Chapter XXXIX
There is so much to write about all at once. In the first place, Captain
West. Not entirely unexpected was his death. Margaret tells me that she
was apprehensive from the start of the voyage–and even before. It was
because of her apprehension that she so abruptly changed her plans and
accompanied her father.
What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that it
was some stroke of the heart. And yet, after the stroke, did he not come
out on deck? Or could the first stroke have been followed by another and
fatal one after I had helped him inside through the door? And even so, I
have never heard of a heart-stroke being preceded hours before by a
weakening of the mind. Captain West’s mind seemed quite clear, and must
have been quite clear, that last afternoon when he wore the Elsinore
and started the lee-shore drift. In which case it was a blunder. The
Samurai blundered, and his heart destroyed him when he became aware of
the blunder.
At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret’s head. She
accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the oncoming
termination of his sickness. And no one will ever undeceive her. Neither
Mr. Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention a whisper of what
so narrowly missed causing disaster. In fact, Mr. Pike does not talk
about the matter at all.–And then, again, might it not have been
something different from heart disease? Or heart disease complicated
with something else that obscured his mind that afternoon before his
death? Well, no one knows, and I, for one, shall not sit, even in secret
judgment, on the event.
* * * * *
At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the Elsinore was
rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of
miles off the land. Captain West was buried at four o’clock, and at
eight bells that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few remarks
to both watches. They were straight-from-the-shoulder remarks, or, as he
called them, they were “brass tacks.”
Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss, and
that they would toe the mark as they never had before. Up to this time
they had been loafing in an hotel, but from this time on they were going
to work.
“On this hooker, from now on,” he perorated, “it’s going to be like old
times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as well as the first.
And God help the man that don’t jump. That’s all. Relieve the wheel and
lookout.”
* * * * *
And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition. I don’t see how they
can jump. Another week of westerly gales, alternating with brief periods
of calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off the Horn. So weak
are the men that they have no spirit left in them–not even the
gangsters. And so afraid are they of the mate that they really do their
best to jump when he drives them, and he drives them all the time. Mr.
Mellaire shakes his head.
“Wait till they get around and up into better weather,” he astonished me
by telling me the other afternoon. “Wait till they get dried out, and
rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more flesh on
their bones, and more spunk in their blood–then they won’t stand for
this driving. Mr. Pike can’t realize that times have changed, sir, and
laws have changed, and men have changed. He’s an old man, and I know
what I am talking about.”
“You mean you’ve been listening to the talk of the men?” I challenged
rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this ship’s
officer.
The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of light
vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching, fearful thing
that lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to leap out at me,
while the cruel gash of mouth drew thinner and crueller. And at the same
time, on my inner sight, was grotesquely limned a picture of a brain
pulsing savagely against the veneer of skin that covered that cleft of
skull beneath the dripping sou’-wester. Then he controlled himself, the
mouth-gash relaxed, and the suave and gentle film drew again across the
eyes.
“I mean, sir,” he said softly, “that I am speaking out of a long sea
experience. Times have changed. The old driving days are gone. And I
trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the matter,
nor misinterpret what I have said.”
Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I could
not ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the talk of the
men. And yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is a good sailorman
and second mate save for his unholy intimacy with the men for’ard–an
intimacy which even the Chinese cook and the Chinese steward deplore as
unseamanlike and perilous.
Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that they
have no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest for’ard
who will not die, and who are as spunky as ever. They are Andy Fay,
Mulligan Jacobs, and Charles Davis. What strange, abysmal vitality
informs them is beyond all speculation. Of course, Charles Davis should
have been overside with a sack of coal at his feet long ago. And Andy
Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only, and have always been, wrecked and
emaciated wisps of men. Yet far stronger men than they have gone over
the side, and far stronger men than they are laid up right now in
absolute physical helplessness in the soggy forecastle bunks. And these
two bitter flames of shreds of things stand all their watches and answer
all calls for both watches.
Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in them.
Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed dripping on
occasion by the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight through canvas
tarpaulins, nevertheless not a chicken has died. Is it a matter of
selection? Are these the iron-vigoured ones that survived the hardships
from Baltimore to the Horn, and are fitted to survive anything? Then for
a De Vries to take them, save them, and out of them found the hardiest
breed of chickens on the planet! And after this I shall always query
that phrase, most ancient in our language–“chicken-hearted.” Measured
by the Elsinore’s chickens, it is a misnomer.
Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
topaz eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest of
the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech, nevertheless they
are good sailors and are always first to spring into any enterprise of
work or peril. They have gone into Mr. Mellaire’s watch, and they are
quite apart from the rest of the sailors. And when there is a delay, or
wait, with nothing to do for long minutes, they shoulder together, and
stand and sway to the heave of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale,
topaz eyes, of a country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes
and sandy hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of
topaz eyes and sandy hair.
But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too keenly
intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure. He is a
shadow of his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark circles of
suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and English
intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as if aflame
with fever.
Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long tried
and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit. He is whining and
fearful. So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he is
prideless and shameless.
“I’ll never ship around the Horn again, sir,” he began on me the other
day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel. “I’ve sworn it before,
but this time I mean it. Never again, sir. Never again.”
“Why did you swear it before?” I queried.
“It was on the Nahoma, sir, four years ago. Two hundred and thirty
days from Liverpool to ‘Frisco. Think of it, sir. Two hundred and
thirty days! And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
creosote got loose. We buried the captain right here off the Horn. The
grub gave out. Most of us nearly died of scurvy. Every man Jack of us
was carted to hospital in ‘Frisco. It was plain hell, sir, that’s what
it was, an’ two hundred and thirty days of it.”
“Yet here you are,” I laughed; “signed on another Horn voyage.”
And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
“If only we’d lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney.”
I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered. The
carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with the
winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.
* * * * *
Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
eternal buffeting by the Great West Wind. Nor are we alone in our
travail on this desolate ocean. Never a day does the gray thin, or the
snow-squalls cease that we do not sight ships, west-bound like ourselves,
hove-to and trying to hold on to the meagre westing they possess. And
occasionally, when the gray clears and lifts, we see a lucky ship, bound
east, running before it and reeling off the miles. I saw Mr. Pike,
yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at one such craft that
flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile away.
And the men are jumping. Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square
fists of his, as many a man’s face attests. So weak are they, and so
terrible is he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-handed. I
cannot help but note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take part in this
driving. Yet I know that he is a trained driver, and that he was not
averse to driving at the outset of the voyage. But now he seems bent on
keeping on good terms with the crew. I should like to know what Mr. Pike
thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be blind to what is going on; but I
am too well aware of what would happen if I raised the question. He
would insult me, snap my head off, and indulge in a three-days’
sea-grouch. Things are sad and monotonous enough for Margaret and me in
the cabin and at table, without invoking the blight of the mate’s
displeasure.
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