Drowned Gold/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
NO individual is indispensable to a nation, regardless of his greatness or his smallness. The great Lincoln, of whose tragic death no real American may think without a sudden tremor of veneration and pity, left but a momentary gap when his life's work was ended. How little, then, mattered the loss of the services of Thomas Hale, a mere lieutenant-commander aboard one of America's many ships? But I still cherish, with much pride, some of the letters I received from superiors and brother officers! Each individual, be he ever so humble, must have something of which to be proud if he has been at all a man!
I had not appreciated to the full my father's harassments until that day I presented myself in the offices of the Esperanza Sailing Company, to learn the exact financial status upon which my mother and I must depend. His letter, written some years previous, had foreseen difficulties that were to be brought about by steam, although he, old-fashioned if you will, clung to sail. Moreover, I learned that first day that in the years intervening between the writing of the letter and my advent into the company's affairs, my father had sold, bit by bit, shares of stock until I was now but a third owner in the corporation. Worst of all, it had been sold to old friends of his, retired mariners, who were fighting the last fight between sail and steam from sentiment alone and regardless of gain. I was made president and general manager of the Esperanza Sailing Company, and fell to work to try to retrieve its fallen fortunes.
It is very useless to detail the struggles and trials that nearly overwhelmed me in the two most miserable years of my life that followed. I derived such comfort as I could from correspondence and sometimes visits with Marty Sterritt, until I read a paragraph in a Boston newspaper announcing her betrothal to Count Waldo von Vennemann.
She was at the time abroad.
I had cherished the ambition to marry her, if possible, whenever I could come to her with my affairs in better condition; I had come to believe that she loved me; I had almost conceived it to be a wordless understanding between us, and—I loved her as none but a man of mature years, who has kept his own moral life clean, can love. Her last letter lay before me, and was almost intimate. I saw, of a sudden, that I had been a fool, reading between lines phrases that were not there, building dreams that were but dreams, and painting pictures with colors of hope rather than reality. I wrote her a letter that was intended to conceal my wound, and convey the impression that no air castle of mine had been toppled by the news. I congratulated her and wished her much happiness. I directed it to her latest address in the German health resort where she was ministering to the comfort of her stricken father, and with my own hands posted it.
And on that evening, returning home with this sickening sense of irrevocable defeat, I came to meet another loss. The chauffeur and man-of-all-work who met me at the station told me that but half an hour previously my mother had been stricken ill, and that even then the doctor was in attendance. I took the wheel myself, and forgetting speed laws and all else, drove madly from the station.
Thank God I did; for I was in time to hear her last words and pillow her in my arms, as with a smile of ineffable happiness she went to meet the waiting one beyond sight. At the very last she lifted her arms and called my father's name, and then lay very still. That she, foreseeing dissolution, had patted my cheek with her frail and trembling hand and whispered that she had naught but a happy tale to carry across the border-land, did not lessen my grief; for now I was alone. I was the sole survivor of that Esperanza that had fought its fight in the tropical hurricane.
And when I awoke from the dumb lethargy of grief, more than a week later, I learned that war had been declared in Europe, which was to try the souls of men more than they had ever been tried before.
To forget my own woes, I plunged into business affairs more strenuously than ever, and there was need; for the affairs of the Esperanza Sailing Company were daily growing more difficult. I foresaw that we must at once go into steam vessels in a time when speed would be the paramount consideration. But I was fighting the one thing that knows neither reason nor argument,—sentiment!
For one whole year I strove to overcome the stubbornness of those ancient mariners who constituted my board of directors, urging that we transform as rapidly as possible to steam vessels, myself urging the purchase of numerous small steamships of freighter class and that alone. I might as well have attacked a stone pier with a palm needle. That we could not pay dividends and must confine ourselves to a mere coasting trade, small and unprofitable, did not alter their minds. At the next annual election I was removed, not only from the presidency, but also from the management of the line that my father had established.
I think that for at least a six-months I sulked, living in the meantime at my lonely home, driving my car hither and yon, devoting my water hours to a yawl that I had bought, and cruising along the coast. And then I applied to the United States Navy for reinstatement. It was useless at the time, for now a new regime had entered that hoped to decrease rather than increase the Navy, in the fervent trust that our country could sheer clear of the shoals, and that after the conclusion of the European war no man could possibly live to know another conflict.
It was sheer inaction and opportunity that changed my whole course and aroused me from sloth. I was offered seventy-five thousand dollars for my holdings in the Esperanza Sailing Company, by a man who was fighting for control. Pessimistic as to its future, I seized the chance, and sold. And on the day the check was received and recognized as a deposit, I began to haunt the water-fronts. The Navy would not have me, but I was going to sea again, on a vessel of my own, and lay the foundations for a new Esperanza line. And that I should not be combated for the name I was convinced, being quite certain that within a year the old line, with its ancient mariners, would be dead and gone.
The price of steamships had advanced enormously. Had the old Esperanza line turned to steam before the beginning of the war, I should now have been an independently wealthy man. Ships that in the month preceding the outbreak could have been bought for thirty dollars a ton now readily brought two hundred a ton, so that my total fortune did not give me the ownership of an ocean liner, by any means. Although, to her credit, I must say that, considering the times, I made a good bargain when I bought that lazy but commodious old tramp, the Golden West. She was slow, but her engines were good, and her hull was something better than a solid scale of rust with a cement bottom, such as were many of the craft dragged out from ship boneyards after years of idleness and sent forth to sea, wheezing and trembling, like palsied old men. Ah, many of them left port in those strenuous days never to return. I promptly renamed her the Esperanza.
I was out to take chances, and strange chances I took! For by unheard-of pay I succeeded in gathering together a crew, all American, that would jauntily have sailed her over the edge of a flat world without qualm or whimper; but of these, as Fate would have it, by far the most peculiar, and the most valuable, as time proved, was the man who signed on as chief engineer, "Twisted Jimmy" Martin. And most aptly was he named, for a more irascible, gruff, unsociable, violent-tempered man never entered an engine-room; which is certainly giving him a character for those who know how heat is inclined to sour the tempers of many such of that calling. Jimmy Martin I had met years before, when our Government was testing some new submarines. He was the expert for one of the big companies and it fell to my lot to come in contact with him many times when taking over such boats. His capability was admitted, for he was no ordinary man; but he had never been known to hold any berth overly long, and was almost invariably fired for insolence to superiors, an insolence that sometimes went as far as personal violence, for his strength was as a gorilla's, and his pugnacity notorious. Moreover, he was a self-made scientist, and had been discharged from two submarine concerns for conducting experiments on his own responsibility without any permission whatever from his employers. His sole passion was for inventing different appliances, nearly all of which proved worthless, or were stolen from him. He had been derided and ridiculed until he had gained a thorough contempt for the intelligence of other men, robbed until he doubted most men's honesty, and feared to talk lest some one should pirate his ideas; but we had become fairly acquainted, although for more than a year I had lost touch with him.
I had some difficulty in getting such a man as I wanted for chief engineer of the Esperanza, for good men were scarce. A labor exchange agent had just told me he could not furnish me with any man he could wholly recommend, and I was turning out of the office when he said, "By the way, there is one man who is a crack, but a crank, that is on my list. If you can't do better— But I can't say much for him. Bad-tempered old devil. Twisted Jimmy Martin, they call him."
"Why, I know him!" I exclaimed. "How does he happen to be on the beach?"
"Same old trouble. And the worst of it is, he won't take most of the places I've got him, because he makes such ridiculous terms."
"What does he want?"
"I'll be blest if I know. Like to talk to him? By the way, there he comes now. Just in time."
It took me but five minutes to learn that my friend Jimmy Martin would like to see the Esperanza before he would sign on, and I took him to her berth and conducted him over her. For some reason that was like intuition, I desired to have him, believing that he was not as bad as his reputation, and that, in any case, I could get along with him. And then came his most singular stipulation. It was that he should have a cabin on the deck, which no one, not even a steward, was to be allowed to enter.
"You can have two cabins, if you like," I said, knowing that there would be at least three unoccupied ones. He positively beamed.
"Then, if you'll do that, Captain Hale, I'm your man, and I'll not quarrel about the screw. Stick in your own figures."
I gave an order then and there to carpenters who were making some alterations for me, to cut and fit a door in a partition, thus turning two cabins into one. Twisted Jimmy seemed abashed by so much consideration. I made up my mind to go the limit, foreseeing that if I could win him over to a real friendship I would have the prize of engineers.
"Now, if you wish," I added, "I'll have the berths taken out of that extra cabin and fit it up as you say. I'm the owner."
"Do you mean it?" he growled, eying me almost with suspicion.
"Certainly I do," I confirmed. "I've known you a long time. I don't believe you're as rotten hard to get along with as you're painted. I'm going to do as I please aboard my own ship, and it's all to my good to make you so comfortable that you'll stand by."
He stood for some time looking over toward the bay, and then abruptly questioned, "You're old Tom Hale's son? Him that men used to call 'Honest Tom'?"
I nodded.
"I knew him well," he said. "And I'll trust any of that breed till hell freezes over. Yes, you can do something more for me. I'd like that cabin stripped, and a bench built along this side here. Then I'd like some shelves with racks on this side. If I'm asking too much, you can take the cost out of my pay."
"I'll do nothing of the latter sort," I declared. "I'll stand for it myself. All I ask you, Jimmy Martin, is to curb your temper as much as you can and run my engines. What you want that extra cabin for is none of my business, and you shall not be disturbed in it. It is yours.
He did not even thank me, but turned on his heel and walked away.
"I'll be up at that shark's office to sign on at four o'clock," he called over his shoulder, without so much as looking back, and he was as good as his word. Moreover, he was aboard before the ship was ready to go into commission, and himself went over the engines until they were as perfect as human skill could make them.
I said that I took chances. My first cargo was one of high explosives for a certain one of the Allies, and we cleared port without a penny of insurance, but under a freight rate that was so high I blush to tell the figures. Nor did we stop at that; for we made several such passages, constantly holding our lives in our hands, and earned some reputation for being adroit by the manner in which we avoided, on two occasions, German submarines. Within a short time, the Esperanza had paid for herself, even after deducting prize money that I distributed among the members of my crew, who began to look upon me as a sort of fairy godfather. And in a whole year I had got but little closer to Jimmy. He was the only man aboard who seemed incapable of favoring me with a smile or a word of thanks. Even the men had learned to leave him severely alone, prompted, I think, in several cases, by his quickness of fists. It was more than a year before I discovered the use of that mysterious cabin wherein he buried himself whenever off watch, and then in rather a startling manner.
Let no one think that the carrying of a cargo of high explosives across the Atlantic and into the danger zone was without anxieties. It had been my rule to do as little work as possible until mid-ocean was reached, thereby resting myself for the last strain, during which time I was frequently on the bridge for forty-eight hours at a stretch. There was the certain knowledge that we were carrying contraband, that most likely this was fully known to the German Government, and that, as my chief mate said, if we were hit, we "wouldn't go down at all, but straight up!" We made it a rule to travel without a ray of light showing. Hence I think I may be pardoned for being somewhat alarmed on that very dark night when, coming along the starboard side and abaft Jimmy's cabin, I was suddenly half blinded by a flash of light through screens and blinds. I fairly leaped to one side, with my hands clutched over my burning eyes, but in that single flash I recognized something so weird, so unusual in the quality of the light, that it presented more the appearance of a writhing bar of spectral, boiling flame in an infinite variety of color. Terrified, I ran to his cabin door and battered on it with my hands. The light had disappeared and all was blackness. I got no response, but fancied I heard him moving within his outer cabin, so called, "Martin! Martin! Jimmy! Are you hurt?"
The door suddenly flung open so sharply as almost to knock me over, and a snarling, angry form jumped through. In the little light there was I discerned that his fists were shut and his arms tensed to strike.
"Hold fast!" I shouted. "What's the matter with you, man?"
"Oh, it's the skipper," I heard him say, as if to himself.
"Yes, it is," I retorted; and then demanded, somewhat harshly, "What is the meaning of that flash-light from your back cabin window? I thought the ship was afire, or that you were signaling to some one."
To my utter surprise, he fairly sprang forward and did the most remarkable act—caught both my arms in his hands, that clenched my muscles with his fingers, and thrust his face toward mine.
"Flash-light? From my back cabin window? You saw a light?"
His voice was hoarse with excitement, as he fairly shot his questions at me; but now, as I tried to shake myself loose, fearing that he had gone insane, and that I should be compelled to defend myself until I could call for help to subdue him, his voice abruptly changed to one of appeal. "Tell me, Hale, please tell me, are you quite certain? Certain that you saw a light?"
"See here," I said, "either you or I have gone mad! Control yourself, can't you? What does this nonsense mean? Of course I saw a light. So could any German sub have seen it if it had been five miles away. Do you mean to tell me you know nothing about it?"
And I had a right to feel anger, I think, considering the risks that we incurred there in mid-ocean, with a ship solidly loaded with the most deadly explosives man had ever utilized, and with a price on our heads.
"My God! I've got it! Got it!" he cried, suddenly wilting back against the door-frame, and then sinking down to a half-sitting posture, as if his knees had given way through weakness.
"Come, come! This won't do, Martin," I said, in a much more kindly tone, for now I regarded him as being hopelessly insane, or on the verge of collapse. "Here! Let me get my arm under you and help you to your bunk. You 're ill, and I can't afford to have anything happen to you. I thought I was the only man aboard this boat who had nerves. It's enough, Jimmy, to give any man the jumps! Come on. Let me help you. I've some brandy in my cabin, and maybe a pull at that will set you straight."
I bent over to assist him, but he half pushed me away, gently, as if to assure me that he had no intention of being rude, and straightened himself until he stood erect. He barred his arms across the door to prevent my entering his precincts, and stammered, "Please, sir! Please! Let me—let me come to your cabin for the brandy. I'm—I'm a bit upset. I've reasons for—for—But there'll be no more light shine through. I promise."
"All right. Come on over to my cabin," I said, half soothingly, thinking that his paroxysm was subsiding, but intent on satisfying myself that there had been nothing sinister in what I had seen. I turned from him and walked cautiously away, to make sure that no one but myself had witnessed that singular menace, and was relieved when convinced that no one had; for men living under the constant strain in which we labored are touchy. A mere whisper that Twisted Jimmy Martin was playing with the enemy, and not even I could have saved him from being hurled overboard.
He came from the darkness into my brilliantly lighted cabin, jerked the door shut behind him, and stood, blinking and confused. He ran a hand across his forehead, and left thereon a broad smear of livid green as from some chemical with which his fingers had been smeared. His eyes glowed and burned beneath his overhanging gray eyebrows, as he stared at me for an instant, and then seemed to gaze still farther at something beyond my sight.
"Old honest Tom Hale's son!" he said, in a barely audible mutter, and then, after an instant's pause, and still in self-communion,—"and the breed is honest, and wouldn't rob any man on earth!"
There was something so strange in his demeanor that I took refuge in the time necessary to open a locker and pour him the brandy, before questioning him. I thrust a chair toward him, into which he sank before gulping the stimulant. It appeared to pacify him. Before I had time to ask him a question he lifted his eyes, that had been staring with that same absorption at the floor, and met mine.
"Captain Tom Hale," he said, in a voice softer than I had ever heard him use, "you have been very decent to me. I trust you more than any man I have met in the last twenty years. You've trusted me, and trust wins trust. I'm going to ask you to trust me some more. It's about that light you saw."
He looked at me questioningly.
"Jimmy Martin," I said, with a swift and unaccountable faith that he was at least very honest, "you can trust me, and I'm going to trust you; but I do want to say that you put us in pretty big danger. One never can tell who is watching, in times like these. You know that. And I think you know that there are a lot of men looking for the Esperanza, all the time. You got that second cabin to use as a laboratory."
"Yes, I did," he admitted. "And you have played the game with me. Fair and square! You kept me from being interfered with or annoyed. I heard you tell the mate to see that nobody so much as loafed around my quarters. You said that my business was my own, and nobody's else. In the year and three months that I've been aboard this ship, you never allowed any man to so much as knock on the door. Well, I've had my way, and been unmolested for the first time in my life. To-night I made the first real step in something I've been working on for twenty years, and if it hadn't been for you, I'd never have known it. I didn't know that I had it. You helped me without knowing it. And—I've got something revolutionary. I've got—"
I held up my hand to check him.
"See here," I said, "I don't wish you to think that I am out to learn anything at all of what you are working upon. That is your affair. You needn't tell me anything concerning it. I'll not take advantage of my position as owner and captain of this ship to compel you to confidence. All I say is that you and I both know the risks of displaying at sea, just now, a beam of light like that."
He continued to stare at me for a long time, and then questioned, dryly, "Suppose I told you that the—er—thing I have invented might make any man who has it a millionaire?"
"Then I should say to you, Jim Martin, 'I hope you make a million out of it.' I never yet begrudged or envied a man who has gained something by his own brains or work!"
"And you wouldn't want to get in on it?" he demanded, as if astonished.
"Certainly not by any unfair means. That's what it would amount to if I took advantage of your and my positions aboard this ship."
"And you don't intend to hinder me, or even ask me what it is?" he asked incredulously, his heavy eyebrows lifting, and his eyes snapping open and shut.
"Not at all! All I ask is that you don't put us all in danger."
"I'd like to shake hands with you," he said, getting to his feet with an air of relief. "I've had an experience that hasn't made me think very much of my fellow men, as a whole; but I think I know a square man when I see him, and—somehow it makes me feel considerable better about life in general. The light will not be seen again. Good-night, sir."
And before I could say any more he jerked the door open, slammed it shut again, and was gone. I did not then in the least appreciate that Opportunity had been paying me a visit, unsuspected and unsought, and that Twisted Jimmy was her agent. Nor, to be cleanly frank, did I have any great belief in his invention, whatever it was, because the hard, matter-of-fact world is inclined to scoff at those strange beings who have found "something revolutionary"!