The Clearchus did not get off that day, and at six o’clock my father
and I walked home together, my heart like lead. The evening passed
somehow. We all went up to bed at nine, as we always did, while the
bell on the Stone Church was ringing the curfew; but we might as
well have stayed up for two or three hours longer, for I could not
sleep, and I am sure that my mother could not. It had begun to rain,
a dreary drizzle, before I finally fell asleep.
I was awakened to find my mother standing in my doorway. She was
smiling, but she looked as if she had not slept well. It was already
after six. I jumped up, slid into my clothes hastily, and joined
the family at breakfast, but I could scarcely eat. I was glad when
my father pushed back his plate and got up. I said good-bye simply
enough to my brothers, and they said good-bye to me, but they did not
get up. They did not even stop eating. My mother came to the door
with us. Tears stood in her eyes, but she smiled as she gave me a
long, close hug. I returned her hug and her kiss, but I was very near
to tears and I could not speak, so I bolted out at the door into the
rain after my father, and I waved my hand to her. That was another
picture that I carried locked in my breast of my mother standing at
the open door, in the dreary drizzle, looking after me and smiling.
Mothers have a good deal to bear. I wonder that they stand it.
We did not get off until after ten o’clock. I was the first to
see it—I mean the job wagon with its load of men and bundles. It
was being driven on to the next wharf below—Central Wharf it was,
although I did not know the wharves infallibly by name then. I called
to {21} my father, took up my bundle, and walked, rather slowly, I
am afraid, around the head of the dock. The afternoon before I should
have run. My father caught up with me at the head of the wharf.
The wagon was unloading about halfway down the wharf when we got
there, and the men were taking out their bundles. Those bundles
were of all sizes and all colors, but all were shapeless, a few in
neat canvas bags, several in pillow-cases, and the others in gay
flame-colored cloths, red and orange and a peculiar blue, but the
predominating color was some shade of magenta. It is curious how
fond those Western Islanders are of magenta. The men were grouping
themselves, squatting on their bundles in the drizzle, or sitting
on the rounded tops of the mooring-piles or on the stringpiece, or
standing. I noticed only three of them: a great, gaunt, very black
man, with thin hoops of gold in his ears, who stood impassively,
his arms folded across his breast, and gazed at nothing and did not
speak; a smaller man, also intensely black and with similar gold
hoops in his ears, who sat atop of a pile and smiled and poured a
steady stream of talk that I could not understand up to the first,
and the gaunt man smiled now and then, showing a set of teeth that
were sharp and of a dazzling whiteness; and a very old man, who I
suppose was originally a white man, with fingers permanently bent,
like talons, and very wrinkled face that looked like leather in
texture and in color. He was sitting on the stringpiece, his neat
canvas bag between his knees, and looking up at the two black men;
and occasionally there would flit over his face a humorous smile,
leaving the look of humor there. On the whole it was a quiet crowd,
and merry enough, considering the weather. A man, who I found
afterwards was the second mate, moved slowly around among the groups
and finally stood still, holding converse with none and gazing out
over the harbor. {22}
The old man cast his humorous eye up at my father.
“Lovely morning,” he said.
My father laughed. “If you take it so,” he said, “it ’s better. After
all, what does the weather matter to an old sailorman like you?”
“Not a bit. I never let it make any difference to me. But the talk
of these lads,” he said, waving a weatherbeaten hand, with its
talon-fingers, at the two black men, “always makes me want to laugh.
It sounds like monkey talk.”
“Don’t you understand it?”
He shook his head. “Not me. I never learned Portagee. I should die
laughin’ if I tried. They had none in the navy in my day.”
My father was interested. “Have you been in the navy? I should have
said merchant vessels, but I did n’t think of the navy.”
The old man nodded. “Oh, aye,” he said. “It was the navy until the
war was over, and I was too old for that, and then the merchant
service for a couple o’ years, and then whalin’. Whalin’ ’s easier.
They don’t drive a vessel so. You were n’t goin’ on this ship?”
My father smiled, and laid his great arm across my shoulders.
“No, I ’m not going, but—”
“The boy?” the old man interrupted. “Is he so? Well, can I be sort of
lookin’ after him? I ’d take him under my wing with pleasure, perhaps
teach him a thing or two, and try to keep him out o’ trouble.”
My father was pleased, and accepted the old sailor’s offer; and he
told him of his own experience in the navy, and they swapped yarns
for half an hour. The old man had been a boatswain in the navy. He
was only fifty-eight, he said. I don’t wonder he put it that way. The
second mate had moved, and I looked up and saw the Helen Augusta,
our largest tugboat, just about to make a landing at the end of the
wharf. {23}
I seized my father’s arm in a panic.
He smiled. There was something infinitely protective in my father’s
smile.
“I ’m going down with you, Timmie, and come back in the tug. It ’s
too wet to work, luckily, so it won’t make any difference to me, and
I guess Cap’n Nelson ’ll let me go. Unless,” he added, looking at
me suddenly, “you ’d rather not have me. Perhaps you ’d rather say
good-bye here. If you would I ’d understand it.”
I shook my head, and clung fast to his arm. I could not have spoken
to save my life. The old sailor, my new friend, was rolling along
beside us, his canvas bag over his shoulder and sticking out a foot
or two fore and aft. He glanced at me and smiled, and we all trooped
aboard the tug on to her upper deck, and the men filed down the
ladder to a place where it was dry and warm.
We were about to follow them when we were hailed from the pilot
house. We obeyed the beckoning finger, and in the pilot house we
found Captain Nelson and the captain of the tugboat, a silent,
sour-faced man whose name I cannot now remember, although it was then
very familiar to me. Another man was leaning on the windowsill, his
head outside, and one hand grasping a spoke of the wheel. He shouted
some orders, pulled the bell, and we backed for a minute against
a stern hawser. Then he pulled the bell once, and the chug of the
engine stopped; before the water had stopped its swirling past the
side he pulled the bell again, the engine chugged once more, and
the bows turned faster toward the harbor. I was looking out at the
wharves through a glass covered with little fine drops of mist, and
I saw one of the men on the wharf lift the bight of heavy line over
the top of the mooring-pile and drop it into the water as we began to
go ahead. The man at the wheel pulled the jingle bell, and the engine
chugged faster, and I could hear little familiar noises from the
engine, as though it had settled down for a day’s work. {24}
I was still looking out through the misty glass at the rapidly
receding wharves, with the vessel that the riggers were not through
with, the other that my father was working on hauled down, the
stagings floating in the dock beside her; the lightship in the
process of being hove down; the pens of sheathing and the rows of
oil barrels; the tops of the wharves themselves, every foot of which
I knew intimately. I wondered when I should next set foot on those
familiar wharves; the picture blurred a little, and it was not the
rain. But I was not quite fifteen, and I was going away on a voyage
of four or five years. At fifteen, four or five years might as well
be four or five æons. Our turning had cut off my view of the wharves,
and we had straightened out for the Clearchus, and the rain was
coming dead ahead.
We were drawing alongside the Clearchus, and we made fast and the
crew went over the side stolidly, although some of them seemed merry
enough, and my old sailor took the whole thing as a joke. Then
Captain Nelson went, and my father and I. By the time I had got on
the deck of the ship the captain had gone aft and was talking with
the mate.
I had never happened to be on the Clearchus before, and neither had
I been on any whaler just starting on a voyage. Her deck was well
cluttered with all sorts of stuff, which there had been no time to
stow below, and no men to do it. Some of it was covered roughly with
tarpaulins to keep it from the wet, and it was shoved into corners
or littered the alleyways between the great brick try-works and the
bulwarks. The deck itself—where it showed at all—was covered with a
film of moisture, and seemed to have sweated just oil enough to make
it very slippery.
The deck of an old whaler is full of odd structures. On almost all
old whaleships there were two small deckhouses aft, one on either
side, with the wheel and the cabin {25} skylight between them;
and on many ships this space was roofed over, giving the steersman
protection in bad weather. This was the case on the Clearchus;
and there was another structure just forward of this after house.
This “gallows,” as it is called, was no more than a roof covering
the booby-hatch—which led to the steerage; where the boat-steerers
slept—supported on posts at the corners, the posts inclined sharply
inward at the angle of the standing rigging. On the top of this
roof were three spare whale-boats, bottom up. There was a third
structure—merely a roof—just aft of the foremast, over the try-works.
The galley was in the starboard side of the after house, which may
strike some as a very queer place for it, but it was always so on a
whaler. It was necessarily very small, taking up less than half of
that side. The cabin stairs, or companion, were in the port side of
the after house.
We took refuge under the gallows over the booby-hatch, from which
point we had as clear a view of the deck as it was possible to have
anywhere except from the scuppers. The deck was anything but clear,
and the man at the wheel saw the great butts of the masts, the
try-works, and other things of a more temporary nature, but little
of the deck, and of the sea before the ship and of the sky above
nothing at all. There was no need for him to see either. He had an
unobstructed view of the compass.
The tug took us about twenty-five miles, but it seemed an unbearably
short journey on that dull, rainy morning. The silence was broken
only by the soft noise of the sea, and of the ship going through it,
and by the creak and groan of the hawser on the bitts and of the
yards in the slings as she rose and fell gently; and by the sound of
the water dripping from the yards and rigging upon the deck, and now
and then a voice. Altogether it was a silent, gray, dismal journey.
Coils of rope hung from the belaying pins near me, and they swung
regularly with the {26} motion of the ship. I wished that they would
stop. They did not, of course, except for a moment, regularly; then
they began again.
The time was coming soon when the tug would cast off, and my father
must go back. We got beyond Devil’s Bridge, with the Vineyard looming
indistinctly, but scarcely visible, on our weather beam. The tug
whistled, and Captain Nelson came to us.
“Well, Tim,” he said, “I guess you ’ll have to get ready. It ’s too
rough for the tug to come alongside, but I ’ll send you over in a
boat. She ’s dropping us now.”
My father said he was sorry to be so much trouble; and Captain Nelson
said it was no matter, that it would be good practice for the crew.
Then he looked at me, and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Timmie,” he said gently, “you have n’t signed yet, and if you want
to go back with your father I ’ll send you.”
I shook my head furiously. “No, thank you, sir,” I said. “I ’ll sail
with you—if you want me—if you ’ll take me.”
How could I back out then? I should have been a laughing-stock for
years, and I should never have a better chance. But I did want to go
back with my father.
Captain Nelson smiled. “I ’ll take you, and you ’ll get over your
homesickness when we get a sight of the sun. It ’s a dismal day to
start off.”
They cast off the hawser, and backed the main topsail, and the vessel
lay there with the seas beating upon her while the tug came up abeam,
and lay rolling. And they came and cast loose the very boat we were
standing under, and the men tailed on to the falls, and the boat was
lowered until it was level with the rail; and two of the crew tumbled
in to look after the falls, and my father gave me one hug, and I
clung to him for a moment.
“Good-bye, Timmie,” he whispered. “I ’ll give your {27} love to your
mother. Be a good boy, and do a little more than is expected of you.
Be ready to do a man’s work when you are able, and let us be proud of
you when you come home.”
The men began to slack away on the falls. I watched the men slide
down the falls as the boat touched the water, my father among them;
and the falls were unhooked quickly, two men holding her off from the
side of the ship. Then they shoved off, the five long oars took the
water, and they rowed to the tug, the whaleboat rising to the seas as
lightly as a cork. And they drew alongside the tug, but did not stop,
and my father stepped out upon the broad rail of the tug and down
upon her deck, and turned to wave to me.
As the boat came back the tug started, with long blasts of her
whistle as a message of farewell to us. My father still stood in the
gangway, close to her house, and waved to me. I watched her as long
as I could see her; a mite—a speck tossing on the heaving sea.
{28}