had occurred years ago, while he was running down the Easting--a bad
helmsman had lost his head through watching the following seas instead
of his course, and let the ship run away with him. Broughton had been
close to him when it happened. He struck the man a blow that sent him
rolling in the scuppers, and himself seized the spokes and jammed the
helm up. The mate, in the meantime, had let the topsail halyards run
without waiting for the order, and, freed from the weight of her
canvas, the ship paid off and the danger was over.

The memory flashed through his mind and was gone during the few seconds
it took him to grope his way to the door and emerge into the roaring,
thundering darkness beyond.

The ship lay sprawled in the trough of the sea, like a horse fallen at a
fence. Her lee rail was buried four feet deep, and her lower yards were
hidden almost to the slings in the seething, churned-up whiteness which
surrounded her. The night was black as pitch. A pale glimmer showed
faintly from the binnacle, and the sickly red and green of the
side-lights gleamed wan and fitful amid the watery desolation. But
otherwise the only fight was that which seemed to be given by the white
crests of the endless procession of galloping seas which came tearing
out of the night to pour themselves over the helpless vessel.

The wheel appeared to be still intact; in the darkness Broughton thought
he could still make out the hunched figure of the helmsman beside it.
That was so much. If the spars held....

As he emerged from the shelter of the chart-room the full force of the
wind struck him like a steady push from some huge, invisible hand. He
waited for a lull and made a dash for the wheel.

The lull was for a few moments only--a few moments during which the ship
lay in the lee of a tremendous sea, which, towering up fifty feet above
her, held her for a brief space in its perilous and betraying shelter.
The next instant it broke clean over her--a great mass of green marbled
water that filled her decks, carried her boats away like matchboxes
down a flooded gutter, and swept her decks from end to end with a
triumphant trampling as of a conquering army.

“This finishes it!” Broughton thought.

He was swept clean off his feet; rolled over and over; buried in foam;
engulfed in what seemed to him like the whole Atlantic ocean; carried,
as he believed, right down to Davy Jones’s locker, where the light of
day would never reach him again....

The next thing he knew he was lying jammed against the lee rail of the
poop, his legs hanging outboard, his arm hooked round a cleat,
presumably by some subconscious instinct of self-preservation, for he
had no recollection of putting it there. The water was pouring past him
in a green cataract, and dragging at him like clutching fingers. He was
alive. The ship was alive. “Good old girl!” Broughton said to himself.
He began to struggle to his feet. Something moved beside him and clawed
at his ankles.

“Oh, Lord!” said a voice out of the darkness--the mate’s voice. “Oh,
Lord--I thought I was a goner!”

“Oh--you!” said Broughton. “Get off my feet, damn you!”

“Oh, Lord!” said the voice again.

“Pull yourself together!” Broughton rapped out. “What were you doing?
Why didn’t you call me?”

“There wasn’t time,” moaned the mate. “She was going along all right,
and the next minute--oh, Lord, I was nearly overboard!”

“Think you’re at a bloody revival meeting?” snapped Broughton. He shook
him off, and, holding by the rail, fought his way up the slanting deck
to the wheel.

The young second mate came butting head down through the murk.

“Fore upper topsail’s gone out of the bolt-ropes, sir!”

Broughton smiled grimly to himself. Old Featherstone’s skinflint ways
had turned out good policy for once. If that fore upper topsail had
held, as it would have done if it had been the stout Number One canvas
his soul craved, instead of a flimsy patched affair only fit for the
Tropics, they might all have been with Davy Jones by now.

“Take the best hands you can find to the braces,” Broughton ordered. “I
must try to get her away before it. Mister!”--this to the mate, who had
by this time picked himself out of the scuppers and came scrambling up
the deck--“take half a dozen hands down to see to the cargo, and do what
you can to secure it if it looks like shifting.”

The helmsman, a big heavy Swede, was still clinging to the wheel like a
limpet; partly because it appeared to him good to have something to hold
on to, partly because his wits worked so slowly that it hadn’t yet
occurred to him to let go. Broughton grasped the spokes and the two men
threw every ounce of their strength into the task of putting the helm
over.

Gusts of cheery obscenity came out of the darkness forward as the crew
fought to get the spars round. “Good men!” Broughton said between his
teeth. “‘Maid of Athens, ere we part,’ eh? Not yet, old girl--not yet!”

It seemed as if the helpless ship knew the feel of the familiar hand on
her helm, and strove with all her might to respond to it. She struggled;
she almost rose. Then, wind and sea beating her down anew, she slid
down into the trough again.

Again and again she tried to heave herself free from the weight of water
that dragged her down; again and again she slipped back again, like a
fallen horse trying vainly to get a footing on a slippery road. The two
men wrestled with the wheel in grim silence. It kicked and strove in
their grasp like a living thing. But at last, slowly, the ship quivered,
righted herself. She shook the seas impatiently from her flanks as the
reefed foresail filled. Inch by inch the yards came round to windward.
The fight was over.

By daybreak the gale had all but blown itself out. The sea still ran
high, but the wind had fallen, and a watery sun was trying to break
through the hurrying clouds. The hands were already at work bending a
new foretopsail, and their short, staccato cries came on the wind like
the mewings of gulls.

“Life in the old dog yet, Mr. Kennedy!” said Broughton to the second
mate. He struck his hands together, exulting. The struggle seemed to him
a good omen. If she could live through a night like that, surely she
could also survive those obscurer dangers which threatened her. His
shoulders ached like the shoulders of Atlas from the battle with the
kicking wheel. He had not known such physical effort since his
apprentice days. The fight had put new heart into him. By God, it had
been worth it, he told himself. It made a man feel that it was worth
while to be alive....

A few days later the “Maid of Athens” picked up the north-east Trades,
and carried them with her almost down to the Line through a succession
of golden days and star-dusted nights. She loitered through the
doldrums--found her Trades again just south of the Line--wrestled with
the Westerlies off the Horn--and, speeding northward again through the
flying-fish weather, made the Strait of Juan de Fuca a hundred and nine
days out.

VIII

The “Maid of Athens” discharged her cargo of cement at Vancouver, and
went over to the Puget Sound wharf at Victoria to load lumber for Chile.

She was there for nearly a month before she left her berth on a fine
October afternoon, and anchored in the Royal Roads, where the pilot
would board her next morning to take her down to Flattery.

Broughton went ashore in the evening for the last time, and walked up to
his agent’s offices in Wharf Street. He was burningly anxious to be at
sea again. The old restlessness was strong upon him that he had felt
before leaving London River, and a number of small vexatious delays had
whetted his impatience to the breaking point.

“Letter for you, Cap’n,” the clerk hailed him. “I thought maybe you’d be
around, or I’d have sent it over to you.”

Broughton turned the letter in his hands for a minute or two before
opening it. He recognized the prim, clerkly hand at once. It was from
Jenkinson. A cold wave of apprehension flooded over him. Some mysterious
kind of telepathy told him that it contained unwelcome tidings.

He slit the envelope at last, unfolded the sheet, and read it through.
Then he read it again, and still again--uncomprehendingly, as if it were
something in a foreign and unknown language:

“ ...Sorry to say the old ship has now been sold ... firm at Gibraltar
... understand she is to be converted into a coal hulk....”

Broughton crumpled the sheet in his hand with a fierce gesture, staring
out with unseeing eyes into a world aglow with the glory of sunset. It
was the worst--the very worst--he had ever dreamed of! Why hadn’t he let
her go, he wondered, that night in the North Atlantic? Why had he
dragged her back from a decent death for a fate like this? He could have
stuck it if she had gone to the shipbreakers. It would have hurt like
hell, but he could have stuck it. But this; it made him think, somehow,
of those old pitiful horses you saw being shipped across to Belgium with
their bones sticking through their skins. People used to have their old
horses shot when they were past work. They were different now. It was
all money--money--money! They thought nothing of fidelity, of loyalty,
of long service. They cared no more for their ships than for so many
slop pails....

Wasn’t it the old Vikings that used to take their old ships out to sea
and burn them? There was a fine end for a ship now--a fine, clean,
splendid death for a ship that had been a great ship in her day! He
remembered once, years ago, watching a ship burn to the water’s edge in
the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t much more than a nipper at the time, but he
had never forgotten it. The calm night, and the stars, and the ship
flaring up to heaven like a torch. He didn’t think he would have minded,
somehow, seeing his old ship go like that. But this--oh, he had got to
find a way out of it somehow....

“Bad news, Cap’n?” came the clerk’s inquiring voice.

Broughton pulled himself together with an effort.

“No, no, thanks!” Mechanically he made his adieux and passed out into
the street. He didn’t know where he was going. He never remembered how
he found his way to the Outer Wharf where his boat was waiting.

But he must have got there somehow, for now he was sitting in the
stern-sheets and looking out across the water to the ship lying at
anchor, with eyes to which sorrow and the shadow of parting seemed to
have given a strange new apprehension of beauty. How lovely she looked,
he thought, with the little pink clouds seeming to be caught in her
rigging, and the gulls flying and calling all about her! It was queer
that he should notice things like that so much, now that he was going to
lose her. He had known the time when he would have taken it all for
granted. Now, he kept seeing all kinds of little things in a kind of
new, clear light, as if he saw them for the first time----

Let young Kennedy tell the rest of the tale--in his cabin in a Blue
Funnel liner, years afterwards; the unforgettable, indefinable smell of
China drifting up from the Chinese emigrants’ quarters, the gabble of
the stokers at their interminable fan-tan on the forecastle mingling
with the piping of the gulls along the wharf sheds.

“I could see at once” (thus young Kennedy) “that something had gone
wrong with the Old Man. He looked ten years older since I had seen him
a couple of hours before. He came up the ladder very slowly and heavily,
passed me by without speaking--I might have been a stanchion standing
there for all the notice he took of me--and went down into the cabin
almost as if he were walking in his sleep.

“Something--I don’t exactly know what--intuition, perhaps, you’d call
it--made me trump up an excuse to follow him. I didn’t like the looks of
him, somehow.

“I found him sitting in his chair by the table, staring straight before
him with that same fixed look as if he didn’t really see anything.

“He didn’t so much as turn his head when I went in, and at first when I
spoke he didn’t seem to hear me. I spoke again, a little louder, and he
gave a sort of start, as if he had been suddenly roused out of a sleep.

“‘Yes--no!’ he said in a dazed kind of way. ‘Yes--no’ (like that); and
then suddenly, in a very loud, harsh voice, quite different from his
ordinary way of speaking: ‘A hulk! A hulk! They are going to make a coal
hulk of her!’

“The words seemed to be fairly ripped out of him. He didn’t seem to be
speaking to me. It was more as if he were trying to make himself believe
something that was too bad to realize.

“I managed to say something--I forget just what: that it was rotten
luck, perhaps. I doubt if he heard me, anyhow, for he went on in the
same strange voice, like someone talking to himself.

“‘She’s good for twenty years yet!’ And then, in a sort of choking
voice, ‘Mine--mine, by God, mine!’

“Well, I just turned at that and bolted. I felt I couldn’t stand any
more. It seemed like eavesdropping on a man’s soul.

“I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when the tug came
alongside as soon as it was light. He came on deck looking as if nothing
had happened. I never said anything, of course--no more did he; and from
that day to this I don’t really know--though I rather fancy he did--if
he remembered what had passed between us.

“We had a fine passage down to Iquique, where we discharged our lumber
and loaded nitrates for the U.K. The Old Man had got very fussy about
the ship. He had every inch of her teak scraped and oiled while we were
running down the Trades, and everything made as smart as could be aloft;
and while we were lying at Iquique he had her figurehead, which was a
very pretty one, all done over--pure white, of course. I did the best
part of it myself, for I used to be reckoned rather a swell in the
slap-dab business in those days, though I say it myself!

“Well, we finished our loading and left, and all the ships cheered us
down the tier; and I don’t wonder, for the old ship looked a picture.

“The Old Man and I had got to be quite friends. I suppose we were as
near being pals as a skipper and a second mate ever could be. He was
working on a new rail for the poop ladder--all fancy ropework and so
on--and he used to bring it up on deck and yarn away to me about old
times hour by the length. I fancy he rather liked me, but up till then
he had always had a kind of stand-offish, you-keep-your-place-young-man
way with him; and for my part I’d always looked on him with that sort
of mixture of holy awe when he was there and disrespect behind his back
a fellow has for the skipper he’s served his time under. I suppose our
both thinking such a lot of the old barky gave us an interest in common.
You see, I’d served my time in her right from the start, so that
naturally she was the ship of all ships for me--still is, for the matter
of that.... Say what you will, she was a great old ship, and he was a
great old skipper!”

(Kennedy paused. A quiver had crept somehow into his voice, and he had
to get it under control again.)

“The Old Man” (he went on) “had always been what I should call a careful
skipper. Not nervous--nothing of that sort--but cautious; I never knew
him lose a sail but once, and never a spar. In fact, I used to feel a
bit annoyed with him sometimes because he didn’t go out of his way to
take risks. He was a fine seaman; but there’s no denying the fact he
_was_ cautious. He made some fine passages in the ‘Maid of Athens,’ and
never a bad one. But he didn’t really drive her. I believe he was too
damned fond of her.

“So that you may imagine it was a bit of a surprise when we began to get
into the high south latitudes and he started to crack on in a way that
made even me open my eyes a little.

“I well remember the first day I noticed it. It was just on sunset--a
black and red sort of affair with lots of low-hanging clouds, and the
seas came rolling up with that ugly, sickly green on them when the light
caught them that always goes with bad weather.

“It had been blowing pretty hard all day, and the glass dropping fast.
The ship was labouring heavily and shipping quantities of water; she was
loaded nearly to her marks with nitrates. There stood the skipper--I can
just see him now--with his feet planted wide, holding on to the weather
rigging and looking up aloft, as his way always was when it was blowing
up.

“I expected him, of course, to order some of the canvas off her, for she
was carrying a fairish amount considering the weather. So I was fairly
taken aback, as you may imagine, when he turned round and said quite
quietly:

“‘I want the fore upper topsail reefed and set, Mr. Kennedy.’

“I was so surprised that I just stood and gaped for a minute or so. He
looked at me in a sort of a challenging way, and said:

“‘Didn’t you hear the order? What are you waiting for?’

“I pulled myself together, said ‘Fore upper topsail it is, sir!’ and off
I went. And I can tell you that for the next half hour or so I had
plenty to occupy me without worrying my head about what the Old Man was
thinking of.

“Well, we got the sail reefed and set. By this time the ship was ripping
along at a good sixteen knots or more. You could see her wake spread out
a mile behind her like a winding sheet. It was quite dark by this time.
Her lee rail was right under, and making our way aft was like going
through a swimming-bath.

“The Old Man was still standing just as I had left him, holding on with
both hands to the weather rigging, and bracing his feet against the
slant of the deck. I had hardly got my foot on the poop ladder when he
turned his head and called to me. I could see his lips move, but I could
hear nothing for the noise of the wind and sea.

“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.

“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of
it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just
happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.

“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then.
‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur
again!’

“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the
“Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T.
examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet
question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more
sail and chance it!’

“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water
on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then--flop!--would come a
big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives--on
again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and
after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the
braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all
gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we
hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer--at
least I know I did--that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to
fly any more kites just yet.

“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so
before my time--the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the
dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea
ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was
getting all of it I wanted for once!

“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a
youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about,
and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting
in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind
that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed
shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about
details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond
thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work,
and there you are!

“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit--not a
little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little
bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played
the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after
what he called “skirts” and soaking _aguardiente_. The skipper’s
carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went
about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away,
and _he_ wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to
England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start
burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.

“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing
like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t
say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of
being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew
her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did
under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have
been God help her!

“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s
arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him
while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been
imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he
kept in his room--the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.

“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s--he’s m-m-mad,’ he
stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast
in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!

“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more
about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far
as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.

“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a
despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all
the world like a startled penguin.

“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a
little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about
him.

“What _was_ he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing,
sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those
years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister
Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all
over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving
my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet
I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that
he just felt as if things had gone too far for him--so he threw his
cards on the table, and left it to--well, shall we say Providence to
shuffle them!

“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!

“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease
off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just
flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.

“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the
thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out
of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could
judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was
the old bos’n--a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on
the slow side, like most Dutchmen--standing under the break of the poop
with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.

“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’

“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails
were like boards--as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled
them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved,
left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny
experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as
tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else
to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the
‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.

“And ice--there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us,
though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard
it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for
miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises--shrieks and
groans--that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks
like musketry fire--and in the midst of it all the penguins would make
you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.

“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen
image than a man--his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin
resting on them--for hours, never speaking or moving.

“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call
him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he
had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and
frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get
it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and
leave the skin behind.

“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down
on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him,
as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind--it
is nothing,’ and lay down again.

“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was
still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired
he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and
left him.

“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the
ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more
than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my
nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was
something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss
if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne,
what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man
he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this--well, it staggered
me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.

“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had
taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was
safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the
skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare
to-do.

“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with
anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own
ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost
his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and
Board of Trade inquiries.

“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the
big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the
mate.

“And then--something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash
forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.

“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent,
and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling
out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I
don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit
jumpy since we had been among the ice.

“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of
the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh.
Then I saw the Old Man--and the laugh died.

“I shall never forget his face--miserable and yet lifted up both at
once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name--you
know--sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the
poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats,
and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went
back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.

“He sighed once, and looked round--a long look as if he were saying
good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a
minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then
he sighed again, and went in.

“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes--ten minutes. I
began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I
glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see
his grey head--the hair getting a bit thin on top--just as I’d seen it
scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....

“Fifteen minutes--twenty--I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was
waiting....

“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a
stroke--evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for
the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it.
I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.

“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain
to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.

“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite
steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo--she was loaded
right down to her marks--helped to keep her upright. She just settled
quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping
into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked
through. She looked--oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut
down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was
like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from
my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me--a young
fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks
wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him----

“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and
we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old
‘Maid of Athens’ went down.

“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he
thought a lot of the old ship....”

THE END OF AN ARGUMENT

A good solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as
satisfactory as an interest in common--which, in the case of Kavanagh,
the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer
“Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed
none at all.

Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved
before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as
religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.

Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.

Kavanagh was neat in his attire.

Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick
of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket
handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.

Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub
which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of
him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he
couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in
sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being
entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he
should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the
last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He
found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging
about docks and shipping offices--found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”

He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson
wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”

She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d
gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical
rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities
being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and
decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of
which he was inordinately fond.

The argument began something after this fashion:

The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching
forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her
ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted
barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber.
It was a glorious morning--one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings
that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was
bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of
the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they
were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon
ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the
early morning sky.

The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main,
and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in
the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just
laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone
in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted
on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing
for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in
fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:

    “We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling--o--oh ...
     An’ pa--ay Paddy Doyle for his bo--o--ots....”

“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.

“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow--the voice of
Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in
ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”

Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of
feeling to be overheard--least of all to be overheard by Ferguson.
Sneaking about in carpet slippers....

“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he
snapped.

“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.

The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch”
rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and
winds which grew ever more stormy.

The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of
his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she
pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden
and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of
the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin,
with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in
its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.

But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued
without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked
on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of
their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board
for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of
cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin
floor.

And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened
to interrupt them.

In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.

It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning,
when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving
waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his
reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in
harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him
no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic--dreary,
monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a
command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got
into one of the big liner companies. Now----

Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted
ship--now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she
slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.

It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was
yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the
rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute
appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.

“‘Maria’--Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and
built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been
abandoned--I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”

He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the
bridge.

“Aye--she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged
scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her--can’t do anything more. It’s
out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”

He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.

Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like
Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted
by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a
sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision
had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than
the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”

“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising
... in for a night of it....”

Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with
a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.

It was queer. He couldn’t explain it--couldn’t understand it! But there
was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he
_must_ save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than
if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a
knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel
making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and
rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making
signals--personal signals--to him and to no one else: to be saying,
“Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”

“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the
eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot
of money ... if you could spare the hands----”

Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But
Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the
money, and his hopes rose.

“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and
besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if
there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”

“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have
half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”

Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke
out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better
of him again: “Well, have it your own way--your own responsibility,
mind--and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men
away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do
it--oughtn’t to do it----”

There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six
hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen
volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage
crew.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a
brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge
they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a
romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain
Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.

Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd
ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He
foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the
duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those
of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’--Genoa.”

Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with
themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly
creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along
the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”

One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance
thrust over the rail.

“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma
precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s
gaun to blaw the nicht!”

His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short,
fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and
Kavanagh heard no more.

A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had
a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up
against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a
stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in
itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was
in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all
intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but
every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of
the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale
had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas,
and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no
attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken
off by some passing vessel.

He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was
able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off
again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the
gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.

Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the
side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men,
a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.

The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man
when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began
to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked
for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an
unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange
voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too,
which he could not at all make out.

There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet--it was a
peculiar sort of voice--a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in
it--unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the
companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must
be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained,
not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again--an
impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth
just behind him helped him to check.

The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which
followed it was worse than the sound.

“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.

“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and
they couldn’t get him away----”

He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the
descent into the saloon.

They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled
with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in
elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany
table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished
mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.

It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke
hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of
the deserted ship was all around--a silence only intensified by the
monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally
spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.

The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible
speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It
was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half
its terrors fled.

“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”

Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.

The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and
imposing stateroom with a big teak bed--evidently the captain’s, a relic
of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a
somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with
him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner
of the voice--a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now
pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever
heard.

It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the
haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled.
Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour
of his new command.

The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit,
mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the
thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce
gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.

Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so,
leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of
getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or
rather the whole) sail in its place.

And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh
forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never
before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had
never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.

Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and
toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last--it seemed like a
miracle--all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The
chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the
ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the
watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been
longing to do--find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.

He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or
Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition,
there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass
on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters
of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance,
while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette,
that he made the great discovery.

This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s
bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been
thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with
dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of
curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with
his knife to see if anything lay beneath.

His first find was a date--1869.

“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter--‘D’--no,
‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’----”

His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder
than ever.

“It _can’t_ be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George,
it _is_!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”

Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which
is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could
understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of
the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To
most laymen--indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school--it would
have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship--a good ship, no doubt,
in her day, a day long since over and done.

But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very
different significance.

Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long
after they themselves are gone--names about which yarns will be spun and
songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship
was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious
“Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and
her forerunner “The Tweed.” And--though perhaps in a lesser degree--such
was also the “Plinlimmon.”

And to Kavanagh she was even more.

She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was
inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first
voyage--those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour
of youth departed.

For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily
eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition.
There had been an old fellow in his first ship--they called him Old
Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was
commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal
honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a
hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he
had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which
belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.

Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many
an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had
thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the
gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully
Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e _set_ it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals
was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes....
‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’
‘Plinlimmon.’...”

Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now,
he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy
and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....

But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to
bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He
turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.

The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind
the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving
a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk--the wind all the
while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.

Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine
weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One
canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.

A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she _shall_ do it!” he
said to the sea and the darkness.

Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days,
Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.

Time--there _was_ no time! There was just a never-ending succession of
low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of
white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim
vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been
days--there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their
coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one
thing, and one thing only--saving that old ship from her old rival the
sea.

How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was
as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to
join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of
sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed
rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath
in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they
dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.

Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace,
only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once
Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone
of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which
had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered
seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade
out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It
just vanished....

But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere
about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what
didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that
Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest--yet at the time
Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that