CHAPTER I
From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end precisely on time. At nine o’clock the tug was to have taken me down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside, the driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than mine. And there was no tug.
Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and bitten by the cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back.
His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He meant nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two little girls – evidently the wharfinger’s daughters – went by, my hand reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and present them with the puling little wretch.
A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith’s way. Yet he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit.. or flowers, even. But no; his affectionate inspiration had to take the form of a yelping, yapping two months’ old puppy. And with the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And then Wada, on his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the hotel clerk had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was only what he had expected of me.
Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in the cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
By ten o’clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-case, which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the wharfinger. It belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to the chauffeur how to find some other pier from which, at some indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the Elsinore by some other tug. This served to increase my irritation. Why should I not have been informed as well as the pilot?
An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the new pier, the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could not have imagined. Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the sea, but a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of successful business man one meets in all the clubs. He introduced himself immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with Possum and the baggage. That some change had been made in the arrangements by Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug would come along any time.
And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait and freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made up my mind that I was not going to like this Captain West. Although I had never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the least, cavalier. When the Elsinore lay in Erie Basin, just arrived from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over from New York to inspect what was to be my home for many months. I had been delighted with the ship and the cabin accommodation. Even the stateroom selected for me was satisfactory and far more spacious than I had expected. But when I peeped into the captain’s room I was amazed at its comfort. When I say that it opened directly into a bath-room, and that, among other things, it was furnished with a big brass bed such as one would never suspect to find at sea, I have said enough.
Naturally, I had resolved that the bath-room and the big brass bed should be mine. When I asked the agents to arrange with the captain they seemed non-committal and uncomfortable. “I don’t know in the least what it is worth,” I said. “And I don’t care. Whether it costs one hundred and fifty dollars or five hundred, I must have those quarters.”
Harrison and Gray, the agents, debated silently with each other and scarcely thought Captain West would see his way to the arrangement. “Then he is the first sea captain I ever heard of that wouldn’t,” I asserted confidently. “Why, the captains of all the Atlantic liners regularly sell their quarters.”
“But Captain West is not the captain of an Atlantic liner,” Mr. Harrison observed gently.
“Remember, I am to be on that ship many a month,” I retorted. “Why, heavens, bid him up to a thousand if necessary.”
“We’ll try,” said Mr. Gray, “but we warn you not to place too much dependence on our efforts. Captain West is in Searsport at the present time, and we will write him to-day.”
To my astonishment Mr. Gray called me up several days later to inform me that Captain West had declined my offer. “Did you offer him up to a thousand?” I demanded. “What did he say?”
“He regretted that he was unable to concede what you asked,” Mr. Gray replied.
A day later I received a letter from Captain West. The writing and the wording were old-fashioned and formal. He regretted not having yet met me, and assured me that he would see personally that my quarters were made comfortable. For that matter he had already dispatched orders to Mr. Pike, the first mate of the Elsinore, to knock out the partition between my state-room and the spare state-room adjoining. Further – and here is where my dislike for Captain West began – he informed me that if, when once well at sea, I should find myself dissatisfied, he would gladly, in that case, exchange quarters with me.
Of course, after such a rebuff, I knew that no circumstance could ever persuade me to occupy Captain West’s brass bed. And it was this Captain Nathaniel West, whom I had not yet met, who had now kept me freezing on pier-ends through four miserable hours. The less I saw of him on the voyage the better, was my decision; and it was with a little tickle of pleasure that I thought of the many boxes of books I had dispatched on board from New York. Thank the Lord, I did not depend on sea captains for entertainment.
I turned Possum over to Wada, who was settling with the cabman, and while the tug’s sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by the pilot to an introduction with Captain West. At the first glimpse I knew that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot. I had seen the best of the breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a woman, of whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was well-nigh buried.
“My God! – his wife!” I darted in a whisper at the pilot. “Going along with him?.. ”
I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage, that the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the Elsinore taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had smiled and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.
“It’s his daughter,” the pilot replied under his breath. “Come to see him off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say that is what sent him back to sea. He’d retired, you know.”
Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of – oh – such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt’s when she moulds sound into speech.
So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that I was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of untold beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most commonplace regrets at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me. It was low and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as a bell and touched with a faint reminiscent twang of old New England.
“And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay,” he concluded my introduction to his daughter. “Margaret, this is Mr. Pathurst.”
Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and I found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and gravely upon me. It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching gaze. It was not that it was challenging, but that it was so insolently business-like. It was much in the very way one would look at a new coachman he was about to engage. I did not know then that she was to go on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the man who was to be a fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only natural. Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes smiled as she spoke.
As we moved on to enter the tug’s cabin I heard Possum’s shivering whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the creature in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my luggage, wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my little automatic rifle. I was startled by the mountain of luggage around which mine was no more than a fringe. Ship’s stores, was my first thought, until I noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and bundles of all sorts. The initials on what looked suspiciously like a woman’s hat trunk caught my eye – “M.W.” Yet Captain West’s first name was Nathaniel. On closer investigation I did find several “N.W’s.” but everywhere I could see “M.W’s.” Then I remembered that he had called her Margaret.
I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold deck biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly stipulated with the agents that no captain’s wife was to come along. The last thing under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman. But I had never thought about a captain’s daughter. For two cents I was ready to throw the voyage over and return on the tug to Baltimore.
By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid being struck by the spring and vitality of her walk. Her face, despite its firm moulding, had a suggestion of fragility that was belied by the robustness of her body. At least, one would argue that her body must be robust from her fashion of movement of it, though little could one divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of the furs.
I turned away on my heel and fell moodily to contemplating the mountain of luggage. A huge packing-case attracted my attention, and I was staring at it when she spoke at my shoulder.
“That’s what really caused the delay,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked incuriously.
“Why, the Elsinore’s piano, all renovated. When I made up my mind to come, I telegraphed Mr. Pike – he’s the mate, you know. He did his best. It was the fault of the piano house. And while we waited to-day I gave them a piece of my mind they’ll not forget in a hurry.”
She laughed at the recollection, and commenced to peep and peer into the luggage as if in search of some particular piece. Having satisfied herself, she was starting back, when she paused and said:
“Won’t you come into the cabin where it’s warm? We won’t be there for half an hour.”
“When did you decide to make this voyage?” I demanded abruptly.
So quick was the look she gave me that I knew she had in that moment caught all my disgruntlement and disgust.
“Two days ago,” she answered. “Why?”
Her readiness for give and take took me aback, and before I could speak she went on:
“Now you’re not to be at all silly about my coming, Mr. Pathurst. I probably know more about long-voyaging than you do, and we’re all going to be comfortable and happy. You can’t bother me, and I promise you I won’t bother you. I’ve sailed with passengers before, and I’ve learned to put up with more than they ever proved they were able to put up with. So there. Let us start right, and it won’t be any trouble to keep on going right. I know what is the matter with you. You think you’ll be called upon to entertain me. Please know that I do not need entertainment. I never saw the longest voyage that was too long, and I always arrive at the end with too many things not done for the passage ever to have been tedious, and.. I don’t play Chopsticks.”
CHAPTER II
The Elsinore, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when we came alongside. I knew too little about ships to be capable of admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration. I was still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole thing and return on the tug. From all of which it must not be taken that I am a vacillating type of man. On the contrary.
The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I been keen for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was because there was nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life had lost its savour. I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But the zest had gone out of things. I had lost taste for my fellow-men and all their foolish, little, serious endeavours. For a far longer period I had been dissatisfied with women. I had endured them, but I had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them. And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of art – a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners.
In short, I was embarking on the Elsinore because it was easier to than not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy. That was the curse of the condition into which I had fallen. That was why, as I stepped upon the deck of the Elsinore, I was half of a mind to tell them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain West and his daughter good-day.
I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile Miss West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the cabin, and the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie Basin. He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled up from somewhere in the waist of the ship. Mr. Pike had been drinking. That was patent. His face was puffed and discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.
I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few words that would put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who were now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike any concept I had ever entertained of sailors. Certainly, on the liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.
One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of remarkable Italian eyes. But he was a dwarf. So short was he that he was all sea-boots and sou’wester. And yet he was not entirely Italian. So certain was I that I asked the mate, who answered morosely:
“Him? Shorty? He’s a dago half-breed. The other half’s Jap or Malay.”
One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I thought he had been recently injured. His face was stolid and ox-like, and as he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he paused every several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement. Months were to pass, in which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that there was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a habit. His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it was unthinkably and abysmally stupider. And his name, as I was to learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers. And he was bosun of the fine American sailing-ship Elsinore– rated one of the finest sailing-ships afloat!
Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like. He had come off a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage to sea. His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements, and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace. In fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming creature fore and aft.
The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any moment, the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy. Those already on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped themselves in New York without the mediation of boarding-house masters. And what the crew itself would be like God alone could tell – so said the mate. Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come out of steam and this was his first sailing voyage.
“Ordinary seamen!” Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question. “We don’t carry Landsmen! – forget it! Every clodhopper an’ cow-walloper these days is an able seaman. That’s the way they rank and are paid. The merchant service is all shot to hell. There ain’t no more sailors. They all died years ago, before you were born even.”
I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate’s breath. Yet he did not stagger nor show any signs of intoxication. Not until afterward was I to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was where the liquor gave him away.
“It’d a-ben a grace had I died years ago,” he said, “rather than to a-lived to see sailors an’ ships pass away from the sea.”
“But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest,” I urged.
“So she is.. to-day. But what is she? – a damned cargo-carrier. She ain’t built for sailin’, an’ if she was there ain’t no sailors left to sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers! When I think of ’em! —The Gamecock, Shootin’ Star, Flyin’ Fish, Witch o’ the Wave, Staghound, Harvey Birch, Canvas-back, Fleetwing, Sea Serpent, Northern Light! An’ when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers that used to load at Hong Kong an’ race the Eastern Passages. A fine sight! A fine sight!”
I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to go into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I paced up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in all conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.
“You are a splendid figure of a man,” I complimented.
“I was, I was,” he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey strong on the air.
I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three of mine. His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
“How much do you weigh?” I asked.
“Two hundred an’ ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales close to two-forty.”
“And the Elsinore can’t sail,” I said, returning to the subject which had roused him.
“I’ll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month’s wages, she won’t make it around in a hundred an’ fifty days,” he answered. “Yet I’ve come round in the old Flyin’ Cloud in eighty-nine days – eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to ’Frisco. Sixty men for’ard that was men, an’ eight boys, an’ drive! drive! drive! Three hundred an’ seventy-four miles for a day’s run under t’gallantsails, an’ in the squalls eighteen knots o’ line not enough to time her. Eighty-nine days – never beat, an’ tied once by the old Andrew Jackson nine years afterwards. Them was the days!”
“When did the Andrew Jackson tie her?” I asked, because of the growing suspicion that he was “having” me.
“In 1860,” was his prompt reply.
“And you sailed in the Flying Cloud nine years before that, and this is 1913 – why, that was sixty-two years ago,” I charged.
“And I was seven years old,” he chuckled. “My mother was stewardess on the Flyin’ Cloud. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was twelve, on the Herald o’ the Morn, when she made around in ninety-nine days – half the crew in irons most o’ the time, five men lost from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken square off, knuckle-dusters an’ belayin’-pins flyin’, three men shot by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an’ no one to know who done it, an’ drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an’ east to west around Cape Stiff!”
“But that would make you sixty-nine years old,” I insisted.
“Which I am,” he retorted proudly, “an’ a better man at that than the scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of ’em would die under the things I’ve been through. Did you ever hear of the Sunny South? – she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an’ changed her name to Emanuela?”
“And you’ve sailed the Middle Passage!” I cried, recollecting the old phrase.
“I was on the Emanuela that day in Mozambique Channel when the Brisk caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she wouldn’t a-caught us except for her having steam.”
I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old man-killing and man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and yet, as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge feet, I was convinced that his years were as he asserted. He spoke of a Captain Sonurs.
“He was a great captain,” he was saying. “An’ in the two years I sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn’t jump the ship goin’ in an’ stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed again.”
“But why?”
“The men, on account of the men swearin’ blood an’ vengeance and warrants against me because of my ways of teachin’ them to be sailors. Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid for me – and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.”
He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed knuckles I understood the nature of his work.
“But all that’s stopped now,” he lamented. “A sailor’s a gentleman these days. You can’t raise your voice or your hand to them.”
At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the second mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
“The tug’s in sight with the crew, sir,” he announced.
The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, “Come on down, Mr. Mellaire, and meet our passenger.”
I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire came down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction. He was courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and unmistakably from south of Mason and Dixon.
“A Southerner,” I said.
“Georgia, sir.” He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow and smile.
His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man’s face. It was a gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate’s, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided neither sincerity nor mercy. Behind that gloss was something cold and terrible, that lurked and waited and watched – something catlike, something inimical and deadly. Behind that gloss of soft light and of social sparkle was the live, fearful thing that had shaped that mouth into the gash it was. What I sensed behind in those eyes chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.
As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and exchanged amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying upon him. Frankly I was afraid of the thing ambushed behind there in the skull of Mr. Mellaire. One so as a matter of course identifies form and feature with the spirit within. But I could not do this with the second mate. His face and form and manner and suave ease were one thing, inside which he, an entirely different thing, lay hid.
I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask for instructions. I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside. Mr. Pike looked at me quickly and said:
“Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst.”
He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and started for’ard. I stood and waited for Mr. Pike’s communication, which he did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out of ear-shot. Then he leaned closely to me and said:
“Don’t mention that little matter of my age to anybody. Each year I sign on I sign my age one year younger. I am fifty-four, now, on the articles.”
“And you don’t look a day older,” I answered lightly, though I meant it in all sincerity.
“And I don’t feel it. I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the younglings. And don’t let my age get to anybody’s ears, Mr. Pathurst. Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the seventy mark. And owners neither. I’ve had my hopes for this ship, and I’d a-got her, I think, except for the old man decidin’ to go to sea again. As if he needed the money! The old skinflint!”
“Is he well off?” I inquired.
“Well off! If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken ranch in California and live like a fighting cock – yes, if I had a fiftieth of what he’s got salted away. Why, he owns more stock in all the Blackwood ships.. and they’ve always been lucky and always earned money. I’m getting old, and it’s about time I got a command. But no; the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to sea again just as the berth’s ripe for me to fall into.”
Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
“Mr. Pathurst? You won’t mention about my age?”
“No, certainly not, Mr. Pike,” I said.
