The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
"THE BIG BOYS"
As they passed South Shore Light, at sun-up, the skipper of the Provincetown was startled to see, on his own deck, the first mate of the rival North Star. However, he maintained enough of his Yankee aplomb to observe the ritual following all physical contests that take place in America, by inquiring most solicitously after "the other fellow."
He was duly reassured. To the best of Ben's belief and knowledge, they were enjoying excellent health.
The skipper took note of the plural, also of the bruised cheek and hair clotted with blood.
"So they was they—huh!"
Thus conservatively expressing his sympathy and admiration, he called to the man at the wheel to "starb'r'd" his helm, meanwhile doing the same for the brown ballast in his cheek.
"If it's a foul wind that blowed ye aboard," he further observed, "it's turned out fair. Rogers, y' know, has the scurvy, and when I found he wahn't aboard, I gave Harris his berth, an damme if Harris didn't just go an break his leg. So the berth's yours, seein' ye've shipped with us," he paused to port his ballast again, the peculiar sucking, rotary motion expressing an infinite sarcasm as he added,—"however unwillin'."
So for this voyage at least Ben was signed up without examining the articles.
It was a fair one almost all the way down. Even Hatteras was not inclement and off the Carolinas, though the wind edged a little towards the north, it continued so favouring that they ran before it, three shining towers of cupolaed canvas under the bluest of skies. Fortune had not so smiled on them for many moons. But on the ninth day out, she and her breezes shifted most capriciously. Now folk who work under white, wind-driven canvas are quite as superstitious as those who play before its still, painted walls, and the crew, from the second officer down to the little runt of a cabin-boy, declared it was "all on account o' that black cat."
It was a hundred miles southeast of Forida, and in the morning. All one could see was a gentle respiration of waters fulfilling that pathetic fallacy of unnumbered poets, seeming indeed asleep. All one could hear was a gentle swish as the ship's prow shore their pellucid green. Astern a shark's fin winked threateningly.
Forward and in the waist, the hands were sluicing the decks, or mending the ship's-gear. In the standing rigging, six of them sang as they dipped their brushes into little buckets of tar,—an old Down East chanty, slow-measured and mournful. No one was in the foc's'le except a foreign seaman, who had gone below a few hours before, complaining of a touch of fever.
Suddenly three screams split the still air in rapid succession. The bosun and the ship's carpenter rushed forward into the forecastle, and there, stretched on his bunk, froth on his ashen face, his limbs distorted and rigid, lay the foreign sailor.
"Look at that!" whispered the bosun. His voice shook. So, too, did the forefinger pointing at the twisted corpse.
His companion stopped short, and he, too, shivered through all of his sturdy bulk, as his own eyes met two others of yellow, gleaming above the bunk. On the breast of the dead man, humping its back and spitting at them, sat—a black cat.
Perhaps the death could have been diagnosed by a ship's-surgeon, had there been one aboard, but the crew would never have believed him. They came tumbling on deck, trembling and swearing the strange rough oaths of the sea, each under his breath as if in fear of disturbing some evil presence that haunted the ship.
After them came the bosun, and in his hands, carried at arms'-length like a thing accursed, the black cat. Reaching the rail, he spun it by its tail three times around his head, then hurled it into the waters with a strength that seemed almost preternaturally aided. The ill-omened animal fell far astern, close by the winking shark's fin, which vanished, then reappeared, waiting with infinite patience for greater prey.
They buried the strange sailor in the next watch, for there must be haste in the heat of the tropics. While the crew gathered round, one or two in old-fashioned New England devoutness, but most of them turning their caps in their hands, or shifting from one foot to another in child like awe, the captain read a brief burial service. Then the weighted form dropped into the sea.
In the late afternoon, the second officer approached the quarter-deck.
"Jones and that damned squarehead Swanson have smuggled a jug o' Jamaicy in the foc's'le 'n are raisin' seven kinds o' hell."
Ordered on deck, that amiable pair became drunkenly mutinous, until Ben knocked them into the scuppers. Buckets of cold sea water revived them, and they returned to their duties, but in a sullen manner that boded further trouble.
Meanwhile the barometer was falling steadily. Twilight and the dog-watch came, but the haze on the horizon was even thicker and more ominous than the twilight. The wind shifted again, tuning the countless harps of the shrouds to an alarming concert-pitch.
"Port y'r 'elm two points," called Ben; "Port-ellum-two-points-sir," the man at the wheel, and the ship came up into the wind. Another short command, and swiftly as circus hands striking a tent, little dark figures scurried up the tall spars into the commingled clouds of mist and canvas, and, curled perilously on yard-arms describing violent arcs on the sky, gathered in the crackling ghostly cupolas.
The gallant white towers had fallen now, and shorn of all but a little reefed square of topsail, two tiny mutton-legs of storm-jib and spanker, the Provincetown bowled along through the murk, holding well to her course, when the real gale struck her. For a moment she trembled through all her timbers, then ran like a racehorse feeling whip and spur for the first time. The steersman spun his wheel, and the bark swung into head-seas, then pitched and tossed sickeningly, each mountainous wave hitting her slender ribs like a mighty triphammer fist in cruel infighting.
"A uv a night," growled a hand as eight bells clanged again through the darkness, then to the slickered figure beside him:
"Say, matey, how'd the little house on Preble Square look t'ye now?"
"'Tain't a fair question, it's crool—I'm afeared—" the words were lost in the wind and flying spate—"Never again"
"It's the black cat that done it, dang 'er," and simultaneously they reached into hip-pockets for the old consoler, when a moving mountain of foam swept across the deck, tossing them against the knightheads, and carrying the brown treasures away.
"Dod gast that black cat!" cried the less blasphemous one as they picked themselves up from the scuppers, "we ain't had no luck since we found 'er a-clawin the corp."
In a slight lull following midnight, Ben went below to the cabin where the cook brought as much of a can of coffee as he had been able to salvage in the rocking trip from the galley.
The mate stood a moment, dripping rivulets on the swaying floor, the mug of steaming liquid half way to his lips, but drinking in surer sustenance from a little picture frame. She had smuggled it in her blue dress to the Light, that night before he sailed. In the midst of the storm the girlish face was strangely calm.
Draining the mug, he clambered on deck again, taking the lee-side, the captain still sticking to the weather. To the boy he seemed suddenly old and weak. And in the light from the binnacle the muscles of his face were caught up on one side as if in pain. His lurching, too, was more than the ship's roll warranted a veteran rider of the seas.
Stroke coming? Ben asked himself, then shouted in the other's ear,—
"You'd ought to go below, sir."
"What'd ye take me for?" the granite soul roared back above the storm, "a lily-livered landlubber afeared of a capful o' wind?"
"It'll be a regular jugful before we're through, sir, and you're not well."
"The more reason I shouldn't leave it to youngsters without hair on 'er—chests but sure as there's a God above those masts, the old girl'll ride 'er out. She's His fav'rite daughter, boy."
At this premature boast the shrouds whistled eerily, every plank groaned as if torn asunder, and above the pandemoniac symphony blared the voice of some galloping storm king. Even as he spoke the captain staggered, but dauntlessly gazed aloft to where noble spars should have ranged, tier on tier, with three little pieces of canvas holding on stoutly against the wind, but all they could see through the gloom was the ghostly jib and the innumerable driving lances of the rain. Even the sailing lights gleamed dimly, rather like glazing eyes than lanterns, and time after time—the watcher would tire of counting—the ship's nose reared to the sky, then swung down into the maelstrom, not sliding gently but plunging desperately, as a wounded and frantic steed with legions of others at her heels, onrushing to beat her under.
So the night wore on.
At dawn, or the hour that should have seen dawn, Ben. scenting trouble again, visited the engine-room.
"How's she holding, Sandy?" he asked the grizzled Scot who was watching the little auxiliary engine as a mother a dying child.
"Ay, she'll pull through, sir, wi' care, though I might gae sae far," he qualified with characteristic canniness, "as to wish I had the auld engine on the Cameronia, noo. These mickle toys are no o' much account."
"You're right. It's only good in a calm, or to save tug hire in a harbour, but it's the only liftin' propeller that ever buzzed out of Salthaven, so the captain's stuck on it like a kid with a tin machine."
As he spoke, the unsteady floor on which they stood rose up at a perilous angle. The engineer slipped, his hand falling from the throttle. Deep within the hull as they were, they could feel the screw under her stern rising clear of water with the plunge, only to spin futilely in the air. The little engine, now uncontrolled, wheezed and thrashed as though it would be racked to pieces. Ben flew to the throttle, while Scotty steadied himself, then resumed the careful operation of opening and shutting it with the interminable fall and rise.
"The big boys are out, the nicht," he said to Ben as they climbed another long watery mountain, then jerked out a warning "Look out!"
The mate turned just in time to escape the heavy wrench flung by the leader of the drunken pair whom he had laid out on the deck in the afternoon watch, and who, bent on vengeance, were clambering down the ladder. The flying missile hurtled over his scalp into the frail engine. The damage was done; the frail mechanism was injured beyond repair.
The topmost sailor escaped up the ladder, but his companion, crouching low, hurled a belaying pin at the mate. It, too, missed the mark by a hair's-breadth, smashing the swinging lamp instead, and leaving the hold in utter darkness just as a heavy sea shattered the hatches, deluging them and the engine-room with a foot of water. In the murk and cloud of escaping steam, they grappled, Ben seizing the sailor's throat, and choking the spluttered curses until they died to a hissing whisper. There was a splash as a limp form dropped in the water swishing from side to side—followed by silence within, bedlam without. Above, he found the crew frantically clearing away the wreckage of the fore-topmast. As swiftly as possible he made his way over the careening deck.
Suddenly the heaviest sea of all that night struck them, and the skipper, shouting some inaudible command, lurched, missed his footing, falling afoul of the binnacle. The mate bent over to help him, when above the din of the tempest, rose the warning cry of the lookout forward.
It came too late. Head-on, the Provincetown crashed into the dark mass floating only two feet above the water, and just a shade darker than the surrounding waves.
"A derelict!" came the cry.
"Dang that black cat! We might have knowed it."
The ship's carpenter reached the quarter deck.
"She's filling a hundred to the minute," he panted out, "she'll founder in ten."
"All hands to the boats!" megaphoned Ben through his trumpeted hands, but there was little need for the command. The panic-stricken crew were sprawling and sliding over the slanting decks to port and starboard.
The Chinese cook stumbled out from the galley, the oblique slits of his eyes turning almost to full oval as they rolled in an ecstasy of fear. He was jabbering a strange heathenish prayer and for defense against the raging elements, he carried a meat-cleaver, weapon futile enough. A heavy sea, breaking over the port side, silenced his uncouth orisons and hurled him, weapon and all, at the mast, then over the taffrail, as it might a tiny cork—and on out into the darkness.
A little mongrel dog, yellow as his vanished master, for whom he had conceived a strange and currish affection, had followed the cook up the ladder, and stood shivering and whimpering on the companionway. But there was no pity even for his helplessness. Like a little trick dog, striving for balance on the top of some elephant suddenly gone mad in a stampeded circus, he seemed, his forefeet churning the crest of the long greyback that carried him over.
Nine hands reached the lifeboats, four on the port, five on the starboard side. The one who in the earlier watches had longed for the little house on Preble Square was praying, but others were cursing, not in the flippant ejaculations of ordinary intercourse, nor the reckless taunts flung in a fight, but the frenzied blasphemies of craven souls that face and tremble before annihilation.
The port boat swung clear but in the fury of the wind and their mad haste the "forward fall" quickly jammed; the stern tilted downward, and spilled them into the sea.
One by one they were washed astern. A clutching hand—a distorted face—a last imprecation—and they were gone.
The five in the starboard boat were ready when Ben, seeing their defection, ripped out the angry command:
"Belay there till I give orders!"
The renegade five would have put off, but the man who had just stood his trick at the wheel, the devout soul from Preble Square, and Scotty, his Gaelic dourness for once a beautiful thing, stood by, stopping the unreeling tackle and the boat midway in its descent to the waves. The mate bore the unconscious figure of his chief to the rail and propped him up in the bottom of the boat.
"In with you!" he called, shoving the steersman towards safety, but the engineer shook his grizzled old head.
"I'll stay wi' ye, laddie."
"In, you fool!" and Ben, shaking the affectionate hand from his shoulder, drew his revolver. Under its chill persuasion, the old man, stunned and wondering, clambered in just as the boat slid to the waves.
Then the boy s face changed. Peril ever wears a shrouding cloak, but its countenance envisaged by souls of steel is an immortal flame, and in its light the boyish features seemed almost transfigured. Holding to the standing rigging, he waved to the old engineer.
"Good old Scotty, good-bye and good luck!"
Reaching under his oilskins, he drew forth a packet, clenched it in his fist as though weighing precious gold and tossed it to him.
"Get it to Sally Fell," was his last order as a long swell took the boat on its acre-wide shoulder and bore it away from the ship.
And then as, true to the old traditions of the sea, he waited for the final plunge, somehow in sublime irony, now that its work was done, the storm lulled.
As the skies began to lighten, a half mile away he could still see the last boat. But whether because the cowardly majority of its crew over-ruled old Scotty and the loyal hands, or because the seas still ran too high to effect a rescue, it disappeared, and he was left alone on the deep. The wind died down, the clouds rifted in the north, but the long rollers still broke against the sides of the doomed vessel.
For a moment he leaned against the shrouds in despair. The bright vision had gone, hidden in its enshrouding cloak, but another came to him out of the dying storm,—a red tam o' shanter, lustrous black curls, and eyes with gleams like phosphor flashes on the midnight sea.
He looked up, murmuring a sailor s prayer. As if in answer, a solitary star shone in the rifts of the clouds. Its rays were a symbol of hope and he said to himself:
"What a fool I was to think of dying! I would have quit cold."
Carefully guiding himself along by bulwark and rail, across the slanting deck he made his way. The ship's prow was deeper under the foam. Only a moment, perhaps two or three, was the margin between life with Sally—and death. There was no time to construct a raft, and the life-boats were gone. With deft quick fingers he lashed himself to a spar, and was clear of the wreck but a few powerful strokes when the stern rose into the air and her nose plunged for the last time. The suction almost dragged him down after the expiring ship, but after a fathom's submergence he floated free.
And strangely, as he rose and fell on the buoyant waves, and star after star came out, he felt, not dismay, but peace and hope. And memories, not the scarlet rosary whose telling, they say, no drowning man can escape, but glimpses of a girl, in all her varying moods and adorable ways, came and sustained him.
Then broke the dawn, at first just the promise of light, then a mirage of rose, the golden flood tide, and at last the jocund sun himself, like a perfect yellow coin lost from the purse of some old freebooter who once roved these waters, stood balanced on the far rim of the sea.
The hours passed. Once, a faint feather of smoke, two tiny needles of masts, and a thin line of hull, betrayed a far away steamer. But it, too, passed, like a sick man's fancy. And the lonely sailor felt sick all over, and parched and faint in the sun. Now and then he swam a little but his strength was weakening.
Night fell again and its coolness freshened him. His fancy likened the light touch of the wind to Sally's own upon his brow. And once again the stars smiled on the man lashed to the bit of boating spar, speaking of hope. But Hope is a frail thing, delicate as any bird, and Despair has long clutching arms that forever drag one under.
Another dawn. More hours of pitiless sun. Now in his disordered imaginings he heard the sound of bells—bells—bells everywhere. At first he thought they were bell-buoys, all around him, rung by phantom hands to mock him. Now it was the bell in the old church at home, its brazen tones multiplied a thousand times, tolling his own knell.
"Ding-dong, ding-dong"—why couldn't he drive their ringing from his head.
Again they became ships' bells telling the time.
"How long have I been drifting, drifting! They must have tolled a thousand, thousand hours—enough time for all eternity."
"Ding-dong, ding-dong," to the rising and falling of the waves. Why couldn't he get them out of his head!
Perhaps back in her home in Salthaven, Sally, with the premonition God gives, they say, to faithful lovers, was praying hard for him, for a favouring wind sprang up, refreshing the shipwrecked sailor, silencing the incessant tones of those dreadful bells, and wafting him towards an unknown shore.
He rubbed his eyes he feared a mirage. No, it persisted, that dark line, a little heavier and deeper than the sea-rim, like a deep-blue stroke of crayon on a thin line of lighter blue. Its form grew more distinct. A tiny cone rose from its center. It grew into a mountain top. Rounded masses around it gave evidence of trees; a white strip betrayed sand; and gradually he was borne between the encircling arms of two coral reefs into a peaceful, happy bay.
Gently the rollers carried him to the white shore. Wearily he unlashed himself, then, too spent to move, lay on the sand in the sun. But so deep and full are the hidden reservoirs of human vitality and so strengthening was the thought of his escape that he finally managed to stagger to his feet. Crossing the sand and searching through the tropical vegetation, he discovered, but a few rods away, a little spring; drank of its cooling water, and then fell fast asleep.