Fear of Home

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

FEAR OF HOME

By THEODORE GOODRIDGE ROBERTS

 

THE lads of Fore-and-aft Cove are not given to deep-sea faring. They are confirmed home-keepers. Poverty and the perils of the coastwise waters keep the population from increasing to an inconvenient extent.

In the memory of the oldest inhabitant, Jerry Chalker was the first and only son of the little harbour to leave it for deep-sea voyaging. But no adventurous spirit drove him forth; no craving for wider horizons lured him out.

The men and boys of Fore-and-aft Cove worked the shore fisheries of the outer bay in their skiffs. Senseless currents, sudden fogs, and shifts of wind made it a perilous and benumbing occupation; and the reward was frequently insufficient for the needs of back and belly. In the early months of winter they hunted the caribou on the vast barrens behind the harbour, sometimes with success, and as often with failure. In the spring, ten or a dozen of the sturdiest of them tramped southward to Harbour Grace, and shipped with Old Skipper Bartt, Young Skipper Bartt, Skipper Bill Pike, or some other notable slayer of seals, for a trip to the ice. The adventure to the floes was a hard way of making a modest sum of money, even with luck and a "log-loaded" ship; but the men of Fore-and-aft were accustomed to hard ways, and even in their wildest dreams an easy way of making money was beyond their imagining.

Jerry Chalker made his first journey to Harbour Grace, and his first and last trip to the ice, in his eighteenth year; but he was not without experience. Like other strong-limbed lads of the coast, he had learned at an early age to run on the shore ice when it was adrift in the spring; to leap unerringly from pan to pan; to cross patches of "slob," or crushed ice, with flying feet; even to strike some unwary harbour seal with his bat, and deprive it of hide and blubber with his "sculping knife."

All ten men from Fore-and-aft Cove obtained berths with Captain Pike, of the old Walrus. This was a grand stroke of luck for the ten men from the north, for Bill Pike had the name of a successful sealer, and it was years since the Walrus had returned from the ice without a deck-load; and the larger the load for the ship, the larger the "bill" for every member of the crew.

That year the sealing fleet from Harbour Grace consisted of four vessels. The four lay all night with their bows toward the great bay and the sea beyond, their furnaces aglow and all their men aboard. At seven o'clock they started away to the bang of a gun ashore, as if for a race. And truly they raced, each captain striving against his fellows in a competition that offered prizes of gold and death, steaming out of the great bay and northward to put his luck, his skill, and his ship and men to the test of the ice.

When the ships got clear of the northern cape of Conception Bay, and swung their heavy prows north and nor'-by-west, the Walrus was slightly in the lead. The wind was moderate, and out of the west. The sun was bright, the sky clear, and the air nipping cold. To port lay the broken coast, the snow-capped cliffs brown and purple in the sun, the land-wash fringed by shore ice that gleamed white and azure between the black rocks and the green seas. To starboard lay the vasts of ocean, the discoloured hulls and black reek of the other sealers, the innumerable grey seas rising and falling and rising again without haste or violence, riding in from a wavering and colourless horizon.

The one hundred and forty men aboard the Walrus were in high spirits. Captain Pike was a great skipper, and the Walrus was a grand ship. Every poor son of distress aboard felt as sure of "making a bill" as of his need of it. Songs were sung. Big-chested stories were told of other trips to the ice, of log-loaded ships, of fabulous bills. Had not Skipper Bill Pike himself once encountered the Greenland floe and the myriads of ice-riding seals just north of the straits, and loaded his ship, to the utter disregard of the Plimsoll marks; in two days and a night? It was so.

From Cape Freels the course of the Walrus was laid fair for Cape Bauld, the most northern point of Newfoundland. The white glimmer of floe ice was sighted to the eastward as darkness settled slowly upon the wastes; but Captain Pike held to his course. It was the right kind of ice, he admitted—Greenland ice—but few seals were riding it.

"I can smell the swile," he said to his bewhiskered mate, "like my father could, an' like his father afore him."

Dawn showed nothing of the other ships to the men of the Walrus, save two smudges of black smoke far to the east, and a third far astern.

Jerry Chalker was big, ignorant, uncouth, docile, and immune to hardship. He differed from his kind only in one particular. His mind was alive to such an extent as to be affected by other suggestions than those inspired by hunger, cold, and physical danger. He wondered and worried about the depths under the ship's keel. Sometimes the immensities of sky and sea awoke sensations of despair in him which he could neither name nor understand. He knew fear, and this was not fear. He had known grief when his mother died, and this was not grief. Vaguely, almost unconsciously, he envied the men around him, who smoked and cursed undismayed in the face of that vast of desolation, merry so long as their bellies were satisfied, unafraid so long as they were not actually struggling against death and disaster. But when Jerry tried to reason out these distressing sensations, his mind seemed to drift in a circle, feebly, painfully, uselessly. He could not think: He could only feel with his mind.

Jerry's queer distaste for his desolate surroundings did not occupy his time and attention exclusively. Far from it. A keener emotion than this periodical and nameless despair was his admiration for the captain. It was an awed admiration, and impersonal, like a savage's regard for the god of thunder and lightning. The two had never exchanged a word, to date.

Jerry Chalker, lolling with his kind on the forward deck, raised his eyes to the bridge continually, and regarded the supermen there with awe and wonder. And the greatest of those superior creatures was Captain Pike. Jerry's mind struggled to comprehend the greatness of the skipper, as yours and mine sometimes struggle to comprehend the vastness of the starry universe. The immensities of the captain's powers and parts baffled the lout's toiling intelligence.

He knew that the big, lean man, with the sandy moustaches and the blue eyes, held the life of the great ship and the lives of her company in his hand; and yet he seemed to give his attention only to the ship, the sea, and the sky, standing apart from and high above the crew and the company of seal killers, and dealing with them only through his officers.

He had seen the captain turn his head, up there on the bridge, and the boiling cutwater swing to port in answer. With a turn of the head the master directed those thousands of tons of wood, steel, and humanity across the trackless seas.

The wonder of it filled Jerry, head and soul, for he knew nothing of the mechanical contrivances which connected the bridge with the engine-room. To him it seemed that the ship read the captain's thought.

Bill Pike was a clever sealer, beyond a shadow of doubt. Fifty miles north of the strait, and one hundred miles off-shore, at noon of a golden and windless day, he ran the old Walrus into the seal-ridden floe. He drove that massive prow into a wound in the seaward flank of that immeasurable white field, so that his killers could disembark from both sides. They scattered over the ice, each man equipped with towline, skinning knife, and "bat" of birch wood.

The seals were of the two great "hair-seal" families—Harps and Hoods. They are valuable only for their hides and blubber. In the gathering of this strange and pitiful harvest, the thick pelt and its deep lining of blubber are removed in one operation, and the red carcase is left to blot the white floe, to feed the sea-birds, and later the fishes.

The ice was soon stained and fouled in all directions. The pelts of the nearer seals were towed back to the ship as soon as procured; but the farther slayers killed and flayed and passed on, leaving mounds of pelts behind them to be towed to the ship by others, or picked up later by the ship herself, should a shift of wind spread the component parts of the floe. These deposits of hide and blubber were marked by small flags distinguishing them as the property of the Walrus, as a safeguard against their being claimed by the crews of any other ships that might happen along.

Jerry Chalker worked in company with three others, all of Fore-and-aft Cove. They struck and skinned, struck and skinned, and moved on to fresh slaughters, unceasingly, reaping that bleeding field with a perfect frenzy of energy, dead to the horrors of their task. The larger the ship's load, the larger the reward for every member of her company; and the quicker the load aboard and the ship back in port, the sooner the money in the pocket.

A little wind fanned out from the west. Captain Pike, on the high bridge, remarked it, read the glass, and studied the round horizon. The little wind shifted slightly, shifted again and again, pouring out across those thousands of acres of ice a clear, cold current—from the nor'-west, from the nor'-west, from the north-by-west. Again the captain consulted the glass and the sky. The sky had lost something of its clear azure, the sunlight something of its clear gold. The captain looked down at the pelts which had already been hoisted aboard, and out and away at the gleaming, stained ice, at the scattered, active black dots which were the toiling killers, and at the mounds of skins. He was an ambitious man, and there was greed as well as courage in his heart. He turned his glance to the south and east.

"Not another ship in sight," he said. "It is all ours. There will be dirty weather to-morrow; but we'll be log-loaded and away before it strikes us, at this rate."

"The glass bes fallin' fast, sir," said the second mate.

"I noticed it, Mr. Kelly," replied the skipper ironically. And then, with another voice, he cried: "We'll go home with a deck-load this trip! Aye, Tim, loaded to the stack—log-loaded! We'll show 'em who are the lads who can smell out the ice an' the swile!"

"She bes breedin' for a flurry, sir," said old Kelly, gazing straight into the north with narrowed eyes. "Aye, breedin' fast."

The skipper slapped Mr. Kelly playfully on a bulky shoulder.

"Belay that, Tim Kelly!" he cried. "D'ye think to teach me the tricks o' wind and weather? A flurry we'll have, as sure as God makes ice an' sets it adrift; but we'll be log-loaded before we clear away from this floe."

The shifting of the wind into the north, and the scarcely perceptible dulling of the sky, did not escape the more experienced of the busy slayers out on the ice. Black Nick Chalker looked up from the sculping of a seal, with his bewhiskered face to the north, as sharply as if someone had spoken his name. He read the signs. He had made the trip to the ice every spring for twenty years. He finished the task in hand, then flung the warm pelt aside, and got to his feet. He turned and gazed questioningly off toward the distant ship.

"B'ys, a flurry bes breedin' to the nor'ard," he said, "an' they breeds big an' quick hereabouts. The ice will go all abroad i' a gale o' wind, an' the flurry'll blind us. I see it fifteen year ago, an' I see it free year ago."

His three companions halted in their advance, considered sky and wind and ice, then turned and came back to him.

"Aye, it do look bad," said Jerry Chalker, shivering slightly. "It do look like somethin' dead was comin' alive 'way off there."

"Aye, but the skipper bain't flyin' no flag to call us aboard," said Con Strowd.

"They hangs on, the skippers do," said Black Nick Chalker mournfully. "They allus hangs on. Where the swile lays thick the skippers shut their eyes to what's breedin' to win'ward. Sure, an' why not? It bain't on the ship's bridge, nor yet i' the chart-room, ye git yerself lost i' the flurry, an' starved to death wid the cold. I'll be headin' back for the old Walrus, lads, widout waitin' for the skipper's signal, an' the t'ree o' ye will be comin' along wid me if ye bain't fools."

So the four worthies from Fore-and-aft Cove ceased their slaying, shouldered their bats, coiled their towlines, and started back for the ship. They moved without haste at first, and with a casual air. They did not want to attract attention to their retreat, for, after all, Nick might be wrong about the speed of the storm that was gathering in the north. The skipper's neglect to fly a signal for return to the ship might be justified by a continuation of fine weather for hours.

The pale, steel tint of the northern sky thickened to an earthy brown. This, in turn, changed, and deepened and hardened to dull slate. The wind increased in weight and chill. Black Nick Chalker quickened his pace, and Jerry and the other two followed him close. Jerry glanced behind him, and to the right and left, and saw other groups of killers desist from their work and bead for the ship. Many of these groups were miles away on the darkling floe, and looked no larger than crawling flies. The ship flew the signal of recall. The gloom deepened with the swiftness of the shadow of titanic wings. Jerry turned fearful eyes to the north, and saw the sky as black as night from the tossing horizon to the ominous purple dome.

A sound sprang into being, grew, filled the darkening world. A torrent of falling wind struck the floe. Jerry and his friends held their mittened hands to their mouths and ran. The wind pressed down upon their bowed shoulders, and struck upon their necks like frosty iron. The ice rose and fell beneath their feet. They staggered; they went down upon their hands and knees; they scrambled up and raced forward madly. Cracks appeared in the labouring floe, through which the breath of the tortured waters beneath blew like smoke.

The gloom deepened. The outcry of the wind bruised ear and brain. The bitter cold snatched the breath from the lips. Men leaped the crevices in the breaking floe with prayers on their lips and terror at their heels. The ship's whistle piped feebly against the roaring of the elements. Snow as dry as sand appeared suddenly in the deluging tides of air, and swirled about the frantic runners. Bats and towlines and bags of food were discarded. The race was with death.

Captain Pike stood on the high bridge and drove the big ship into the spreading ice. The whistle bellowed behind him. Red lights flared on the decks below him, forward and aft. The wind buffeted him and wrenched him. The swirling dry snow powdered him and blinded him. He clung to the iron railing and drove his ship through the ice, searching for his men—searching heroically for the lives which he had already played with and lost. Ten men had come aboard at the first stroke of the tempest. Six more had been picked up before the wind had become thickened by the snow. After that the lads from Fore-and-aft Cove had been found and hoisted over the rail. And since then—nothing.

The darkness and the violence of the storm increased. The fury of the snow-freighted wind exceeded the power of human comprehension, of belief, of the meaning of words. The great pans of ice plunged against the old ship's broad bows and hammered her sides. The frothing screw drove her forward, and the black-and-white tempest hurled her back. The ship and her master fought the storm—man's handiwork and science, man's brain and courage and cunning fought against the insane and unreasoning monstrosity which the wastes of the North had conceived and hurled forth. And man and ship were defeated. Captain Pike was dragged into the chart-room, unconscious and frost-burned, and revived with brandy. The first mate and Mr. Kelly took the bridge, muffled in furs to their eyes. The beaten ship swung around and retreated sullenly before the onslaught of ice and wind.

The wind abated before midnight, and the snow ceased to fall an hour later. The cold did not lessen. Frozen stars glinted above the rolling seas. Captain Pike staggered back to his post on the high and swaying bridge. The old ship swung around and steamed back t.o the scene of its defeat. A man went aloft to keep a sharp look-out. The captain nursed a wild hope in his heart that some of the poor fellows on the ice might have made fires of their splintered bats and the raw blubber of the seals, and so saved themselves from death. But this hope died miserably. The ice rode the seas in widely scattered pans, but no pan showed the red blink of fire.

Dawn was glimmering under an ashen lid when the old ship began to recover her men from the great scattered ice rafts. I call them men. They were hauled up the sides and swung inboard to the icy decks like baulks of timber. Some were straight and some were crooked. They were piled upon the decks. The ship headed southward and homeward then, her sealing over for that year. She carried a deck-load, even as the skipper had prophesied.

Eighty-two frozen corpses stacked like timber on the icy decks! It is not every skipper that is called upon to sail such a freight as that into port.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Young Jerry Chalker possessed a mind to feel with, even if not to reason with. It was a wonderful mind for the retention of terrific pictures. Courageous as he was in heart and nerve, he was a coward inside his skull. The grim incidents of his first trip to the ice haunted him with marrow-chilling pictures day and night. The homeward voyage with those frozen bodies was a black, unforgettable horror. Near the top of one of the heaps of timber-stiff human flesh lay red Mike Scanlon, of Fore-and-aft Cove, face upward, eyes open, mouth wide as if he had died in the very act of shouting down the wind. Jerry saw it once, and held it clear-cut in his brain until the day of his death.

Only once between the ice and Harbour Grace, homeward bound, did Jerry see the great captain. He looked up at the bridge many times a day, and saw only one or two of the mates there; but on the morning of the day they made port he beheld the broad shoulders and splendid head of the skipper above the canvas dodgers. The lean, high-featured face was not so ruddy as of, old, but the blue eyes were clear and fearless, though somewhat fixed in their forward gaze.

Jerry Chalker fled from the death-ship into the streets of the grief-stricken town, with the horrors of that voyage at his heels. He had no money, and he had made no "bills," but sympathetic and carious townsmen entertained him and questioned him. The red rum did not cheer Jerry. It only served to excite him, and to brighten and warm the pictures in his mind. The tolling of the bells in the town seemed to drive the horror deeper and deeper into the young man's brain at every booming stroke. No tavern in the place was deep enough to guard his throbbing brain from that sound.

A shipmaster all ready to clear for Brazil, but short of men, happened upon Jerry, listened, questioned, and understood. Jerry went aboard the barque that same night, signed on as an ordinary seaman. He slept like a log in the warm forecastle, and he was allowed to sleep late. His mental distress and the fumes of his unaccustomed potations deepened and prolonged his slumber. The barque was clear of the harbour and heading eastward for the open sea when he awoke.

Jerry rejoiced in the daily unwinding of the salty miles between himself and the fearsome North. He felt homesickness, but his horror of the entire terrific North, from Harbour Grace to the drifting ice fields beyond the strait, was stronger than his affection for Fore-and-aft Cove. No one was dependent upon him in Fore-and-aft Cove. His mother was dead; he was unmarried; he had no sweetheart. Whenever he thought of the little harbour of his nativity, the picture of the frozen corpse of Red Mike Scanlon flashed to aching fire in his brain—the wide eyes as dull as frosted windows, the open mouth, whose black lips were set for ever in a futile grimace of shouting for help.

Pictures of Captain Pike on the sealer's high bridge sometimes returned to Jerry, and he wondered about that great man. The tragedy of the floe would not touch the great man deeply, he was set so high above the poor fellows who had died, thought Jerry. And he was without fear or pity. Jerry had seen that in the clear, unflinching eyes. And he was rich. The loss of one trip to the ice would mean little to him, even though his share of a full cargo of pelts would have been reckoned in thousands.

The captain of the barque was an excellent man within his limitations. He had understood Jerry Chalker's desire to forget his terrible experience of the ice in foreign voyaging that day in Harbour Grace; but he could not understand the condition of the mind that whitened the lad's face at the suggestion of returning to Newfoundland. He thought it sheer nonsense, and he said so; and, to prove that he was right, he refused shore leave to Jerry in Pernambuco.

Refused the customary privilege of shore leave, Jerry Chalker took French leave. It was not into a bed of roses that Jerry jumped from the ship's rail; but his blood and upbringing saved him from the pangs of humiliation, and he was hardened to hunger and thirst. In time he found work of sorts, and so claimed the privilege inherited from Father Adam, to eat and drink in the sweat of his brow. The sweat of his brow was copious in that stewing climate. Within six months of his desertion from the barque he obtained humble but steady employment on a big coffee estate behind the city. He was content, even happy, save when his mind was tortured by visions of that breaking floe, that darkling sky, the torrent of wind and snow, and the four score dead men stacked like baulks of timber on the icy decks. Sometimes at night he awoke, shaken with fear, with the tolling of the bells of Harbour Grace clanging in his brain.

So two years passed. Jerry went into the city one day on some petty affair of business for his employer. He stabled his mule, attended to the business, and then entered a shabby eating-house for his belated breakfast. Two seafaring men sat at a table in front of him. He judged them to be skippers or mates of sailing vessels from the north. One faced him, the other sat with his back turned squarely to him. Jerry was not impressed by these small fry of the sea. He had known a greater—the master of a sealing steamer—Skipper Pike. But as he ate his highly seasoned breakfast, he could not avoid overhearing fragments of the mariners' conversation. What he heard caught his attention and interest.

It was evident to Jerry that the two shipmasters were somewhat the worse for their morning cups. Both voices were thick. The eyes of the one who faced him were staring and moistly glazed.

"The disgrace of it," said the big man with his back to Jerry. "I could have kep' my ship if I'd wanted to, but not me! I don't show my face where any man alive has a right to sneer at it."

"Seven thousand for a three weeks' v'yage!" exclaimed the other. "Don't tell me it wasn't nothin' but sneers drove ye away from that to sail a rotten little barquentine out o' Halifax."

"One spring it was nine thousand I drew. But what the devil do you an' the likes o' you know about the wages o' men and the ways o' the ice?"

"You was scart, that's what. Fear's what's brought ye to this."

"Fear! Not me! But it was a girl—a merchants daughter round in St. John's. Nothing like the kind o' women ye know about, ye mean little squid of a windjammer pilot! Oh, shucks! Don't mind what I say. Have another. She called me a murderer! Aye, slam in my face. A murderer! That's what a man gets when his luck turns just once. I went to the States an' burned all my money in six months. An' here I am. Whenever I stow too much liquor aboard, I blab about it to some fool like you. But fear? No by——"

The other, the smaller of the two, laughed unpleasantly.

"I don't believe a blasted word of it!" he cried.

His companion swung around violently in his chair and faced Jerry Chalker. His blue eyes were blurred and moist, his cheeks were inflamed, and a tangle of red beard hid his jaws and chin.

"You!" he cried. "D'ye hear this shrimp call me a liar? Remember it. He called me a liar! An' now you'll see me kill 'im. You'll see me do it, whoever you are!"

Jerry pulled himself to his feet.

"Don't ye do it, sir!" he cried. "Leave 'im be, sir. I'll tell 'im who ye be, for didn't I make a trip to the ice wid ye meself, Skipper Pike?"

"You?" cried the big mariner, sagging in his chair and staring at Jerry with amazed and desperate eyes. "When?"

"Two year ago, sir," replied Jerry. "Two year ago—when the flurry caught us on the floe—an' you sailed the old Walrus into port log-loaded—log-loaded with frozen men!"

Captain Pike screamed with terror, sprang from his seat, and fled from the eating-house into the glaring street. Jerry could not move. He sat and gaped at the open door.

"Scart," said the remaining shipmaster. "I was right. He mistook ye for a frozen corpse, mate. He's a coward. He's ha'nted. Fear will kill 'im yet, for the rum can't save 'im."

Jerry Chalker got heavily to his feet, left the place without a word, and rode back to his rural employment and the sweltering fields, with the horror of the North riding his crupper, and the dust of a fallen god choking his heart.