← catalogue

The Mutiny of the Elsinore

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #2415 · 644,298 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mutiny of the Elsinore
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: December 1, 2000 [eBook #2415]
                Most recently updated: April 20, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2415

Credits: David Price and Rab Hughes


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE ***




The Mutiny of the Elsinore

by

JACK LONDON

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.

_Published 1915_

_Copyright in the United States of America by_ Jack London


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.
 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
 CHAPTER XXX.
 CHAPTER XXXI.
 CHAPTER XXXII.
 CHAPTER XXXIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIV.
 CHAPTER XXXV.
 CHAPTER XXXVI.
 CHAPTER XXXVII.
 CHAPTER XXXVIII.
 CHAPTER XXXIX.
 CHAPTER XL.
 CHAPTER XLI.
 CHAPTER XLII.
 CHAPTER XLIII.
 CHAPTER XLIV.
 CHAPTER XLV.
 CHAPTER XLVI.
 CHAPTER XLVII.
 CHAPTER XLVIII.
 CHAPTER XLIX.
 CHAPTER L.




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.




CHAPTER III.


Quite chilled through, I was immediately struck by the warm comfort of
the cabin. All the connecting doors were open, making what I might call
a large suite of rooms or a whale house. The main-deck entrance, on the
port side, was into a wide, well-carpeted hallway. Into this hallway,
from the port side, opened five rooms: first, on entering, the mate’s;
next, the two state-rooms which had been knocked into one for me; then
the steward’s room; and, adjoining his, completing the row, a
state-room which was used for the slop-chest.

Across the hall was a region with which I was not yet acquainted,
though I knew it contained the dining-room, the bath-rooms, the cabin
proper, which was in truth a spacious living-room, the captain’s
quarters, and, undoubtedly, Miss West’s quarters. I could hear her
humming some air as she bustled about with her unpacking. The steward’s
pantry, separated by crosshalls and by the stairway leading into the
chart-room above on the poop, was placed strategically in the centre of
all its operations. Thus, on the starboard side of it were the
state-rooms of the captain and Miss West, for’ard of it were the
dining-room and main cabin; while on the port side of it was the row of
rooms I have described, two of which were mine.

I ventured down the hall toward the stern, and found it opened into the
stern of the _Elsinore_, forming a single large apartment at least
thirty-five feet from side to side and fifteen to eighteen feet in
depth, curved, of course, to the lines of the ship’s stern. This seemed
a store-room. I noted wash-tubs, bolts of canvas, many lockers, hams
and bacon hanging, a step-ladder that led up through a small hatch to
the poop, and, in the floor, another hatch.

I spoke to the steward, an old Chinese, smooth-faced and brisk of
movement, whose name I never learned, but whose age on the articles was
fifty-six.

“What is down there?” I asked, pointing to the hatch in the floor.

“Him lazarette,” he answered.

“And who eats there?” I indicated a table with two stationary
sea-chairs.

“Him second table. Second mate and carpenter him eat that table.”

When I had finished giving instructions to Wada for the arranging of my
things I looked at my watch. It was early yet, only several minutes
after three so I went on deck again to witness the arrival of the crew.

The actual coming on board from the tug I had missed, but for’ard of
the amidship house I encountered a few laggards who had not yet gone
into the forecastle. These were the worse for liquor, and a more
wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any
slum. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and
dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and
vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.

“Come! Come! Get your dunnage into the fo’c’s’le!”

Mr. Pike uttered these words sharply from the bridge above. A light and
graceful bridge of steel rods and planking ran the full length of the
_Elsinore_, starting from the poop, crossing the amidship house and the
forecastle, and connecting with the forecastle-head at the very bow of
the ship.

At the mate’s command the men reeled about and glowered up at him, one
or two starting clumsily to obey. The others ceased their drunken
yammerings and regarded the mate sullenly. One of them, with a face
mashed by some mad god in the making, and who was afterwards to be
known by me as Larry, burst into a guffaw, and spat insolently on the
deck. Then, with utmost deliberation, he turned to his fellows and
demanded loudly and huskily:

“Who in hell’s the old stiff, anyways?”

I saw Mr. Pike’s huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and I
noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the
bridge-railing. Beyond that he controlled himself.

“Go on, you,” he said. “I’ll have nothing out of you. Get into the
fo’c’s’le.”

And then, to my surprise, he turned and walked aft along the bridge to
where the tug was casting off its lines. So this was all his high and
mighty talk of kill and drive, I thought. Not until afterwards did I
recollect, as I turned aft down the deck, that I saw Captain West
leaning on the rail at the break of the poop and gazing for’ard.

The tug’s lines were being cast off, and I was interested in watching
the manoeuvre until she had backed clear of the ship, at which moment,
from for’ard, arose a queer babel of howling and yelping, as numbers of
drunken voices cried out that a man was overboard. The second mate
sprang down the poop-ladder and darted past me along the deck. The
mate, still on the slender, white-painted bridge, that seemed no more
than a spider thread, surprised me by the activity with which he dashed
along the bridge to the ’midship house, leaped upon the canvas-covered
long-boat, and swung outboard where he might see. Before the men could
clamber upon the rail the second mate was among them, and it was he who
flung a coil of line overboard.

What impressed me particularly was the mental and muscular superiority
of these two officers. Despite their age—the mate sixty-nine and the
second mate at least fifty—their minds and their bodies had acted with
the swiftness and accuracy of steel springs. They were potent. They
were iron. They were perceivers, willers, and doers. They were as of
another species compared with the sailors under them. While the latter,
witnesses of the happening and directly on the spot, had been crying
out in befuddled helplessness, and with slow wits and slower bodies
been climbing upon the rail, the second mate had descended the steep
ladder from the poop, covered two hundred feet of deck, sprung upon the
rail, grasped the instant need of the situation, and cast the coil of
line into the water.

And of the same nature and quality had been the actions of Mr. Pike. He
and Mr. Mellaire were masters over the wretched creatures of sailors by
virtue of this remarkable difference of efficiency and will. Truly,
they were more widely differentiated from the men under them than were
the men under them differentiated from Hottentots—ay, and from monkeys.

I, too, by this time, was standing on the big hawser-bitts in a
position to see a man in the water who seemed deliberately swimming
away from the ship. He was a dark-skinned Mediterranean of some sort,
and his face, in a clear glimpse I caught of it, was distorted by
frenzy. His black eyes were maniacal. The line was so accurately flung
by the second mate that it fell across the man’s shoulders, and for
several strokes his arms tangled in it ere he could swim clear. This
accomplished, he proceeded to scream some wild harangue and once, as he
uptossed his arms for emphasis, I saw in his hand the blade of a long
knife.

Bells were jangling on the tug as it started to the rescue. I stole a
look up at Captain West. He had walked to the port side of the poop,
where, hands in pockets, he was glancing, now for’ard at the struggling
man, now aft at the tug. He gave no orders, betrayed no excitement, and
appeared, I may well say, the most casual of spectators.

The creature in the water seemed now engaged in taking off his clothes.
I saw one bare arm, and then the other, appear. In his struggles he
sometimes sank beneath the surface, but always he emerged, flourishing
the knife and screaming his addled harangue. He even tried to escape
the tug by diving and swimming underneath.

I strolled for’ard, and arrived in time to see him hoisted in over the
rail of the _Elsinore_. He was stark naked, covered with blood, and
raving. He had cut and slashed himself in a score of places. From one
wound in the wrist the blood spurted with each beat of the pulse. He
was a loathsome, non-human thing. I have seen a scared orang in a zoo,
and for all the world this bestial-faced, mowing, gibbering thing
reminded me of the orang. The sailors surrounded him, laying hands on
him, withstraining him, the while they guffawed and cheered. Right and
left the two mates shoved them away, and dragged the lunatic down the
deck and into a room in the ’midship house. I could not help marking
the strength of Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire. I had heard of the
superhuman strength of madmen, but this particular madman was as a wisp
of straw in their hands. Once into the bunk, Mr. Pike held down the
struggling fool easily with one hand while he dispatched the second
mate for marlin with which to tie the fellow’s arms.

“Bughouse,” Mr. Pike grinned at me. “I’ve seen some bughouse crews in
my time, but this one’s the limit.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “The man will bleed to death.”

“And good riddance,” he answered promptly. “We’ll have our hands full
of him until we can lose him somehow. When he gets easy I’ll sew him
up, that’s all, if I have to ease him with a clout of the jaw.”

I glanced at the mate’s huge paw and appreciated its anæsthetic
qualities. Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands
still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky
to the north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the
drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in
pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world from any I had
known.

Wada broke in upon my thoughts by telling me he had been sent to say
that Miss West was serving tea in the cabin.




CHAPTER IV.


The contrast, as I entered the cabin, was startling. All contrasts
aboard the _Elsinore_ promised to be startling. Instead of the cold,
hard deck my feet sank into soft carpet. In place of the mean and
narrow room, built of naked iron, where I had left the lunatic, I was
in a spacious and beautiful apartment. With the bawling of the men’s
voices still in my ears, and with the pictures of their drink-puffed
and filthy faces still vivid under my eyelids, I found myself greeted
by a delicate-faced, prettily-gowned woman who sat beside a lacquered
oriental table on which rested an exquisite tea-service of Canton
china. All was repose and calm. The steward, noiseless-footed,
expressionless, was a shadow, scarcely noticed, that drifted into the
room on some service and drifted out again.

Not at once could I relax, and Miss West, serving my tea, laughed and
said:

“You look as if you had been seeing things. The steward tells me a man
has been overboard. I fancy the cold water must have sobered him.”

I resented her unconcern.

“The man is a lunatic,” I said. “This ship is no place for him. He
should be sent ashore to some hospital.”

“I am afraid, if we begin that, we’d have to send two-thirds of our
complement ashore—one lump?

“Yes, please,” I answered. “But the man has terribly wounded himself.
He is liable to bleed to death.”

She looked at me for a moment, her gray eyes serious and scrutinizing,
as she passed me my cup; then laughter welled up in her eyes, and she
shook her head reprovingly.

“Now please don’t begin the voyage by being shocked, Mr. Pathurst. Such
things are very ordinary occurrences. You’ll get used to them. You must
remember some queer creatures go down to the sea in ships. The man is
safe. Trust Mr. Pike to attend to his wounds. I’ve never sailed with
Mr. Pike, but I’ve heard enough about him. Mr. Pike is quite a surgeon.
Last voyage, they say, he performed a successful amputation, and so
elated was he that he turned his attention on the carpenter, who
happened to be suffering from some sort of indigestion. Mr. Pike was so
convinced of the correctness of his diagnosis that he tried to bribe
the carpenter into having his appendix removed.” She broke off to laugh
heartily, then added: “They say he offered the poor man just pounds and
pounds of tobacco to consent to the operation.”

“But is it safe . . . for the . . . the working of the ship,” I urged,
“to take such a lunatic along?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if not intending to reply, then said:

“This incident is nothing. There are always several lunatics or idiots
in every ship’s company. And they always come aboard filled with
whiskey and raving. I remember, once, when we sailed from Seattle, a
long time ago, one such madman. He showed no signs of madness at all;
just calmly seized two boarding-house runners and sprang overboard with
them. We sailed the same day, before the bodies were recovered.”

Again she shrugged her shoulders.

“What would you? The sea is hard, Mr. Pathurst. And for our sailors we
get the worst type of men. I sometimes wonder where they find them. And
we do our best with them, and somehow manage to make them help us carry
on our work in the world. But they are low . . . low.”

As I listened, and studied her face, contrasting her woman’s
sensitivity and her soft pretty dress with the brute faces and rags of
the men I had noticed, I could not help being convinced intellectually
of the rightness of her position. Nevertheless, I was hurt
sentimentally,—chiefly, I do believe, because of the very hardness and
unconcern with which she enunciated her view. It was because she was a
woman, and so different from the sea-creatures, that I resented her
having received such harsh education in the school of the sea.

“I could not help remarking your father’s—er, er _sang froid_ during
the occurrence.” I ventured.

“He never took his hands from his pockets!” she cried.

Her eyes sparkled as I nodded confirmation.

“I knew it! It’s his way. I’ve seen it so often. I remember when I was
twelve years old—mother was alone—we were running into San Francisco.
It was in the _Dixie_, a ship almost as big as this. There was a strong
fair wind blowing, and father did not take a tug. We sailed right
through the Golden Gate and up the San Francisco water-front. There was
a swift flood tide, too; and the men, both watches, were taking in sail
as fast as they could.

“Now the fault was the steamboat captain’s. He miscalculated our speed
and tried to cross our bow. Then came the collision, and the _Dixie’s_
bow cut through that steamboat, cabin and hull. There were hundreds of
passengers, men, women, and children. Father never took his hands from
his pockets. He sent the mate for’ard to superintend rescuing the
passengers, who were already climbing on to our bowsprit and
forecastle-head, and in a voice no different from what he’d use to ask
some one to pass the butter he told the second mate to set all sail.
And he told him which sails to begin with.”

“But why set more sails?” I interrupted.

“Because he could see the situation. Don’t you see, the steamboat was
cut wide open. All that kept her from sinking instantly was the bow of
the _Dixie_ jammed into her side. By setting more sail and keeping
before the wind, he continued to keep the bow of the _Dixie_ jammed.

“I was terribly frightened. People who had sprung or fallen overboard
were drowning on each side of us, right in my sight, as we sailed along
up the water-front. But when I looked at father, there he was, just as
I had always known him, hands in pockets, walking slowly up and down,
now giving an order to the wheel—you see, he had to direct the
_Dixie’s_ course through all the shipping—now watching the passengers
swarming over our bow and along our deck, now looking ahead to see his
way through the ships at anchor. Sometimes he did glance at the poor,
drowning ones, but he was not concerned with them.

“Of course, there were numbers drowned, but by keeping his hands in his
pockets and his head cool he saved hundreds of lives. Not until the
last person was off the steamboat—he sent men aboard to make sure—did
he take off the press of sail. And the steamboat sank at once.”

She ceased, and looked at me with shining eyes for approbation.

“It was splendid,” I acknowledged. “I admire the quiet man of power,
though I confess that such quietness under stress seems to me almost
unearthly and beyond human. I can’t conceive of myself acting that way,
and I am confident that I was suffering more while that poor devil was
in the water than all the rest of the onlookers put together.”

“Father suffers!” she defended loyally. “Only he does not show it.”

I bowed, for I felt she had missed my point.




CHAPTER V.


I came out from tea in the cabin to find the tug _Britannia_ in sight.
She was the craft that was to tow us down Chesapeake Bay to sea.
Strolling for’ard I noted the sailors being routed out of the
forecastle by Sundry Buyers, forever tenderly pressing his abdomen with
his hands. Another man was helping Sundry Buyers at routing out the
sailors. I asked Mr. Pike who the man was.

“Nancy—my bosun; ain’t he a peach?” was the answer I got, and from the
mate’s manner of enunciation I was quite aware that “Nancy” had been
used derisively.

Nancy could not have been more than thirty, though he looked as if he
had lived a very long time. He was toothless and sad and weary of
movement. His eyes were slate-coloured and muddy, his shaven face was
sickly yellow. Narrow-shouldered, sunken-chested, with cheeks
cavernously hollow, he looked like a man in the last stages of
consumption. Little life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even
less life. And these were bosuns!—bosuns of the fine American
sailing-ship _Elsinore_! Never had any illusion of mine taken a more
distressing cropper.

It was plain to me that the pair of them, spineless and spunkless, were
afraid of the men they were supposed to boss. And the men! Doré could
never have conjured a more delectable hell’s broth. For the first time
I saw them all, and I could not blame the two bosuns for being afraid
of them. They did not walk. They slouched and shambled, some even
tottered, as from weakness or drink.

But it was their faces. I could not help remembering what Miss West had
just told me—that ships always sailed with several lunatics or idiots
in their crews. But these looked as if they were all lunatic or
feeble-minded. And I, too, wondered where such a mass of human wreckage
could have been obtained. There was something wrong with all of them.
Their bodies were twisted, their faces distorted, and almost without
exception they were under-sized. The several quite fairly large men I
marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large and unmistakably
Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking and muttering to
himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his head
on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue
eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him
O’Sullivan. But O’Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the heels
of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth,
followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed
a marvel his flesh could hold his frame together.

Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
have ever beheld. He was a twisted oaf of a man. Face and body were
twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture. His was the
face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His large black eyes
were bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed
questioningly from face to face and to everything about. They were so
pitifully alert, those eyes, as if forever astrain to catch the clue to
some perplexing and threatening enigma. Not until afterwards did I
learn the cause of this. He was stone deaf, having had his ear-drums
destroyed in the boiler explosion which had wrecked the rest of him.

I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the men
from a distance. His keen, Asiatic face, quick with intelligence, was a
relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the
forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was
something wrong with him, too. He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to
know, his high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown.

Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I
watched him. The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer, and
it was plain that he was disgusted with the quality of cattle
delivered.

“Something the matter with the last mother’s son of them,” he growled.

And still they came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly
adjudged a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced
and wrinkled, with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small,
well-fleshed man, who seemed to my eye the most normal and least
unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared. But Mr. Pike’s eye was
better trained than mine.

“What’s the matter with _you_?” he snarled at the man.

“Nothing, sir,” the fellow answered, stopping immediately.

“What’s your name?”

Mr. Pike never spoke to a sailor save with a snarl.

“Charles Davis, sir.”

“What are you limping about?”

“I ain’t limpin’, sir,” the man answered respectfully, and, at a nod of
dismissal from the mate, marched off jauntily along the deck with a
hoodlum swing to the shoulders.

“He’s a sailor all right,” the mate grumbled; “but I’ll bet you a pound
of tobacco or a month’s wages there’s something wrong with him.”

The forecastle now seemed empty, but the mate turned on the bosuns with
his customary snarl.

“What in hell are you doing? Sleeping? Think this is a rest cure? Get
in there an’ rustle ’em out!”

Sundry Buyers pressed his abdomen gingerly and hesitated, while Nancy,
his face one dogged, long-suffering bleakness, reluctantly entered the
forecastle. Then, from inside, we heard oaths, vile and filthy, urgings
and expostulations on the part of Nancy, meekly and pleadingly uttered.

I noted the grim and savage look that came on Mr. Pike’s face, and was
prepared for I knew not what awful monstrosities to emerge from the
forecastle. Instead, to my surprise, came three fellows who were
strikingly superior to the ruck that had preceded them. I looked to see
the mate’s face soften to some sort of approval. On the contrary, his
blue eyes contracted to narrow slits, the snarl of his voice was
communicated to his lips, so that he seemed like a dog about to bite.

But the three fellows. They were small men, all; and young men,
anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. Though roughly dressed, they
were well dressed, and under their clothes their bodily movements
showed physical well-being. Their faces were keen cut, intelligent. And
though I felt there was something queer about them, I could not divine
what it was.

Here were no ill-fed, whiskey-poisoned men, such as the rest of the
sailors, who, having drunk up their last pay-days, had starved ashore
until they had received and drunk up their advance money for the
present voyage. These three, on the other hand were supple and
vigorous. Their movements were spontaneously quick and accurate.
Perhaps it was the way they looked at me, with incurious yet
calculating eyes that nothing escaped. They seemed so worldly wise, so
indifferent, so sure of themselves. I was confident they were not
sailors. Yet, as shore-dwellers, I could not place them. They were a
type I had never encountered. Possibly I can give a better idea of them
by describing what occurred.

As they passed before us they favoured Mr. Pike with the same
indifferent, keen glances they gave me.

“What’s your name—you?” Mr. Pike barked at the first of the trio,
evidently a hybrid Irish-Jew. Jewish his nose unmistakably was. Equally
unmistakable was the Irish of his eyes, and jaw, and upper lip.

The three had immediately stopped, and, though they did not look
directly at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference.
Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic,
Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so
crass as a wink or a nod. I almost doubted that I had intercepted it,
and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his fellows. More a
shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of
sudden light—or whatever it was, it carried the message.

“Murphy,” the other answered the mate.

“Sir!” Mr. Pike snarled at him.

Murphy shrugged his shoulders in token that he did not understand. It
was the poise of the man, of the three of them, the cool poise that
impressed me.

“When you address any officer on this ship you’ll say ‘sir,’” Mr. Pike
explained, his voice as harsh as his face was forbidding. “Did you get
_that_?”

“Yes . . . sir,” Murphy drawled with deliberate slowness. “I gotcha.”

“Sir!” Mr. Pike roared.

“Sir,” Murphy answered, so softly and carelessly that it irritated the
mate to further bullyragging.

“Well, Murphy’s too long,” he announced. “Nosey’ll do you aboard this
craft. Got _that_?”

“I gotcha . . . sir,” came the reply, insolent in its very softness and
unconcern. “Nosey Murphy goes . . . sir.”

And then he laughed—the three of them laughed, if laughter it might be
called that was laughter without sound or facial movement. The eyes
alone laughed, mirthlessly and cold-bloodedly.

Certainly Mr. Pike was not enjoying himself with these baffling
personalities. He turned upon the leader, the one who had given the
warning and who looked the admixture of all that was Mediterranean and
Semitic.

“What’s _your_ name?”

“Bert Rhine . . . sir,” was the reply, in tones as soft and careless
and silkily irritating as the other’s.

“And _you_?”—this to the remaining one, the youngest of the trio, a
dark-eyed, olive-skinned fellow with a face most striking in its
cameo-like beauty. American-born, I placed him, of immigrants from
Southern Italy—from Naples, or even Sicily.

“Twist . . . sir,” he answered, precisely in the same manner as the
others.

“Too long,” the mate sneered. “The Kid’ll do you. Got _that_?”

“I gotcha . . . sir. Kid Twist’ll do me . . . sir.”

“Kid’ll do!”

“Kid . . . sir.”

And the three laughed their silent, mirthless laugh. By this time Mr.
Pike was beside himself with a rage that could find no excuse for
action.

“Now I’m going to tell you something, the bunch of you, for the good of
your health.” The mate’s voice grated with the rage he was suppressing.
“I know your kind. You’re dirt. D’ye get _that_? You’re dirt. And on
this ship you’ll be treated as dirt. You’ll do your work like men, or
I’ll know the reason why. The first time one of you bats an eye, or
even looks like batting an eye, he gets his. D’ye get that? Now get
out. Get along for’ard to the windlass.”

Mr. Pike turned on his heel, and I swung alongside of him as he moved
aft.

“What do you make of them?” I queried.

“The limit,” he grunted. “I know their kidney. They’ve done time, the
three of them. They’re just plain sweepings of hell—”

Here his speech was broken off by the spectacle that greeted him on
Number Two hatch. Sprawled out on the hatch were five or six men, among
them Larry, the tatterdemalion who had called him “old stiff” earlier
in the afternoon. That Larry had not obeyed orders was patent, for he
was sitting with his back propped against his sea-bag, which ought to
have been in the forecastle. Also, he and the group with him ought to
have been for’ard manning the windlass.

The mate stepped upon the hatch and towered over the man.

“Get up,” he ordered.

Larry made an effort, groaned, and failed to get up.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Sir!”

“I can’t, sir. I was drunk last night an’ slept in Jefferson Market.
An’ this mornin’ I was froze tight, sir. They had to pry me loose.”

“Stiff with the cold you were, eh?” the mate grinned.

“It’s well ye might say it, sir,” Larry answered.

“And you feel like an old stiff, eh?”

Larry blinked with the troubled, querulous eyes of a monkey. He was
beginning to apprehend he knew not what, and he knew that bending over
him was a man-master.

“Well, I’ll just be showin’ you what an old stiff feels like, anyways.”
Mr. Pike mimicked the other’s brogue.

And now I shall tell what I saw happen. Please remember what I have
said of the huge paws of Mr. Pike, the fingers much longer than mine
and twice as thick, the wrists massive-boned, the arm-bones and the
shoulder-bones of the same massive order. With one flip of his right
hand, with what I might call an open-handed, lifting, upward slap, save
that it was the ends of the fingers only that touched Larry’s face, he
lifted Larry into the air, sprawling him backward on his back across
his sea-bag.

The man alongside of Larry emitted a menacing growl and started to
spring belligerently to his feet. But he never reached his feet. Mr.
Pike, with the back of same right hand, open, smote the man on the side
of the face. The loud smack of the impact was startling. The mate’s
strength was amazing. The blow looked so easy, so effortless; it had
seemed like the lazy stroke of a good-natured bear, but in it was such
a weight of bone and muscle that the man went down sidewise and rolled
off the hatch on to the deck.

At this moment, lurching aimlessly along, appeared O’Sullivan. A sudden
access of muttering, on his part, reached Mr. Pike’s ear, and Mr. Pike,
instantly keen as a wild animal, his paw in the act of striking
O’Sullivan, whipped out like a revolver shot, “What’s that?” Then he
noted the sense-struck face of O’Sullivan and withheld the blow.
“Bug-house,” Mr. Pike commented.

Involuntarily I had glanced to see if Captain West was on the poop, and
found that we were hidden from the poop by the ’midship house.

Mr. Pike, taking no notice of the man who lay groaning on the deck,
stood over Larry, who was likewise groaning. The rest of the sprawling
men were on their feet, subdued and respectful. I, too, was respectful
of this terrific, aged figure of a man. The exhibition had quite
convinced me of the verity of his earlier driving and killing days.

“Who’s the old stiff now?” he demanded.

“’Tis me, sir,” Larry moaned contritely.

“Get up!”

Larry got up without any difficulty at all.

“Now get for’ard to the windlass! The rest of you!”

And they went, sullenly, shamblingly, like the cowed brutes they were.




CHAPTER VI.


I climbed the ladder on the side of the for’ard house (which house
contained, as I discovered, the forecastle, the galley, and the
donkey-engine room), and went part way along the bridge to a position
by the foremast, where I could observe the crew heaving up anchor. The
_Britannia_ was alongside, and we were getting under way.

A considerable body of men was walking around with the windlass or
variously engaged on the forecastle-head. Of the crew proper were two
watches of fifteen men each. In addition were sailmakers, boys, bosuns,
and the carpenter. Nearly forty men were they, but such men! They were
sad and lifeless. There was no vim, no go, no activity. Every step and
movement was an effort, as if they were dead men raised out of coffins
or sick men dragged from hospital beds. Sick they
were—whiskey-poisoned. Starved they were, and weak from poor nutrition.
And worst of all, they were imbecile and lunatic.

I looked aloft at the intricate ropes, at the steel masts rising and
carrying huge yards of steel, rising higher and higher, until steel
masts and yards gave way to slender spars of wood, while ropes and
stays turned into a delicate tracery of spider-thread against the sky.
That such a wretched muck of men should be able to work this
magnificent ship through all storm and darkness and peril of the sea
was beyond all seeming. I remembered the two mates, the
super-efficiency, mental and physical, of Mr. Mellaire and Mr.
Pike—could they make this human wreckage do it? They, at least, evinced
no doubts of their ability. The sea? If this feat of mastery were
possible, then clear it was that I knew nothing of the sea.

I looked back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men
who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These
were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of
the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the
points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed and were killed,
but who did their work as men. These men, these shambling carcasses at
the windlass—I looked, and looked, and vainly I strove to conjure the
vision of them swinging aloft in rack and storm, “clearing the raffle,”
as Kipling puts it, “with their clasp knives in their teeth.” Why
didn’t they sing a chanty as they hove the anchor up? In the old days,
as I had read, the anchor always came up to the rollicking sailor songs
of sea-chested men.

I tired of watching the spiritless performance, and went aft on an
exploring trip along the slender bridge. It was a beautiful structure,
strong yet light, traversing the length of the ship in three aerial
leaps. It spanned from the forecastle-head to the forecastle-house,
next to the ’midship house, and then to the poop. The poop, which was
really the roof or deck over all the cabin space below, and which
occupied the whole after-part of the ship, was very large. It was
broken only by the half-round and half-covered wheel-house at the very
stern and by the chart-house. On either side of the latter two doors
opened into a tiny hallway. This, in turn, gave access to the
chart-room and to a stairway that led down into the cabin quarters
beneath.

I peeped into the chart-room and was greeted with a smile by Captain
West. He was lolling back comfortably in a swing chair, his feet cocked
on the desk opposite. On a broad, upholstered couch sat the pilot. Both
were smoking cigars; and, lingering for a moment to listen to the
conversation, I grasped that the pilot was an ex-sea-captain.

As I descended the stairs, from Miss West’s room came a sound of
humming and bustling, as she settled her belongings. The energy she
displayed, to judge by the cheerful noises of it, was almost
perturbing.

Passing by the pantry, I put my head inside the door to greet the
steward and courteously let him know that I was aware of his existence.
Here, in his little realm, it was plain that efficiency reigned.
Everything was spotless and in order, and I could have wished and
wished vainly for a more noiseless servant than he ashore. His face, as
he regarded me, had as little or as much expression as the Sphinx. But
his slant, black eyes were bright, with intelligence.

“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, in order to put words to my
invasion of his castle.

“Buggy-house,” he answered promptly, with a disgusted shake of the
head. “Too much buggy-house. All crazy. You see. No good. Rotten. Down
to hell.”

That was all, but it verified my own judgment. While it might be true,
as Miss West had said, that every ship’s crew contained several
lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew
contained far more than several. In fact, and as it was to turn out,
our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in
so far as its helplessness and worthlessness were beyond the average.

I found my own room (in reality it was two rooms) delightful. Wada had
unpacked and stored away my entire outfit of clothing, and had filled
numerous shelves with the library I had brought along. Everything was
in order and place, from my shaving outfit in the drawer beside the
wash-basin, and my sea-boots and oilskins hung ready to hand, to my
writing materials on the desk, before which a swing arm-chair,
leather-upholstered and screwed solidly to the floor, invited me. My
pyjamas and dressing-gown were out. My slippers, in their accustomed
place by the bed, also invited me.

Here, aft, all was fitness, intelligence. On deck it was what I have
described—a nightmare spawn of creatures, assumably human, but
malformed, mentally and physically, into caricatures of men. Yes, it
was an unusual crew; and that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire could whip it
into the efficient shape necessary to work this vast and intricate and
beautiful fabric of a ship was beyond all seeming of possibility.

Depressed as I was by what I had just witnessed on deck, there came to
me, as I leaned back in my chair and opened the second volume of George
Moore’s _Hail and Farewell_, a premonition that the voyage was to be
disastrous. But then, as I looked about the room, measured its generous
space, realized that I was more comfortably situated than I had ever
been on any passenger steamer, I dismissed foreboding thoughts and
caught a pleasant vision of myself, through weeks and months, catching
up with all the necessary reading which I had so long neglected.

Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew. No, he hadn’t, but the
steward had said that in all his years at sea this was the worst crew
he had ever seen.

“He say, all crazy, no sailors, rotten,” Wada said. “He say all big
fools and bime by much trouble. ‘You see,’ he say all the time. ‘You
see, You see.’ He pretty old man—fifty-five years, he say. Very smart
man for Chinaman. Just now, first time for long time, he go to sea.
Before, he have big business in San Francisco. Then he get much
trouble—police. They say he opium smuggle. Oh, big, big trouble. But he
catch good lawyer. He no go to jail. But long time lawyer work, and
when trouble all finish lawyer got all his business, all his money,
everything. Then he go to sea, like before. He make good money. He get
sixty-five dollars a month on this ship. But he don’t like. Crew all
crazy. When this time finish he leave ship, go back start business in
San Francisco.”

Later, when I had Wada open one of the ports for ventilation, I could
hear the gurgle and swish of water alongside, and I knew the anchor was
up and that we were in the grip of the _Britannia_, towing down the
Chesapeake to sea. The idea suggested itself that it was not too late.
I could very easily abandon the adventure and return to Baltimore on
the _Britannia_ when she cast off the _Elsinore_. And then I heard a
slight tinkling of china from the pantry as the steward proceeded to
set the table, and, also, it was so warm and comfortable, and George
Moore was so irritatingly fascinating.




CHAPTER VII.


In every way dinner proved up beyond my expectations, and I registered
a note that the cook, whoever or whatever he might be, was a capable
man at his trade. Miss West served, and, though she and the steward
were strangers, they worked together splendidly. I should have thought,
from the smoothness of the service, that he was an old house servant
who for years had known her every way.

The pilot ate in the chart-house, so that at table were the four of us
that would always be at table together. Captain West and his daughter
faced each other, while I, on the captain’s right, faced Mr. Pike. This
put Miss West across the corner on my right.

Mr. Pike, his dark sack coat (put on for the meal) bulging and
wrinkling over the lumps of muscles that padded his stooped shoulders,
had nothing at all to say. But he had eaten too many years at captains’
tables not to have proper table manners. At first I thought he was
abashed by Miss West’s presence. Later, I decided it was due to the
presence of the captain. For Captain West had a way with him that I was
beginning to learn. Far removed as Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire were from
the sailors, individuals as they were of an entirely different and
superior breed, yet equally as different and far removed from his
officers was Captain West. He was a serene and absolute aristocrat. He
neither talked “ship” nor anything else to Mr. Pike.

On the other hand, Captain West’s attitude toward me was that of a
social equal. But then, I was a passenger. Miss West treated me the
same way, but unbent more to Mr. Pike. And Mr. Pike, answering her with
“Yes, Miss,” and “No, Miss,” ate good-manneredly and with his
shaggy-browed gray eyes studied me across the table. I, too, studied
him. Despite his violent past, killer and driver that he was, I could
not help liking the man. He was honest, genuine. Almost more than for
that, I liked him for the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave on the
occasions when I reached the points of several funny stories. No man
could laugh like that and be all bad. I was glad that it was he, and
not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit opposite throughout the voyage. And I
was very glad that Mr. Mellaire was not to eat with us at all.

I am afraid that Miss West and I did most of the talking. She was
breezy, vivacious, tonic, and I noted again that the delicate, almost
fragile oval of her face was given the lie by her body. She was a
robust, healthy young woman. That was undeniable. Not fat—heaven
forbid!—not even plump; yet her lines had that swelling roundness that
accompanies long, live muscles. She was full-bodied, vigorous; and yet
not so full-bodied as she seemed. I remember with what surprise, when
we arose from table, I noted her slender waist. At that moment I got
the impression that she was willowy. And willowy she was, with a normal
waist and with, in addition, always that informing bodily vigour that
made her appear rounder and robuster than she really was.

It was the health of her that interested me. When I studied her face
more closely I saw that only the lines of the oval of it were delicate.
Delicate it was not, nor fragile. The flesh was firm, and the texture
of the skin was firm and fine as it moved over the firm muscles of face
and neck. The neck was a beautiful and adequate pillar of white. Its
flesh was firm, its skin fine, and it was muscular. The hands, too,
attracted me—not small, but well-shaped, fine, white and strong, and
well cared for. I could only conclude that she was an unusual captain’s
daughter, just as her father was an unusual captain and man. And their
noses were alike, just the hint-touch of the beak of power and race.

While Miss West was telling of the unexpectedness of the voyage, of how
suddenly she had decided to come—she accounted for it as a whim—and
while she told of all the complications she had encountered in her
haste of preparation, I found myself casting up a tally of the
efficient ones on board the _Elsinore_. They were Captain West and his
daughter, the two mates, myself, of course, Wada and the steward, and,
beyond the shadow of a doubt, the cook. The dinner vouched for him.
Thus I found our total of efficients to be eight. But the cook, the
steward, and Wada were servants, not sailors, while Miss West and
myself were supernumeraries. Remained to work, direct, do, but three
efficients out of a total ship’s company of forty-five. I had no doubt
that other efficients there were; it seemed impossible that my first
impression of the crew should be correct. There was the carpenter. He
might, at his trade, be as good as the cook. Then the two sailmakers,
whom I had not yet seen, might prove up.

A little later during the meal I ventured to talk about what had
interested me and aroused my admiration, namely, the masterfulness with
which Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire had gripped hold of that woeful,
worthless crew. It was all new to me, I explained, but I appreciated
the need of it. As I led up to the occurrence on Number Two hatch, when
Mr. Pike had lifted up Larry and toppled him back with a mere slap from
the ends of his fingers, I saw in Mr. Pike’s eyes a warning, almost
threatening, expression. Nevertheless, I completed my description of
the episode.

When I had quite finished there was a silence. Miss West was busy
serving coffee from a copper percolator. Mr. Pike, profoundly occupied
with cracking walnuts, could not quite hide the wicked, little,
half-humorous, half-revengeful gleam in his eyes. But Captain West
looked straight at me, but from oh! such a distance—millions and
millions of miles away. His clear blue eyes were as serene as ever, his
tones as low and soft.

“It is the one rule I ask to be observed, Mr. Pathurst—we never discuss
the sailors.”

It was a facer to me, and with quite a pronounced fellow-feeling for
Larry I hurriedly added:

“It was not merely the discipline that interested me. It was the feat
of strength.”

“Sailors are trouble enough without our hearing about them, Mr.
Pathurst,” Captain West went on, as evenly and imperturbably as if I
had not spoken. “I leave the handling of the sailors to my officers.
That’s their business, and they are quite aware that I tolerate no
undeserved roughness or severity.”

Mr. Pike’s harsh face carried the faintest shadow of an amused grin as
he stolidly regarded the tablecloth. I glanced to Miss West for
sympathy. She laughed frankly, and said:

“You see, father never has any sailors. And it’s a good plan, too.”

“A very good plan,” Mr. Pike muttered.

Then Miss West kindly led the talk away from that subject, and soon had
us laughing with a spirited recital of a recent encounter of hers with
a Boston cab-driver.

Dinner over, I stepped to my room in quest of cigarettes, and
incidentally asked Wada about the cook. Wada was always a great
gatherer of information.

“His name Louis,” he said. “He Chinaman, too. No; only half Chinaman.
Other half Englishman. You know one island Napoleon he stop long time
and bime by die that island?”

“St. Helena,” I prompted.

“Yes, that place Louis he born. He talk very good English.”

At this moment, entering the hall from the deck, Mr. Mellaire, just
relieved by the mate, passed me on his way to the big room in the stern
where the second table was set. His “Good evening, sir,” was as stately
and courteous as any southern gentleman of the old days could have
uttered it. And yet I could not like the man. His outward seeming was
so at variance with the personality that resided within. Even as he
spoke and smiled I felt that from inside his skull he was watching me,
studying me. And somehow, in a flash of intuition, I knew not why, I
was reminded of the three strange young men, routed last from the
forecastle, to whom Mr. Pike had read the law. They, too, had given me
a similar impression.

Behind Mr. Mellaire slouched a self-conscious, embarrassed individual,
with the face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant. His feet were
even larger than Mr. Pike’s, but the hands—I shot a quick glance to
see—were not so large as Mr. Pike’s.

As they passed I looked inquiry to Wada.

“He carpenter. He sat second table. His name Sam Lavroff. He come from
New York on ship. Steward say he very young for carpenter, maybe
twenty-two, three years old.”

As I approached the open port over my desk I again heard the swish and
gurgle of water and again realized that we were under way. So steady
and noiseless was our progress, that, say seated at table, it never
entered one’s head that we were moving or were anywhere save on the
solid land. I had been used to steamers all my life, and it was
difficult immediately to adjust myself to the absence of the
propeller-thrust vibration.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked Wada, who, like myself, had never
made a sailing-ship voyage.

He smiled politely.

“Very funny ship. Very funny sailors. I don’t know. Mebbe all right. We
see.”

“You think trouble?” I asked pointedly.

“I think sailors very funny,” he evaded.




CHAPTER VIII.


Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for’ard along the deck to where
work was going on. Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed in the
starlight. Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I might
judge, who was only the veriest tyro in such matters. The
indistinguishable shapes of men, in long lines, pulled on ropes. They
pulled in sick and dogged silence, though Mr. Pike, ubiquitous, snarled
out orders and rapped out oaths from every angle upon their miserable
heads.

Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever proceeded
so sadly and blunderingly to sea. Ere long Mr. Mellaire joined Mr. Pike
in the struggle of directing the men. It was not yet eight in the
evening, and all hands were at work. They did not seem to know the
ropes. Time and again, when the half-hearted suggestions of the bosuns
had been of no avail, I saw one or the other of the mates leap to the
rail and put the right rope in the hands of the men.

These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones. Up aloft, from
sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who were at
least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails.

But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope that
hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with painfully
slow movements. “Walk away with it!” Mr. Pike would yell. And perhaps
for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the rope ere they
came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill. And yet, did either of
the mates spring in and add his strength, they were able to move right
along the deck without stopping. Either of the mates, old men that they
were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of the wretched creatures.

“This is what sailin’s come to,” Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
“This ain’t the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling. But
what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?”

“I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled,” I said.

“Sure they do. Want to hear ’em?”

I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that
I’d like to very much.

“Here, you bosun!” Mr. Pike snarled. “Wake up! Start a song! Topsail
halyards!”

In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness
freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.

Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it
should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for
the words poor Nancy sang were:

“Away, way, way, yar,
We’ll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots.”


“Quit it! Quit it!” Mr. Pike roared. “This ain’t a funeral! Ain’t there
one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It’s a topsail-yard—”

He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of
the men’s hands to put into them the right rope.

“Come on, bosun! Break her out!”

Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers’ voice, cracked and crazy and
even more lugubrious than Nancy’s:

“Then up aloft that yard must go,
Whiskey for my Johnny.”


The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:

“Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue.”


Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin and
lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:

“And whiskey killed the old man, too,
Whiskey for my Johnny.”


He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
work and to the chorused emphasis of “Whiskey for my Johnny.”

And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
until he interrupted the song to cry “Belay!”

And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
maundering and futile things, getting in one another’s way, stumbling
and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
first. Skulkers there were among them, too; and once, from for’ard of
the ’midship house, I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and out of
the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on their heels Mr. Pike, who
chanted a recital of the distressing things that would befall them if
he caught them at such tricks again.

The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further, so
I strolled aft and climbed the poop. In the lee of the chart-house
Captain West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down. Passing on
aft, I saw steering at the wheel the weazened little old man I had
noted earlier in the day. In the light of the binnacle his small blue
eyes looked more malevolent than ever. So weazened and tiny was he, and
so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they seemed of a height. His
face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled, and in all seeming he was
fifty years older than Mr. Pike. He was the most remarkable figure of a
burnt-out, aged man one would expect to find able seaman on one of the
proudest sailing-ships afloat. Later, through Wada, I was to learn that
his name was Andy Fay and that he claimed no more years than
sixty-three.

I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared up
at the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there. No,
I decided I was not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of it was
wrong. There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-ends. There
was Miss West coming along. There was the crew of broken men and
lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek in the ’midship house still
gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up; and I was quite sure I
would not care to witness such a transaction in surgery.

Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of the
voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in
sailing-ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not
exist. And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she
could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had
always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always live
and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious personality.

Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition that
the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to me—for I
knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be. And for five
months at least—there was Mr. Pike’s offered wager of a pound of
tobacco or a month’s wages to that effect—I was to be pent on the same
ship with her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was
I that ere the voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love
to me. Please do not mistake me. My certainty in this matter was due,
not to any exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my
anything but exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men.
In my experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism
that marks the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of
attachable surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.

Call me blasé—I do not mind, if by blasé is meant the world-weariness,
intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young man of
thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these things—weary and
in doubt. It was because of this state that I was undertaking the
voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away from all these
things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter over.

It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness
had been brought about by the success of my play—my first play, as
every one knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the
doubt in my own mind, just as the success of my several volumes of
verse had raised doubts. Was the public right? Were the critics right?
Surely the function of the artist was to voice life, yet what did I
know of life?

So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that
afflicted me. Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts of
isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me. I had even
canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of my
years to the lepers—I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and
strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I
knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the
lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with—I was that
mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.

Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very
well. Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible
fact—my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact. This I
knew: I had reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a
life-climacteric of some sort. And I had diagnosed my own case and
prescribed this voyage. And here was the atrociously healthy and
profoundly feminine Miss West along—the very last ingredient I would
have considered introducing into my prescription.

A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their
persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not
entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world,
and an income most dazzling—why shouldn’t women pursue me? They would
have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic
place alone, for the sake of my income alone.

Yes; and love! Did I not know love—lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and sung
and sobbed and sighed—yes, and known grief, and buried my dead. But it
was so long ago. How young I was—turned twenty-four! And after that I
had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I
had laughed again and done my share of philandering with the pretty,
ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of my fortune and
artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired disgusted from the
lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking adventures in the realm
of mind. And here I was, on board the _Elsinore_, unhorsed by my
encounters with the problems of the ultimate, carried off the field
with a broken pate.

As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as she
made her little nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the
everlasting mystery of woman. Yes, I, with all the futuristic contempt
for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.

Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than Lucifer
and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid, attraction for the
thinker. What is this flame of her, blazing through all her
contradictions and ignobilities?—this ruthless passion for life, always
for life, more life on the planet? At times it seems to me brazen, and
awful, and soulless. At times I am made petulant by it. And at other
times I am swayed by the sublimity of it. No; there is no escape from
woman. Always, as a savage returns to a dark glen where goblins are and
gods may be, so do I return to the contemplation of woman.

Mr. Pike’s voice interrupted my musings. From for’ard, on the main
deck, I heard him snarl:

“On the main-topsail-yard, there!—if you cut that gasket I’ll split
your damned skull!”

Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he called
to I concluded was the training-ship boy.

“You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!” he cried. “Don’t make those
gaskets up! Fetch ’em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!”

Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my hand
went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate’s voice
rang out:

“Come on, you gentlemen’s sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively now!”




CHAPTER IX.


I did not sleep well. To begin with, I read late. Not till two in the
morning did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp which
Wada had purchased and installed for me. I was asleep
immediately—perfect sleep being perhaps my greatest gift; but almost
immediately I was awake again. And thereafter, with dozings and
cat-naps and restless tossings, I struggled to win to sleep, then gave
it up. For of all things, in my state of jangled nerves, to be
afflicted with hives! And still again, to be afflicted with hives in
cold winter weather!

At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated skin
in Vernon Lee’s delightful screed against William James, and his “will
to believe.” I was on the weather side of the ship, and from overhead,
through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer on watch. I
knew that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and wondered whether
they were Mr. Mellaire’s or the pilot’s. Somebody above there was
awake. The work was going on, the vigilant seeing and overseeing, that,
I could plainly conclude, would go on through every hour of all the
hours on the voyage.

At half-past four I heard the steward’s alarm go off, instantly
suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in
through my open door. What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada had
been with me through too many years for me to doubt that he had given
the steward precise instructions and turned over to him my coffee and
my coffee-making apparatus.

The steward was a jewel. In ten minutes he served me with a perfect cup
of coffee. I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found me,
breakfast in bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck. We were
still towing, but all sails were set to a light favouring breeze from
the north. In the chart-room Captain West and the pilot were smoking
cigars. At the wheel I noted what I decided at once was an efficient.
He was not a large man; if anything he was undersized. But his
countenance was broad-browed and intelligently formed. Tom, I later
learned, was his name—Tom Spink, an Englishman. He was blue-eyed,
fair-skinned, well-grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty years of
age. His reply of “Good morning, sir” was cheery, and he smiled as he
uttered the simple phrase. He did not look sailor-like, as did Henry,
the training-ship boy; and yet I felt at once that he was a sailor, and
an able one.

It was Mr. Pike’s watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
admitted that the man was the “best of the boiling.”

Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and
her vital, springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing
her contacts. On asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly,
she demanded an explanation. I told her of my affliction of hives and
showed her the lumps on my wrists.

“Your blood needs thinning and cooling,” she adjudged promptly. “Wait a
minute. I’ll see what can be done for you.”

And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand a
part glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream of
tartar.

“Drink it,” she ordered, as a matter of course.

I drank it. And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-chair
with a second dose of the stuff. Also she reproached me soundly for
permitting Wada to feed meat to Possum. It was from her that Wada and I
learned how mortal a sin it was to give meat to a young puppy.
Furthermore, she laid down the law and the diet for Possum, not alone
to me and Wada, but to the steward, the carpenter, and Mr. Mellaire. Of
the latter two, because they ate by themselves in the big after-room
and because Possum played there, she was especially suspicious; and she
was outspoken in voicing her suspicions to their faces. The carpenter
mumbled embarrassed asseverations in broken English of past, present,
and future innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before
her on his huge feet. Mr. Mellaire’s protestations were of the same
nature, save that they were made with the grace and suavity of a
Chesterfield.

In short, Possum’s diet raised quite a tempest in the _Elsinore_
teapot, and by the time it was over Miss West had established this
particular contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the
mutual owners of the puppy. I noticed, later in the day, that it was to
Miss West that Wada went for instructions as to the quantity of warm
water he must use to dilute Possum’s condensed milk.

Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook. In the afternoon I made
a trip for’ard to the galley to make his acquaintance. To all intents
he was a Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by speech alone,
he was an Englishman. In fact, so cultured was his speech that I can
fairly say it was vested with an Oxford accent. He, too, was old, fully
sixty—he acknowledged fifty-nine. Three things about him were markedly
conspicuous: his smile, that embraced all of his clean-shaven Asiatic
face and Asiatic eyes; his even-rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which
I deemed false until Wada ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands
and feet. It was his hands, ridiculously small and beautifully
modelled, that led my scrutiny to his feet. They, too, were
ridiculously small and very neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.

We had put the pilot off at midday, but the _Britannia_ towed us well
into the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide
about us and the land a faint blur on the western horizon. Here, at the
moment of leaving the tug, we made our “departure”—that is to say,
technically began the voyage, despite the fact that we had already
travelled a full twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.

It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the
poop-rail gazing for’ard, when Miss West joined me. She had been busy
below all day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of
air. She surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five
minutes, then remarked:

“The barometer’s very high—30.60. This light north wind won’t last. It
will either go into a calm or work around into a north-east gale.”

“Which would you prefer?” I asked.

“The gale, by all means. It will help us off the land, and it will put
me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly. Oh, yes,” she
added, “I’m a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the beginning
of every voyage. You probably won’t see me for a couple of days now.
That’s why I’ve been so busy getting settled first.”

“Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea,” I
said.

“And I’ve seen father sea-sick on occasion,” she answered. “Yes, and
some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known.”

Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting
pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.

Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck
below us. To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing
than ever.

“A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike,” Miss West remarked.

“The worst ever,” he growled, “and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones.
We’re teachin’ them the ropes just now—most of ’em.”

“They look starved,” I commented.

“They are, they almost always are,” Miss West answered, and her eyes
roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer’s fashion I had
marked in Mr. Pike. “But they’ll fatten up with regular hours, no
whiskey, and solid food—won’t they, Mr. Pike?”

“Oh, sure. They always do. And you’ll see them liven up when we get ’em
in hand . . . maybe. They’re a measly lot, though.”

I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed to
have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us,
under Mr. Mellaire’s direction, were setting triangular sails, like
jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped
one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled
these small sails led me to ask:

“But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an
earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head
from both sides of a street.

“Do?” Miss West answered for him. “We’d get the sail off. Oh, it can be
done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn’t, I should
have been drowned long ago.”

“Sure,” Mr. Pike upheld her. “So would I.”

“The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in
a pinch,” Miss West went on.

Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big
paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite
unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted
fresh abrasions on the knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from
some recollection.

“I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most
hopeless crew. It was in the _Lallah Rookh_—you remember her, Mr.
Pike?”

“Your father’s fifth command,” he nodded. “Lost on the West Coast
afterwards—went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave. Parted
her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on her.”

“That’s the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where the
boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number of them
were shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them when they
were first sent aloft.” Again she laughed. “It was better than circus
clowns. And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when
it began to blow up and we began to shorten down. And then our mates
performed miracles. You remember Mr. Harding—Silas Harding?”

“Don’t I though!” Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically. “He was some
man, and he must have been an old man even then.”

“He was, and a terrible man,” she concurred, and added, almost
reverently: “And a wonderful man.” She turned her face to me. “He was
our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But Mr.
Harding got the sail off the _Lallah Rookh_ just the same. What I
wanted to tell you was this:

“I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail. How
far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?”

“Let me see . . . the _Lallah Rookh_.” Mr. Pike paused to consider.
“Oh, say around a hundred feet.”

“I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp—and he must already
have got a taste of Mr. Harding—fell off the lower-topsail-yard. I was
only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was
falling from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck. But he
fell into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a
somersault, and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt. And he landed
right alongside of Mr. Harding, facing him. I don’t know which was the
more astonished, but I think Mr. Harding was, for he stood there
petrified. He had expected the man to be killed. Not so the man. He
took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump for the rigging and
climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.”

Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me
say:

“Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man’s nerves, falling to apparent
death that way.”

“He’d been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess,” was Mr. Pike’s
remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.

Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by what
I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary. But that
a young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things
and be so saturated in this side of ship life was not nice. It was not
nice for me, though it interested me, I confess,—and strengthened my
grip on reality. Yet it meant a hardening of one’s fibres, and I did
not like to think of Miss West being so hardened.

I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
firmness of her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her eyes
were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression,
intelligent and alive. Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most
noteworthy expression of it was a great calm. She seemed always in
repose, at peace with herself and with the external world. The most
beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows
and hair. The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very
straight, and just the slightest trifle too long. In this it was
reminiscent of her father’s nose. But the perfect modelling of the
bridge and nostrils conveyed an indescribable advertisement of race and
blood.

Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous
mouth—generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but
generous rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter. All the health
and buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes. She
rarely exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed
chiefly to employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong
white teeth, even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm,
sensible, normal size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal
as she.

I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many of
the factors that go to compose feminine beauty. She had all the beauty
of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was
emphasized by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair. And, in the
same way, the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of skin
set off the warm gray of her eyes. The forehead was, well, medium-broad
and medium high, and quite smooth. No lines nor hints of lines were
there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of depression and white
nights of insomnia. Oh, she bore all the marks of the healthy, human
female, who never worried nor was vexed in the spirit of her, and in
whose body every process and function was frictionless and automatic.

“Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet,” I said to the
mate. “Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?”

“She ought to be,” was Mr. Pike’s reply as he lifted his glance across
the smooth swell of sea to the sky. “This ain’t the first time she’s
been on the North Atlantic in winter.” He debated a moment, as he
studied the sea and sky. “I should say, considering the high barometer,
we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with the
chances in favour of the calm.”

She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail
as the _Elsinore_ lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the
trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in hollow
thunder.

“The calm has it,” Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness. “And
if this keeps up I’ll be in my bunk in about five minutes.”

She waved aside all sympathy. “Oh, don’t bother about me, Mr. Pathurst.
Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy
weather, and poison ivy; besides, I’d rather be sea-sick than have the
hives.”

Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity
or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire’s raised voice.
Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was
distinctly unpleasant to the ear.

On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One,
in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.

“Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark,” I observed.

Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West’s
eyes to Mr. Pike’s big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on
the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. _She knew_.




CHAPTER X.


That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
table, while the _Elsinore_ rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West
to her room.

“You won’t see her for a couple of days,” Captain West told me. “Her
mother was the same way—a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of
a voyage.”

“It’s the shaking down.” Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
observation I had yet heard him utter at table. “Everybody has to shake
down when they leave the land. We’ve got to forget the good times on
shore, and the good things money’ll buy, and start watch and watch,
four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our
tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you
heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?”

I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.

“Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give
it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch.”

“You don’t like the sea?” I queried.

He sighed.

“I don’t know. But of course the sea is all I know—”

“Except music,” I threw in.

“Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most
of the music I oughta have had coming to me.”

“I suppose you’ve heard Schumann Heink?”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an
eager wistfulness. “I’ve half-a-dozen of her records, and I’ve got the
second dog-watch below. If Captain West don’t mind . . . ” (Captain
West nodded that he didn’t mind). “And if you’d want to hear them? The
machine is a good one.”

And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this
hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of
the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid
collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed on
the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the
main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain West
and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph.
His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and every
shade of expression was visible to me.

In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records were
only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation. He
handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping
it and brushing it with a fine camel’s hair brush while it revolved and
ere he placed the needle on it. For a time all I could see was the huge
brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the knuckles, that
expressed love in their every movement. Each touch on the discs was a
caress, and while the record played he hovered over it and dreamed in
some heaven of music all his own.

During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face was
expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I
almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles,
betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He seemed
preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I watched him
I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr.
Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not until she was ready
for sea had Captain West come on board. I had not seen him give an
order. It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did the work. All
Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully oblivious of
the _Elsinore’s_ crew.

When Mr. Pike had played the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the _Messiah_,
and “He Shall Feed His Flock,” he mentioned to me, almost
apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason,
perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he
had been a choir boy.

“And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and
sneaked off to sea again,” he concluded with a harsh laugh.

And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer’s “King of
Heaven,” and Mendelssohn’s “O Rest in the Lord.”

When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all
carefully wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he
rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.

“I’ve got a lot more good things,” he said confidentially: “Coenen’s
‘Come Unto Me,’ and Faure’s ‘Crucifix’; and there’s ‘O Salutaris,’ and
‘Lead, Kindly Light’ by the Trinity Choir; and ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’
would just melt your heart. I’ll play ’em for you some night.”

“Do you believe in them?” I was led to ask by his rapt expression and
by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from
my consciousness.

He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:

“I do . . . when I’m listening to them.”

* * * * *


My sleep that night was wretched. Short of sleep from the previous
night, I closed my book and turned my light off early. But scarcely had
I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my
hives. All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the
light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up. Wada had not
yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of tartar. It was
useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the watch changing, I
partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and went up on to the
poop.

I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours’ watch, pacing up and down
the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the
wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the
wheel-house.

Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and
lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and
experienced premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be
possible, with such a crew, on the huge _Elsinore_, a cargo-carrier
that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five
thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate. The voyage had
gone wrong from the first. In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep
brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was
doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman could
have dreamed.

I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no
doubts but what she would always live. I thought of the killing and
driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had
gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He
was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who
had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of
his own creating.

Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and
lying gibbering between the steel walls of the ’midship-house. This
picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified
the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew. Certainly I could go back to
Baltimore. Thank God I had the money to humour my whims. Had not Mr.
Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the running
expenses of the _Elsinore_ at two hundred dollars a day? I could afford
to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the several days that
might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot tug, or any
inbound craft to Baltimore.

I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to
tell him my decision, when another presented itself: _Then are you_,
_the thinker and philosopher_, _the world-sick one_, _afraid to go
down_, _to cease in the darkness_? Bah! My own pride in my
life-pridelessness saved Captain West’s sleep from interruption. Of
course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be
called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and
lunatics—and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and Semitic
ones who had aroused Mr. Pike’s ire and who had laughed so terribly and
silently.

Night thoughts! Sleepless thoughts! I dismissed them all and started
below, chilled through by the cold. But at the chart-room door I
encountered Mr. Mellaire.

“A pleasant evening, sir,” he greeted me. “A pity there’s not a little
wind to help us off the land.”

“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, after a moment or so.

Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst. But I never saw
one as queer as this—boys, old men, cripples and—you saw Tony the Greek
go overboard yesterday? Well, that’s only the beginning. He’s a sample.
I’ve got a big Irishman in my watch who’s going bad. Did you notice a
little, dried-up Scotchman?”

“Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the
evening before last?”

“The very one—Andy Fay. Well, Andy Fay’s just been complaining to me
about O’Sullivan. Says O’Sullivan’s threatened his life. When Andy Fay
went off watch at eight he found O’Sullivan stropping a razor. I’ll
give you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:

“‘Says O’Sullivan to me, “Mr. Fay, I’ll have a word wid yeh?”
“Certainly,” says I; “what can I do for you?” “Sell me your sea-boots,
Mr. Fay,” says O’Sullivan, polite as can be. “But what will you be
wantin’ of them?” says I. “’Twill be a great favour,” says O’Sullivan.
“But it’s my only pair,” says I; “and you have a pair of your own,”
says I. “Mr. Fay, I’ll be needin’ me own in bad weather,” says
O’Sullivan. “Besides,” says I, “you have no money.” “I’ll pay for them
when we pay off in Seattle,” says O’Sullivan. “I’ll not do it,” says I;
“besides, you’re not tellin’ me what you’ll be doin’ with them.” “But I
will tell yeh,” says O’Sullivan; “I’m wantin’ to throw ’em over the
side.” And with that I turns to walk away, but O’Sullivan says, very
polite and seducin’-like, still a-stroppin’ the razor, “Mr. Fay,” says
he, “will you kindly step this way an’ have your throat cut?” And with
that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to
you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.’

“Or soon will be,” I remarked. “I noticed him yesterday, a big man
muttering continually to himself?”

“That’s the man,” Mr. Mellaire said.

“Do you have many such at sea?” I asked.

“More than my share, I do believe, sir.”

He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement he
pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing
match that I might see.

I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald,
but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across
this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran the
most prodigious scar I had ever seen. Because the vision of it was so
fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar’s very
prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have sworn that
I could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and that it was
fully two fingers broad. There seemed no bone at all, just a great
fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was confident that the
brain pulsed immediately under that skin.

He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.

“A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe. We were
thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the
time, running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his
addled head that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn’t
let him go ashore. I had my back to him at the time, and I never knew
what struck me.”

“But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?” I questioned.
“There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have
had wonderful vitality.”

He shook his head.

“It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses.”

“Molasses!”

“Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics. He
always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk many
weary weeks—we had a long passage—and by the time we reached Hong Kong
the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore surgeon, and I was
standing my third mate’s watch—we carried third mates in those days.”

Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in Mr.
Mellaire’s head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of the
_Elsinore_. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have received
the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever experienced; for he
would have been routed out by a very determined, partially-dressed
passenger with a proposition capable of going to the extent of buying
the _Elsinore_ outright with all her cargo, so that she might be sailed
straight back to Baltimore.

As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr.
Mellaire should have lived so many years with such a hole in his head.

We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular happening,
and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics that seem to
infest the sea.

And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the manner
of saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous, broad-minded,
and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world. It was easy for me
to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and super-courtesy of
social mannerism. It was not that. But all the time I was
distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though in the
darkness I couldn’t even see his eyes, that there, behind those eyes,
inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality that spied upon
me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing while it thought
another thing.

When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I
had been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature. The
other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and quick,
behind the mask of words and flesh.




CHAPTER XI.


But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the heat
of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet, whenever
I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and read, my skin
irritation decreased. But as soon as I turned out the lamp and closed
my eyes I was troubled again. So hour after hour passed, through which,
between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to wade through many pages of
Rosny’s _Le Termite_—a not very cheerful proceeding, I must say,
concerned as it is with the microscopic and over-elaborate recital of
Noël Servaise’s tortured nerves, bodily pains, and intellectual
phantasma. At last I tossed the novel aside, damned all analytical
Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in the more genial and
cynical Stendhal.

Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down. At
four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike’s
promenade. Half an hour later, just as the steward’s alarm went off,
instantly checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the _Elsinore_ began
to heel over on my side. I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling
orders, and at times a trample and shuffle of many feet passed over my
head as the weird crew pulled and hauled. The _Elsinore_ continued to
heel over until I could see the water against my port, and then she
gathered way and dashed ahead at such a rate that I could hear the
stinging and singing of the foam through the circle of thick glass
beside me.

The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after, when
Wada served me breakfast and helped me dress. He, too, complained of
inability to sleep. He had been bunked with Nancy in one of the rooms
in the ’midship-house. Wada described the situation. The tiny room,
made of steel, was air-tight when the steel door was closed. And Nancy
insisted on keeping the door closed. As a result Wada, in the upper
bunk, had stifled. He told me that the air had got so bad that the
flame of the lamp, no matter how high it was turned, guttered down and
all but refused to burn. Nancy snored beautifully through it all, while
he had been unable to close his eyes.

“He is not clean,” quoth Wada. “He is a pig. No more will I sleep in
that place.”

On the poop I found the _Elsinore_, with many of her sails furled,
slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky. Also I
found Mr. Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours
before, and it took quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he
had had the watch off between four and eight. Even then, he told me, he
had slept from four until half-past seven.

“That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . .
which means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience.”

And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that
that alien thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.

In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible. Miss West
did not appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the curse
of sea-sickness had not been added.

Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place
for himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the corner
with a solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.

It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain
and a persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of water
across the deck. With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which gave
for’ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors, whenever
they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and through by
the boarding seas. Several times I saw some of them taken off their
feet and rolled about in the creaming foam. And yet, erect,
unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among these rolled
men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr. Pike or Mr.
Mellaire. They were never taken off their feet. They never shrank away
from a splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-falling water. They had
fed on different food, were informed with a different spirit, were of
iron in contrast with the poor miserables they drove to their bidding.

In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in
the cabin. Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I could
have slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble. Captain
West, stretched out on the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet slippers,
slept enviably. By some instinct, I might say, in the deep of sleep, he
kept his place and was not rolled off upon the floor. Also, he lightly
held a half-smoked cigar in one hand. I watched him for an hour, and
knew him to be asleep, and marvelled that he maintained his easy
posture and did not drop the cigar.

After dinner there was no phonograph. The second dog-watch was Mr.
Pike’s on deck. Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too severe.
It would make the needle jump and scratch his beloved records.

And no sleep! Another weary night of torment, and another dreary,
overcast day and leaden, troubled sea. And no Miss West. Wada, too, is
sea-sick, although heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend on me
with glassy, unseeing eyes. I sent him to his bunk, and read through
the endless hours until my eyes were tired, and my brain, between lack
of sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.

Captain West is no conversationalist. The more I see of him the more I
am baffled. I have not yet found a reason for that first impression I
received of him. He has all the poise and air of a remote and superior
being, and yet I wonder if it be not poise and air and nothing else.
Just as I had expected, that first meeting, ere he spoke a word, to
hear fall from his lips words of untold beneficence and wisdom, and
then heard him utter mere social commonplaces, so I now find myself
almost forced to conclude that his touch of race, and beak of power,
and all the tall, aristocratic slenderness of him have nothing behind
them.

And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that
first impression. He has not shown any strength, but by the same token
he has not shown any weakness. Sometimes I wonder what resides behind
those clear blue eyes. Certainly I have failed to find any intellectual
backing. I tried him out with William James’ _Varieties of Religious
Experience_. He glanced at a few pages, then returned it to me with the
frank statement that it did not interest him. He has no books of his
own. Evidently he is not a reader. Then what is he? I dared to feel him
out on politics. He listened courteously, said sometimes yes and
sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very discouragement, said
nothing.

Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still more
aloof from his officers. I have not seen him address a further word to
Mr. Mellaire than “Good morning” on the poop. As for Mr. Pike, who eats
three times a day with him, scarcely any more conversation obtains
between them. And I am surprised by what seems the very conspicuous awe
with which Mr. Pike seems to regard his commander.

Another thing. What are Captain West’s duties? So far he has done
nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day
stroll a total of one mile around the poop. The mates do all the work,
and hard work it is, four hours on deck and four below, day and night
with never a variation. I watch Captain West and am amazed. He will
loll back in the cabin and stare straight before him for hours at a
time, until I am almost frantic to demand of him what are his thoughts.
Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all. I give him up. I cannot
fathom him.

Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across
the deck. I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with five
thousand tons of coal around the Horn is more serious than I had
thought. So deep is the _Elsinore_ in the water that she is like a log
awash. Her tall, six-foot bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas from
boarding her. She has not the buoyancy one is accustomed to ascribe to
ships. On the contrary, she is weighted down until she is dead, so
that, for this one day alone, I am appalled at the thought of how many
thousands of tons of the North Atlantic have boarded her and poured out
through her spouting scuppers and clanging ports.

Yes, a depressing day. The two mates have alternated on deck and in
their bunks. Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the
Bible. Miss West is still sea-sick. I have tired myself out with
reading, and the fuzziness of my unsleeping brain makes for melancholy.
Even Wada is anything but a cheering spectacle, crawling out of his
bunk, as he does at stated intervals, and with sick, glassy eyes trying
to discern what my needs may be. I almost wish I could get sea-sick
myself. I had never dreamed that a sea voyage could be so unenlivening
as this one is proving.




CHAPTER XII.


Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the _Elsinore_,
under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from her
scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic. And I
have failed to sleep half-an-hour all told. At this rate, in a very
short time I shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the ship. I
never have had hives like these before. I can’t understand it. So long
as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled. The instant I put
out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and the lumps on my
skin begin to form.

Miss West may be sea-sick, but she cannot be comatose, because at
frequent intervals she sends the steward to me with more cream of
tartar.

I have had a revelation to-day. I have discovered Captain West. He is a
Samurai.—You remember the Samurai that H. G. Wells describes in his
_Modern Utopia_—the superior breed of men who know things and are
masters of life and of their fellow-men in a super-benevolent,
super-wise way? Well, that is what Captain West is. Let me tell it to
you.

We had a shift of wind to-day. In the height of a south-west gale the
wind shifted, in the instant, eight points, which is equivalent to a
quarter of the circle. Imagine it! Imagine a gale howling from out of
the south-west. And then imagine the wind, in a heavier and more
violent gale, abruptly smiting you from the north-west. We had been
sailing through a circular storm, Captain West vouchsafed to me, before
the event, and the wind could be expected to box the compass.

Clad in sea-boots, oilskins and sou’wester, I had for some time been
hanging upon the rail at the break of the poop, staring down fascinated
at the poor devils of sailors, repeatedly up to their necks in water,
or submerged, or dashed like straws about the deck, while they pulled
and hauled, stupidly, blindly, and in evident fear, under the orders of
Mr. Pike.

Mr. Pike was with them, working them and working with them. He took
every chance they took, yet somehow he escaped being washed off his
feet, though several times I saw him entirely buried from view. There
was more than luck in the matter; for I saw him, twice, at the head of
a line of the men, himself next to the pin. And twice, in this
position, I saw the North Atlantic curl over the rail and fall upon
them. And each time he alone remained, holding the turn of the rope on
the pin, while the rest of them were rolled and sprawled helplessly
away.

Almost it seemed to me good fun, as at a circus, watching their antics.
But I did not apprehend the seriousness of the situation until, the
wind screaming higher than ever and the sea a-smoke and white with
wrath, two men did not get up from the deck. One was carried away
for’ard with a broken leg—it was Iare Jacobson, a dull-witted
Scandinavian; and the other, Kid Twist, was carried away, unconscious,
with a bleeding scalp.

In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not
break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape
being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving
spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs
out of my sleep-starved brain.

And all the time, slender, aristocratic, graceful in streaming
oilskins, in apparent unconcern, giving no orders, effortlessly
accommodating his body to the violent rolling of the _Elsinore_,
Captain West strolled up and down.

It was at this stage in the gale that he unbent sufficiently to tell me
that we were going through a circular storm and that the wind was
boxing the compass. I did notice that he kept his gaze pretty steadily
fixed on the overcast, cloud-driven sky. At last, when it seemed the
wind could not possibly blow more fiercely, he found in the sky what he
sought. It was then that I first heard his voice—a sea-voice, clear as
a bell, distinct as silver, and of an ineffable sweetness and volume,
as it might be the trump of Gabriel. That voice!—effortless,
dominating! The mighty threat of the storm, made articulate by the
resistance of the _Elsinore_, shouted in all the stays, bellowed in the
shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the
myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil’s chorus of shrill pipings
and screechings. And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain
West’s voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as
all music and mighty as an archangel’s call to judgment. And it carried
understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike,
waist-deep in the wash of sea below us. And the man at the wheel
obeyed, and Mr. Pike obeyed, barking and snarling orders to the poor
wallowing devils who wallowed on and obeyed him in turn. And as the
voice was the face. This face I had never seen before. It was the face
of the spirit visitant, chaste with wisdom, lighted by a splendour of
power and calm. Perhaps it was the calm that smote me most of all. It
was as the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men
with the word that all was well. It was not the face of the fighter. To
my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all
strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of the blood.

The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings
of the storm, directing the gigantic, labouring _Elsinore_ in all her
intricate massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will,
which was the will of wisdom.

And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his
creatures laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more
slenderly tall and aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins,
Captain West touched my shoulder and pointed astern over our weather
quarter. I looked, and all that I could see was a vague smoke of sea
and air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at the ocean’s breast. And at
the same moment the gale from the south-west ceased. There was no gale,
no moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.

“What is it?” I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation of
wind.

“The shift,” he said. “There she comes.”

And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an
atmospheric impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the
_Elsinore_ harp protest. It forced me down on the rail. I was like a
windle-straw. As I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the air
back into my lungs, so that I suffocated and turned my head aside to
breathe in the lee of the draught. The man at the wheel again listened
to the Gabriel voice; and Mr. Pike, on the deck below, listened and
repeated the will of the voice; and Captain West, in slender and
stately balance, leaned into the face of the wind and slowly paced the
deck.

It was magnificent. Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and
the men who overlord the sea. Captain West had vindicated himself,
exposited himself. At the height and crisis of storm he had taken
charge of the _Elsinore_, and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was
all he was, the foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves,
serving the one from beyond—the Samurai.

A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily
into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back
against it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on
the knob of the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the
storm-white sea and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.

Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and
saw him. Sea-boots and storm-trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet
slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather
chair smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing—or, if
they saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my
ken. I have developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I
know him less than the little I thought I knew him before.




CHAPTER XIII.


Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this,
which has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the
selectest and most mountainous brands of cross-seas. The way the poor
_Elsinore_ pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty
spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is
astonishing. To me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr.
Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is
a good cargo, and that the _Elsinore_ is well-loaded because he saw to
it himself.

He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in
order to watch her in her maddest antics. The sight is very pleasant to
him, for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face
and impart to it a hint of ecstasy. The _Elsinore_ has a snug place in
his heart, I am confident. He calls her behaviour admirable, and at
such times will repeat to me that it was he who saw to her loading.

It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on
the sea, to the motion of the sea. There _is_ a rhythm to this chaos of
crossing, buffeting waves. I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve
it. But Mr. Pike _knows_ it. Again and again, as we paced up and down
this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he
would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the _Elsinore_ smashed
down on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that
seemed never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt,
snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the corresponding roll to
windward. In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these
antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously
forecast them at all. He _feels_ them; he knows them. They, and the
sea, are ingrained in him.

Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently
shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw. If ever, in an
hour, the _Elsinore_ had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had
not noticed it. So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next
moment the _Elsinore_ had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred
feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the
deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the chart-house.
My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet. Now how did he know?

And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away. On the
contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and
again he lent his surplus to me. I begin to have more respect, not for
the sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of
seamen that are as slaves on our decks, but for the real seamen who are
their masters—for Captain West, for Mr. Pike, yes, and for Mr.
Mellaire, dislike him as I do.

As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back to
the south-west. Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and
reported the change to Captain West.

“We’ll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst,” the second mate told me when
he came back. “You’ll find it an interesting manoeuvre.”

“But why wait till four?” I asked.

“The Captain’s orders, sir. The watches will be changing, and we’ll
have the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the watch
below by calling it out now.”

And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins,
came out of the chart-house. Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took charge
of the many men who, on deck and on the poop, were to manage the
mizzen-braces, while Mr. Mellaire went for’ard with his watch to handle
the fore-and main-braces. It was a pretty manoeuvre, a play of
leverages, by which they eased the force of the wind on the after part
of the _Elsinore_ and used the force of the wind on the for’ard part.

Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite
oblivious of what was being done. He was again the favoured passenger,
taking a stroll for his health’s sake. And yet I knew that both his
officers were uncomfortably aware of his presence and were keyed to
their finest seamanship. I know, now, Captain West’s position on board.
He is the brains of the _Elsinore_. He is the master strategist. There
is more in directing a ship on the ocean than in standing watches and
ordering men to pull and haul. They are pawns, and the two officers are
pieces, with which Captain West plays the game against sea, and wind,
and season, and ocean current. He is the knower. They are his tongue,
by which he makes his knowledge articulate.

* * * * *


A bad night—equally bad for the _Elsinore_ and for me. She is receiving
a sharp buffeting at the hands of the wintry North Atlantic. I fell
asleep early, exhausted from lack of sleep, and awoke in an hour,
frantic with my lumped and burning skin. More cream of tartar, more
reading, more vain attempts to sleep, until shortly before five, when
the steward brought me my coffee, I wrapped myself in my dressing-gown,
and like a being distracted prowled into the cabin. I dozed in a
leather chair and was thrown out by a violent roll of the ship. I tried
the sofa, sinking to sleep immediately, and immediately thereafter
finding myself precipitated to the floor. I am convinced that when
Captain West naps on the sofa he is only half asleep. How else can he
maintain so precarious a position?—unless, in him, too, the sea and its
motion be ingrained.

I wandered into the dining-room, wedged myself into a screwed chair,
and fell asleep, my head on my arms, my arms on the table. And at
quarter past seven the steward roused me by shaking my shoulders. It
was time to set table.

Heavy with the brief heaviness of sleep I had had, I dressed and
stumbled up on to the poop in the hope that the wind would clear my
brain. Mr. Pike had the watch, and with sure, age-lagging step he paced
the deck. The man is a marvel—sixty-nine years old, a life of hardship,
and as sturdy as a lion. Yet of the past night alone his hours had
been: four to six in the afternoon on deck; eight to twelve on deck;
and four to eight in the morning on deck. In a few minutes he would be
relieved, but at midday he would again be on deck.

I leaned on the poop-rail and stared for’ard along the dreary waste of
deck. Every port and scupper was working to ease the weight of North
Atlantic that perpetually fell on board. Between the rush of the
cascades, streaks of rust showed everywhere. Some sort of a wooden
pin-rail had carried away on the starboard-rail at the foot of the
mizzen-shrouds, and an amazing raffle of ropes and tackles washed
about. Here Nancy and half-a-dozen men worked sporadically, and in fear
of their lives, to clear the tangle.

The long-suffering bleakness was very pronounced on Nancy’s face, and
when the walls of water, in impending downfall, reared above the
_Elsinore’s_ rail, he was always the first to leap for the life-line
which had been stretched fore and aft across the wide space of deck.

The rest of the men were scarcely less backward in dropping their work
and springing to safety—if safety it might be called, to grip a rope in
both hands and have legs sweep out from under, and be wrenched
full-length upon the boiling surface of an ice-cold flood. Small wonder
they look wretched. Bad as their condition was when they came aboard at
Baltimore, they look far worse now, what of the last several days of
wet and freezing hardship.

From time to time, completing his for’ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike
would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what
happened to the poor devils below. The man’s heart is callous. A thing
of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these
creatures who lack his own excessive iron.

I noticed the stone-deaf man, the twisted oaf whose face I have
described as being that of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His
bright, liquid, pain-filled eyes were more filled with pain than ever,
his face still more lean and drawn with suffering. And yet his face
showed an excess of nervousness, sensitiveness, and a pathetic
eagerness to please and do. I could not help observing that, despite
his dreadful sense-handicap and his wrecked, frail body, he did the
most work, was always the last of the group to spring to the life-line
and always the first to loose the life-line and slosh knee-deep or
waist-deep through the churning water to attack the immense and
depressing tangle of rope and tackle.

I remarked to Mr. Pike that the men seemed thinner and weaker than when
they came on board, and he delayed replying for a moment while he
stared down at them with that cattle-buyer’s eye of his.

“Sure they are,” he said disgustedly. “A weak breed, that’s what they
are—nothing to build on, no stamina. The least thing drags them down.
Why, in my day we grew fat on work like that—only we didn’t; we worked
so hard there wasn’t any chance for fat. We kept in fighting trim, that
was all. But as for this scum and slum—say, you remember, Mr. Pathurst,
that man I spoke to the first day, who said his name was Charles
Davis?”

“The one you thought there was something the matter with?”

“Yes, and there was, too. He’s in that ’midship room with the Greek
now. He’ll never do a tap of work the whole Voyage. He’s a hospital
case, if there ever was one. Talk about shot to pieces! He’s got holes
in him I could shove my fist through. I don’t know whether they’re
perforating ulcers, or cancers, or cannon-shot wounds, or what not. And
he had the nerve to tell me they showed up after he came on board!”

“And he had them all the time?” I asked.

“All the time! Take my word, Mr. Pathurst, they’re years old. But he’s
a wonder. I watched him those first days, sent him aloft, had him down
in the fore-hold trimming a few tons of coal, did everything to him,
and he never showed a wince. Being up to the neck in the salt water
finally fetched him, and now he’s reported off duty—for the voyage. And
he’ll draw his wages for the whole time, have all night in, and never
do a tap. Oh, he’s a hot one to have passed over on us, and the
_Elsinore’s_ another man short.”

“Another!” I exclaimed. “Is the Greek going to die?”

“No fear. I’ll have him steering in a few days. I refer to the misfits.
If we rolled a dozen of them together they wouldn’t make one real man.
I’m not saying it to alarm you, for there’s nothing alarming about it;
but we’re going to have proper hell this voyage.” He broke off to stare
reflectively at his broken knuckles, as if estimating how much drive
was left in them, then sighed and concluded, “Well, I can see I’ve got
my work cut out for me.”

Sympathizing with Mr. Pike is futile; the only effect is to make his
mood blacker. I tried it, and he retaliated with:

“You oughta see the bloke with curvature of the spine in Mr. Mellaire’s
watch. He’s a proper hobo, too, and a land lubber, and don’t weigh
more’n a hundred pounds, and must be fifty years old, and he’s got
curvature of the spine, and he’s able seaman, if you please, on the
_Elsinore_. And worse than all that, he puts it over on you; he’s
nasty, he’s mean, he’s a viper, a wasp. He ain’t afraid of anything
because he knows you dassent hit him for fear of croaking him. Oh, he’s
a pearl of purest ray serene, if anybody should slide down a backstay
and ask you. If you fail to identify him any other way, his name is
Mulligan Jacobs.”

* * * * *


After breakfast, again on deck, in Mr. Mellaire’s watch, I discovered
another efficient. He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular
man of say forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big
eagle-face, swarthy, with keen, intelligent black eyes.

Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the best
sailor in his watch, a proper seaman. When he referred to the man as
the Maltese Cockney, and I asked why, he replied:

“First, because he is Maltese, Mr. Pathurst; and next, because he talks
Cockney like a native. And depend upon it, he heard Bow Bells before he
lisped his first word.”

“And has O’Sullivan bought Andy Fay’s sea-boots yet?” I queried.

It was at this moment that Miss West emerged upon the poop. She was as
rosy and vital as ever, and certainly, if she had been sea-sick, she
flew no signals of it. As she came toward me, greeting me, I could not
help remarking again the lithe and springy limb-movement with which she
walked, and her fine, firm skin. Her neck, free in a sailor collar,
with white sweater open at the throat, seemed almost redoubtably strong
to my sleepless, jaundiced eyes. Her hair, under a white knitted cap,
was smooth and well-groomed. In fact, the totality of impression she
conveyed was of a well-groomedness one would not expect of a
sea-captain’s daughter, much less of a woman who had been sea-sick.
Life!—that is the key of her, the essential note of her—life and
health. I’ll wager she has never entertained a morbid thought in that
practical, balanced, sensible head of hers.

“And how have you been?” she asked, then rattled on with sheer
exuberance ere I could answer. “Had a lovely night’s sleep. I was
really over my sickness yesterday, but I just devoted myself to resting
up. I slept ten solid hours—what do you think of that?”

“I wish I could say the same,” I replied with appropriate dejection, as
I swung in beside her, for she had evinced her intention of
promenading.

“Oh, then you’ve been sick?”

“On the contrary,” I answered dryly. “And I wish I had been. I haven’t
had five hours’ sleep all told since I came on board. These pestiferous
hives. . . ”

I held up a lumpy wrist to show. She took one glance at it, halted
abruptly, and, neatly balancing herself to the roll, took my wrist in
both her hands and gave it close scrutiny.

“Mercy!” she cried; and then began to laugh.

I was of two minds. Her laughter was delightful to the ear, there was
such a mellowness, and healthiness, and frankness about it. On the
other hand, that it should be directed at my misfortune was
exasperating. I suppose my perplexity showed in my face, for when she
had eased her laughter and looked at me with a sobering countenance,
she immediately went off into more peals.

“You poor child,” she gurgled at last. “And when I think of all the
cream of tartar I made you consume!”

It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to
take advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain
just how many years she was my junior. She had told me she was twelve
years old the time the _Dixie_ collided with the river steamer in San
Francisco Bay. Very well, all I had to do was to ascertain the date of
that disaster and I had her. But in the meantime she laughed at me and
my hives.

“I suppose it is—er—humorous, in some sort of way,” I said a bit
stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss
West, for it only set her off into more laughter.

“What you needed,” she announced, with fresh gurglings, “was an
exterior treatment.”

“Don’t tell me I’ve got the chicken-pox or the measles,” I protested.

“No.” She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another
paroxysm. “What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . ”

She paused deliberately, and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Of bedbugs,” she concluded. And then, all seriousness and
practicality, she went on: “But we’ll have that righted in a jiffy.
I’ll turn the _Elsinore’s_ after-quarters upside down, though I know
there are none in father’s room or mine. And though this is my first
voyage with Mr. Pike I know he’s too hard-bitten” (here I laughed at
her involuntary pun) “an old sailor not to know that his room is clean.
Yours” (I was perturbed for fear she was going to say that I had
brought them on board) “have most probably drifted in from for’ard.
They always have them for’ard.

“And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case. You’d
better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you. The next couple
of nights you’ll spend in the cabin or chart-room. And be sure Wada
removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from your rooms.
There’s going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing out of
woodwork, and rebuilding. Trust me. I know the vermin.”




CHAPTER XIV.


Such a cleaning up and turning over! For two nights, one in the
chart-room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep,
and I am now almost stupid with excess of sleep. The land seems very
far away. By some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or
months, have passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March
morning. And yet it was March 28, and this is only the first week in
April.

I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West. She is the
most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered. What
passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she
was convinced that he was not the erring one. In some strange way, my
two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of
vermin. Under Miss West’s instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all
superficial woodwork have been ripped out. She worked the carpenter
from daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of
the sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches
on the cleansing operations. The carpenter is now busy rebuilding my
rooms. Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days I
expect to be settled back in my quarters.

Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been
four. Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to
the work. The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name,
is an interesting fellow. I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West
sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.

This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea. How he
happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not
explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
_Elsinore_. But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
the sea. He is a small man, but most powerfully built. His shoulders
are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and yet he is
slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked. This last, however,
is not due to sickness or ill-health. Tyro as he is on the sea, Steve
Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked. He has a way of
looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet
it is at such moments I get most strongly the impression of
crookedness. But he is a man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned
with. In ways he suggests a kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so
instant a prejudice against—Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.
And I have already noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this
trio that Steve Roberts chums.

The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work
for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature
of the spine. But before she sent him packing other things occurred in
which I was concerned. I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first
came in to go to work, and I could not help observing the startled,
avid glance he threw at my big shelves of books. He advanced on them in
the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard of gold, and as a
miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these book-titles
with his eyes.

And such eyes! All the bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the
man possessed was there in his eyes. They were small, pale-blue, and
gimlet-pointed with fire. His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to
ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils. The man
was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in learning that he
hated all things except books.

“Would you care to read some of them?” I said hospitably.

All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head
to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.

“It’s hell, ain’t it?—you with a strong body and servants to carry for
you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts
the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?”

How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he
uttered these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the
hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety.
Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were
locked in a cage with a tiger-cat. The devilishness, the wickedness,
and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me
and addressed me, were most unpleasant. I swear I knew fear—not
calculated caution, not timid apprehension, but blind, panic,
unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the creature was blood curdling;
nor did it require words to convey it: it poured from him, out of his
red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered, twisted, tortured face,
out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of hands. And yet, in that
very moment of instinctive startle and repulsion, the thought was in my
mind that with one hand I could take the throat of the weazened wisp of
a crippled thing and throttle the malformed life out of it.

But there was little encouragement in such thought—no more than a man
might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush
them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their
poison into him. And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of him was
the fear of being infected with his venom. I could not help it; for I
caught a quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his
mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid,
destroying me.

One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely, he
did not know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads
underfoot in nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a
nightmare.

“You suffer pain often?” I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by
the calculated use of sympathy.

“The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an’
burn,” was his reply. “But by what damnable right do you have all these
books, and time to read ’em, an’ all night in to read ’em, an’ soak in
them, when me brain’s on fire, and I’m watch and watch, an’ me broken
spine won’t let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?”

Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what
were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the
writers he preferred. His library, he told me, among other things
included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a complete
Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full hall dozen
he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood
Reade’s _Martyrdom of Man_, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of
Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime favourite.

He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently
mad from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him about
books and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He liked O.
Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four—flusher. Edgar Saltus’
_Anatomy of Negation_ was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a
mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ was the stuff,
though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He
preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but
Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. John Masefield knew what he
was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was living too fat to turn out the
stuff he first turned out.

And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had
ever heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology.
Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist. On
the other hand, political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism
and quietism. Political socialism had gone to pot, while industrial
unionism was the logical culmination of Marxism. He was a direct
actionist. The mass strike was the thing. Sabotage, not merely as a
withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen destruction-of-profits policy,
was the weapon. Of course he believed in the propaganda of the deed,
but a man was a fool to talk about it. His job was to do it and keep
his mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence. Of
course, _he_ talked; but what of it? Didn’t he have curvature of the
spine? He didn’t care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried to
give it to him.

And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he talked
about and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was
patent that he was self-educated. When I asked him how it was he had
come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as hot one
place as another. He unbent enough to tell me that he had been an
athlete, when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer in Eastern
Canada. And then his disease had come upon him, and for a quarter of a
century he had been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of a
personal acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any
man that ever existed.

It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour
look of disapprobation. Mr. Pike’s countenance is almost petrified. Any
expression seems to crack it—with the exception of sourness. But when
Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His
hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he
condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs’s time. To Mulligan Jacobs he
said in his customary snarl:

“Go on an’ get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch below.”

And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I had
already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was
manifested. I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather,
did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.

“Aw, go to hell, you old stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs.

If ever I had seen murder in a man’s eyes, I saw it then in the mate’s.
He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open
but clenched. One stroke of that bear’s paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all
the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake
on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate
giant. More than that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted
neck to meet the blow.

It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that
frail, crippled, repulsive thing.

“It’s me that can call you the stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs. “I ain’t
no Larry. G’wan an’ hit me. Why don’t you hit me?”

And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose whole
career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, could
not strike this fractured splinter of a man. I swear that Mr. Pike
actually struggled with himself to strike. I saw it. But he could not.

“Go on to your work,” he ordered. “The voyage is young yet, Mulligan.
I’ll have you eatin’ outa my hand before it’s over.”

And Mulligan Jacobs’s face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
into incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that
consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it. All he could do
was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should not have
been surprised had he spat poison in the mate’s face.

And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
beaten.

* * * * *


I can’t get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the cripple
facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is different
from the books and from what I know of existence. It is revelation.
Life is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter flame that
informs Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he—with no hope of any profit, not a
hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to God, but a mere
filthy, malignant rat—how dare he, I ask myself, be so defiant, so
death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt all the schools of
the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg to stand
on that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil
of philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan
Jacobs . . . unless he be insane. And then I don’t know.

Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans
with whom I am herded on the _Elsinore_?

* * * * *


And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is
another one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon. He
is the pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the
men were routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass—the man I so
instantly adjudged a drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.

I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.

“White slaver,” was his answer. “Had to skin outa New York to save his
skin. He’ll be consorting with those other three larrakins I gave a
piece of my mind to.”

“And what do you make of them?” I asked.

“A month’s wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin’ for
’em right now. I’d like to have the cash somebody’s put up in New York
to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed.”

“Gangsters?” I queried.

“That’s what. But I’ll trim their dirty hides. I’ll trim ’em. Mr.
Pathurst, this voyage ain’t started yet, and this old stiff’s a long
way from his last legs. I’ll give them a run for their money. Why, I’ve
buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And I’ll
bury some of them that think me an old stiff.”

He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.

“Mr. Pathurst, I’ve heard you’re a writing man. And when they told me
at the agents’ you were going along passenger, I made a point of going
to see your play. Now I’m not saying anything about that play, one way
or the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you’ll
get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell’s going to pop,
believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that’ll do a lot of
the poppin’. Some several and plenty’s going to learn who’s an old
stiff.”




CHAPTER XV.


How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is
delicious—thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then there
was Wada. But no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate the
problem of woman. It is just such an incident among a million others
that keeps the thinker’s gaze fixed on woman. They truly are the
mothers and the conservers of the race.

Rail as I will at Miss West’s red-blood complacency of life, yet I must
bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible, hard-headed,
a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing
attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must
confess I am most grateful that she is along. Had she not been on the
_Elsinore_, by this time I should have been so overwrought from lack of
sleep that I would be biting my veins and howling—as mad a hatter as
any of our cargo of mad hatters. And so we come to it—the everlasting
mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it
patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her. But,
regarding Miss West, I do entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she
is not a suffragette. That would be too much.

Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a
bit fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he
regretted the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms. It seems
he has a keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on the
_Elsinore_, and that, although he is oblivious of the existence of the
crew, he is not oblivious of my comfort. By his few expressions of
regret it appears that he cannot forgive himself for his careless
acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my affliction. Yes; Captain
West is a real human man. Is he not the father of the slender-faced,
strapping-bodied Miss West?

“Thank goodness that’s settled,” was Miss West’s exclamation this
morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how
gloriously I had slept.

And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all
practical purposes—it was settled, she next said:

“Come on and see the chickens.”

And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the
’midship-house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat hens
in the ship’s chicken-coop.

As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait
of hers as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming
down on the tug from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor
require to be entertained.

_Come and see the chickens_!—Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of
that simple invitation! For effrontery of possessiveness is there
anything that can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female,
human woman?—_Come and see the chickens_! Oh, well, the sailors for’ard
may be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here, aft, is one
male passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an equally
hard-bitten adventurer on the sea of matrimony. When I go over the
census I remember at least several women, superior to Miss West, who
trilled their song of sex and failed to shipwreck me.

As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of the
sea has stolen into my mental processes. Involuntarily I think in terms
of the sea. Another thing I notice is my excessive use of superlatives.
But then, everything on board the _Elsinore_ is superlative. I find
myself continually combing my vocabulary in quest of just and adequate
words. Yet am I aware of failure. For example, all the words of all the
dictionaries would fail to approximate the exceeding terribleness of
Mulligan Jacobs.

But to return to the chickens. Despite every precaution, it was evident
that they had had a hard time during the past days of storm. It was
equally evident that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness, had not
neglected them. Under her directions the steward had actually installed
a small oil-stove in the big coop, and she now beckoned him up to the
top of the house as he was passing for’ard to the galley. It was for
the purpose of instructing him further in the matter of feeding them.

Where were the grits? They needed grits. He didn’t know. The sack had
been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had promised a
couple of sailors that afternoon to overhaul the lazarette.

“Plenty of ashes,” she told the steward. “Remember. And if a sailor
doesn’t clean the coop each day, you report to me. And give them only
clean food—no spoiled scraps, mind. How many eggs yesterday?”

The steward’s eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got nine
the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.

“The poor things,” said Miss West—to me. “You’ve no idea how bad
weather reduces their laying.” She turned back upon the steward. “Mind
now, you watch and find out which hens don’t lay, and kill them first.
And you ask me each time before you kill one.”

I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while
Miss West talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler. But it gave me
opportunity to observe her. It is the length of her eyes that
accentuates their steadiness of gaze—helped, of course, by the dark
brows and lashes. I noted again the warm gray of her eyes. And I began
to identify her, to locate her. She is a physical type of the best of
the womanhood of old New England. Nothing spare nor meagre, nor bred
out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one would call
robust. When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred. I must fall back
on my other word, which will have to be the last: Miss West is
vital-bodied. That is the key-word.

When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I ventured
my customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:

“And has O’Sullivan bought Andy Fay’s sea-boots yet?”

“Not yet, Mr. Pathurst,” was the reply, “though he nearly got them
early this morning. Come on along, sir, and I’ll show you.”

Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along
the bridge, across the ’midship-house and the for’ard-house. From the
edge of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two
Japanese, with sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed
bundle that unmistakably contained a human body.

“O’Sullivan used a razor,” said Mr. Mellaire.

“And that is Andy Fay?” I cried.

“No, sir, not Andy. That’s a Dutchman. Christian Jespersen was his name
on the articles. He got in O’Sullivan’s way when O’Sullivan went after
the boots. That’s what saved Andy. Andy was more active. Jespersen
couldn’t get out of his own way, much less out of O’Sullivan’s. There’s
Andy sitting over there.”

I followed Mr. Mellaire’s gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe. One arm was in a
sling and his head was bandaged. Beside him squatted Mulligan Jacobs.
They were a pair. Both were blue-eyed, and both were malevolent-eyed.
And they were equally emaciated. It was easy to see that they had
discovered early in the voyage their kinship of bitterness. Andy Fay, I
knew, was sixty-three years old, although he looked a hundred; and
Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty, made up for the difference
by the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in his face and eyes. I
wondered if he sat beside the injured bitter one in some sense of
sympathy, or if he were there in order to gloat.

Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
inevitable clown-grin. One hand was swathed in bandages.

“Must have kept Mr. Pike busy,” was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.

“He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till eight.”

“What?” I asked. “Are there any more?”

“One more, sir, a sheeny. I didn’t know his name before, but Mr. Pike
got it—Isaac B. Chantz. I never saw in all my life at sea as many
sheenies as are on board the _Elsinore_ right now. Sheenies don’t take
to the sea as a rule. We’ve certainly got more than our share of them.
Chantz isn’t badly hurt, but you ought to hear him whimper.”

“Where’s O’Sullivan?” I inquired.

“In the ’midship-house with Davis, and without a mark. Mr. Pike got
into the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw. And now he’s
lashed down and talking in a trance. He’s thrown the fear of God into
Davis. Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike, threatening
to brain O’Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and complaining that
it’s no way to run a hospital. He’d have padded cells, straitjackets,
night and day nurses, and violent wards, I suppose—and a convalescents’
home in a Queen Anne cottage on the poop.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mr. Mellaire sighed. “This is the funniest voyage
and the funniest crew I’ve ever tackled. It’s not going to come to a
good end. Anybody can see that with half an eye. It’ll be dead of
winter off the Horn, and a fo’c’s’le full of lunatics and cripples to
do the work.—Just take a look at that one. Crazy as a bedbug. He’s
likely to go overboard any time.”

I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung
overboard the first day. He had just come around the corner of the
house, and, beyond one arm in a sling, seemed in good condition. He
walked easily and with strength, a testimonial to the virtues of Mr.
Pike’s rough surgery.

My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian
Jespersen, and to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor’s
shroud. One of them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton and
bandage.

“Did he get hurt, too?” I asked.

“No, sir. He’s the sail-maker. They’re both sail-makers. He’s a good
one, too. Yatsuda is his name. But he’s just had blood-poisoning and
lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months. He flatly refused to
let them amputate. He’s all right now, but the hand is dead, all except
the thumb and fore-finger, and he’s teaching himself to sew with his
left hand. He’s as clever a sail-maker as you’ll find at sea.”

“A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination,” I remarked.

“It’s put five men out of commission,” Mr. Mellaire sighed. “There’s
O’Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone, and Andy Fay, and
Shorty, and the sheeny. And the voyage not started yet. And there’s
Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps—why, sir, we’ll
soon be that weak it’ll take both watches to set a staysail.”

Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr. Mellaire,
I was shocked—no; not because death was aboard with us. I have stood by
my philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or by murder. What
affected me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the affair. Even
murder—murder for cause—I can understand. It is comprehensible that men
should kill one another in the passion of love, of hatred, of
patriotism, of religion. But this was different. Here was killing
without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing monstrously
irrational.

Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the open
door of the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O’Sullivan, and
peeped in. There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower bunk,
rolling his eyes and raving. In the top bunk, directly above, lay
Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe. I looked for the marlin-spike.
There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him.

“It’s hell, ain’t it, sir?” was his greeting. “And how am I goin’ to
get any sleep with that baboon chattering away there. He never lets
up—keeps his chin-music goin’ right along when he’s asleep, only worse.
The way he grits his teeth is something awful. Now I leave it to you,
sir, is it right to put a crazy like that in with a sick man? And I am
a sick man.”

While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and
halted just out of sight of the man in the bunk. And the man talked on.

“By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk. It hurts me to crawl up
here. It’s inhumanity, that’s what it is, and sailors at sea are better
protected by the law than they used to be. And I’ll have you for a
witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle.”

Mr. Pike stepped into the doorway.

“Shut up, you damned sea-lawyer, you,” he snarled. “Haven’t you played
a dirty trick enough comin’ on board this ship in your condition? And
if I have anything more out of you . . . ”

Mr. Pike was so angry that he could not complete the threat. After
spluttering for a moment he made a fresh attempt.

“You . . . you . . . well, you annoy me, that’s what you do.”

“I know the law, sir,” Davis answered promptly. “I worked full able
seaman on this here ship. All hands can testify to that. I was aloft
from the start. Yes, sir, and up to my neck in salt water day and
night. And you had me below trimmin’ coal. I did full duty and more,
until this sickness got me—”

“You were petrified and rotten before you ever saw this ship,” Mr. Pike
broke in.

“The court’ll decide that, sir,” replied the imperturbable Davis.

“And if you go to shoutin’ off your sea-lawyer mouth,” Mr. Pike
continued, “I’ll jerk you out of that and show you what real work is.”

“An’ lay the owners open for lovely damages when we get in,” Davis
sneered.

“Not if I bury you before we get in,” was the mate’s quick, grim
retort. “And let me tell you, Davis, you ain’t the first sea-lawyer
I’ve dropped over the side with a sack of coal to his feet.”

Mr. Pike turned, with a final “Damned sea-lawyer!” and started along
the deck. I was walking behind him when he stopped abruptly.

“Mr. Pathurst.”

Not as an officer to a passenger did he thus address me. His tone was
imperative, and I gave heed.

“Mr. Pathurst. From now on the less you see aboard this ship the
better. That is all.”

And again he turned on his heel and went his way.




CHAPTER XVI.


No, the sea is not a gentle place. It must be the very hardness of the
life that makes all sea-people hard. Of course, Captain West is unaware
that his crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never address the
men save to give commands. But Miss West, who is more like myself, a
passenger, ignores the men. She does not even say good-morning to the
man at the wheel when she first comes on deck. Nevertheless I shall, at
least to the man at the wheel. Am I not a passenger?

Which reminds me. Technically I am not a passenger. The _Elsinore_ has
no licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as third
mate and am supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month. Wada is
down as cabin boy, although I paid a good price for his passage and he
is my servant.

Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead. Within an hour
after I had watched the sail-makers at work Christian Jespersen was
slid overboard, feet first, a sack of coal to his feet to sink him. It
was a mild, calm day, and the _Elsinore_, logging a lazy two knots, was
not hove to for the occasion. At the last moment Captain West came
for’ard, prayer-book in hand, read the brief service for burial at sea,
and returned immediately aft. It was the first time I had seen him
for’ard.

I shall not bother to describe the burial. All I shall say of it is
that it was as sordid as Christian Jespersen’s life had been and as his
death had been.

As for Miss West, she sat in a deck-chair on the poop busily engaged
with some sort of fancy work. When Christian Jespersen and his coal
splashed into the sea the crew immediately dispersed, the watch below
going to its bunks, the watch on deck to its work. Not a minute elapsed
ere Mr. Mellaire was giving orders and the men were pulling and
hauling. So I returned to the poop to be unpleasantly impressed by Miss
West’s smiling unconcern.

“Well, he’s buried,” I observed.

“Oh,” she said, with all the tonelessness of disinterest, and went on
with her stitching.

She must have sensed my frame of mind, for, after a moment, she paused
from her sewing and looked at me.

Your first sea funeral, Mr. Pathurst?

“Death at sea does not seem to affect you,” I said bluntly.

“Not any more than on the land.” She shrugged her shoulders. “So many
people die, you know. And when they are strangers to you . . . well,
what do you do on the land when you learn that some workers have been
killed in a factory you pass every day coming to town? It is the same
on the sea.”

“It’s too bad we are a hand short,” I said deliberately.

It did not miss her. Just as deliberately she replied:

“Yes, isn’t it? And so early in the voyage, too.” She looked at me, and
when I could not forbear a smile of appreciation she smiled back.

“Oh, I know very well, Mr. Pathurst, that you think me a heartless
wretch. But it isn’t that it’s . . . it’s the sea, I suppose. And yet,
I didn’t know this man. I don’t remember ever having seen him. At this
stage of the voyage I doubt if I could pick out half-a-dozen of the
sailors as men I had ever laid eyes on. So why vex myself with even
thinking of this stupid stranger who was killed by another stupid
stranger? As well might one die of grief with reading the murder
columns of the daily papers.”

“And yet, it seems somehow different,” I contended.

“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” she assured me cheerfully, and returned to
her sewing.

I asked her if she had read Moody’s _Ship of Souls_, but she had not. I
searched her out further. She liked Browning, and was especially fond
of _The Ring and the Book_. This was the key to her. She cared only for
healthful literature—for the literature that exposits the vital lies of
life.

For instance, the mention of Schopenhauer produced smiles and laughter.
To her all the philosophers of pessimism were laughable. The red blood
of her would not permit her to take them seriously. I tried her out
with a conversation I had had with De Casseres shortly before leaving
New York. De Casseres, after tracing Jules de Gaultier’s philosophic
genealogy back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had concluded with the
proposition that out of their two formulas de Gaultier had constructed
an even profounder formula. The “Will-to-Live” of the one and the
“Will-to-Power” of the other were, after all, only parts of de
Gaultier’s supreme generalization, the “Will-to-Illusion.”

I flatter myself that even De Casseres would have been pleased with the
way I repeated his argument. And when I had concluded it, Miss West
promptly demanded if the realists might not be fooled by their own
phrases as often and as completely as were the poor common mortals with
the vital lies they never questioned.

And there we were. An ordinary young woman, who had never vexed her
brains with ultimate problems, hears such things stated for the first
time, and immediately, and with a laugh, sweeps them all away. I doubt
not that De Casseres would have agreed with her.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked rather abruptly. She dropped her
sewing into her lap, looked at me meditatively, then gazed on and away
across the flashing sea and up into the azure dome of sky. And finally,
with true feminine evasion, she replied:

“My father does.”

“But you?” I insisted.

“I really don’t know. I don’t bother my head about such things. I used
to when I was a little girl. And yet . . . yes, surely I believe in
God. At times, when I am not thinking about it at all, I am very sure,
and my faith that all is well is just as strong as the faith of your
Jewish friend in the phrases of the philosophers. That’s all it comes
to, I suppose, in every case—faith. But, as I say, why bother?”

“Ah, I have you now, Miss West!” I cried. “You are a true daughter of
Herodias.”

“It doesn’t sound nice,” she said with a _moue_.

“And it isn’t,” I exulted. “Nevertheless, it is what you are. It is
Arthur Symon’s poem, _The Daughters of Herodias_. Some day I shall read
it to you, and you will answer. I know you will answer that you, too,
have looked often upon the stars.”

We had just got upon the subject of music, of which she possesses a
surprisingly solid knowledge, and she was telling me that Debussy and
his school held no particular charm for her, when Possum set up a wild
yelping.

The puppy had strayed for’ard along the bridge to the ’midship-house,
and had evidently been investigating the chickens when his disaster
came upon him. So shrill was his terror that we both stood up. He was
dashing along the bridge toward us at full speed, yelping at every jump
and continually turning his head back in the direction whence he came.

I spoke to him and held out my hand, and was rewarded with a snap and
clash of teeth as he scuttled past. Still with head turned back, he
went on along the poop. Before I could apprehend his danger, Mr. Pike
and Miss West were after him. The mate was the nearer, and with a
magnificent leap gained the rail just in time to intercept Possum, who
was blindly going overboard under the slender railing. With a sort of
scooping kick Mr. Pike sent the animal rolling half across the poop.
Howling and snapping more violently, Possum regained his feet and
staggered on toward the opposite railing.

“Don’t touch him!” Mr. Pike cried, as Miss West showed her intention of
catching the crazed little animal with her hands. “Don’t touch’m! He’s
got a fit.”

But it did not deter her. He was half-way under the railing when she
caught him up and held him at arm’s length while he howled and barked
and slavered.

“It’s a fit,” said Mr. Pike, as the terrier collapsed and lay on the
deck jerking convulsively.

“Perhaps a chicken pecked him,” said Miss West. “At any rate, get a
bucket of water.”

“Better let me take him,” I volunteered helplessly, for I was
unfamiliar with fits.

“No; it’s all right,” she answered. “I’ll take charge of him. The cold
water is what he needs. He got too close to the coop, and a peck on the
nose frightened him into the fit.”

“First time I ever heard of a fit coming that way,” Mr. Pike remarked,
as he poured water over the puppy under Miss West’s direction. “It’s
just a plain puppy fit. They all get them at sea.”

“I think it was the sails that caused it,” I argued. “I’ve noticed that
he is very afraid of them. When they flap, he crouches down in terror
and starts to run. You noticed how he ran with his head turned back?”

“I’ve seen dogs with fits do that when there was nothing to frighten
them,” Mr. Pike contended.

“It was a fit, no matter what caused it,” Miss West stated
conclusively. “Which means that he has not been fed properly. From now
on I shall feed him. You tell your boy that, Mr. Pathurst. Nobody is to
feed Possum anything without my permission.”

At this juncture Wada arrived with Possum’s little sleeping box, and
they prepared to take him below.

“It was splendid of you, Miss West,” I said, “and rash, as well, and I
won’t attempt to thank you. But I tell you what-you take him. He’s your
dog now.”

She laughed and shook her head as I opened the chart-house door for her
to pass.

“No; but I’ll take care of him for you. Now don’t bother to come below.
This is my affair, and you would only be in the way. Wada will help
me.”

And I was rather surprised, as I returned to my deck chair and sat
down, to find how affected I was by the little episode. I remembered,
at the first, that my pulse had been distinctly accelerated with the
excitement of what had taken place. And somehow, as I leaned back in my
chair and lighted a cigarette, the strangeness of the whole voyage
vividly came to me. Miss West and I talk philosophy and art on the poop
of a stately ship in a circle of flashing sea, while Captain West
dreams of his far home, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire stand watch and
watch and snarl orders, and the slaves of men pull and haul, and Possum
has fits, and Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs burn with hatred
unconsumable, and the small-handed half-caste Chinese cooks for all,
and Sundry Buyers perpetually presses his abdomen, and O’Sullivan raves
in the steel cell of the ’midship-house, and Charles Davis lies about
him nursing a marlin-spike, and Christian Jespersen, miles astern, is
deep sunk in the sea with a sack of coal at his feet.




CHAPTER XVII.


Two weeks out to-day, on a balmy sea, under a cloud-flecked sky, and
slipping an easy eight knots through the water to a light easterly
wind. Captain West said he was almost convinced that it was the
north-east trade. Also, I have learned that the _Elsinore_, in order to
avoid being jammed down on Cape San Roque, on the Brazil coast, must
first fight eastward almost to the coast of Africa. On occasion, on
this traverse, the Cape Verde Islands are raised. No wonder the voyage
from Baltimore to Seattle is reckoned at eighteen thousand miles.

I found Tony, the suicidal Greek, steering this morning when I came on
deck. He seemed sensible enough, and quite rationally took off his hat
when I said good morning to him. The sick men are improving nicely,
with the exceptions of Charles Davis and O’Sullivan. The latter still
is lashed to his bunk, and Mr. Pike has compelled Davis to attend on
him. As a result, Davis moves about the deck, bringing food and water
from the galley and grumbling his wrongs to every member of the crew.

Wada told me a strange thing this morning. It seems that he, the
steward, and the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the cook’s
room—all being Asiatics—where they talk over ship’s gossip. They seem
to miss little, and Wada brings it all to me. The thing Wada told me
was the curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire. They have sat in judgment on
him and they do not approve of his intimacy with the three gangsters
for’ard.

“But, Wada,” I said, “he is not that kind of a man. He is very hard and
rough with all the sailors. He treats them like dogs. You know that.”

“Sure,” assented Wada. “Other sailors he do that. But those three very
bad men he make good friends. Louis say second mate belong aft like
first mate and captain. No good for second mate talk like friend with
sailors. No good for ship. Bime by trouble. You see. Louis say Mr.
Mellaire crazy do that kind funny business.”

All of which, if it were true, and I saw no reason to doubt it, led me
to inquire. It seems that the gangsters, Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and
Bert Rhine, have made themselves cocks of the forecastle. Standing
together, they have established a reign of terror and are ruling the
forecastle. All their training in New York in ruling the slum brutes
and weaklings in their gangs fits them for the part. As near as I could
make out from Wada’s tale, they first began on the two Italians in
their watch, Guido Bombini and Mike Cipriani. By means I cannot guess,
they have reduced these two wretches to trembling slaves. As an
instance, the other night, according to the ship’s gossip, Bert Rhine
made Bombini get out of bed and fetch him a drink of water.

Isaac Chantz is likewise under their rule, though he is treated more
kindly. Herman Lunkenheimer, a good-natured but simple-minded dolt of a
German, received a severe beating from the three because he refused to
wash some of Nosey Murphy’s dirty garments. The two bosuns are in fear
of their lives with this clique, which is growing; for Steve Roberts,
the ex-cowboy, and the white-slaver, Arthur Deacon, have been admitted
to it.

I am the only one aft who possesses this information, and I confess I
don’t know what to do with it. I know that Mr. Pike would tell me to
mind my own business. Mr. Mellaire is out of the question. And Captain
West hasn’t any crew. And I fear Miss West would laugh at me for my
pains. Besides, I understand that every forecastle has its bully, or
group of bullies; so this is merely a forecastle matter and no concern
of the afterguard. The ship’s work goes on. The only effect I can
conjecture is an increase in the woes of the unfortunates who must bow
to this petty tyranny for’ard.

—Oh, and another thing Wada told me. The gangster clique has
established its privilege of taking first cut of the salt-beef in the
meat-kids. After that, the rest take the rejected pieces. But I will
say, contrary to my expectations, the _Elsinore’s_ forecastle is well
found. The men are not on whack. They have all they want to eat. A
barrel of good hardtack stands always open in the forecastle. Louis
bakes fresh bread for the sailors three times a week. The variety of
food is excellent, if not the quality. There is no restriction in the
amount of water for drinking purposes. And I can only say that in this
good weather the men’s appearance improves daily.

Possum is very sick. Each day he grows thinner. Scarcely can I call him
a perambulating skeleton, because he is too weak to walk. Each day, in
this delightful weather, Wada, under Miss West’s instructions, brings
him up in his box and places him out of the wind on the awninged poop.
She has taken full charge of the puppy, and has him sleep in her room
each night. I found her yesterday, in the chart-room, reading up the
_Elsinore’s_ medical library. Later on she overhauled the
medicine-chest. She is essentially the life-giving, life-conserving
female of the species. All her ways, for herself and for others, make
toward life.

And yet—and this is so curious it gives me pause—she shows no interest
in the sick and injured for’ard.

They are to her cattle, or less than cattle. As the life-giver and
race-conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping
regularly into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the
midship-house and dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts. On the
contrary, as with her father, these wretched humans do not exist.

And still again, when the steward jammed a splinter under his nail, she
was greatly concerned, and manipulated the tweezers and pulled it out.
The Elsinore reminds me of a slave plantation before the war; and Miss
West is the lady of the plantation, interested only in the
house-slaves. The field slaves are beyond her ken or consideration, and
the sailors are the Elsinore’s field slaves. Why, several days back,
when Wada suffered from a severe headache, she was quite perturbed, and
dosed him with aspirin. Well, I suppose this is all due to her
sea-training. She has been trained hard.

We have the phonograph in the second dog-watch every other evening in
this fine weather. On the alternate evenings this period is Mr. Pike’s
watch on deck. But when it is his evening below, even at dinner, he
betrays his anticipation by an eagerness ill suppressed. And yet, on
each such occasion, he punctiliously waits until we ask if we are to be
favoured with music. Then his hard-bitten face lights up, although the
lines remain hard as ever, hiding his ecstasy, and he remarks gruffly,
off-handedly, that he guesses he can play over a few records. And so,
every other evening, we watch this killer and driver, with lacerated
knuckles and gorilla paws, brushing and caressing his beloved discs,
ravished with the music of them, and, as he told me early in the
voyage, at such moments believing in God.

A strange experience is this life on the Elsinore. I confess, while it
seems that I have been here for long months, so familiar am I with
every detail of the little round of living, that I cannot orient
myself. My mind continually strays from things non-understandable to
things incomprehensible—from our Samurai captain with the exquisite
Gabriel voice that is heard only in the tumult and thunder of storm; on
to the ill-treated and feeble-minded faun with the bright, liquid,
pain-filled eyes; to the three gangsters who rule the forecastle and
seduce the second mate; to the perpetually muttering O’Sullivan in the
steel-walled hole and the complaining Davis nursing the marlin-spike in
the upper bunk; and to Christian Jespersen somewhere adrift in this
vastitude of ocean with a coal-sack at his feet. At such moments all
the life on the _Elsinore_ becomes as unreal as life to the philosopher
is unreal.

I am a philosopher. Therefore, it is unreal to me. But is it unreal to
Messrs. Pike and Mellaire? to the lunatics and idiots? to the rest of
the stupid herd for’ard? I cannot help remembering a remark of De
Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin’s. Said he: “The profoundest
instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real.
He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion.
Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and
myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the
privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake,
has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination.
Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief,
Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From
Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.”

Ben will agree that I have quoted him fairly. And so, the thought comes
to me, that to all these slaves of the _Elsinore_ the Real is real
because they fictionally escape it. One and all they are obsessed with
the belief that they are free agents. To me the Real is unreal, because
I have torn aside the veils of fiction and myth. My pristine fictional
escape from the Real, making me a philosopher, has bound me absolutely
to the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist
on board the _Elsinore_. Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the
whole phenomena of living on the _Elsinore_ see it only as
phantasmagoria.

Paradoxes? I admit it. All deep thinkers are drowned in the sea of
contradictions. But all the others on the _Elsinore_, sheer surface
swimmers, keep afloat on this sea—forsooth, because they have never
dreamed its depth. And I can easily imagine what Miss West’s practical,
hard-headed judgment would be on these speculations of mine. After all,
words are traps. I don’t know what I know, nor what I think I think.

This I do know: I cannot orient myself. I am the maddest and most
sea-lost soul on board. Take Miss West. I am beginning to admire her.
Why, I know not, unless it be because she is so abominably healthy. And
yet, it is this very health of her, the absence of any shred of
degenerative genius, that prevents her from being great . . . for
instance, in her music.

A number of times, now, I have come in during the day to listen to her
playing. The piano is good, and her teaching has evidently been of the
best. To my astonishment I learn that she is a graduate of Bryn Mawr,
and that her father took a degree from old Bowdoin long ago. And yet
she lacks in her music.

Her touch is masterful. She has the firmness and weight (without
sharpness or pounding) of a man’s playing—the strength and surety that
most women lack and that some women know they lack. When she makes a
slip she is ruthless with herself, and replays until the difficulty is
overcome. And she is quick to overcome it.

Yes, and there is a sort of temperament in her work, but there is no
sentiment, no fire. When she plays Chopin, she interprets his sureness
and neatness. She is the master of Chopin’s technique, but she never
walks where Chopin walks on the heights. Somehow, she stops short of
the fulness of music.

I did like her method with Brahms, and she was not unwilling, at my
suggestion, to go over and over the Three R

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2415