Chapter VIII (1)

The “Maid of Athens” discharged her cargo of cement at Vancouver, and went over to the Puget Sound wharf at Victoria to load lumber for Chile.

She was there for nearly a month before she left her berth on a fine October afternoon, and anchored in the Royal Roads, where the pilot would board her next morning to take her down to Flattery.

Broughton went ashore in the evening for the last time, and walked up to his agent’s offices in Wharf Street. He was burningly anxious to be at sea again. The old restlessness was strong upon him that he had felt before leaving London River, and a number of small vexatious delays had whetted his impatience to the breaking point.

“Letter for you, Cap’n,” the clerk hailed him. “I thought maybe you’d be around, or I’d have sent it over to you.”

Broughton turned the letter in his hands for a minute or two before opening it. He recognized the prim, clerkly hand at once. It was from Jenkinson. A cold wave of apprehension flooded over him. Some mysterious kind of telepathy told him that it contained unwelcome tidings.

He slit the envelope at last, unfolded the sheet, and read it through. Then he read it again, and still again--uncomprehendingly, as if it were something in a foreign and unknown language:

“ ...Sorry to say the old ship has now been sold ... firm at Gibraltar ... understand she is to be converted into a coal hulk....”

Broughton crumpled the sheet in his hand with a fierce gesture, staring out with unseeing eyes into a world aglow with the glory of sunset. It was the worst--the very worst--he had ever dreamed of! Why hadn’t he let her go, he wondered, that night in the North Atlantic? Why had he dragged her back from a decent death for a fate like this? He could have stuck it if she had gone to the shipbreakers. It would have hurt like hell, but he could have stuck it. But this; it made him think, somehow, of those old pitiful horses you saw being shipped across to Belgium with their bones sticking through their skins. People used to have their old horses shot when they were past work. They were different now. It was all money--money--money! They thought nothing of fidelity, of loyalty, of long service. They cared no more for their ships than for so many slop pails....

Wasn’t it the old Vikings that used to take their old ships out to sea and burn them? There was a fine end for a ship now--a fine, clean, splendid death for a ship that had been a great ship in her day! He remembered once, years ago, watching a ship burn to the water’s edge in the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t much more than a nipper at the time, but he had never forgotten it. The calm night, and the stars, and the ship flaring up to heaven like a torch. He didn’t think he would have minded, somehow, seeing his old ship go like that. But this--oh, he had got to find a way out of it somehow....

“Bad news, Cap’n?” came the clerk’s inquiring voice.

Broughton pulled himself together with an effort.

“No, no, thanks!” Mechanically he made his adieux and passed out into the street. He didn’t know where he was going. He never remembered how he found his way to the Outer Wharf where his boat was waiting.

But he must have got there somehow, for now he was sitting in the stern-sheets and looking out across the water to the ship lying at anchor, with eyes to which sorrow and the shadow of parting seemed to have given a strange new apprehension of beauty. How lovely she looked, he thought, with the little pink clouds seeming to be caught in her rigging, and the gulls flying and calling all about her! It was queer that he should notice things like that so much, now that he was going to lose her. He had known the time when he would have taken it all for granted. Now, he kept seeing all kinds of little things in a kind of new, clear light, as if he saw them for the first time----

* * * * *

Let young Kennedy tell the rest of the tale--in his cabin in a Blue Funnel liner, years afterwards; the unforgettable, indefinable smell of China drifting up from the Chinese emigrants’ quarters, the gabble of the stokers at their interminable fan-tan on the forecastle mingling with the piping of the gulls along the wharf sheds.

“I could see at once” (thus young Kennedy) “that something had gone wrong with the Old Man. He looked ten years older since I had seen him a couple of hours before. He came up the ladder very slowly and heavily, passed me by without speaking--I might have been a stanchion standing there for all the notice he took of me--and went down into the cabin almost as if he were walking in his sleep.

“Something--I don’t exactly know what--intuition, perhaps, you’d call it--made me trump up an excuse to follow him. I didn’t like the looks of him, somehow.

“I found him sitting in his chair by the table, staring straight before him with that same fixed look as if he didn’t really see anything.

“He didn’t so much as turn his head when I went in, and at first when I spoke he didn’t seem to hear me. I spoke again, a little louder, and he gave a sort of start, as if he had been suddenly roused out of a sleep.

“‘Yes--no!’ he said in a dazed kind of way. ‘Yes--no’ (like that); and then suddenly, in a very loud, harsh voice, quite different from his ordinary way of speaking: ‘A hulk! A hulk! They are going to make a coal hulk of her!’

“The words seemed to be fairly ripped out of him. He didn’t seem to be speaking to me. It was more as if he were trying to make himself believe something that was too bad to realize.

“I managed to say something--I forget just what: that it was rotten luck, perhaps. I doubt if he heard me, anyhow, for he went on in the same strange voice, like someone talking to himself.

“‘She’s good for twenty years yet!’ And then, in a sort of choking voice, ‘Mine--mine, by God, mine!’

“Well, I just turned at that and bolted. I felt I couldn’t stand any more. It seemed like eavesdropping on a man’s soul.

“I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when the tug came alongside as soon as it was light. He came on deck looking as if nothing had happened. I never said anything, of course--no more did he; and from that day to this I don’t really know--though I rather fancy he did--if he remembered what had passed between us.

“We had a fine passage down to Iquique, where we discharged our lumber and loaded nitrates for the U.K. The Old Man had got very fussy about the ship. He had every inch of her teak scraped and oiled while we were running down the Trades, and everything made as smart as could be aloft; and while we were lying at Iquique he had her figurehead, which was a very pretty one, all done over--pure white, of course. I did the best part of it myself, for I used to be reckoned rather a swell in the slap-dab business in those days, though I say it myself!

“Well, we finished our loading and left, and all the ships cheered us down the tier; and I don’t wonder, for the old ship looked a picture.

“The Old Man and I had got to be quite friends. I suppose we were as near being pals as a skipper and a second mate ever could be. He was working on a new rail for the poop ladder--all fancy ropework and so on--and he used to bring it up on deck and yarn away to me about old times hour by the length. I fancy he rather liked me, but up till then he had always had a kind of stand-offish, you-keep-your-place-young-man way with him; and for my part I’d always looked on him with that sort of mixture of holy awe when he was there and disrespect behind his back a fellow has for the skipper he’s served his time under. I suppose our both thinking such a lot of the old barky gave us an interest in common. You see, I’d served my time in her right from the start, so that naturally she was the ship of all ships for me--still is, for the matter of that.... Say what you will, she was a great old ship, and he was a great old skipper!”

(Kennedy paused. A quiver had crept somehow into his voice, and he had to get it under control again.)

“The Old Man” (he went on) “had always been what I should call a careful skipper. Not nervous--nothing of that sort--but cautious; I never knew him lose a sail but once, and never a spar. In fact, I used to feel a bit annoyed with him sometimes because he didn’t go out of his way to take risks. He was a fine seaman; but there’s no denying the fact he _was_ cautious. He made some fine passages in the ‘Maid of Athens,’ and never a bad one. But he didn’t really drive her. I believe he was too damned fond of her.

“So that you may imagine it was a bit of a surprise when we began to get into the high south latitudes and he started to crack on in a way that made even me open my eyes a little.

“I well remember the first day I noticed it. It was just on sunset--a black and red sort of affair with lots of low-hanging clouds, and the seas came rolling up with that ugly, sickly green on them when the light caught them that always goes with bad weather.

“It had been blowing pretty hard all day, and the glass dropping fast. The ship was labouring heavily and shipping quantities of water; she was loaded nearly to her marks with nitrates. There stood the skipper--I can just see him now--with his feet planted wide, holding on to the weather rigging and looking up aloft, as his way always was when it was blowing up.

“I expected him, of course, to order some of the canvas off her, for she was carrying a fairish amount considering the weather. So I was fairly taken aback, as you may imagine, when he turned round and said quite quietly:

“‘I want the fore upper topsail reefed and set, Mr. Kennedy.’

“I was so surprised that I just stood and gaped for a minute or so. He looked at me in a sort of a challenging way, and said:

“‘Didn’t you hear the order? What are you waiting for?’

“I pulled myself together, said ‘Fore upper topsail it is, sir!’ and off I went. And I can tell you that for the next half hour or so I had plenty to occupy me without worrying my head about what the Old Man was thinking of.

“Well, we got the sail reefed and set. By this time the ship was ripping along at a good sixteen knots or more. You could see her wake spread out a mile behind her like a winding sheet. It was quite dark by this time. Her lee rail was right under, and making our way aft was like going through a swimming-bath.

“The Old Man was still standing just as I had left him, holding on with both hands to the weather rigging, and bracing his feet against the slant of the deck. I had hardly got my foot on the poop ladder when he turned his head and called to me. I could see his lips move, but I could hear nothing for the noise of the wind and sea.

“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.

“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.

“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then. ‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur again!’

“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the “Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T. examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more sail and chance it!’

“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then--flop!--would come a big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives--on again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer--at least I know I did--that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to fly any more kites just yet.

“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so before my time--the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was getting all of it I wanted for once!

“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about, and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work, and there you are!

“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit--not a little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after what he called “skirts” and soaking _aguardiente_. The skipper’s carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away, and _he_ wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.

“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have been God help her!

“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he kept in his room--the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.

“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s--he’s m-m-mad,’ he stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!

“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.

“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all the world like a startled penguin.

“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about him.

“What _was_ he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that he just felt as if things had gone too far for him--so he threw his cards on the table, and left it to--well, shall we say Providence to shuffle them!

“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!

“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.

“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was the old bos’n--a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on the slow side, like most Dutchmen--standing under the break of the poop with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.

“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’

“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails were like boards--as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved, left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the ‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.

“And ice--there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us, though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises--shrieks and groans--that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks like musketry fire--and in the midst of it all the penguins would make you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.

“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen image than a man--his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin resting on them--for hours, never speaking or moving.

“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and leave the skin behind.

“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him, as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind--it is nothing,’ and lay down again.

“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and left him.

“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne, what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this--well, it staggered me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.

“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare to-do.

“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and Board of Trade inquiries.

“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the mate.

“And then--something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.

“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent, and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit jumpy since we had been among the ice.

“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh. Then I saw the Old Man--and the laugh died.

“I shall never forget his face--miserable and yet lifted up both at once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name--you know--sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats, and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.

“He sighed once, and looked round--a long look as if he were saying good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then he sighed again, and went in.

“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes--ten minutes. I began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see his grey head--the hair getting a bit thin on top--just as I’d seen it scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....

“Fifteen minutes--twenty--I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was waiting....

“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a stroke--evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it. I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.

“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.

“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo--she was loaded right down to her marks--helped to keep her upright. She just settled quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked through. She looked--oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me--a young fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him----

“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old ‘Maid of Athens’ went down.

“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he thought a lot of the old ship....”

THE END OF AN ARGUMENT

A good solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as satisfactory as an interest in common--which, in the case of Kavanagh, the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer “Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed none at all.

Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.

Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.

Kavanagh was neat in his attire.

Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.

Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging about docks and shipping offices--found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”

He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”

She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of which he was inordinately fond.

The argument began something after this fashion:

The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber. It was a glorious morning--one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the early morning sky.

The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main, and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:

“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling--o--oh ...
An’ pa--ay Paddy Doyle for his bo--o--ots....”

“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.

“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow--the voice of Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”

Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of feeling to be overheard--least of all to be overheard by Ferguson. Sneaking about in carpet slippers....

“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he snapped.

“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.

The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch” rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and winds which grew ever more stormy.

The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin, with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.

But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin floor.

And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened to interrupt them.

In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.

It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning, when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic--dreary, monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got into one of the big liner companies. Now----

Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted ship--now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.

It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.

“‘Maria’--Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been abandoned--I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”

He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the bridge.

“Aye--she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her--can’t do anything more. It’s out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”

He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.

Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”

“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising ... in for a night of it....”

Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.

It was queer. He couldn’t explain it--couldn’t understand it! But there was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he _must_ save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making signals--personal signals--to him and to no one else: to be saying, “Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”

“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot of money ... if you could spare the hands----”

Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the money, and his hopes rose.

“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”

“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”

Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better of him again: “Well, have it your own way--your own responsibility, mind--and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do it--oughtn’t to do it----”

There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage crew.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.

Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’--Genoa.”

Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”

One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance thrust over the rail.

“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s gaun to blaw the nicht!”

His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short, fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and Kavanagh heard no more.

A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas, and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken off by some passing vessel.

He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.

Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men, a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.

The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too, which he could not at all make out.

There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet--it was a peculiar sort of voice--a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in it--unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained, not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again--an impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth just behind him helped him to check.

The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which followed it was worse than the sound.

“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.

“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and they couldn’t get him away----”

He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the descent into the saloon.

They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.

It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of the deserted ship was all around--a silence only intensified by the monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.

The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half its terrors fled.

“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”

Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.

The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and imposing stateroom with a big teak bed--evidently the captain’s, a relic of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner of the voice--a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever heard.

It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled. Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour of his new command.

The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit, mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.

Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so, leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or rather the whole) sail in its place.

And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.

Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last--it seemed like a miracle--all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been longing to do--find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.

He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition, there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance, while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette, that he made the great discovery.

This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with his knife to see if anything lay beneath.

His first find was a date--1869.

“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter--‘D’--no, ‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’----”

His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder than ever.

“It _can’t_ be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George, it _is_!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”

Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To most laymen--indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school--it would have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship--a good ship, no doubt, in her day, a day long since over and done.

But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very different significance.

Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long after they themselves are gone--names about which yarns will be spun and songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious “Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and her forerunner “The Tweed.” And--though perhaps in a lesser degree--such was also the “Plinlimmon.”

And to Kavanagh she was even more.

She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first voyage--those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour of youth departed.

For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition. There had been an old fellow in his first ship--they called him Old Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.

Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e _set_ it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes.... ‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’ ‘Plinlimmon.’...”

Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now, he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....

But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.

The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk--the wind all the while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.

Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.

A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she _shall_ do it!” he said to the sea and the darkness.

* * * * *

Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days, Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.

Time--there _was_ no time! There was just a never-ending succession of low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been days--there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one thing, and one thing only--saving that old ship from her old rival the sea.

How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.

Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace, only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It just vanished....

But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest--yet at the time Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half a dozen in the whole blessed ship--yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their faces--a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew. Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him. And he needed it before the end!...

At last--at long last--came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary, indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!

Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired--dog-tired; that his wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids like lead.

But he had won--he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”! Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.

There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came back out of the grey dawn.

“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”

A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s” donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!

Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.

“A steamer--a Dago--rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”

He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:

“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”

Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he could afford it.

ORANGES

The clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm.