It wasn’t long before she began to live up to her reputation. She
started in quite a small way by fouling her anchor off Gravesend, and
giving every one a peck of trouble clearing it. Incidentally, it was Mr.
Mate’s morning-after head that was responsible for the mess. But that
didn’t matter: it went down to the ship’s account all the same. Her
next exploit was to cut a hay barge in two in the estuary. It was foggy
at the time, the barge’s skipper was drunk, and the “crew”--a boy of
sixteen or so--lost his head when the ship loomed suddenly up right on
top of him, and put his helm up instead of down. But what of that? She
was the Unlucky “Altisidora,” or very likely the barge wouldn’t have
been there at all. Down went another black mark against her name.
The captain, in the meantime, had apparently gone into retreat like an
Anglican parson. He had dived below as soon as he came on board, and
there he remained, to all intents and purposes as remote and
inaccessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet, until the ship was well to
westward of the Lizard. This, Anderton learned, was his invariable
custom when nearing or leaving land. Mr. Rumbold, the mate, defined his
malady briefly and scornfully as “soundings-itis.” “No nerve--that’s
what’s the matter with him: as much use as the ship’s figurehead and a
damn sight less ornamental!”
Not that it seemed to make much difference whether he was there or not.
He was a singularly colourless little man, whose very features were so
curiously indeterminate that his face made no more impression on the
mind than if it had been a sheet of blank paper. It seemed to be a
positive agony to him to give an order. Even in ordinary conversation he
was never quite sure which word to put first. He never finished a
sentence or even a phrase straight ahead, but dropped it and made a
fresh start, only to change his mind a second time and run back to pick
up what he had discarded. And this same painful uncertainty was evident
in all he did. His fingers were constantly busy--fiddling with his
beard, smoothing his tie, twiddling the buttons of his coat. Even his
eyes were irresolute--wandering hither and thither as if they couldn’t
decide to look at the same thing two minutes together. He had the look
of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, in point of fact,
he was. He had jockeyed himself somehow into the command of the
“Altisidora,” through family influence or something of the kind, and had
lived ever since in momentary dread of his unfitness for his position
being discovered.
Anderton, for his part, owed to the skipper’s invisibility one of the
most unforgettable moments of his whole life. The pilot had just gone
ashore. The mate was below. To all intent Anderton had the ship to
himself.
A glorious moment--a magnificent moment! He was nineteen--not six months
out of his time--and he was in sole charge of a ship--and such a ship.
The veriest cockboat might well have gained a borrowed splendour in the
circumstances; but here was no need for the rose-coloured spectacles of
idealizing youth. Tier on tier, her canvas rose rounding and dimpling
against the blue of the sky. She curtseyed, bowed, dipped, and rose on
the long lift of the seas. Her hull quivered like a thing alive. Oh, she
was beautiful! beautiful! Whatever life might yet hold for him of
happiness or success, it could bring again no moment quite so splendid
as this.
Mr. Rumbold, after a few days of the most appalling moroseness while the
drink was working out of his system, developed, rather to Anderton’s
surprise, into a quite entertaining companion, possessed of the relics
of a good education, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of unprintable
stories, and a pretty if slightly bitter wit. He was perfectly conscious
of the failing that had made a mess of his career. Anderton guessed from
a hint he let drop one day that he had once had a command and had lost
it, probably through over-indulgence in the good old English pastime
known as “lifting the elbow.” “A sailor’s life would be all right if it
was all like this,” he broke out one day--it was one of those glorious
exhilarating days in the Trades when the whole world seems full of
rejoicing--“it’s the damned seaports that play hell with a fellow,
Anderton, you take my word for it! Drink, my boy, that’s what does
it--drink and little dirty sluts of women--that’s what we risk our lives
every day earning money for! It’s all a big joke--a big bloody joke, my
son--and the only thing to do is to laugh at it!” And off he went again
on one of his Rabelaisian stories.
The ship fought her way to the southward against a succession of
baffling airs and head winds where the Trades should have been, and a
few degrees north of the Line ran into a belt of flat calm which bade
fair to keep her there until the crack of doom. It wasn’t a case of the
usual unreliable, irritating Doldrum weather. It was a dead flat calm in
which day after day came and went while the sails drooped lifeless
against the masts, and men’s nerves got more and more on edge, and
Anderton began to have visions of the months and the years passing by,
and the weed growing long and green on the “Altisidora’s” hull like the
whiskers of some marine deity, and himself returning, one day, old and
white-haired and toothless, to a world which had forgotten his
existence. To crown all, the melancholy steward at this time suffered a
sad bereavement. His cat was missing--a ginger-and-white specimen,
gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s
cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all
the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost,
making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected
places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The
steward had only to murmur “P’sss--p’sss--p’sss!” under his breath, and
out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying
roar of “Damn you--shishing that infernal cat again! If I hear any more
of it I’ll wring your neck!”
But good and bad times and all times pass over--and there came at last a
day when the “Altisidora’s” idle sails once more filled to a heartening
breeze, and the seas slipped bubbling under her keel, and she sped
rejoicing on her way as if no dark star brooded over her.
The steward poked his head out of his pantry that morning as Anderton
passed, with a smile that was like a convulsion of nature.
“Ol’ Ginger’s turned up again, sir!... What do you think of ’er?”
He indicated a small box in the corner in which a gently palpitating
mass of kittenhood explained how Ginger had been spending her time. The
prodigal in the meantime was parading proudly round the steward’s legs,
thrumming to the end of her thin tail with the cat’s ever-recurring
surprise and delight over the miracle of maternity.
“Artful, ain’t she?” said the steward. “Right down in the lazareet, she
was! Must ’ave poked ’erself down there w’en I was gettin’ up some
stores las’ week. That’s ’cos I drahned ’er last lot--see? Wot, drahn
these ’ere! No blinkin’ fear! W’y, they’re _black_ ’uns--ketch me
drahnin’ a black cat!”
Whether the advent of the black kittens had anything to do with it or
not, it certainly seemed for a time as if the luck had turned. Day after
day the ship reeled the knots off behind her at a steady fifteen. Every
one’s spirits rose. “Wot price the hunlucky ‘Altisidora’ now?” said Bill
Green to the man next him on the yard. They were tarring down, their
tar-pots slung round their necks as they worked. “There you go, you
ruddy fool, askin’ for trouble!” replied Mike, the ancient shellback,
wise in the lore of the sea. “Didn’t I tell ye now?” Bill’s tar-pot had
given an unexpected tilt and spread its contents impartially over Bill’s
person and the deck below. “If you was in the Downeaster ‘Elias K.
Slocum’ wot I sailed in once, you’d git a dose o’ belayin’ pin soup for
supper over that, my son, as’d learn you to play tricks with luck.”
The luck didn’t last long. Possibly a hatful of blind black kittens had
not the efficacy as mascots of a full-grown black Tom. Ginger’s progeny
undeniably looked very small, helpless, squirming morsels to contend
successfully against the Dark Gods.
The ship was by now getting into the high latitudes, and sail had to be
gradually shortened until she was running down the Easting under lower
topsails and foresail. Anderton had been keeping the middle watch, and
had gone below, tired out, after a night of “All hands on deck.” It
seemed to him that his eyes were no sooner closed than once again the
familiar summons beat upon the doors of his consciousness, and he
stumbled on deck, still only half roused from sleep, to find a scene of
the wildest confusion.
A sudden shift of wind had caught the ship aback. Both the foremast and
mainmast were hanging over the side in a raffle of rigging, only the
mizen, with the rags of the lower topsail still clinging to the yard,
being left standing. The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen
no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea,
under the grey light of the dreary dawn--a sight to daunt the stoutest
heart.
It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto
unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a
drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining
companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its
more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. But now
he recognized in him a fine and resourceful seaman and a determined and
indomitable leader of men in the face of instant danger. The suddenness
and completeness of the disaster which might well have induced the
numbness of despair, only seemed to arouse in him a spirit in proportion
to the needs of the moment. During the long hours while the ship fought
for her life--during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept
going incessantly to free her from the volume of water that had flooded
her hold--when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient
sail to keep her going before the wind--he it was who continually urged,
encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who
thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. He it was who
worked hardest of all, and who, when things seemed at their worst and
blackest, brought a grin to haggard, worn-out faces with a shanty stave
of an irresistible humour and--be it added--a devastating
unprintableness.
The ship managed to hobble into Cape Town under her jury rig, where Mr.
Rumbold promptly vanished into his customary haunts, to reappear just
before the ship sailed after her refit, the same sprawling and
disreputable wreck he had been when Anderton first saw him. He never
again showed that side of himself that had come to the surface on the
night of disaster; but Anderton never quite forgot it, and because of
the memory of it he spent many a patient hour in port tracking the mate
to his favourite unsavoury resorts, and dragging him, maudlin, riotous,
or quarrelsome, back again to the ship.
The “Altisidora” arrived in Sydney a hundred and forty days out. Her
fame had gone before her, and she attracted quite an amount of attention
in the capacity of a nautical curiosity. Moreover, the legend grew
apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the
beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed
her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t
she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in
her!”
And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of
herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She
lost spars--she lost sails--she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows
what! She scraped bits off wharves; she lost her sheer in open
roadsteads and barged into other ships. She ran short of food and had to
supplicate passing ships for help. When she couldn’t think of anything
else to do she even tried to run down her own tug. And yet in spite of
it all--perhaps, for sailormen are queer beings, because of it all--her
men liked her. They cursed her, they chid her, kindly, without rancour,
as one might chide a charming but erring woman; but they stuck by her
all the same. The old sailmaker, a West Country man who had lost all his
teeth on hard tack, had been with her for years. “You don’t mind sailing
in an unlucky ship, then, Sails,” said Anderton to him one day, when he
was helping him to cut a new upper topsail to replace one of the ship’s
casual losses.
The old man pushed his spectacles up on to his bald head, and looked out
over the sea with eyes flattened by age and faded to the remote blue of
an early morning sky when mist is clearing.
“I rackon’t ain’t no use worryin’ ’bout luck, sir,” he said, “so long’s
there’s a job o’ work wants doin’.”
From Sydney she went over to Newcastle to load coal for Chile, then on
to ’Frisco with nitrates, ’Frisco to Caleta Buena again, over again to
Newcastle, and last of all to Sydney once more to load wool for home.