Chapter IV (3)

Then they got to business. What Elderkin had feared had happened--Lemaire's suspicions were aroused in port over the loading of the _Spirito Santo_, over the paucity of the stores taken aboard, over the many oddnesses that reveal themselves to a cunning mind when something beyond the normal is in progress. Elderkin remembered the night when Lemaire and the successfully bribed official had gone together, as he had then thought, to a rowdy house--it must have been on that occasion that the stronger man won definite confirmation from the weaker. Now there was nothing for it but to let Lemaire in on the deal--for the present.

"You are not t'inking of a storm, no?" asked the mate, when both men had laid their cards upon the table. "With our boats we should not stand a chance. . . . A fire, perhaps? We are car'n some cotton, sah, and it might have been packed damp."

"Too risky. I thought of all that. We can only trust our boats to takes us a little way. I must pile her up near the mainland. There's a reef I know of----"

"A reef!" scoffed Lemaire, "and you de best skipper on either side! Who d'you s'pose believe dat? Not unless we first had an accident to de engines, anyway. What about Olsen? Does he--know?"

"Yes. It could not be carried through without him."

"Ah, I see. . . . Only poor Lemaire was to be kept out. . . . And dis reef?"

"It's uncharted. I found it years ago. I had reasons for not wanting it known where I'd been and I never reported. It's a tricky place, the sea don't break true on it, sets in sideways. Beyond it's flat to the shore. No risk of salvage; it's out of the course, and a wooden ship goes to pieces at once, anyway."

"Where is it, dis reef?"

Elderkin drew his pencil down the chart to an indented bit of coast not a couple of degrees below the fortieth parallel. Lemaire sweated to think how near he had been to risk.

"If this north-west gale holds, and we are to have an accident which made her unmanageable," went on Elderkin, "we should be driven ashore, on to that reef. Or at least we could always say so afterwards."

"We might arrange so's Olsen was neber able to give us de lie . . ." suggested Lemaire, glancing sidelong at the other.

"If needful."

But when the tussle over terms was ended and Lemaire had gone forth, Elderkin swore to himself that it was the mate who should never again see the Islands rise above the rim of the sea. He cursed, and for a few moments as he sat at the chart-room table, he allowed himself the luxury of hating the course on which he had embarked. A man cannot give his soul into the keeping of any one idea, whether that idea be embodied in another person or in a mode of life, without suffering a profound disturbance if he violently part from it; and for many years now Elderkin's soul had been one with his ship. She was ugly, cranky, she bore a name as a hell-ship that he had earned for her, but together they had won through much; men had died on her, blood run upon her decks, misery and pride and drunkenness and strange doings permeated her very frame. She was as the flesh of his flesh, and only that dream-ship of his own which floated in a mirage before his mind could have made him unfaithful to her. He was in the position of a man who has lived with a despised but deeply felt mistress, and who at last thinks he holds the ideal woman, the bride, the untouched, within his grasp, at the price of the severance of the old ties. And, like a reproachful ghost, as though she were dead already, the appeal of the old reprobate of the seas kept pricking at him, day and night, throughout the ordered watches that drew her towards her end.

He had sold his soul to gain his soul, a not altogether uncommon bargain. "If I can only have this one thing I will Be Good ever after," is a cry that must have caused amusement above and below as many times as there are mortals upon the earth. In Elderkin's case the "one thing" was a ship of his own, and now that she loomed at last over his horizon, he found that it was this old Hagar of the high seas, the mistress and not the wife, who, in spite of himself, absorbed his consciousness. All the ugliness of his betrayal of her was thrown sharply into notice by the compact with his mate; and, shot by a sharper distaste than ever before, he covered his eyes for a minute, in an attempt to focus his will undistracted. It was successful; Elderkin, little as he knew it, was an idealist, however perverted a one, and idealism was with him in this venture, beckoning to him in the dip and curtsy of a dream vessel, her bright canvas burning with perpetual sunlight. . . . He dropped his hands and straightened himself, and his eye fell on the Bible in which he had made his calculations, and where he had also noted down his covenant with Lemaire. It had fallen open, by the chance movement of his arms, at a different place, and he found he was reading a few lines before he knew what he was about.

Too imperceptibly for him to have noticed the progress of it, the light had strengthened in the chart-room, for a stormy sun had penetrated the gloom, and the heavy black letters stood out distinctly on the yellowed page. A sudden flash of memory leapt through Elderkin's mind--the memory of a day long ago in his childhood.

He had been brought up in New England by a rigid old grandmother until he ran away to sea, his Nova Scotian blood too strong for him. But his mother's Puritan strain was with him nevertheless, had held by him if in nothing else but a certain Biblical flavour in his oaths. Now there flashed across his mind a dreary Sunday when he was a little boy--one of many like it, but this particular one had stuck in his memory. And, probably because of the yellow light flooding the chart-room, the memory surged up at him, for on that Sunday he had escaped to the barn, although with no better spoils than a book of Old Testament stories, and lain there, heels in the air and elbows on the straw, reading the story of the Flood in just such a stormy yellow glow as this. A gale had followed, rain-laden, and his childish mind had half-feared, half-hoped, that a flood was coming, down which he could float triumphantly in some makeshift ark . . . as to his grandmother, he might rescue her and he might not, but if he did, of course, she would be so overcome with gratitude and admiration that she would never again abase his dignity with a certain limber cane. Then, in a lull of the gale, the gleam had shone out once more, and by its light he read on; read how God had promised there should never come a flood over all the earth again, and had made a rainbow as a sign of it. Rather dull of God, he thought in his disappointment. The storm raged so that he dared not slip back to the house, not because of any fear of the elements, but because his grandmother would notice if his clothes got wet; so he had stayed on, his mind thronged with imaginary adventures, till the storm was over. Then he had gone back to the house, feeling curiously flat after the excitement wind always produced in him. A faint yet, pictorially, a vivid memory of that strained hour of varying emotions swept across him now in a moment's space, as he gazed at the page before him. The next moment he understood why--it was not only the light that reproduced that afternoon of long ago, but also the words at which he was looking--the two things together had fused a section of time from thirty years earlier into a section of the present. He read the verses through, but a few phrases knocked at his mind to the exclusion of the rest. The word "covenant," especially, so hard upon his pact with Lemaire, seemed to stare up at him. . . .

"And I will establish a covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. . . . And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you. . . . I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be the token of a covenant. . . . And it shall come to pass when I shall bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I shall remember the covenant which is between me and you. . . ."

Elderkin sat at gaze like a man in a trance, unable for a few moments to disassociate that hour in the barn from the present--not sure which was the present, so vivid was the illusion and so sharp the knock on his dormant spiritual sense. His hands, which were trembling oddly, went out to grasp the edge of the table, not for the physical support, but more that a common sensation should reassure his mind. Then he rose, and backing away from the Book as though it would spring at him, he went out.

The wind had dropped, but the _Spirito Santo_ was rolling her bulwarks--those solid structures which were traps for all the water shipped--into the confused sea that the dead wind had left. She was travelling badly, her heavy load robbed her of the elasticity which would have enabled her to rise to the onslaught of each successive wave.

The _Spirito Santo_ boasted no bridge, the roof of the chart-room, which was situated on the poop, just forward of the mizzen-mast, doing duty instead. The wheel, which was uncovered, was set at the break of the poop, between the rail and the chart-house. Elderkin climbed the ladder to the top of the chart-house, and then stood there, struck to sudden stillness. He never glanced at the binnacle to see if the man were keeping the course, or noted the wiry figure of the mate as he tramped back and forth; his whole being was arrested by the portent which held the sky. And all the long-dormant but never wholly cast-off beliefs of his childhood awoke in his blood.

A curtain of luminous, ashen-pink cloud was drawn across the sky from horizon to zenith, absolutely smooth and unbroken, and against it arched a rainbow, spanning the horizon and coming down mistily into the sea. So close the opalescent feet of it looked that it seemed as though the ship's bows were heading through the phantom portals of some new world, but high in air the summit of the curve, clear and burnished as cut-glass, looked infinitely far away. As Elderkin stood at gaze, particles of sun-bright cloud floated slowly across the right of the arch, like little morsels of golden wool.

Elderkin, his fingers clutching a wet stanchion, was aware of a curious feeling coming over him. He felt he had seen just that effect before--that curtain of ashen pink, the rainbow against it, the flock of little golden-bright morsels, floating slowly across it . . . and had seen it in connexion with something of vital importance. Yet, try as he would, he could not capture the thought--memory--dream--whatever it was, of which he was so sure in the back of his mind that he felt it waiting for him to recognize it every moment. . . . All sorts of bewildering little half-memories flitted across his mind, and refused to be captured or placed. Queer, irrational little things they were, incongruous and wildly senseless; he felt dizzy chasing them, but he knew if he gave up concentrating even for an instant, the whole thing would be gone. Yet piece together these half-memories that pricked at him he could not, they were elusive as moths and as unsubstantial. He knew that there was one key to them and that if he could only find it they would become sense, though not sense of this world--it was as though they were in a different focus and on a different plane, but they would become clear if only he could find the key. . . .

As he stared the little particles of cloud in front of the rainbow slowly dissolved and melted into the ashen pink of the cloud-curtain, from that, too, the glow was fading, and the arch itself began slowly to die into the air. Elderkin found himself in the chart-room again; he sat down and shut his eyes, striving to remember. He could not recollect having dreamt such a thing, and yet the feeling aroused in him was exactly that provoked when, on the day following a very vivid dream, it will keep on intruding in fragments, each time to be shaken off as the mind readjusts itself to the normal after the moment's blurring of edge. Suddenly it occurred to him that he must have seen that effect only a few days before and he opened his diary, in which, his vice being pen and paper, he noted down matters not important enough for the "Remarks" space in the log. He hunted the pages back and forth, and in the midst of his futile search his mind seemed to give a click and he was switched back into the normal again. He sat looking at the book in his hands and realized that he had never seen that especial effect before, that he had most certainly never noted it down; the mere idea that he had now seemed as silly as a dream when the mind has struggled fully awake, though when he had first thought of it and taken the notebook up, it had seemed as possible as the same dream when the sleeper is in the midst of it. He still felt curiously dizzy, though his head was clearing slowly: things seemed commonplace around him once more; he could not even remember distinctly what his sensations had been. He only knew that in that trance-like state, of a moment--of aeons--earlier, he had known he had seen before that which he then saw, and seen it connected with something he could not catch. Whether he ever had seen it, perhaps on that incompletely remembered day of storm which had flashed back to him on this afternoon; or whether, already worked up by his conscience, by the interview with Lemaire, and, to his sensitized mind, by the words in the Bible, the sudden effect on him of seeing that bow set in the flaming cloud, had produced a brainstorm, he could never know. He would have thought it blasphemy to wonder whether nothing more spiritual than the driven blood in his skull was responsible for that queer switching off the track; but whatever it was, the effect of it, on his awakened moral sense, was prodigious. He did not doubt that he had received a divine visitation, that for him the heavens had been decked with pomp, that the workings of God, in particular and exquisite relation to himself, were manifest in the ordered sequence of that day. His own stirrings at the violation of his solitary code had gone deeper with him than he knew, preparing him for further troubling, then the pact with Lemaire, driving in all the distasteful side of the business more keenly still, the coincidence of that word "covenant" coming on the heels of his covenant with the mate, that word used in the Bible passage to suggest the eternal pact between man's soul and its creator, the memory it evoked, and, to crown all, the finding of the seal of it set in the heavens themselves--all these things rushed together, fused, and struck into his being.

He fell on his knees in the chart-room and praised God; praised Him in the phraseology of his Puritan forebears, as he had heard Him praised when a little boy, whose heedless ears had not seemed to take in the words battering about them.

Joab Elderkin had got religion. He had been converted.

When he scrambled to his feet he came to, so to speak, on a different sphere from any he had ever known. He seized up the Bible again, his hands shaken by the strongest passion known to civilized man, the only acquired attribute, besides the making of fire, and of intoxicating liquor, which marks him off fundamentally from the other mammals. He read again the passage that had flamed into his ken earlier, he read the promises of the Almighty, he read of how men were called the Sons of God. He saw himself and all his fellow humans not merely calling God Father by a kindly sufferance towards adopted children, but as beings created of the same substance, their souls as much made of the essence of God as their bodies of the essence of their earthly fathers, and the thought mounted to his head like wine. The swift darkness of the tropics had fallen, but full of his new conception of his fellow-creatures--"every living creature that was with him" of the verses--he, when he opened the chart-room door, flared forth into a night of gods.

All the next day the glory held, both in the air and in Elderkin's mind. The Pacific was rainbow-haunted; phantom archways through which the bowsprits seemed about to soar; pillars of prismatic colour that melted into air; broken shafts of it that flashed out in every sunlit burst of spray upon the decks. Even in the two plumes of spray for ever winging from either side of her cutwater, a curve of burnished colours hung, as though piercing down into the translucent green, through whose depths the drowning surf was driven in paler clouds. The wind still held on and the _Spirito Santo_ made what way she could under steam and canvas, through the confused seas that slopped aboard her and buffeted her from all sides at once. It was of supreme significance to Elderkin that the north-westerly wind on which he had counted for his purpose, should have died away in the self-same hour that, as he phrased it, the wind of the spirit blew into his soul. The barometer was falling rapidly, in spite of the stiller air, and he had had the royals and outer jib and gaff-topsail stowed. What with her reduced sail, the influence of her steam, and the lumpy seas, the _Spirito Santo_ was behaving her worst, riding slugglishly with a heavy reluctant motion as though she hardly considered it worth the effort of keeping her blunt nose above water at all. Elderkin felt her sulkiness, and it seemed to him as though, instead of helping to save her, she was possessed of an evil spirit bent on thwarting him. He watched her closely, and spent the day on the poop, and though he said little, every one was aware of something new and strange about him. The crew commented among themselves on his abstraction and the poverty of his abuse; Lemaire thought he held the key to it, but Olsen, the freckled Dane, grew uneasy. He was having trouble with his engines, which should have been overhauled long ago, and would inevitably have been renovated this trip had it been undertaken with a normal objective. If the voyage were unduly prolonged he would be hard put to it for fuel; it would not take very much to send his boilers crashing from the rusty stays that held them; added to which every degree further south, now they were in the forties, diminished their chances of safety. As there was no longer any wind to contend with, Olsen was all for steaming towards shore at once, for his sea-sense combined with the barometer to tell him of trouble ahead.

Olsen was a taciturn creature, who cared for no one in the world but his half-caste children--bright, large-stomached little creatures, whom he had left playing in the dust in front of his gaily painted wooden house in St. Thomas. For their sakes he put up with his fat, slovenly wife and her swarms of relations of various shades of brown. It was only for the children's sake that he had stuck to the _Spirito Santo_, for it suited him to be able to get home as often as he might, and even when the _Spirito Santo_ did not touch St. Thomas he could always pick up with a mail-packet or a sailing ship of some kind. It was his ambition to send both boy and girl to New York for their education, now that the Civil War had made it possible for anyone with a touch of colour to make good. Therefore he nursed his crazy engines as though he loved them, but he decided that the sooner the accident occurred the better. In the second dog-watch, he, as Lemaire had done the day before, went to Elderkin in the chart-room.

He found the captain with an open book in front of him: he was not reading, but making calculations on the margin. He glanced up at Olsen and his tired eyes brightened for a moment. Then:

"Ask Mr. Lemaire to come here," he ordered, "and come back yourself."

Olsen made his way to the top of the chart-house, where Lemaire was pacing, full of anxiety, and delivered the order. Lemaire came with a mixture of civility and an assumption of confederacy in his manner, but Elderkin took no more notice of it than of Olsen's waiting stolidity. He closed the Bible and confronted the two men.

"Well, Olsen," he said, "you were wanting to see me about something?"

"It is about this affair," answered Olsen, "there is no good to be got by waiting, sir. I tell you plainly my engines will not stand so very much. And the way she is loaded, if we come up against anything in the way of a sea----"

"And you?" asked Elderkin of the mate.

"I am sure dat what Olsen say is right. It must be now or never."

"It is going to be never," replied Elderkin in his usual soft tones.

The two men stared at him, then the quicker Latin flashed into speech. He demanded, with a lapse into Island patois now and again, what the blank blank blank the captain thought he was doing. Elderkin sat through it unmoved.

"I will not speak to you as you have just done to me," he began, "because hairy, forsaken Frenchy as you are, you are still a son of God, even as I am. Praise the Lord with me, for He has shown me into what an abyss of sin I had fallen. Do you hear what I say? I am captain aboard this ship, Mr. Lemaire, and I order you to praise God for having delivered us while there is yet time."

Lemaire stared at his superior officer in total silence for a moment instead of complying. Then he turned to Olsen. The freckled Dane grasped the situation the first. He saw that the skipper was not trying to do them down as Lemaire, when he found his tongue again, accused him: that this was not some deep-laid trick to keep them out of the profits. Olsen had seen many religious revivals in the Islands and he knew the signs.

"See here, Mr. Elderkin," he said, stepping forward; "I've my side of it to think of. I've not suddenly got holy. I'm thinking of my children, same as I was before. You've never thought for anyone but yourself. I only shipped this voyage because it meant being able to do what I want for them. I've only stuck to this hell-ship for them. There's been things done aboard here that would have sunk the ship if sin could sink her. You can't clean your bloody ship by talking of God now. We all made an agreement and let's stand by it like men. Sink the ship, sir, and the top of the sea'll be the sweeter for it."

"I've been a sinful man all my days," agreed Elderkin, "but my eyes have been opened, the Lord be thanked. . . . I have been saved and by the grace of God I mean to save the ship."

"It'll take more than the grace of God to keep my engines working," commented Olsen.

"And suppose we refuse?" asked Lemaire. "We are two to one, Mr. Elderkin. Remember, sah--if the captain is sick it is de mate who take charge of de ship. . . ."

"Mutiny? You? Do you imagine, Mossoo, that I couldn't hold my own ship against any half-breed afloat?"

"Damn you!" screamed the mate, his skin darkening with his angry blood. "If you not take care we will say you are mad, yes, mad. De men have only got to hear religion coming out of your face to believe it. De ship's not safe, and we must scuttle her now, d'you hear?"

"The men!" repeated Elderkin. "Let me tell you there never was a dago crew yet that I couldn't lick. I'll save this ship against the lot of you, I'll save her against herself--God helping me," he added.

"But we shall be ruined, all of us," urged Olsen. "What do you suppose they will say to us at Port of Spain, Mr. Elderkin? They won't be pleased to see the _Spirito Santo_ come crawling into the roadstead with a faked cargo and all that good insurance money wasted. . . . We shall all be ruined men, I tell you. . . . What will become of us?"

"We shall never get into Port of Spain," spoke Lemaire, "we shall never round the Horn. It's coming on to blow now. She can't live through it, I tell you. It's sinking her now and saving ourselves and making a damn-big pile out of it, or it's all going down togeder."

"Then we will all go down together," said Elderkin; "if my repentance is too late the Lord will not let me save the ship nor yet my soul."

"I don't give a curse in hell for your soul, or anyone else's," cried the mate. "I tell you it's madness. Only a miracle could keep de ship afloat."

"There has already been one miracle aboard her," said Elderkin. "Who are we to set limits to the power of the Almighty? It is a small thing to keep a senseless structure of wood and iron afloat in comparison with making the blackest of sinners see the true light, which the Lord has done between two dog-watches. Yesterday I was profaning the Book with my calculations of sinful gain made out upon its pages, to-day I have been calculating how many years I have spent in following my lusts, and were the years as many as the waves of the sea, I have prayed the Lord that the weeks of striving in front of us may wipe out the years."

"He is mad," remarked Olsen, philosophically.

Lemaire turned swiftly on the engineer. "We must take charge," he urged in a low voice, his back to the captain, "and then you must do what I say. We will run her close inshore, and . . ."

Whether Elderkin heard above the growing clamour of the ship or not--for the woodwork had begun to crackle like a wheezy concertina and the slap of green water breaking sounded in a scurrying frequency--he knew what the mate was planning. A rim of something cold on the back of Lemaire's neck made his speech fade on his lips, and he and Olsen stood motionless while Elderkin spoke, Olsen's light eyes looking at the fanatical dark ones above the gun.

"I am master of this ship, and what I say goes, or I'll put daylight through your dirty body," said Elderkin, pressing the muzzle in till the dark seamed skin on the mate's neck turned greenish in a circle around the iron. "As for you, Olsen, you're white, though you're a Dutchman, and I look to you to stick. What about the engines?"

"I am sorry about this," replied Olsen, with seeming inconsequence, "but what must be will be. I will do the best with my engines. But if ever we see port again, I have done with you and your ship and your religion. I have my children to think of. I will go below."

And he pulled the chart-room door open. As though his doing so were the signal to some malignancy without, a sudden blow of wind struck the ship; a crash sounded along her decks and on the moment a surge of water flooded into the chart-room. A sudden squall from the south-west, such as sometimes arises like a thunderclap in those latitudes at that time of year, had caught the _Spirito Santo_ in the confusion of the heavy cross seas. That first blow heeled her over, over, over . . . it seemed as though she were dipping swiftly far beyond the angle of safety; further and further. There was nothing to be done for the moment but clutch on to whatever was nearest; cries of terror from the dagos sounded thinly even through the clamour of wind and sea and crashing of gear. Then came that agonizing moment when a vessel, heeled over as far as possible, seems to hesitate, remains poised for the fraction of a second that partakes of the quality of eternity, between recovery and the hair's-breadth more that means foundering.

Then, with a groaning of timbers like some mammoth animal in pain, a thick jarring of machinery, and a clattering of everything movable aboard her, the _Spirito Santo_ came slowly up again. If that gust of wind had held a minute longer she would have rolled herself, her faked cargo, and her huddled lives, down towards the bed of the Pacific; sins and religions, material hopes and spiritual aspirations, alike marked by one fading trail of air bubbles.

Elderkin found he was holding Lemaire round the waist, while Olsen was on his hands and knees in the lather of water streaming off the floor.

"The Lord has decided," said Elderkin, "we have now no choice. Get below, Olsen." He was heaving himself into his oilskins as he spoke, ordered in his movements but speedy, considering the terrible lurching of the vessel. His fight to save the _Spirito Santo_, to save her against herself, had begun.

He found her topgallant sails thrashing out like blinds from a window, for the topgallant sheets had carried away, while the foresail and fore-topmast-staysail were like to flap themselves to rags. He bellowed his orders above the clamour of the ropes and guys, that were all shrieking and wailing on different notes as though the ship were suddenly endowed with the gift of tongues. The men fought their way up the rigging, and, lying along the slippery yard-arms, wrestled with clew-lines that whipped about as if possessed, while the wet and iron-hard canvas beat back and forth with reports like gunshots. But the men succeeded at length and Elderkin felt that the first tiny stage in his great battle was won.

Already the sea was running in great slopes of blackish green, streaked and scarred with livid whiteness; from the poop the whole of the ship was filled with a swirling mist of spray that wreathed about the masts, only parting here and there to show one boiling flood of broken water that poured across the waist from upreared starboard rail to submerged port scuppers. The forecastle was flooded; from the forecastle head, as the ship pitched, a torrent poured on to the hatches, and when the next moment she dived forward, rushing down a long valley that seemed to slope to the heart of the ocean, two rivers poured out of her hawse-holes. Elderkin, as she dived, called down the tube--the only means of communicating with the engine-room except the still more primitive one of messengers--to stop her. And when it looked as though she could never recover to meet that oncoming mountain, but must dive into it and be smothered, her bows rose once more, up and up, till they raked the swollen clouds, while a wall of whiteness thundered past on either side. As Elderkin called for "full" again, his face was as calm as that of a little child. All that night the storm increased, and wove air and water into one great engine of destruction, and all night Elderkin stayed lashed to the rail of the chart-house, which was momentarily in danger of being washed away like a rabbit-hutch. It was impossible to keep the binnacle alight, and no stars were visible; steering was a mere groping by the feel of the wind. Dawn seemed hardly a lightening, so dark hung the massed clouds, of a curious rusty-brown colour, packed one above the other, overlapping so as to form a solid roof. Only between their lower rim and the slate-grey sea, an occasional glimpse of horizon showed where a thin line of molten pallor ran. Brown, white and steel-grey, with the masts and rigging sharp and black against it all, and the decks, dark and wet, now refracting what light there was as the ship rolled one way, now falling on deadness again as she rolled the other.

With the dawning, Elderkin was unlashed and took the wheel himself, aided by a seaman, for it took two men to stand its kicking. To him came Olsen, still phlegmatic, almost as black as one of his dago squad. Gripping the poop-rail with one hand, with the other he laid hold of the captain's oilskin, and leant as near as possible to shout his news, but even so Elderkin could only catch a word here and there.

"Won't stand . . . stays parting . . ." came to him.

"Keep her at it," he yelled back.

But a sudden shout came from Olsen, while the man at the wheel literally turned colour and closed his eyes. Only Elderkin, with a look that seemed queerly of exultation on his face, stared ahead to where a vast wall of water, so high it glimmered greenly, was rolling towards them over the broken, tossing sea. That was exactly what it looked like, as though it were a body distinct and separate from the rest of the raging water, some great fold pushed up from the Antarctic region and urged across the ocean, on and on. . . . It bore down on the infinitesimal ship and her clinging ants of crew, bore down, blotting out the sky, till suddenly it was so near it became one with the rest of the sea, as though the whole surface were curving over into a hollow sphere. It thundered upon them; then, its glassy concavity reared to an incredible height, it toppled over and broke in one roaring cataract of foam.

What happened next no one remaining in the _Spirito Santo_ could ever have told. Three men were washed overboard; one had his legs so broken that the splintered bones drove into the deck where he was hurled down. There were a few long-drawn seconds when all thought she had gone under, for the rushing sea had climbed level with the chart-house roof, while the air was so thick with spume and spray it would have been difficult to say where the sea left off being solid and became fused with the wind. Then, with a roaring and a sucking like that when a wave, shattered, streams off a cliff, the water poured off decks and hatches in long lacings of dazzling white. The _Spirito Santo_ still lived.

But it seemed she was mortally wounded, for she was jarring all her length, even the twisted stanchions vibrated as though some malignant force within her had broken loose; and when Elderkin tried to bring her head up to the wind, the wheel spun in his hands as easily and uselessly as a child's toy.

"The rudder . . ." cried Olsen, "she is gone. . . ."

Elderkin retained his clarity of aspect and gave his orders collectedly; only when the dago crew clung miserably to any support and refused to obey, he pulled out his gun and drove them to their stations. Hove-to, with only her spanker, close-reefed main-topsail and fore-staysail set, there was a chance of keeping her off the coast till the sea should quiet down enough to allow of a jury rudder being rigged. Meanwhile, as the men were setting the sails she rolled horribly in the trough of the sea; rolled fit to break her heart. Elderkin, on the poop, shouting at the men reefing the topsail, saw something that for the first moment of horror seemed fraught with the supernatural. Years of neglect, of rust, of corrosion from salt, had in reality gone to bring about what he then saw, with dishonesty and money-grubbing meanness behind the rust and corrosion. For, with a scream of ripping iron and the sharp snapping of guys, the _Spirito Santo_ rolled her funnel clean off at the root, the casing along with it. It crashed upon the deck, and the next moment was swept overboard, carrying away the port bulwarks. A gust of heat and a murky torrent of foul smoke blew flatly from the cavity that gaped in the ship's vitals; then a flood of water, luminously pale in the growing daylight, filmed across the deck amidships and poured over the ragged rim of the wound. The _Spirito Santo_ rolled upon the water, little more than a helpless wreck.

Lemaire, who was lying on the top of the chart-house, gripping the rail, screamed out that they were done for; even Olsen, turning his blackened face to the captain, shouted that the game was up; as to the dagos, each yelled where he lay. This time Elderkin had to use his gun before he could get the ship hove-to. At sight of one of their number lying limp in the scuppers, the crew obeyed once more, while Olsen, sticking by his caste, and Lemaire, seeing still a faint chance for life, worked with them to cover the jagged hole with the stoutest timbers they could find. What was left of the fires was drawn, the planks over the hole shored up from below with timbers, tarpaulins stretched a-top of all and fastened down by a great batten bolted through the sodden deck; and, during all the hours of work amid wind and water, Elderkin watched the ship, saw that she did not come too much up into the wind nor fall off into the trough of the sea; kept the men at it when, time and again, they would have given up. Gun in one hand and Bible in the other, he read out threats of the Almighty's, intermingled with his own. And, at last, the jury-hatch was finished, and a further stage of the battle won.

Now came the most trying hours of all, when there no longer remained anything possible to do, when hands fell on inaction and bodies were free to feel sore and cold, and minds were vacant of everything but an animal despondency. Olsen lit a fire on the iron floor by the boilers, and here, for the most part, the miserable men crouched during the rest of the day and the following night. Elderkin, after he had slept the sudden and over-powering sleep of the worn-out man, awoke to his first doubts. As long as there had been continuous need for action, that and the stern joy of a fight had shut out everything else for him; now that there was nothing to be done but hoist the inner jib when she came up too much into the wind and lower it when she paid off again, a need so recurring it was almost mechanical, he became as much a prey to inner questionings as his ship was to the winds. What tormented him was the thought that if the _Spirito Santo_ had foundered in this south-west gale all hands would have inevitably been lost, whereas had he kept by his agreement to scuttle her earlier all could probably have been saved. Was he then become a murderer by having decided as he had, and would it have been more righteous to keep on his evil course? Elderkin, to whom for the first time the lives of his men had become of a value other than commercial, was tormented by the thought of the three washed overboard by the great wave; and the curses of the man who had died a few hours after his legs were shattered re-echoed through his mind. It was not so much that these men had met death--Elderkin had too often stared it in the face to think overmuch of that--but that they were cut off in the midst of their sins, with blasphemies on lip and soul. Elderkin's creed allowed of no gracious after-chances, he saw the entities he had known and bullied in the flesh, as having become blind particles of consciousness burning in undying fires. . . .

With dawn and a further dropping of the wind, which had been lessening all night, he searched again the pages of his Bible, and he followed the instinctive trail of human nature when he thrust the niceties of values from him and determined to hold by what was right and wrong at the springs of his action. When he went out on to the poop and met the crisp but now friendly wind, saw the glitter of sunshine on peacock waves, that still broke into white crests, but without malignance, he knew that the Lord was on his side. How was it possible he had ever thought otherwise? He must indeed be weak in the ways of grace that his first testing should awake such questionings within him. As the weight of despondency and sick dread fell off him in the cold sunlight, Elderkin flung up his arms and shouted for joy. Lemaire, crawling up, found him on his knees upon the top of the battered chart-house, improvising a paen of thanksgiving.

All that day the men worked at rigging a jury rudder and patching up the port bulwarks. Then Olsen, who kept them as doggedly at it as the skipper himself, conceived a plan whereby his engines could once again play a part. He collected sheet-iron and stout pieces of wood, and with these he contrived a jury-funnel, fitting steam-jets at the base to maintain the draught to the furnaces. The freakish erection held together well, though it looked oddly stumpy in place of the thin, raking smoke-stack; Olsen secured it by guys of iron chain. At last all was complete, and once again a plume of dirty smoke trailed from between the sticks of the _Spirito Santo_. The men slept as they fell, but by then the rudder and smoke-stack had converted her from a blind cripple into an intelligent whole which could work independently of the direction of wind and current. A further stage of the battle was won, and with every victory Elderkin felt greater confidence in the Lord and in himself.

By the next day it had grown very cold, and the men began to prepare shapeless and weather-worn garments against the bitterness of the Horn. Even Lemaire, who kept on repeating sullenly that they could never round it, knew that the only chance now was to carry on, and, his face seeming to pale with the first breath of the cold, hugged himself in a great padded coat. Food was already beginning to run short, and only by serving out double quantities of the raw West Indian rum were the men kept going at all. The ship herself could be heartened with no such encouragement, and although she was now snoring at a fair pace through the smother of foam that kept the lee-scuppers covered with a running river, yet her foul sides and wicked loading absorbed half her speed. She was a wet ship at the best of times, now she was sodden to her trucks, and the showers of icy rain that blew down on the westerly gale every now and then, wetted in a worse fashion, for rain-water chills to the bone right through oilskins. One day an exhausted Cape pigeon fell on board, and the little bird was eaten raw by the first man who got to it; sometimes a great albatross sailed on level unmoving wings around the labouring ship, and mollymawks screamed and circled, but none fell a victim to the hungry crew. There was a certain amount of salt junk left aboard, but the chief diet was nothing but hard-tack, and that was mouldy. Elderkin remained unmoved by any consideration save how to get her round the Horn, and he made Olsen save the dwindling fuel as much as possible for the attempt, lest they should be kept beating back and forth for weeks till exhaustion of ship and men sent them under. So the days went on, and the great Cape Horn greybeards rolled up with glistening flanks and white crests that broke and poured down them in thunder. Cold rains, wind squalls, her own condition and that of the men aboard her, all fought against the _Spirito Santo_, till it seemed as though the strongly set will of her captain were the only thing that kept her alive--alive and obedient however sulky, to the intelligence that drove her.

Still she kept going, steaming and sailing into the stormy sunsets till at last she was off Cape Stiff itself, showing unspeakably bleak and gaunt through the driving mist; only now and then were the black cliffs visible, going down into a smoking line of foam.

If a bad storm had hit her off the promontory nothing could have saved her, but the wind, though the strong westerly gale of the "roaring forties," held less of violence than ordinary, and although she rolled till it seemed she would dip her yards, and the water could hardly be pumped out of her as fast as it poured in, yet she pulled through, as she had pulled through the south-westerly gale and the disasters that followed. Elderkin, who had somehow expected his great tussle off the Horn, felt an odd sensation that was almost disappointment.

On looking back afterwards, Elderkin saw that the voyage was, as it were, divided clearly into two by the passing of the Horn--on the Pacific side the actual physical blows of material damage and storm, on the Atlantic the more wearing struggle against spiritual opposition. The men, headed by Lemaire, began to murmur.

For one thing, the last possible scrap of fuel had been burned by the time they were passing the Falklands, and they were left with nothing but their canvas to carry them home. As far as keeping her steady went, she was better under sail than steam, and also, like every true sailor, Elderkin felt more in harmony with the weather when using only canvas. For a steamer goes independently of the wind, ignores it, shoves her nose in its face, and the wind pays her back by becoming an enemy, but a sailing-ship lives by wind, humours it, coaxes the last hair's-breadth of it, and the wind, flattered, ignores that all the time it is being managed and made of use.

But the sails of the _Spirito Santo_ were old and mildewed, she carried little spare canvas, and, worst of all, if they should come into a calm, those on board her might starve to death before they sighted help. All these things the men knew, and knowing, began to rebel. Lemaire, too, no longer seconded Elderkin, and he and Olsen bore the burden of nigger-driving alone--and Olsen, although he was loyal, made his discontent apparent. A terrible loneliness of mind fell upon Elderkin. He felt himself accursed of all men, but he still held on; each successive incident of his fight, instead of wearing his resistance down, went to strengthen it. The crisis came when after weeks of crawling and standing still, hurrying on with any advantage of breeze that presented itself, yet afraid to carry too much canvas, the _Spirito Santo_ was nearing the fortieth parallel once more.

It was a grey, squally day, with the south-westerly wind keeping the sails bellied forward, and the gusts of rain driving so hard that the water in the brimming scuppers was lashed to paleness; the pumps were in pretty constant use now, and the fetid bilge-water washed over the decks in floods of a dark reddish colour, as though the _Spirito Santo_ were bleeding internally. A sullen moodiness held air and sea and mind of those who looked; that grinding reluctance of the _Spirito Santo_ had passed into the men's bones, they moved slowly if ordered to do anything, their shrunken flesh was a mass of sea-boils and, since the lime-juice and potatoes were exhausted, scurvy had broken out. Elderkin himself looked like some mediaeval picture of the Baptist: he had grown a beard that came to a sparse point, and his sombre eyes glowed from behind the disordered streaks of hair that fell over them, while his skin, so tightly stretched over the bones, had taken on a waxen texture. To the men who came crowding on to the after-deck to voice their resentment, he had the air of a madman, as he stood erect at the break of the poop, his figure dark against the grey pallor of the sky. For a few minutes he stood scanning them quietly, and they stared back at him. In marshalling them where he had, Lemaire had made an error in psychology; for the mere fact that they had to look up to Elderkin on the poop affected both him and them unconsciously.

"What do you want?" asked the skipper quietly. Lemaire stepped forward as spokesman.

"We want to get out of dis shop and make for the shore, dat's what we want, and dat's what we'll do."

"Ah . . . how?"

"We'll take de law into our own hands. If we sink her now we can make for the mout' of de Plate, or we might be picked up sooner. I've told de men; I've told how we was all goin' to be rich an' safe and would have been trowin' our money around ashore by now if you hadn't got de praise-de-Lord bug in your head."

"What Massa Lemaire say quite true, sah," called out a burly negro, whose black face was greyed over in patches from disease, "an' we aren't goin' to stand dis any longer. If you won't sink her we're goin' to, or we'll all be dead men."

"We're dead now, dead and rotting," shrieked the bo'sun, on a sudden note of frenzy that pierced the air like a thrown blade, "who ever saw live men rot?" And he held up a hand which scurvy, on an open wound, had literally rotted so that the tendons hung down like weed. He shook the maimed thing at Elderkin. "Look at this"--"And this . . ."--"And this . . ." came up to Elderkin in angry shouts. The men, intoxicated by the sudden venting of their wrongs, began to swarm up the ladders to the poop deck.

Elderkin felt new life urge through his veins, the pressure of the dead weeks behind sloughed off him, as the thinning veils of sleep drop away from the waking consciousness in the morning. He did not pull out his gun, but kept his hands in his pockets and faced the snarling, tentative, ugly pack of them.

Then he talked, not raising his voice more than was needful for the grinding and creaking of the ship's labour and the weary complaining of the wind-tortured rigging.

"So you'd mutiny, would you?" he began in his soft voice, "well, first you'll listen to me. Down off that gang-way, you there . . . that's better. Well, I guess I know what you men are saying to yourselves--that I'm one man against the lot of you, and now we're no longer fighting to keep the ship afloat for our lives, you can easy get the better of me. That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"

A murmur of assent, half-threatening, half-shame-faced, came from below. To Elderkin, looking down, the men appeared as blots of deeper colour against the pale glimmer of the wet deck; their upturned faces had the abrupt fore-shortening that imparts a touch of the ludicrous, but those faces were set in folds which told of hardened determination, behind the swellings and boils which glistened in the watery light, so that Elderkin could see each disfigurement as clearly as pebbles in a pool unshaded from the sky.