Chapter VII

The “Maid of Athens” left Northfleet six weeks later with a cargo of cement for British Columbia, where she was to load lumber for some port as yet unspecified, in accordance with a charter made before Old Featherstone’s death.

The day had dawned grey and melancholy. A mist of fine, drizzling rain blotted out the low, monotonous shores of the estuary, and the crew--dull and dispirited, the last night’s drink not yet out of them--hove the anchor short with hardly a pretence of a shanty. But a fresh, sharp wind began to blow from the north-east as the light grew, and presently the ship was romping down Channel with everything set.

Broughton stood on the poop beside the Channel pilot, watching the familiar coast of so many landfalls slip rapidly by. Like him, the red-faced, stocky man at his side had watched the ship grow old. His name figured many a time, in Broughton’s stiff, precise handwriting, in those shabby, leather-backed volumes which recorded her unconsidered Odyssey:

“6 a.m. Dull and rainy. Landed Mr. Gardiner, Channel pilot.”

“Start point bearing N. 6 miles. Pilot Gardiner left.”

“Off Dungeness, 3 a.m. Took Mr. Gardiner, pilot, off North
Foreland.”

Bald, unadorned entries, dull statements of plain fact set down by plain men with no knowledge of phrase-turning; yet there is more eloquence in them than in all the word-spinnings of literature to those who read aright. What sagas unsung they stand for! What departures fraught with hopes and dreams, with remorse and parting and farewell! What landfalls that were the triumphant climax of long endurance, of patient toil, of cold, hunger, heat, thirst, not to be told in words! What difficulties met and surmounted, what battles fought and won!

The ship glistened white and clean in the morning sun. The men were hard at work washing down decks, ridding her of the last traces of the grime accumulated during her long period in port. Ah, thought Broughton, it was good to be at sea again! The doubts and anxieties of the last six weeks seemed to slip away from him as the river mud slipped from the ship’s keel into the clean Channel tide. The accustomed sights and sounds, the familiar lift and quiver of his ship under him, were like a kind of enchanted circle within which he stood secure against the dark forces of destruction and change. He was a king again in his own little kingdom. The very act of entering up the day’s work in the log book--the taking of sights--all the small duties and ceremonies that make up a shipmaster’s life--helped to create in him an illusion of security. He was like a man awakened from a terrifying dream of judgment, reassuring himself by the sight and touch of common things that the world still goes on its accustomed way. A strange sense of peace and permanency wrapped him round--the peace of an ancient and established order of things seeming so set and rooted that nothing could ever end it. It seemed incredible that all this microcosm should pass away--that the uncounted watches should ever go by and the ship’s faithful bells tell them no more. She appeared to borrow a certain quality of immortality from the winds and the sea and the stars, the eternal things which had been the commonplaces of her wandering years.

Most of all, it was the fact of being once more occupied that brought him solace. By what queer doctrine of theologians, by what sheer translator’s error, did man’s inheritance of daily labour come to be accounted as the penalty of his first folly and sin? Work--surely the one merciful gift vouchsafed to Adam by an angry Deity when he went weeping forth from Paradise! Work--with its kindly weariness of body, compelling the weary brain to rest. Work, the everlasting anodyne, the unfailing salve for man’s most unbearable sorrows--which shall last when pleasure and lust and wealth are so many Dead Sea apples in the mouth, a comfort and a refuge when all human loves and loyalties shall fade and fail.

Five days after the “Maid of Athens” took her departure from the Lizard it began to breeze up from the north-west. At three bells in the first watch the royals and topgallantsails had to come in, then the jibs; and when dark fell she was running before wind and sea under fore and main topsails and reefed foresail. But she liked rough weather, and under her reduced canvas she was going along very safely and easily, so Broughton decided to turn in for an hour’s rest in order to be ready for the strenuous night he anticipated.

“I am going to turn in for an hour or so,” he said, turning to the mate; “call me in that time, if I am not awake before. And sooner if anything out of the way should happen. I think we shall have a dirty night by the look of it.”

The mate was a poor creature--weak, but with the self-assertiveness that generally goes with weakness. Broughton felt he would not like to rely upon him in an emergency.

But he had had very little sleep since the ship sailed--nor, indeed, during the weeks which had elapsed since Featherstone’s funeral. He shrank instinctively from being alone. It was then that his anxieties began to crowd upon him afresh, and that the threat of the future seemed to touch him like the shadow of some boding wing. But now that sudden overpowering heaviness of the eyelids which must inevitably, sooner or later, follow upon a continued sleeplessness, descended upon him. He felt that he could hardly keep awake--no, not though the very skies should fall.

He was sound asleep almost as soon as he had lain down--lost in a labyrinth of ridiculous and confusing dreams in which all sorts of unexpected people and events kept melting into one another in the most illogical and inconsequent fashion, which yet seemed, according to that peculiar fourth-dimensional standard of values which prevails in the dream-world, perfectly proper and reasonable.

Old Featherstone figured in these dreams: so also did the dining-room at “Pulo Way.” Only somehow Old Featherstone kept turning into somebody else; first it was Hobbs the lawyer, then old Mike Brophy the shipkeeper, then an old mate of his called Peters, whom he hadn’t seen or thought of even for years. And then the dining-room had become the cabin of the “Maid of Athens,” and Peters, who had changed into old Captain Waterhouse, was sitting at the head of the table reading Featherstone’s will. He was shouting at the top of his voice, and Broughton was straining his ears to catch what he was saying and couldn’t make out a word of it because of the roar of the wind. And then the floor began to heave and slant, and the pictures on the walls--for the cabin had turned back into a dining-room again--to tumble all about his ears--and the next moment he was sitting up broad awake, his feet and back braced to meet the next lurch of the vessel, the wind and sea making a continuous thunder outside, and a pile of books cascading down upon him from a shelf over his head.

He knew well enough--his seaman’s instinct told him almost before he was fully awake--precisely what had happened. It was just the very possibility which had been in his mind when he turned in. The mate--aided no doubt by a timorous and inefficient helmsman--had let the ship’s head run up into the wind and she had promptly broached to. The “Maid” always carried a good deal of weather helm, and wanted careful watching with a following wind and sea. He remembered an incident which had occurred years ago, while he was running down the Easting--a bad helmsman had lost his head through watching the following seas instead of his course, and let the ship run away with him. Broughton had been close to him when it happened. He struck the man a blow that sent him rolling in the scuppers, and himself seized the spokes and jammed the helm up. The mate, in the meantime, had let the topsail halyards run without waiting for the order, and, freed from the weight of her canvas, the ship paid off and the danger was over.

The memory flashed through his mind and was gone during the few seconds it took him to grope his way to the door and emerge into the roaring, thundering darkness beyond.

The ship lay sprawled in the trough of the sea, like a horse fallen at a fence. Her lee rail was buried four feet deep, and her lower yards were hidden almost to the slings in the seething, churned-up whiteness which surrounded her. The night was black as pitch. A pale glimmer showed faintly from the binnacle, and the sickly red and green of the side-lights gleamed wan and fitful amid the watery desolation. But otherwise the only fight was that which seemed to be given by the white crests of the endless procession of galloping seas which came tearing out of the night to pour themselves over the helpless vessel.

The wheel appeared to be still intact; in the darkness Broughton thought he could still make out the hunched figure of the helmsman beside it. That was so much. If the spars held....

As he emerged from the shelter of the chart-room the full force of the wind struck him like a steady push from some huge, invisible hand. He waited for a lull and made a dash for the wheel.

The lull was for a few moments only--a few moments during which the ship lay in the lee of a tremendous sea, which, towering up fifty feet above her, held her for a brief space in its perilous and betraying shelter. The next instant it broke clean over her--a great mass of green marbled water that filled her decks, carried her boats away like matchboxes down a flooded gutter, and swept her decks from end to end with a triumphant trampling as of a conquering army.

“This finishes it!” Broughton thought.

He was swept clean off his feet; rolled over and over; buried in foam; engulfed in what seemed to him like the whole Atlantic ocean; carried, as he believed, right down to Davy Jones’s locker, where the light of day would never reach him again....

The next thing he knew he was lying jammed against the lee rail of the poop, his legs hanging outboard, his arm hooked round a cleat, presumably by some subconscious instinct of self-preservation, for he had no recollection of putting it there. The water was pouring past him in a green cataract, and dragging at him like clutching fingers. He was alive. The ship was alive. “Good old girl!” Broughton said to himself. He began to struggle to his feet. Something moved beside him and clawed at his ankles.

“Oh, Lord!” said a voice out of the darkness--the mate’s voice. “Oh, Lord--I thought I was a goner!”

“Oh--you!” said Broughton. “Get off my feet, damn you!”

“Oh, Lord!” said the voice again.

“Pull yourself together!” Broughton rapped out. “What were you doing? Why didn’t you call me?”

“There wasn’t time,” moaned the mate. “She was going along all right, and the next minute--oh, Lord, I was nearly overboard!”

“Think you’re at a bloody revival meeting?” snapped Broughton. He shook him off, and, holding by the rail, fought his way up the slanting deck to the wheel.

The young second mate came butting head down through the murk.

“Fore upper topsail’s gone out of the bolt-ropes, sir!”

Broughton smiled grimly to himself. Old Featherstone’s skinflint ways had turned out good policy for once. If that fore upper topsail had held, as it would have done if it had been the stout Number One canvas his soul craved, instead of a flimsy patched affair only fit for the Tropics, they might all have been with Davy Jones by now.

“Take the best hands you can find to the braces,” Broughton ordered. “I must try to get her away before it. Mister!”--this to the mate, who had by this time picked himself out of the scuppers and came scrambling up the deck--“take half a dozen hands down to see to the cargo, and do what you can to secure it if it looks like shifting.”

The helmsman, a big heavy Swede, was still clinging to the wheel like a limpet; partly because it appeared to him good to have something to hold on to, partly because his wits worked so slowly that it hadn’t yet occurred to him to let go. Broughton grasped the spokes and the two men threw every ounce of their strength into the task of putting the helm over.

Gusts of cheery obscenity came out of the darkness forward as the crew fought to get the spars round. “Good men!” Broughton said between his teeth. “‘Maid of Athens, ere we part,’ eh? Not yet, old girl--not yet!”

It seemed as if the helpless ship knew the feel of the familiar hand on her helm, and strove with all her might to respond to it. She struggled; she almost rose. Then, wind and sea beating her down anew, she slid down into the trough again.

Again and again she tried to heave herself free from the weight of water that dragged her down; again and again she slipped back again, like a fallen horse trying vainly to get a footing on a slippery road. The two men wrestled with the wheel in grim silence. It kicked and strove in their grasp like a living thing. But at last, slowly, the ship quivered, righted herself. She shook the seas impatiently from her flanks as the reefed foresail filled. Inch by inch the yards came round to windward. The fight was over.

By daybreak the gale had all but blown itself out. The sea still ran high, but the wind had fallen, and a watery sun was trying to break through the hurrying clouds. The hands were already at work bending a new foretopsail, and their short, staccato cries came on the wind like the mewings of gulls.

“Life in the old dog yet, Mr. Kennedy!” said Broughton to the second mate. He struck his hands together, exulting. The struggle seemed to him a good omen. If she could live through a night like that, surely she could also survive those obscurer dangers which threatened her. His shoulders ached like the shoulders of Atlas from the battle with the kicking wheel. He had not known such physical effort since his apprentice days. The fight had put new heart into him. By God, it had been worth it, he told himself. It made a man feel that it was worth while to be alive....

A few days later the “Maid of Athens” picked up the north-east Trades, and carried them with her almost down to the Line through a succession of golden days and star-dusted nights. She loitered through the doldrums--found her Trades again just south of the Line--wrestled with the Westerlies off the Horn--and, speeding northward again through the flying-fish weather, made the Strait of Juan de Fuca a hundred and nine days out.