Of all the ships that traded from the Islands to the mainland, the
_Spirito Santo_ had the worst reputation. She was known as a "hungry"
vessel; her chief mate was a French Creole from Martinique who had been
trained aboard a Yankee clipper, and her captain was a blue-nose who
behaved as such. Since, on the outward voyage, the crew generally
consisted of men who had made the Islands too hot to hold them, and, on
the return trip, of half-dazed sailors who had been doped by crimps,
there was a certain superficial variety about it--a variety merely of
individuals and not of kind.
The _Spirito Santo_ had been a good enough ship in her day, and had
weathered a typhoon in the China seas and a hurricane in the Atlantic,
but she was one of the earliest steam vessels built, and had started
life as a side-wheeler; her paddles having been changed for a single
screw and simple engines, of the kind guaranteed to combine the greatest
possible consumption of fuel with a correspondingly large waste of
steam.
She was a wooden vessel, iron still being looked at askance when her
keel was laid, and her lines were those of the true sailing-ship, with
bows that bulged out almost square from either side of her cutwater,
above which her long bowsprit raked the air. The result was that she
steamed as a wind-jammer, with her bows delaying her speed by their
large surface of resistance; and went better under canvas, with her
screw running free. She was barque-rigged, that is to say she carried
trysails on her fore and main, below the lovely tower of royals,
topgallant sails and top-sails which even her stumpy sticks and too-wide
yards could not make ungraceful. Her long thin funnel amidships looked
as though it had got there by mistake, and indeed she belonged rather to
the class of auxiliary steam than that of auxiliary sail, in spite of
the motive with which she had conceived. In fact, her trouble was that
in a world where steamships, and iron ones at that, were beginning more
and more to snatch at trade, and where the great racing clippers still
broke records, the _Spirito Santo_, being neither one thing nor the
other, had become a losing proposition. Her owners grudged tar on her
sides as sorely as kids of meat to the men, and no shabbier trader than
the _Spirito Santo_ nosed her way from Port of Spain to the Golden Gate.
Yet she got there all right, bullied and driven, got there on cheap coal
and rotten rigging, though her engines seemed as though they must beat a
hole in her straining sides and her planks part from sheer exhaustion.
She held together as a coherent and reliable whole partly because, with
all her lack of grace, she was a sweet ship in a seaway if one knew her
idiosyncrasies, partly because her skipper could nurse a ship through
anything while the hull stayed afloat. And the _Spirito Santo_ took some
handling, for in spite of her wide yards and tonnage to the tune of
seven hundred, she only drew fourteen feet and was as tricky as a cat.
Her skipper coaxed her and humoured her, bullied her at just the right
moment, in short, treated her as though she had been a woman--only Joab
Elderkin would not have taken the trouble over any she-thing of flesh
and blood.
Elderkin was the best-feared man in the Caribbean. He had a thin sinewy
frame and a very soft voice which he never raised in ordinary
conversation, and this gave a curious effect of monotony to whatever he
was saying. Never drunk at sea, he was always perfectly sober on land
except for the first twenty-four hours after landing, when he soaked
steadily. Even his movements were gentle, as though to match his voice
and the dark eyes, deep-set in his prematurely wizened face, held the
wistful puzzled sadness of a monkey's. His language was unparalleled for
profanity, and to the most hardened there was something of terror in the
appalling flow of words issuing on such an unruffled softness of
intonation. In those days the master of a vessel had almost unlimited
power within the area of his ship's rails. If, goaded by ill-use, a man
struck his officer, he was quite likely to be shot straightway, and on
reporting the matter the captain would be praised for his promptness in
quelling mutiny at its rising. Floggings with the cat or the yoke-rope,
brutal mishandling with knuckle-dusters and belaying-pins, were the
quick and common resort on the slightest count, and Captain Joab
Elderkin was famous for his technique in all these methods. His ship
literally merited the trite description of a floating hell, and one boy
aboard her had died of a broken heart. The child had failed in an
attempt to get ashore at Frisco, been brought back and flogged at the
mizzen rigging, and afterwards turned his face to the dark forecastle
wall, refused food and died. The little incident had added to Elderkin's
unsavoury reputation, but it was this reputation which made him a man
after his owners' hearts. He was not likely to suffer from scruples, and
it is needless to say that the _Spirito Santo_, a free-lance trading
from what port she chose, carried a good deal now and again on which she
never paid duty. Her skipper's only form of conscience was his
seamanship. The owners might grudge paint, but every bit of brass-work
on board shone like gold, and the decks were holy-stoned till the men
sobbed over their aching knees. At twenty-three he had held command of a
full-rigged ship trading to China. Now, since the _Spirito Santo_ was
becoming more and more of a falling investment, he rarely made the
passage round into the Pacific, and, Atlantic-bound, dodging from the
Islands to Colon and down the coast as far as Rio, Elderkin was wont to
refer to the time when he really had been a sailor. . . .
It was his conscience as a seaman that the owners were up against when
they called the captain into consultation over the diminishing returns
of the _Spirito Santo_, and proposed to him the course that is regarded
by sailors the world over as the great betrayal.
To anyone without a nice sense for spiritual values, everything is
merely a matter of price, and Elderkin's fee for the loss of his ship
and with her his soul was higher than the partners could have wished.
They were greasy men, with the Spanish strain, that too often, in those
latitudes, means a hint of the negro as well, and their office was on
the outskirts of the dirty vulture-ridden Port of Spain of those days.
The room was bare, and upon the blotchy whitewash of the wall there
hung nothing but a map and a few advertisements. The mosquitoes sang
through the unscreened windows; outside, in the dusty strip of bleached
earth between the house and the road, a hedge of hibiscus was in bloom.
In the glaring sunshine the flaunting back-curled blossoms seemed afire
as they shot their thin vermeil tongues out into the air made so alive
with light. To Elderkin, as he sat in the dimmed room, full of green
reflections from the vegetation without, came the unpleasant thought
that it was as though he were under seas . . . and the flaming tongues of
the hibiscus were some evil sea-growth, mocking at his plight.
He leaned forward and helped himself again from the bottle of whisky
that stood upon the bare table. When he lifted it a crescent of gold
fled across the table, slipping back again when he set the bottle down,
as a ripple of reflected light runs through water. Elderkin had often
seen a gleam like it when watching a small bright fish flash through a
pool.
His reluctant mind responded to the kick of the liquor: the dirty little
room, the watchful eyes of the partners as they sat on either side of
him in their soiled linen suits, no longer seemed so unpleasant to him,
accustomed as he was to the sordidness that, if care is not exercised,
so soon overtakes an interior in the tropics. His caution still remained
to him, and he sounded the scheme at every point, finding the partners
were prepared, full of urgings, advices, rosy forecasts, cunning
details. On the homeward voyage, that would be best . . . he could
take her out in ballast, bring her back loaded to her limit and beyond
it. . . . Those were days before the Plimsoll mark, and vessels often left
port--even great English ports--so loaded that their scuppers were all
but awash, and not only left but perhaps attempted the passage round the
Horn itself. There would be no difficulty about that, but Captain
Elderkin must, of course, not sail from a Peruvian harbour as the
authorities there had an unpleasant habit of marking a load-line on
every ship that cleared and seeing that she did not go above it.
Besides, a cargo was awaiting him in Chili, and the partners were
prepared about that too. It was to be a double deal, the actual copper
and nitrates, with a small amount of gold, which she would go out to
take was, by arrangement with a certain official known to the partners,
to be changed for sand and stones. Just a sprinkling of nitrate at the
top, perhaps, since nitrate is loaded in bulk. It was risky, but on the
other hand it was a thing often carried through with success, and
Elderkin, who knew all the tricks and possibilities of both coasts,
could see his way with reasonable clarity. The partners advised Captain
Elderkin not to attempt bringing the _Spirito Santo_ round the Horn, as
he might have more difficulty in saving himself; if the accident
occurred on the Pacific side it would be better for many reasons. If he
were picked up by a passing ship he must, of course, see to it that the
_Spirito Santo_ was too far gone for salvage, or that would indeed make
matters worse with a vengeance. An accident with the steering-gear--they
had reason to know that Olsen, the chief engineer, would come in on
it--when off a weather shore, would probably be the best solution. But,
naturally, there was no need to instruct so clever a sailor as Captain
Elderkin in his part of the affair . . . more smiles and whisky.
Joab Elderkin sat and absorbed it all, with little expression on his
sad, gentle face, his thin mouth remained imperturbable under the heavy
dark moustache, only in his high and narrow temples a pulse beat. As he
drank he raised his price, till at last the point was reached above
which the partners refused to go and below which he would not descend.
At that point they came to their agreement, and Joab Elderkin went out
of the office having sold his only form of honour on a gamble which
stood to put him on the way towards attaining a ship of his own. For
that was the desire of his heart, and until now had seemed as impossible
of realization as the phantom vessel of a dream. Probably for no other
inducement under the skies would he have given another ship's salvation.
* * * * *
The month of August found the _Spirito Santo_, all sail set, running
down the Pacific coast before a north-westerly wind. Elderkin watched
the weather carefully, for he had no idea of losing his life, or, for
the matter of that, the lives of any of his crew who could be allowed to
retain them with safety to himself and the partners. For there is always
the personal equation to be studied in a matter of this kind, and
Elderkin had given much thought to the members of his crew. He had
hoped, while always fearing the futility of it, that the first mate,
Isidore Lemaire, might be kept in ignorance. For a while it seemed as
though this were so, but since leaving port Elderkin had felt doubtful
of the creole. Lemaire had a furtive way with him at the best of times,
a hint as of something that crept and glided rather than walked
normally, but then so had many of his race. He was supposed to be a
white--in the expressive Island phrase, he "passed for white"--but on
the French and Spanish and even the Danish islands the objection to
racial mingling is not nearly so strong as in the colonies that have
always been English. Also, Lemaire came from Martinique, which, after
Haiti, is the headquarters of Obeah, and worse, of voodoo. Even quite
good families in decaying Martinique had dealings with the unclean
thing, and St. Pierre was known, even among sailors, for a hotbed of
strange vices. All this was why Lemaire made such a powerful mate, for
the crew, except for the red-headed Danish engineer from St. Thomas,
were either half-castes from the Islands and the southern continent, or
full-blooded negroes; which was to say that superstition was so part of
them that the last vestige of it would only run out with the last drop
of blood from their bodies. Elderkin knew better than to penetrate the
forecastle, but he was aware of the bottles filled with dead
cockroaches, bits of worsted and the rest of the paraphernalia for the
casting of spells, which hung there. He himself had found that the only
way to keep his steward off his whisky was to decorate his locker with a
similar charm, and since he had done so had suffered no more from
pilfering. All this was obeah, harmless enough, and if now and then, a
white cock was sacrificed in the forecastle and a seaman went somewhat
mad on its blood, Elderkin ignored the matter. But Lemaire was, he knew,
suspected by the crew of darker dealings. There had been a rumour that
the reason Lemaire left Martinique was because the disappearance of a
planter's child was like to be laid at his door, and the rumour was
enough to make the niggers cringe before him. This was a master, perhaps
the friend of papalois and mamalois, with the power of life and death.
Elderkin loathed him--there are things from which the most hardened
white man shrinks, and it would have to be one utterly unregenerate who
could dabble his hands in voodooism. Nevertheless, the suspicion made
Lemaire the best nigger-driver in the length and breadth of the
Caribbean, and Elderkin made use of him for that reason. Now, for the
first time, he began to feel the man's peculiarities getting on his own
nerves. A word dropped now and again, odd looks from the protuberant and
opaque brown eyes, were making him wonder if the mate guessed, whether
it would be better to take him into the secret and trust to his never
reaching shore. . . .
They were nearing the forties when Lemaire spoke. The day was wet, with
a strong wind, all the morning they had been driving through tingling
veils of rain and spray, shipping green water that slopped over the
holds and poured in foaming torrents along the dipping scuppers. All day
the wind--which till then had thrummed through the rigging and held the
sails in their stiffened curves so steadily that the _Spirito Santo_
kept a fairly even keel--had been falling on fitfulness. Loaded as she
was, the seas that raced past her, almost level with her deck, seemed
higher than they really were. An odd darkness held the air and through
it everything bright--the flashes of foam, a wheeling bird, or rare
shoal of flying fish--showed up with startling pallor. In the second
dog-watch Lemaire came to Elderkin in the chart-room.
Most men have a weakness and Elderkin's--probably because he never made
a confidant of a human being--was the dangerous one of pen and paper. He
was making calculations on the fly-leaf of an old Bible which had been
unearthed with a lot of other junk from a locker. Calculations about
ships--the varying costs of handling a four-masted schooner and a
barque, the advantages of chartering a small screw steamer; calculations
of routes and cargoes, of many things, but always calculations. . . .
The curious darkness had swamped the chart-room, and made the
discoloured clasps of the Bible and the brighter brass of the ship's
fittings gleam out; made the captain's always pale face seem waxen,
showed two sallow flames in the mate's ophidian eyes. For a moment the
two men looked at each other in silence, then Lemaire spoke.
"I see you figger it all out," he observed. "Don't forget me, dat's all.
I come in on dis, my friend. _Sacre nom de Dieu_"--on a sudden flash of
menace--"did you think I was going to get not'ing out of it? Or perhaps
you was going to drown me, eh?"
Elderkin had got to his feet, and was watching the other man steadily.
When he spoke, his voice was as low and tired as ever.
He asked what the blank the blank mate thought he was talking about.
Lemaire explained that he was talking about the scuttling of the
_Spirito Santo_, and that the captain knew it as blank well as he did.
"While the ship remains afloat, kindly remember that I am in command,
Mr. Lemaire, and address me with proper respect. If you do so I'll
discuss business with you. If not, I'll see that you go to hell along
with the ship. Savvy, you herring-gutted son of a frog-eater, you?"
Lemaire savvied. He had grown sickly hued with anger, but he spread his
dark hands in apology, so that the pinkish palms seemed to flash in the
unnatural gloom.
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.
"The mate tells you you'll get a lot of money if you go home and say
you've sunk the ship. You won't. He will, as Judas did for betraying his
Lord, but you'll just be got rid of, if you don't keep your mouths
shut. You're wrong, as you've been all your lives, as I've been till
now. But I've a stronger man on my side than all of you herring-gutted
sons of a gun would make rolled together. I've the Lord on my side. You
think nothing of that, do you? The Lord's up in heaven and won't notice
what you do, and you ain't feared of the likes of Him anyway. . . . Aren't
you? Why d'you think it is you have bloody sacrifices there in the
fo'c'sle--oh, yes, I know about it all--why d'you suppose you cringe to
that nigger there"--pointing to the mate--"with his black history of
murdered children and flesh eaten in secret when the sacred drum beats
at the full of the moon? Why d'you suppose you're scared sick of a dirty
bug and a bit of wool in an old bottle, or of my Bible that I've set up
on a shelf? It's because you know there's something behind--behind your
ju-jus and behind my ju-ju. . . . You not fear the Lord! Why, you fear Him
with every devilish performance you concoct. You're afraid all the
time--of the something behind. And my ju-ju is greater than your ju-ju,
so you're more afraid of mine, and of me. Could your ju-ju bring you
through the great storm alive? All of you--and that damned baby-eater
there--you was all yelling at your ju-jus and they couldn't wag one of
their accursed fingers to help you. Who saved you and brought you out
alive? White men and the white men's God. You know there's something
behind, and what's behind me is bigger'n what's behind you. . . ."
He suddenly pulled his hand out of the capacious pocket of his coat, and
the men cowered swiftly, but instead of a gun he held his Bible out
over the rail, threatening them not with its insignificant fabric but
with its unknown import. A couple of Jamaican negroes fell on their
knees and writhed upon the deck, making uncouth noises, their eyes
turning palely upwards, their limbs convulsed.
"Praise de Lord!" they yelled. "Praise de Lord wid us, brudders! End of
de world and judgment comin'. Save us, massa, save us. . . ." And a dago
from the southern continent fell to crossing himself and gabbling his
prayers.
"You fools!" cried Lemaire, thrusting through the heaving knot of men,
"don't you listen to his talk. Talk won't fill our stomachs or cure our
skins. How's he going to feed you? Ask him dat."
"Yes--what are we to eat? Give us food and we'll keep on!" shouted the
bo'sun. "Can your God make food?"
"My God provided manna for the children of Israel in the wilderness and
He'll provide for us now if we trust in Him. He will send us meat for
our bellies and drink for our throats."
"How . . . ? Where is it, dis food?" taunted Lemaire; and Elderkin, his
hand pointing, answered, "There . . ."
The men swung round to gaze, and saw a fugitive gleam of sunlight on her
shining tower of cotton canvas, a great four-masted American barque
beating to windward only a few miles away. Elderkin and his ju-ju were
saved, and Lemaire's vision of dollars was routed by the men's vision of
food. The distress signals were run up, and by that night the _Spirito
Santo_ carried enough provisions of a rude kind to last her, with care
and luck--meaning a rigid discipline of practically wreck-rations and
fair winds--to see her safely home again. Elderkin thought that at last
the testings of his faith were over, that the weary ship would blow
towards port on a divinely appointed wind, and that his sacrifice and
conversion were accepted on high. For the image he had had in his mind
on that day of revelation in the chart-house had been of one Titanic
struggle, not of this succession of conflicts which sometimes rose to
crisis point but more often meant fighting against the terrible
depression of day after day's inaction, driven half-crazy by the
unceasing moaning of the rigging. Sustained bad weather gets on a
sailor's nerves not because of any danger but simply by dint of the
repetition of noises; there is only one thing more unbearable to mind
and temper, and that is to be becalmed. Thought of any such happening
was far from those on board the _Spirito Santo_, for the south-westerly
wind urged her on past the Plate, and then a baffling head wind blew her
out of the treacherous skies, and for over a week she beat back and
forth, making hardly any headway. The rations were still further
reduced, and then just as the men were beginning to make trouble again,
the _Spirito Santo_ caught up with the south-west trades. Once again she
made the seas roar past her, for now, regardless of her depth in the
water, Elderkin made all the sail he could. Day after day slipped past
with the slipping foam, and the gaunt creatures aboard felt a stirring
of relief. And then, in the Doldrums, they ran into a dead calm. . . .
Only anyone who has been becalmed on a tropical sea knows the terror
that it is. Of all feelings of helplessness it is probably the most
acute. Without steam or motor a ship is as powerless as though she were
anchored to the sea-bottom with iron cables. Men have gone mad of it,
and men did go mad of it in the starving _Spirito Santo_. She lay, as
famished for a breeze as they for bread, upon a surface of molten glass,
her sails limp as a dead bird's wing, the pitch soft in her seams, and
the only sound in the circle of the horizon the faint creak-creak of her
yards against the masts. Cabins and forecastle were unbearable, yet on
deck the vertical sun had driven all but the thinnest lines of shadow
out of being. The nights were almost as hot as the days and always the
false cross gleamed from a cloudless sky, and the true Cross swam up
lying on her back and trailing the pointers behind her, slowly righting
herself as she rose and driving the pitiless brilliancy of the Milky Way
before her. The drinking-water, what there was of it, stank; and the
dried mouths of the men could hardly manage the mouldy hard-tack which
captain and crew shared alike. And there was nothing to be done, nothing
that could be done. The men were past revolt now, they could only
shamble dizzily about. There was nothing to be done--except pray, and
Elderkin prayed, though his lips moved almost soundlessly. He thought
much these days, and he remembered--probably because of the dead
stillness around--an old seafaring fable that in the calm heart of a
cyclone life is to be found--that there birds and butterflies of every
size and colour crowd, till the air is hung with brightness. He saw the
individual soul of man as the hollow calm in the midst of life, cut off
by the circling storm from all other air, and told himself that it
could be the refuge for beauties of praise . . . he strove to make this
aching solitude of mind wherein he was, rich as the fabled heart of the
cyclone. . . .
Then, just as the first faint breath made her ripple the water at her
bows, he discovered that, worn out by her successive batterings, the
_Spirito Santo_ was literally falling apart. He looked over her side and
saw that she was spewing oakum from her seams, while she settled lower
and lower in the water.
The discovery acted like cool wind on Elderkin--it was unthinkable that
they should perish now, not so very far from home, after all he had won
through, and he prepared to meet this disaster also. He had prudently
kept one last cask of rum unbroached, and this fluid life he now served
out to the men. Then he drove them, as before with gun or Bible, but
this time with rum; drove them to the task of frapping the leaking ship.
Four great chain cables were passed under her and hove tight with
Spanish windlasses on deck--a series of giant tourniquets to keep in her
life. And when that too was accomplished, it was as though the power
above at last was satisfied, and the wind strengthened that was to bear
the _Spirito Santo_ home.
Nearly six months after leaving port with provisions enough for one;
with her rotten ratlines hanging in little tags, her jury smoke-stack
idle between the patched sails that seemed as though one more puff of
wind would tear them from the battered yards, her spewing sides kept
together with cables, and her broken bulwarks level with the water--a
nightmare vessel manned by ghosts--she crawled into the roadstead at
Port of Spain.
* * * * *
For a few years after, a ragged white man haunted the drink-shops of the
Islands and hung about the ports--a man without a ship. The owners of
the _Spirito Santo_ were broken by the safe return of that faked cargo,
but they had passed the word round that her skipper was to be broken
too. He who had been so self-controlled in the old unregenerate days now
drank steadily, but it was only when he was very drunk he talked. And
even then it was difficult to make out what he said--it was all such a
jumble of some strange fight between two ships, and of how the ways of
the Lord were so mysterious that it was often impossible for a man to
tell upon which side righteousness might be found.