"If Weeks is a friend o' yours I should get used to missin' 'im, as I
tell his wife."
There was at that time an ingenious system by which the skipper might
buy his smack from the owner on the instalment plan--as people buy
their furniture--only with a difference: for people sometimes get
their furniture. The instalments had to be completed within a certain
period. The skipper could do it--he could just do it; but he couldn't
do it without running up one little bill here for stores, and another
little bill there for sail-mending. The owner worked in with the
sail-maker, and just as the skipper was putting out to earn his last
instalment, he would find the bailiffs on board, his cruise would be
delayed, he would be, consequently, behindhand with his instalment and
back would go the smack to the owner with a present of four-fifths of
its price. Weeks had to pay two hundred pounds, and had eight weeks to
earn it in. But he got the straight tip that his sail-maker would stop
him; and getting together any sort of crew he could, he slipped out at
night with half his stores.
"Now the No'th Sea," concluded the fisherman, "in November and
December ain't a bobby's job."
Duncan walked forward to the pier-head. He looked out at a grey
tumbled sky shutting down on a grey tumbled sea. There were flecks of
white cloud in the sky, flecks of white breakers on the sea, and it
was all most dreary. He stood at the end of the jetty, and his great
possibility came out of the grey to him. Weeks was shorthanded.
Cribbed within a few feet of the smack's deck, there would be no
chance for any man to shirk. Duncan acted on the impulse. He bought a
fisherman's outfit at Gorleston, travelled up to London, got a passage
the next morning on a Billingsgate fish-carrier, and that night went
throbbing down the great water street of the Swim, past the green
globes of the Mouse. The four flashes of the Outer Gabbard winked him
good-bye away on the starboard, and at eleven o'clock the next night
far out in the North Sea he saw the little city of lights swinging on
the Dogger.
The _Willing Mind's_ boat came aboard the next morning and Captain
Weeks with it, who smiled grimly while Duncan explained how he had
learnt that the smack was shorthanded.
"I can't put you ashore in Denmark," said Weeks knowingly. "There'll
be seven weeks, it's true, for things to blow over; but I'll have to
take you back to Yarmouth. And I can't afford a passenger. If you
come, you come as a hand. I mean to own my smack at the end of this
voyage."
Duncan climbed after him into the boat. The _Willing Mind_ had now
six for her crew, Weeks; his son Willie, a lad of sixteen; Upton,
the first hand; Deakin, the decky; Rall, the baker's assistant, and
Alexander Duncan. And of these six four were almost competent. Deakin,
it is true, was making his second voyage; but Willie Weeks, though
young, had begun early; and Upton, a man of forty, knew the banks and
currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks.
"It's all right," said the skipper, "if the weather holds." And for
a month the weather did hold, and the catches were good, and Duncan
learned a great deal. He learnt how to keep a night-watch from
midnight till eight in the morning, and then stay on deck till noon;
how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel, and how
to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to
lee; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it; to gauge the
leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in
the compass; above all, he learnt to love the boat like a live thing,
as a man loves his horse, and to want every scanty inch of brass on
her to shine.
But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea. He gazed out
at night across the rippling starlit water, and the smacks nestling
upon it, and asked of his God: "Is this all?" And his God answered
him.
The beginning of it was the sudden looming of ships upon the horizon,
very clear, till they looked like carved toys. The skipper got out his
accounts and totted up his catches, and the prices they had fetched
in Billingsgate Market. Then he went on deck and watched the sun set.
There were no cloud-banks in the west, and he shook his head.
"It'll blow a bit from the east before morning," said he, and he
tapped on the barometer. Then he returned to his accounts and added
them up again. After a little he looked up, and saw the first hand
watching him with comprehension.
"Two or three really good hauls would do the trick," suggested Weeks.
The first hand nodded. "If it was my boat I should chance it to-morrow
before the weather blows up."
Weeks drummed his fists on the table and agreed.
On the morrow the Admiral headed north for the Great Fisher Bank, and
the fleet followed, with the exception of the _Willing Mind_. The
_Willing Mind_ lagged along in the rear without her topsails till
about half-past two in the afternoon, when Captain Weeks became
suddenly alert. He bore away till he was right before the wind,
hoisted every scrap of sail he could carry, rigged out a spinnaker
with his balloon fore-sail, and made a clean run for the coast of
Denmark. Deakin explained the manoeuvre to Duncan. "The old man's
goin' poachin'. He's after soles."
"Keep a look-out, lads!" cried Weeks. "It's not the Danish gun-boat
I'm afraid of; it's the fatherly English cruiser a-turning of us
back."
Darkness, however, found them unmolested. They crossed the three-mile
limit at eight o'clock, and crept close in under the Danish headlands
without a glimmer of light showing.
"I want all hands all night," said Weeks; "and there's a couple of
pounds for him as first see the bogey-man."
"Meaning the Danish gun-boat," explained Deakin.
The trawl was down before nine. The skipper stood by his lead. Upton
took the wheel, and all night they trawled in the shallows, bumping on
the grounds, with a sharp eye for the Danish gun-boat. They hauled in
at twelve and again at three and again at six, and they had just got
their last catch on deck when Duncan saw by the first grey of the
morning a dun-coloured trail of smoke hanging over a projecting knoll.
"There she is!" he cried.
"Yes, that's the gun-boat," answered Weeks. "We can laugh at her with
this wind."
He put his smack about, and before the gun-boat puffed round the
headland, three miles away, was reaching northwards with his sails
free. He rejoined the fleet that afternoon. "Fifty-two boxes of
soles!" said Weeks. "And every one of them worth two-pound-ten in
Billingsgate Market. This smack's mine!" and he stamped on the deck in
all the pride of ownership. "We'll take a reef in," he added. "There's
a no'th-easterly gale blowin' up and I don't know anything worse in
the No'th Sea. The sea piles in upon you from Newfoundland, piles in
till it strikes the banks. Then it breaks. You were right, Upton;
we'll be lying hove-to in the morning."
They were lying hove-to before the morning. Duncan, tossing about
in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an
interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high
voice. The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan
caught ran as follows--
You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing,
Your never can know when you're going to die.
Duncan tumbled on to the floor, fell about the cabin as he pulled
on his sea-boots and climbed up the companion. He clung to the
mizzen-runners in a night of extraordinary blackness. To port and to
starboard the lights of the smacks rose on the crests and sank in the
troughs, with such violence they had the air of being tossed up into
the sky and then extinguished in the water; while all round him there
flashed little points of white which suddenly lengthened out into
a horizontal line. There was one quite close to the quarter of the
_Willing Mind_. It stretched about the height of the gaff in a line of
white. The line suddenly descended towards him and became a sheet; and
then a voice bawled, "Water! Jump! Down the companion! Jump!"
There was a scamper of heavy boots, and a roar of water plunging over
the bulwarks, as though so many loads of wood had been dropped on the
deck. Duncan jumped for the cabin. Weeks and the mate jumped the next
second and the water sluiced down after them, put out the fire, and
washed them, choking and wrestling, about on the cabin floor. Weeks
was the first to disentangle himself, and he turned fiercely on
Duncan.
"What were you doing on deck? Upton and I keep the watch to-night. You
stay below, and, by God, I'll see you do it! I have fifty-two boxes of
soles to put aboard the fish-cutter in the morning, and I'm not going
to lose lives before I do that! This smack's mine!"
Captain Weeks was transformed into a savage animal fighting for his
own. All night he and the mate stood on the deck and plunged down the
open companion with a torrent of water to hurry them. All night Duncan
lay in his bunk listening to the bellowing of the wind, the great
thuds of solid green wave on the deck, the horrid rush and roaring of
the seas as they broke loose to leeward from under the smack's keel.
And he listened to something more--the whimpering of the baker's
assistant in the next bunk. "Three inches of deck! What's the use
of it! Lord ha' mercy on me, what's the use of it? No more than an
eggshell! We'll be broken in afore morning, broken in like a man's
skull under a bludgeon.... I'm no sailor, I'm not; I'm a baker. It
isn't right I should die at sea!"
Duncan stopped his ears, and thought of the journey some one would
have to make to the fish-cutter in the morning. There were fifty-two
boxes of soles to be put aboard.
He remembered the waves and the swirl of foam upon their crests and
the wind. Two men would be needed to row the boat, and the boat must
make three trips. The skipper and the first hand had been on deck all
night. There remained four, or rather three, for the baker's assistant
had ceased to count--Willie Weeks, Deakin, and himself, not a great
number to choose from. He felt that he was within an ace of a panic,
and not so far, after all, from that whimperer his neighbour. Two men
to row the boat--two men! His hands clutched at the iron bar of his
hammock; he closed his eyes tight; but the words were thundered out at
him overhead, in the whistle of the wind, and slashed at him by the
water against the planks at his side. He found that his lips were
framing excuses.
Duncan was on deck when the morning broke. It broke extraordinarily
slowly, a niggardly filtering of grey, sad light from the under edge
of the sea. The bare topmasts of the smacks showed one after the
other. Duncan watched each boat as it came into view with a keen
suspense. This was a ketch, and that, and that other, for there was
the peak of its reefed mainsail just visible, like a bird's wing, and
at last he saw it--the fish-cutter--lurching and rolling in the very
middle of the fleet, whither she had crept up in the night. He stared
at it; his belly was pinched with fear as a starveling's with
hunger; and yet he was conscious that, in a way, he would have been
disappointed if it had not been there.
"No other smack is shipping its fish," quavered a voice at his elbow.
It was the voice of the baker's assistant.
"But this smack is," replied Weeks, and he set his mouth hard. "And,
what's more, my Willie is taking it aboard. Now, who'll go with
Willie?"
"I will."
Weeks swung round on Duncan and stared at him. Then he stared out to
sea. Then he stared again at Duncan.
"You?"
"When I shipped as a hand on the _Willing Mind_, I took all a hand's
risks."
"And brought the willing mind," said Weeks with a smile, "Go, then!
Some one must go. Get the boat tackle ready, forward. Here, Willie,
put your life-belt on. You, too, Duncan, though God knows life-belts
won't be of no manner of use; but they'll save your insurance. Steady
with the punt there! If it slips inboard off the rail there will be a
broken back! And, Willie, don't get under the cutter's counter. She'll
come atop of you and smash you like an egg. I'll drop you as close as
I can to windward, and pick you up as close as I can to leeward."
The boat was dropped into the water and loaded up with fish-boxes.
Duncan and Willie Weeks took their places, and the boat slid away into
a furrow. Duncan sat in the boat and rowed. Willie Weeks stood in the
stern, facing him, and rowed and steered.
"Water!" said Willie every now and then, and a wave curled over the
bows and hit Duncan a stunning blow on the back.
"Row," said Willie, and Duncan rowed and rowed. His hands were ice, he
sat in water ice-cold, and his body perspired beneath his oil-skins,
but he rowed. Once, on the crest of a wave, Duncan looked out and saw
below them the deck of a smack, and the crew looking upwards at them
as though they were a horserace. "Row!" said Willie Weeks. Once, too,
at the bottom of a slope down which they had bumped dizzily, Duncan
again looked out, and saw the spar of a mainmast tossing just over the
edge of a grey roller. "Row," said Weeks, and a moment later, "Ship
your oar!" and a rope caught him across the chest.
They were alongside the cutter.
Duncan made fast the rope.
"Push her off!" suddenly cried Willie, and grasped an oar. But he was
too late. The cutter's bulwarks swung down towards him, disappeared
under water, caught the punt fairly beneath the keel and scooped it
clean on to the deck, cargo and crew.
"And this is only the first trip!" said Willie.
The two following trips, however, were made without accident.
"Fifty-two boxes at two-pound-ten," said Weeks, as the boat was swung
inboard. "That's a hundred and four, and ten two's are twenty, and
carry two, and ten fives are fifty, and two carried, and twenties into
that makes twenty-six. One hundred and thirty pounds--this smack's
mine, every rope on her. I tell you what, Duncan: you've done me a
good turn to-day, and I'll do you another. I'll land you at Helsund,
in Denmark, and you can get clear away. All we can do now is to lie
out this gale."
Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray
blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of
the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss--the thud of a
steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves
raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away
in a spume of foam from the ship's keel to lee; and the thrumming and
screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had
ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely
the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There
seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to
wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the
steady volume of the wind.
Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He
stood moodily by Duncan's side, his mind evidently labouring like
his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have
listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the
deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down
and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the
story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned
three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across
the seven-fathom part of the Dogger--the part that looks like a man's
leg in the chart--and which was turned upside-down through the bank
breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her
bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them
both with her iron counter instead.
"Look!" said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. "I don't know why
that breaker didn't hit us. I don't know what we should have done if
it had. I can't think why it didn't hit us! Are you saved?"