Part II

Produced by Dianne Bean

THE EBB-TIDE

A TRIO AND QUARTETTE

By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyde Osbourne

'There is a tide in the affairs of men.'

Part I.

Chapter 1. NIGHT ON THE BEACH

Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many

European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and

disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted the

steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must marry

for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame supports

them in sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining

some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some relic

(such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman, they sprawl

in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with memoirs of

the music-hall. And there are still others, less pliable, less capable,

less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of

plenty, to lack bread.

At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the

beach under a purao tree.

It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home,

a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers,

dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands. Long

ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house about the tiny

pagan city. Only the street lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in

the umbrageous alleys or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the

port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the Government

pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottomed schooners,

where they lay moored close in like dinghies, and their crews were

stretched upon the deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude tent

amidst the disorder of merchandise.

But the men under the purao had no thought of sleep. The same

temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer; but

it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and the

bottle of cocoanut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about

the island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton

clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the

tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast

to mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.

In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were ON THE BEACH.

Common calamity had brought them acquainted, as the three most miserable

English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their misery, they knew

next to nothing of each other, not even their true names. For each had

made a long apprenticeship in going downward; and each, at some stage of

the descent, had been shamed into the adoption of an alias. And yet not

one of them had figured in a court of justice; two were men of kindly

virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered under the purao, had a tattered

Virgil in his pocket.

Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick

would long ago have sacrificed that last possession; but the demand

for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South

Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he

could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger.

He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the

old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less

beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. Or he

would pause on random country walks; sit on the path side, gazing over

the sea on the mountains of Eimeo; and dip into the Aeneid, seeking

sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way of oracles) replied with no

very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England at least

would throng upon the exile's memory: the busy schoolroom, the green

playing-fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and

the fireside, and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of

those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced

and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and

become native in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so

much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student's own

irrevocable youth.

Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent, active, and ambitious man,

small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived

of the boy; he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford

scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With all

his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient

in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study,

worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and

took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house

was disastrously wound up; Mr Herrick must begin the world again as

a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions and

accept with gratitude a career that he detested and despised. He had

no head for figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint of

hours, and despised the aims and the success of merchants. To grow rich

was none of his ambitions; rather to do well. A worse or a more bold

young man would have refused the destiny; perhaps tried his future with

his pen; perhaps enlisted. Robert, more prudent, possibly more timid,

consented to embrace that way of life in which he could most readily

assist his family. But he did so with a mind divided; fled the

neighbourhood of former comrades; and chose, out of several positions

placed at his disposal, a clerkship in New York.

His career thenceforth was one of unbroken shame. He did not drink,

he was exactly honest, he was never rude to his employers, yet was

everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought

no attention; his day was a tissue of things neglected and things done

amiss; and from place to place and from town to town, he carried the

character of one thoroughly incompetent. No man can bear the word

applied to him without some flush of colour, as indeed there is

none other that so emphatically slams in a man's face the door

of self-respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious of talents and

acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in which he was

found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite. Early in his fall, he

had ceased to be able to make remittances; shortly after, having nothing

but failure to communicate, he ceased writing home; and about a year

before this tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San

Francisco by a vulgar and infuriated German Jew, he had broken the last

bonds of self-respect, and upon a sudden Impulse, changed his name and

invested his last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine, the City

of Papeete. With what expectation he had trimmed his flight for the

South Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there were fortunes

to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not more gifted than

himself had climbed in the island world to be queen's consorts and

king's ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with any manful purpose,

he would have kept his father's name; the alias betrayed his moral

bankruptcy; he had struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate

himself or help his straitened family; and he came to the islands (where

he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and manners easy) a skulker

from life's battle and his own immediate duty. Failure, he had said, was

his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.

It is fortunately not enough to say 'I will be base.' Herrick continued

in the islands his career of failure; but in the new scene and under the

new name, he suffered no less sharply than before. A place was got, it

was lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the keepers of

restaurants he fell to more open charity upon the wayside; as time went

on, good nature became weary, and after a repulse or two, Herrick became

shy. There were women enough who would have supported a far worse and a

far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did both,

some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation. Drenched

with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and ruinous

prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps,

his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had

drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to

be resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion

against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair. The time

had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of an easy and perhaps

agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise; he had proved

himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience that he

could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely pride or strength,

that was perhaps only refinement, withheld him from capitulation; but

he looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing rage, and sometimes

wondered at his patience.

It was now the fourth month completed, and still there was no change

or sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds

of every size and shape and density, some black as ink stains, some

delicate as lawn, threw the marvel of her Southern brightness over the

same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the

perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the

masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of

the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,

with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the

American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master

mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes

and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was

society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he

had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution; he was one whose

hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace

about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,

and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in

Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged

from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old

employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and

all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.

Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now

raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the

purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling

as they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a

touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool and, squatting

on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.

Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from

farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in

the distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the

suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel

ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If

a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that

infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers,

perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the

London clerk. He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing,

and the dainties of the sickroom; he lay there now, in the cold open,

exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was

besides infirm; the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions

watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled

them, and contended with and conquered their abhorrence. The disgust

attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same

time, and with more than compensating strength, shame for a sentiment so

inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil

they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is

always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual

and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken

helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor

wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they

would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any

mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was

courage; and he would make haste to reassure them in a pleasantry not

always decent.

'I'm all right, pals,' he gasped once: 'this is the thing to strengthen

the muscles of the larynx.'

'Well, you take the cake!' cried the captain.

'O, I'm good plucked enough,' pursued the sufferer with a broken

utterance. 'But it do seem bloomin' hard to me, that I should be the

only party down with this form of vice, and the only one to do the funny

business. I think one of you other parties might wake up. Tell a fellow

something.'

'The trouble is we've nothing to tell, my son,' returned the captain.

'I'll tell you, if you like, what I was thinking,' said Herrick.

'Tell us anything,' said the clerk, 'I only want to be reminded that I

ain't dead.'

Herrick took up his parable, lying on his face and speaking slowly and

scarce above his breath, not like a man who has anything to say, but

like one talking against time.

'Well, I was thinking this,' he began: 'I was thinking I lay on Papeete

beach one night--all moon and squalls and fellows coughing--and I was

cold and hungry, and down in the mouth, and was about ninety years of

age, and had spent two hundred and twenty of them on Papeete beach. And

I was thinking I wished I had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother,

or could raise Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember how you did it. I

knew you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the Freischutz:

and that you took off your coat and turned up your sleeves, for I had

seen Formes do that when he was playing Kaspar, and you could see (by

the way he went about it) it was a business he had studied; and that you

ought to have something to kick up a smoke and a bad smell, I dare say

a cigar might do, and that you ought to say the Lord's Prayer backwards.

Well, I wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather a feat, you see.

And then I wondered if I would say it forward, and I thought I did.

Well, no sooner had I got to WORLD WITHOUT END, than I saw a man in a

pariu, and with a mat under his arm, come along the beach from the town.

He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped and crippled, and

all the time he kept coughing. At first I didn't cotton to his looks,

I thought, and then I got sorry for the old soul because he coughed so

hard. I remembered that we had some of that cough mixture the American

consul gave the captain for Hay. It never did Hay a ha'porth of service,

but I thought it might do the old gentleman's business for him, and

stood up. “Yorana!” says I. “Yorana!” says he. “Look here,” I said,

“I've got some first-rate stuff in a bottle; it'll fix your cough,

savvy? _Haere mai_ and I'll measure you a tablespoonful in the palm of my

hand, for all our plate is at the bankers.” So I thought the old party

came up, and the nearer he came, the less I took to him. But I had

passed my word, you see.'

'Wot is this bloomin' drivel?' interrupted the clerk. 'It's like the rot

there is in tracts.'

'It's a story; I used to tell them to the kids at home,' said Herrick.

'If it bores you, I'll drop it.'

'O, cut along!' returned the sick man, irritably. 'It's better than

nothing.'

'Well,' continued Herrick, 'I had no sooner given him the cough mixture

than he seemed to straighten up and change, and I saw he wasn't a

Tahitian after all, but some kind of Arab, and had a long beard on his

chin. “One good turn deserves another,” says he. “I am a magician out

of the Arabian Nights, and this mat that I have under my arm is the

original carpet of Mohammed Ben Somebody-or-other. Say the word, and you

can have a cruise upon the carpet.” “You don't mean to say this is the

Travelling Carpet?” I cried. “You bet I do,” said he. “You've been

to America since last I read the Arabian Nights,” said I, a little

suspicious. “I should think so,” said he. “Been everywhere. A man with a

carpet like this isn't going to moulder in a semi-detached villa.” Well,

that struck me as reasonable. “All right,” I said; “and do you mean to

tell me I can get on that carpet and go straight to London, England?” I

said, “London, England,” captain, because he seemed to have been so long

in your part of the world. “In the crack of a whip,” said he. I

figured up the time. What is the difference between Papeete and London,

captain?'

'Taking Greenwich and Point Venus, nine hours, odd minutes and seconds,'

replied the mariner.

'Well, that's about what I made it,' resumed Herrick, 'about nine hours.

Calling this three in the morning, I made out I would drop into London

about noon; and the idea tickled me immensely. “There's only one

bother,” I said, “I haven't a copper cent. It would be a pity to go

to London and not buy the morning Standard.” “O!” said he, “you don't

realise the conveniences of this carpet. You see this pocket? you've

only got to stick your hand in, and you pull it out filled with

sovereigns.”

'Double-eagles, wasn't iff inquired the captain.

'That was what it was!' cried Herrick. 'I thought they seemed unusually

big, and I remember now I had to go to the money-changers at Charing

Cross and get English silver.'

'O, you went there?' said the clerk. 'Wot did you do? Bet you had a B.

and S.!'

'Well, you see, it was just as the old boy said--like the cut of a

whip,' said Herrick. 'The one minute I was here on the beach at three in

the morning, the next I was in front of the Golden Cross at midday.

At first I was dazzled, and covered my eyes, and there didn't seem the

smallest change; the roar of the Strand and the roar of the reef were

like the same: hark to it now, and you can hear the cabs and buses

rolling and the streets resound! And then at last I could look about,

and there was the old place, and no mistake! With the statues in

the square, and St Martin's-in-the-Fields, and the bobbies, and the

sparrows, and the hacks; and I can't tell you what I felt like. I felt

like crying, I believe, or dancing, or jumping clean over the Nelson

Column. I was like a fellow caught up out of Hell and flung down into

the dandiest part of Heaven. Then I spotted for a hansom with a spanking

horse. “A shilling for yourself, if you're there in twenty minutes!”

said I to the jarvey. He went a good pace, though of course it was a

trifle to the carpet; and in nineteen minutes and a half I was at the

door.'

'What door?' asked the captain.

'Oh, a house I know of,' returned Herrick.

'But it was a public-house!' cried the clerk--only these were not his

words. 'And w'y didn't you take the carpet there instead of trundling in

a growler?'

'I didn't want to startle a quiet street,' said the narrator.

'Bad form. And besides, it was a hansom.'

'Well, and what did you do next?' inquired the captain.

'Oh, I went in,' said Herrick.

'The old folks?' asked the captain.

'That's about it,' said the other, chewing a grass.

'Well, I think you are about the poorest 'and at a yarn!' cried the

clerk. 'Crikey, it's like Ministering Children! I can tell you there

would be more beer and skittles about my little jaunt. I would go and

have a B. and S. for luck. Then I would get a big ulster with astrakhan

fur, and take my cane and do the la-de-la down Piccadilly. Then I would

go to a slap-up restaurant, and have green peas, and a bottle of fizz,

and a chump chop--Oh! and I forgot, I'd 'ave some devilled whitebait

first--and green gooseberry tart, and 'ot coffee, and some of that form

of vice in big bottles with a seal--Benedictine--that's the bloomin'

nyme! Then I'd drop into a theatre, and pal on with some chappies,

and do the dancing rooms and bars, and that, and wouldn't go 'ome

till morning, till daylight doth appear. And the next day I'd have

water-cresses, 'am, muffin, and fresh butter; wouldn't I just, O my!'

The clerk was interrupted by a fresh attack of coughing.

'Well, now, I'll tell you what I would do,' said the captain: 'I would

have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from the mizzen

cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered

tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey

and a sucking-pig. Then I'd go to a wine merchant's and get a dozen of

champagne, and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and strong,

something in the port or madeira line, the best in the store. Then I'd

bear up for a toy-store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted toys

for the piccaninnies; and then to a confectioner's and take in cakes and

pies and fancy bread, and that stuff with the plums in it; and then to

a news-agency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids,

and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering

himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private

madhouse; and then I'd tell the fellow to drive home.'

'There ought to be some syrup for the kids,' suggested Herrick; 'they

like syrup.'

'Yes, syrup for the kids, red syrup at that!' said the captain. 'And

those things they pull at, and go pop, and have measly poetry inside.

And then I tell you we'd have a thanksgiving day and Christmas tree

combined. Great Scott, but I would like to see the kids! I guess they

would light right out of the house, when they saw daddy driving up. My

little Adar--'

The captain stopped sharply.

'Well, keep it up!' said the clerk.

'The damned thing is, I don't know if they ain't starving!' cried the

captain.

'They can't be worse off than we are, and that's one comfort,' returned

the clerk. 'I defy the devil to make me worse off.'

It seemed as if the devil heard him. The light of the moon had been

some time cut off and they had talked in darkness. Now there was heard a

roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of the lagoon was seen to

whiten; and before they had staggered to their feet, a squall burst in

rain upon the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche one must

have lived in the tropics to conceive; a man panted in its assault, as

he might pant under a shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night

and water.

They fled, groping for their usual shelter--it might be almost called

their home--in the old calaboose; came drenched into its empty chambers;

and lay down, three sops of humanity on the cold coral floors, and

presently, when the squall was overpast, the others could hear in the

darkness the chattering of the clerk's teeth.

'I say, you fellows,' he walled, 'for God's sake, lie up and try to warm

me. I'm blymed if I don't think I'll die else!'

So the three crept together into one wet mass, and lay until day came,

shivering and dozing off, and continually re-awakened to wretchedness by

the coughing of the clerk.

Chapter 2. MORNING ON THE BEACH--THE THREE LETTERS

The clouds were all fled, the beauty of the tropic day was spread upon

Papeete; and the wall of breaking seas upon the reef, and the palms upon

the islet, already trembled in the heat. A French man-of-war was going

out, homeward bound; she lay in the middle distance of the port, an ant

heap for activity. In the night a schooner had come in, and now lay far

out, hard by the passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of pestilence,

flew on her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes headed

round the point and towards the market, bright as a scarf with the

many-coloured clothing of the natives and the piles of fruit. But not

even the beauty and the welcome warmth of the morning, not even these

naval movements, so interesting to sailors and to idlers, could engage

the attention of the outcasts. They were still cold at heart, their

mouths sour from the want of steep, their steps rambling from the

lack of food; and they strung like lame geese along the beach in a

disheartened silence. It was towards the town they moved; towards the

town whence smoke arose, where happier folk were breakfasting; and as

they went, their hungry eyes were upon all sides, but they were only

scouting for a meal.

A small and dingy schooner lay snug against the quay, with which it was

connected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five

Kanakas who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried feis,

and drinking coffee from tin mugs.

'Eight bells: knock off for breakfast!' cried the captain with a

miserable heartiness. 'Never tried this craft before; positively my

first appearance; guess I'll draw a bumper house.'

He came close up to where the plank rested on the grassy quay; turned

his back upon the schooner, and began to whistle that lively air, 'The

Irish Washerwoman.' It caught the ears of the Kanaka seamen like a

preconcerted signal; with one accord they looked up from their meal and

crowded to the ship's side, fei in hand and munching as they looked.

Even as a poor brown Pyrenean bear dances in the streets of English

towns under his master's baton; even so, but with how much more

of spirit and precision, the captain footed it in time to his own

whistling, and his long morning shadow capered beyond him on the grass.

The Kanakas smiled on the performance; Herrick looked on heavy-eyed,

hunger for the moment conquering all sense of shame; and a little

farther off, but still hard by, the clerk was torn by the seven devils

of the influenza.

The captain stopped suddenly, appeared to perceive his audience for the

first time, and represented the part of a man surprised in his private

hour of pleasure.

'Hello!' said he.

The Kanakas clapped hands and called upon him to go on.

'No, SIR!' said the captain. 'No eat, no dance. Savvy?'

'Poor old man!' returned one of the crew. 'Him no eat?'

'Lord, no!' said the captain. 'Like-um too much eat. No got.'

'All right. Me got,' said the sailor; 'you tome here. Plenty toffee,

plenty fei. Nutha man him tome too.'

'I guess we'll drop right in,' observed the captain; and he and his

companions hastened up the plank. They were welcomed on board with the

shaking of hands; place was made for them about the basin; a sticky

demijohn of molasses was added to the feast in honour of company, and

an accordion brought from the forecastle and significantly laid by the

performer's side.

'Ariana,' said he lightly, touching the instrument as he spoke; and

he fell to on a long savoury fei, made an end of it, raised his mug of

coffee, and nodded across at the spokesman of the crew. 'Here's your

health, old man; you're a credit to the South Pacific,' said he.

With the unsightly greed of hounds they glutted themselves with the hot

food and coffee; and even the clerk revived and the colour deepened in

his eyes. The kettle was drained, the basin cleaned; their entertainers,

who had waited on their wants throughout with the pleased hospitality of

Polynesians, made haste to bring forward a dessert of island tobacco and

rolls of pandanus leaf to serve as paper; and presently all sat about

the dishes puffing like Indian Sachems.

'When a man 'as breakfast every day, he don't know what it is,' observed

the clerk.

'The next point is dinner,' said Herrick; and then with a passionate

utterance: 'I wish to God I was a Kanaka!'

'There's one thing sure,' said the captain. 'I'm about desperate, I'd

rather hang than rot here much longer.' And with the word he took the

accordion and struck up. 'Home, sweet home.'

'O, drop that!' cried Herrick, 'I can't stand that.'

'No more can I,' said the captain. 'I've got to play something though:

got to pay the shot, my son.' And he struck up 'John Brown's Body' in

a fine sweet baritone: 'Dandy Jim of Carolina,' came next; 'Rorin the

Bold,' 'Swing low, Sweet Chariot,' and 'The Beautiful Land' followed.

The captain was paying his shot with usury, as he had done many a

time before; many a meal had he bought with the same currency from the

melodious-minded natives, always, as now, to their delight.

He was in the middle of 'Fifteen Dollars in the Inside Pocket,' singing

with dogged energy, for the task went sore against the grain, when a

sensation was suddenly to be observed among the crew.

'Tapena Tom harry my,' said the spokesman, pointing.

And the three beachcombers, following his indication, saw the figure of

a man in pyjama trousers and a white jumper approaching briskly from the

town.

'Captain Tom is coming.'

'That's Tapena Tom, is it?' said the captain, pausing in his music. 'I

don't seem to place the brute.'

'We'd better cut,' said the clerk. ''E's no good.'

'Well,' said the musician deliberately, 'one can't most generally always

tell. I'll try it on, I guess. Music has charms to soothe the savage

Tapena, boys. We might strike it rich; it might amount to iced punch in

the cabin.'

'Hiced punch? O my!' said the clerk. 'Give him something 'ot, captain.

“Way down the Swannee River”; try that.'

'No, sir! Looks Scotch,' said the captain; and he struck, for his life,

into 'Auld Lang Syne.'

Captain Tom continued to approach with the same business-like alacrity;

no change was to be perceived in his bearded face as he came swinging up

the plank: he did not even turn his eyes on the performer.

'We twa hae paidled in the burn

Frae morning tide till dine,'

went the song.

Captain Tom had a parcel under his arm, which he laid on the house roof,

and then turning suddenly to the strangers: 'Here, you!' he bellowed,

'be off out of that!'

The clerk and Herrick stood not on the order of their going, but fled

incontinently by the plank. The performer, on the other hand, flung down

the instrument and rose to his full height slowly.

'What's that you say?' he said. 'I've half a mind to give you a lesson

in civility.'

'You set up any more of your gab to me,' returned the Scotsman, 'and

I'll show ye the wrong side of a jyle. I've heard tell of the three

of ye. Ye're not long for here, I can tell ye that. The Government has

their eyes upon ye. They make short work of damned beachcombers, I'll

say that for the French.'

'You wait till I catch you off your ship!' cried the captain: and

then, turning to the crew, 'Good-bye, you fellows!' he said. 'You're

gentlemen, anyway! The worst nigger among you would look better upon a

quarter-deck than that filthy Scotchman.'

Captain Tom scorned to reply; he watched with a hard smile the departure

of his guests; and as soon as the last foot was off the plank; turned to

the hands to work cargo.

The beachcombers beat their inglorious retreat along the shore; Herrick

first, his face dark with blood, his knees trembling under him with

the hysteria of rage. Presently, under the same purao where they had

shivered the night before, he cast himself down, and groaned aloud, and

ground his face into the sand.

'Don't speak to me, don't speak to me. I can't stand it,' broke from

him.

The other two stood over him perplexed.

'Wot can't he stand now?' said the clerk. ''Asn't he 'ad a meal? I'M

lickin' my lips.'

Herrick reared up his wild eyes and burning face. 'I can't beg!' he

screamed, and again threw himself prone.

'This thing's got to come to an end,' said the captain with an intake of

the breath.

'Looks like signs of an end, don't it?' sneered the clerk.

'He's not so far from it, and don't you deceive yourself,' replied the

captain. 'Well,' he added in a livelier voice, 'you fellows hang on

here, and I'll go and interview my representative.'

Whereupon he turned on his heel, and set off at a swinging sailor's walk

towards Papeete.

It was some half hour later when he returned. The clerk was dozing with

his back against the tree: Herrick still lay where he had flung himself;

nothing showed whether he slept or waked.

'See, boys!' cried the captain, with that artificial heartiness of his

which was at times so painful, 'here's a new idea.' And he produced note

paper, stamped envelopes, and pencils, three of each. 'We can all write

home by the mail brigantine; the consul says I can come over to his

place and ink up the addresses.'

'Well, that's a start, too,' said the clerk. 'I never thought of that.'

'It was that yarning last night about going home that put me up to it,'

said the captain.

'Well, 'and over,' said the clerk. 'I'll 'ave a shy,' and he retired a

little distance to the shade of a canoe.

The others remained under the purao. Now they would write a word or two,

now scribble it out; now they would sit biting at the pencil end and

staring seaward; now their eyes would rest on the clerk, where he sat

propped on the canoe, leering and coughing, his pencil racing glibly on

the paper.

'I can't do it,' said Herrick suddenly. 'I haven't got the heart.'

'See here,' said the captain, speaking with unwonted gravity; 'it may be

hard to write, and to write lies at that; and God knows it is; but it's

the square thing. It don't cost anything to say you're well and happy,

and sorry you can't make a remittance this mail; and if you don't, I'll

tell you what I think it is--I think it's about the high-water mark of

being a brute beast.'

'It's easy to talk,' said Herrick. 'You don't seem to have written much

yourself, I notice.'

'What do you bring in me for?' broke from the captain. His voice was

indeed scarce raised above a whisper, but emotion clanged in it. 'What

do you know about me? If you had commanded the finest barque that ever

sailed from Portland; if you had been drunk in your berth when she

struck the breakers in Fourteen Island Group, and hadn't had the wit to

stay there and drown, but came on deck, and given drunken orders, and

lost six lives--I could understand your talking then! There,' he said

more quietly, 'that's my yarn, and now you know it. It's a pretty one

for the father of a family. Five men and a woman murdered. Yes, there

was a woman on board, and hadn't no business to be either. Guess I sent

her to Hell, if there is such a place. I never dared go home again; and

the wife and the little ones went to England to her father's place. I

don't know what's come to them,' he added, with a bitter shrug.

'Thank you, captain,' said Herrick. 'I never liked you better.'

They shook hands, short and hard, with eyes averted, tenderness swelling

in their bosoms.

'Now, boys! to work again at lying!' said the captain.

'I'll give my father up,' returned Herrick with a writhen smile. 'I'll

try my sweetheart instead for a change of evils.'

And here is what he wrote:

'Emma, I have scratched out the beginning to my father, for I think I

can write more easily to you. This is my last farewell to all, the last

you will ever hear or see of an unworthy friend and son. I have failed

in life; I am quite broken down and disgraced. I pass under a false

name; you will have to tell my father that with all your kindness. It is

my own fault. I know, had I chosen, that I might have done well; and yet

I swear to you I tried to choose. I could not bear that you should think

I did not try. For I loved you all; you must never doubt me in that,

you least of all. I have always unceasingly loved, but what was my love

worth? and what was I worth? I had not the manhood of a common clerk,

I could not work to earn you; I have lost you now, and for your sake I

could be glad of it. When you first came to my father's house--do you

remember those days? I want you to--you saw the best of me then, all

that was good in me. Do you remember the day I took your hand and would

not let it go--and the day on Battersea Bridge, when we were looking at

a barge, and I began to tell you one of my silly stories, and broke off

to say I loved you? That was the beginning, and now here is the end.

When you have read this letter, you will go round and kiss them all

good-bye, my father and mother, and the children, one by one, and poor

uncle; And tell them all to forget me, and forget me yourself. Turn

the key in the door; let no thought of me return; be done with the poor

ghost that pretended he was a man and stole your love. Scorn of myself

grinds in me as I write. I should tell you I am well and happy, and want

for nothing. I do not exactly make money, or I should send a remittance;

but I am well cared for, have friends, live in a beautiful place and

climate, such as we have dreamed of together, and no pity need be wasted

on me. In such places, you understand, it is easy to live, and live

well, but often hard to make sixpence in money. Explain this to my

father, he will understand. I have no more to say; only linger, going

out, like an unwilling guest. God in heaven bless you. Think of me to

the last, here, on a bright beach, the sky and sea immoderately blue,

and the great breakers roaring outside on a barrier reef, where a little

isle sits green with palms. I am well and strong. It is a more pleasant

way to die than if you were crowding about me on a sick-bed. And yet I

am dying. This is my last kiss. Forgive, forget the unworthy.'

So far he had written, his paper was all filled, when there returned a

memory of evenings at the piano, and that song, the masterpiece of love,

in which so many have found the expression of their dearest thoughts.

'Einst, O wunder!' he added. More was not required; he knew that in his

love's heart the context would spring up, escorted with fair images and

harmony; of how all through life her name should tremble in his ears,

her name be everywhere repeated in the sounds of nature; and when death

came, and he lay dissolved, her memory lingered and thrilled among his

elements.

'Once, O wonder! once from the ashes of my heart

Arose a blossom--'

Herrick and the captain finished their letters about the same time; each

was breathing deep, and their eyes met and were averted as they closed

the envelopes.

'Sorry I write so big,' said the captain gruffly. 'Came all of a rush,

when it did come.'

'Same here,' said Herrick. 'I could have done with a ream when I got

started; but it's long enough for all the good I had to say.'

They were still at the addresses when the clerk strolled up, smirking

and twirling his envelope, like a man well pleased. He looked over

Herrick's shoulder.

'Hullo,' he said, 'you ain't writing 'ome.'

'I am, though,' said Herrick; 'she lives with my father. Oh, I see what

you mean,' he added. 'My real name is Herrick. No more Hay'--they had

both used the same alias--'no more Hay than yours, I dare say.'

'Clean bowled in the middle stump!' laughed the clerk. 'My name's 'Uish

if you want to know. Everybody has a false nyme in the Pacific. Lay you

five to three the captain 'as.'

'So I have too,' replied the captain; 'and I've never told my own since

the day I tore the title page out of my Bowditch and flung the damned

thing into the sea. But I'll tell it to you, boys. John Davis is my

name. I'm Davis of the Sea Ranger.'

'Dooce you are!' said Hush. 'And what was she? a pirate or a slyver?'

'She was the fastest barque out of Portland, Maine,' replied the

captain; 'and for the way I lost her, I might as well have bored a hole

in her side with an auger.'

'Oh, you lost her, did you?' said the clerk. ''Ope she was insured?'

No answer being returned to this sally, Huish, still brimming over with

vanity and conversation, struck into another subject.

'I've a good mind to read you my letter,' said he. 'I've a good fist

with a pen when I choose, and this is a prime lark. She was a barmaid

I ran across in Northampton; she was a spanking fine piece, no end

of style; and we cottoned at first sight like parties in the play. I

suppose I spent the chynge of a fiver on that girl. Well, I 'appened to

remember her nyme, so I wrote to her, and told her 'ow I had got rich,

and married a queen in the Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace.

Such a sight of crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the

nigger parliament in a cocked 'at. It's really prime.'

The captain jumped to his feet. 'That's what you did with the paper that

I went and begged for you?' he roared.

It was perhaps lucky for Huish--it was surely in the end unfortunate for

all--that he was seized just then by one of his prostrating accesses of

cough; his comrades would have else deserted him, so bitter was their

resentment. When the fit had passed, the clerk reached out his hand,

picked up the letter, which had fallen to the earth, and tore it into

fragments, stamp and all.

'Does that satisfy you?' he asked sullenly.

'We'll say no more about it,' replied Davis.

Chapter 3. THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR

The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low,

rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western

avenue and a little townward of the British consulate. Within was

a grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant

occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court: the doors, that

had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the

grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars

upon the windows.

The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the

last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of

water by the door, a half cocoanut shell beside it for a drinking cup;

and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open,

his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of

sunbright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window;

and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused

and laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket. His long

arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the insults of the morning, and

the harrowing business of the letter, had strung him to that point when

pain is almost pleasure, time shrinks to a mere point, and death and

life appear indifferent. To and fro he paced like a caged brute; his

mind whirling through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes, as

he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crumbling whitewash was

all full of them: Tahitian names, and French, and English, and rude

sketches of ships under sail and men at fisticuffs.

It came to him of a sudden that he too must leave upon these walls the

memorial of his passage. He paused before a clean space, took the pencil

out, and pondered. Vanity, so hard to dislodge, awoke in him. We call it

vanity at least; perhaps unjustly. Rather it was the bare sense of his

existence prompted him; the sense of his life, the one thing wonderful,

to which he scarce clung with a finger. From his jarred nerves there

came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could

not say: change, he knew no more--change, with inscrutable veiled face,

approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert

room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud

voice of the symphony. 'Destiny knocking at the door,' he thought; drew

a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth

Symphony. 'So,' thought he, 'they will know that I loved music and had

classical tastes. They? He, I suppose: the unknown, kindred spirit that

shall come some day and read my memor querela. Ha, he shall have Latin

too!' And he added: terque quaterque beati Queis ante ora patrum.

He turned again to his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and

supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he

had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should

he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and

looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment

and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance.

Could the thing continue? What bound him now? Had he no rights?--only

the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the

unbearable? Ich trage unertragliches, the quotation rose in his mind; he

repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect of

poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, A hast

es ja gewolit. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against

himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn.

'I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood,' he thought, 'or why

should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I

have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit!

and to be starving here with worse than banditti--with this trivial

hell-hound!' His rage against his comrade rose and flooded him, and he

shook a trembling fist at the sleeper.

A swift step was audible. The captain appeared upon the threshold of the

cell, panting and flushed, and with a foolish face of happiness. In his

arms he carried a loaf of bread and bottles of beer; the pockets of his

coat were bulging with cigars.

He rolled his treasures on the floor, grasped Herrick by both hands, and

crowed with laughter.

'Broach the beer!' he shouted. 'Broach the beer, and glory hallelujah!'

'Beer?' repeated Huish, struggling to his feet. 'Beer it is!' cried

Davis. 'Beer and plenty of it. Any number of persons can use it (like

Lyon's tooth-tablet) with perfect propriety and neatness. Who's to

officiate?'

'Leave me alone for that,' said the clerk. He knocked the necks off with

a lump of coral, and each drank in succession from the shell.

'Have a weed,' said Davis. 'It's all in the bill.'

'What is up?' asked Herrick.

The captain fell suddenly grave. 'I'm coming to that,' said he. 'I want

to speak with Herrick here. You, Hay--or Huish, or whatever your name

is--you take a weed and the other bottle, and go and see how the wind is

down by the purao. I'll call you when you're wanted!'

'Hay? Secrets? That ain't the ticket,' said Huish.

'Look here, my son,' said the captain, 'this is business, and don't you

make any mistake about it. If you're going to make trouble, you can

have it your own way and stop right here. Only get the thing right: if

Herrick and I go, we take the beer. Savvy?'

'Oh, I don't want to shove my oar in,' returned Huish. 'I'll cut right

enough. Give me the swipes. You can jaw till you're blue in the face for

what I care. I don't think it's the friendly touch: that's all.' And he

shambled grumbling out of the cell into the staring sun.

The captain watched him clear of the courtyard; then turned to Herrick.

'What is it?' asked Herrick thickly.

'I'll tell you,' said Davis. 'I want to consult you. It's a chance we've

got. What's that?' he cried, pointing to the music on the wall.

'What?' said the other. 'Oh, that! It's music; it's a phrase of

Beethoven's I was writing up. It means Destiny knocking at the door.'

'Does it?' said the captain, rather low; and he went near and studied

the inscription; 'and this French?' he asked, pointing to the Latin.

'O, it just means I should have been luckier if I had died at horne,'

returned Herrick impatiently. 'What is this business?'

'Destiny knocking at the door,' repeated the captain; and then, looking

over his shoulder. 'Well, Mr Herrick, that's about what it comes to,' he

added.

'What do you mean? Explain yourself,' said Herrick.

But the captain was again staring at the music. 'About how long ago

since you wrote up this truck?' he asked.

'What does it matter?' exclaimed Herrick. 'I dare say half an hour.'

'My God, it's strange!' cried Davis. 'There's some men would call that

accidental: not me. That--' and he drew his thick finger under the

music--'that's what I call Providence.'

'You said we had a chance,' said Herrick.

'Yes, SIR!' said the captain, wheeling suddenly face to face with

his companion. 'I did so. If you're the man I take you for, we have a

chance.'

'I don't know what you take me for,' was the reply. 'You can scarce take

me too low.'

'Shake hands, Mr Herrick,' said the captain. 'I know you. You're a

gentleman and a man of spirit. I didn't want to speak before that bummer

there; you'll see why. But to you I'll rip it right out. I got a ship.'

'A ship?' cried Herrick. 'What ship?'

'That schooner we saw this morning off the passage.'

'The schooner with the hospital flag?'

'That's the hooker,' said Davis. 'She's the Farallone, hundred and

sixty tons register, out of 'Frisco for Sydney, in California champagne.

Captain, mate, and one hand all died of the smallpox, same as they had

round in the Paumotus, I guess. Captain and mate were the only white

men; all the hands Kanakas; seems a queer kind of outfit from a

Christian port. Three of them left and a cook; didn't know where they

were; I can't think where they were either, if you come to that;

Wiseman must have been on the booze, I guess, to sail the course he did.

However, there HE was, dead; and here are the Kanakas as good as lost.

They bummed around at sea like the babes in the wood; and tumbled

end-on upon Tahiti. The consul here took charge. He offered the berth to

Williams; Williams had never had the smallpox and backed down. That was

when I came in for the letter paper; I thought there was something up

when the consul asked me to look in again; but I never let on to you

fellows, so's you'd not be disappointed. Consul tried M'Neil; scared of

smallpox. He tried Capirati, that Corsican and Leblue, or whatever his

name is, wouldn't lay a hand on it; all too fond of their sweet lives.

Last of all, when there wasn't nobody else left to offer it to, he

offers it to me. “Brown, will you ship captain and take her to Sydney?”

says he. “Let me choose my own mate and another white hand,” says I,

“for I don't hold with this Kanaka crew racket; give us all two months'

advance to get our clothes and instruments out of pawn, and I'll take

stock tonight, fill up stores, and get to sea tomorrow before dark!”

That's what I said. “That's good enough,” says the consul, “and you

can count yourself damned lucky, Brown,” says he. And he said it pretty

meaningful-appearing, too. However, that's all one now. I'll ship Huish

before the mast--of course I'll let him berth aft--and I'll ship you

mate at seventy-five dollars and two months' advance.'

'Me mate? Why, I'm a landsman!' cried Herrick.

'Guess you've got to learn,' said the captain. 'You don't fancy I'm

going to skip and leave you rotting on the beach perhaps? I'm not that

sort, old man. And you're handy anyway; I've been shipmates with worse.'

'God knows I can't refuse,' said Herrick. 'God knows I thank you from my

heart.'

'That's all right,' said the captain. 'But it ain't all.' He turned

aside to light a cigar.

'What else is there?' asked the other, with a pang of undefinable alarm.

'I'm coming to that,' said Davis, and then paused a little. 'See here,'

he began, holding out his cigar between his finger and thumb, 'suppose

you figure up what this'll amount to. You don't catch on? Well, we

get two months' advance; we can't get away from Papeete--our creditors

wouldn't let us go--for less; it'll take us along about two months

to get to Sydney; and when we get there, I just want to put it to you

squarely: What the better are we?'

'We're off the beach at least,' said Herrick.

'I guess there's a beach at Sydney,' returned the captain; 'and I'll

tell you one thing, Mr Herrick--I don't mean to try. No, SIR! Sydney

will never see me.'

'Speak out plain,' said Herrick.

'Plain Dutch,' replied the captain. 'I'm going to own that schooner.

It's nothing new; it's done every year in the Pacific. Stephens stole a

schooner the other day, didn't he? Hayes and Pease stole vessels all

the time. And it's the making of the crowd of us. See here--you think of

that cargo. Champagne! why, it's like as if it was put up on purpose. In

Peru we'll sell that liquor off at the pier-head, and the schooner after

it, if we can find a fool to buy her; and then light out for the mines.

If you'll back me up, I stake my life I carry it through.'

'Captain,' said Herrick, with a quailing voice, 'don't do it!'

'I'm desperate,' returned Davis. 'I've got a chance; I may never get

another. Herrick, say the word; back me up; I think we've starved

together long enough for that.'

'I can't do it. I'm sorry. I can't do it. I've not fallen as low as

that,' said Herrick, deadly pale.

'What did you say this morning?' said Davis. 'That you couldn't beg?

It's the one thing or the other, my son.'

'Ah, but this is the jail!' cried Herrick. 'Don't tempt me. It's the

jail.'

'Did you hear what the skipper said on board that schooner?' pursued the

captain. 'Well, I tell you he talked straight. The French have let us

alone for a long time; It can't last longer; they've got their eye on

us; and as sure as you live, in three weeks you'll be in jail whatever

you do. I read it in the consul's face.'

'You forget, captain,' said the young man. 'There is another way. I can

die; and to say truth, I think I should have died three years ago.'

The captain folded his arms and looked the other in the face. 'Yes,'

said he, 'yes, you can cut your throat; that's a frozen fact; much good

may it do you! And where do I come in?'

The light of a strange excitement came in Herrick's face. 'Both of us,'

said he, 'both of us together. It's not possible you can enjoy this

business. Come,' and he reached out a timid hand, 'a few strokes in the

lagoon--and rest!'

'I tell you, Herrick, I'm 'most tempted to answer you the way the man

does in the Bible, and say, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”' said the

captain. 'What! you think I would go drown myself, and I got children

starving? Enjoy it? No, by God, I do not enjoy it! but it's the row

I've got to hoe, and I'll hoe it till I drop right here. I have three of

them, you see, two boys and the one girl, Adar. The trouble is that you

are not a parent yourself. I tell you, Herrick, I love you,' the man

broke out; 'I didn't take to you at first, you were so anglified and

tony, but I love you now; it's a man that loves you stands here and

wrestles with you. I can't go to sea with the bummer alone; it's not

possible. Go drown yourself, and there goes my last chance--the last

chance of a poor miserable beast, earning a crust to feed his family.

I can't do nothing but sail ships, and I've no papers. And here I get

a chance, and you go back on me! Ah, you've no family, and that's where

the trouble is!'

'I have indeed,' said Herrick.

'Yes, I know,' said the captain, 'you think so. But no man's got

a family till he's got children. It's only the kids count. There's

something about the little shavers... I can't talk of them. And if

you thought a cent about this father that I hear you talk of, or that

sweetheart you were writing to this morning, you would feel like me. You

would say, What matters laws, and God, and that? My folks are hard up,

I belong to them, I'll get them bread, or, by God! I'll get them wealth,

if I have to burn down London for it. That's what you would say. And

I'll tell you more: your heart is saying so this living minute. I can

see it in your face. You're thinking, Here's poor friendship for the man

I've starved along of, and as for the girl that I set up to be in love

with, here's a mighty limp kind of a love that won't carry me as far

as 'most any man would go for a demijohn of whisky. There's not much

ROmance to that love, anyway; it's not the kind they carry on about in

songbooks. But what's the good of my carrying on talking, when it's all

in your inside as plain as print? I put the question to you once for

all. Are you going to desert me in my hour of need?--you know if I've

deserted you--or will you give me your hand, and try a fresh deal, and

go home (as like as not) a millionaire? Say no, and God pity me! Say

yes, and I'll make the little ones pray for you every night on their

bended knees. “God bless Mr Herrick!” that's what they'll say, one after

the other, the old girl sitting there holding stakes at the foot of the

bed, and the damned little innocents.. . He broke off. 'I don't often

rip out about the kids,' he said; 'but when I do, there's something

fetches loose.'

'Captain,' said Herrick faintly, 'is there nothing else?'

'I'll prophesy if you like,' said the captain with renewed vigour.

'Refuse this, because you think yourself too honest, and before a

month's out you'll be jailed for a sneak-thief. I give you the word

fair. I can see it, Herrick, if you can't; you're breaking down.

Don't think, if you refuse this chance, that you'll go on doing the

evangelical; you're about through with your stock; and before you know

where you are, you'll be right out on the other side. No, it's either

this for you; or else it's Caledonia. I bet you never were there, and

saw those white, shaved men, in their dust clothes and straw hats,

prowling around in gangs in the lamplight at Noumea; they look like

wolves, and they look like preachers, and they look like the sick; Hulsh

is a daisy to the best of them. Well, there's your company. They're

waiting for you, Herrick, and you got to go; and that's a prophecy.'

And as the man stood and shook through his great stature, he seemed

indeed like one in whom the spirit of divination worked and might utter

oracles. Herrick looked at him, and looked away; It seemed not decent to

spy upon such agitation; and the young man's courage sank.

'You talk of going home,' he objected. 'We could never do that.'

'WE could,' said the other. 'Captain Brown couldn't, nor Mr Hay, that

shipped mate with him couldn't. But what's that to do with Captain Davis

or Mr Herrick, you galoot?'

'But Hayes had these wild islands where he used to call,' came the next

fainter objection.

'We have the wild islands of Peru,' retorted Davis. 'They were wild

enough for Stephens, no longer agone than just last year. I guess

they'll be wild enough for us.'

'And the crew?'

'All Kanakas. Come, I see you're right, old man. I see you'll stand by.'

And the captain once more offered his hand.

'Have it your own way then,' said Herrick. 'I'll do it: a strange thing

for my father's son. But I'll do it. I'll stand by you, man, for good or

evil.'

'God bless you!' cried the captain, and stood silent. 'Herrick,' he

added with a smile, 'I believe I'd have died in my tracks, if you'd

said, No!'

And Herrick, looking at the man, half believed so also.

'And now we'll go break it to the bummer,' said Davis.

'I wonder how he'll take it,' said Herrick.

'Him? Jump at it!' was the reply.

Chapter 4. THE YELLOW FLAG

The schooner Farallone lay well out in the jaws of the pass, where the

terrified pilot had made haste to bring her to her moorings and escape.

Seen from the beach through the thin line of shipping, two objects stood

conspicuous to seaward: the little isle, on the one hand, with its palms

and the guns and batteries raised forty years before in defence of Queen

Pomare's capital; the outcast Farallone, upon the other, banished to the

threshold of the port, rolling there to her scuppers, and flaunting the

plague-flag as she rolled. A few sea birds screamed and cried about the

ship; and within easy range, a man-of-war guard boat hung off and on and

glittered with the weapons of marines. The exuberant daylight and the

blinding heaven of the tropics picked out and framed the pictures.

A neat boat, manned by natives in uniform, and steered by the doctor

of the port, put from shore towards three of the afternoon, and pulled

smartly for the schooner. The fore-sheets were heaped with sacks of

flour, onions, and potatoes, perched among which was Huish dressed as

a foremast hand; a heap of chests and cases impeded the action of the

oarsmen; and in the stern, by the left hand of the doctor, sat Herrick,

dressed in a fresh rig of slops, his brown beard trimmed to a point, a

pile of paper novels on his lap, and nursing the while between his feet

a chronometer, for which they had exchanged that of the Farallone, long

since run down and the rate lost.

They passed the guard boat, exchanging hails with the boat-swain's

mate in charge, and drew near at last to the forbidden ship. Not a cat

stirred, there was no speech of man; and the sea being exceeding high

outside, and the reef close to where the schooner lay, the clamour of

the surf hung round her like the sound of battle.

'Ohe la goelette!' sang out the doctor, with his best voice.

Instantly, from the house where they had been stowing away stores, first

Davis, and then the ragamuffin, swarthy crew made their appearance.

'Hullo, Hay, that you?' said the captain, leaning on the rail. 'Tell the

old man to lay her alongside, as if she was eggs. There's a hell of a

run of sea here, and his boat's brittle.'

The movement of the schooner was at that time more than usually violent.

Now she heaved her side as high as a deep sea steamer's, and showed the

flashing of her copper; now she swung swiftly toward the boat until her

scuppers gurgled.

'I hope you have sea legs,' observed the doctor. 'You will require

them.'

Indeed, to board the Farallone, in that exposed position where she lay,

was an affair of some dexterity. The less precious goods were hoisted

roughly in; the chronometer, after repeated failures, was passed gently

and successfully from hand to hand; and there remained only the more

difficult business of embarking Huish. Even that piece of dead weight

(shipped A.B. at eighteen dollars, and described by the captain to the

consul as an invaluable man) was at last hauled on board without mishap;

and the doctor, with civil salutations, took his leave.

The three co-adventurers looked at each other, and Davis heaved a breath

of relief.

'Now let's get this chronometer fixed,' said he, and led the way

into the house. It was a fairly spacious place; two staterooms and a

good-sized pantry opened from the main cabin; the bulkheads were

painted white, the floor laid with waxcloth. No litter, no sign of

life remained; for the effects of the dead men had been disinfected and

conveyed on shore. Only on the table, in a saucer, some sulphur burned,

and the fumes set them coughing as they entered. The captain peered into

the starboard stateroom, where the bed-clothes still lay tumbled in

the bunk, the blanket flung back as they had flung it back from the

disfigured corpse before its burial.

'Now, I told these niggers to tumble that truck overboard,' grumbled

Davis. 'Guess they were afraid to lay hands on it. Well, they've hosed

the place out; that's as much as can be expected, I suppose. Huish, lay

on to these blankets.'

'See you blooming well far enough first,' said Huish, drawing back.

'What's that?' snapped the captain. 'I'll tell you, my young friend, I

think you make a mistake. I'm captain here.'

'Fat lot I care,' returned the clerk.

'That so?' said Davis. 'Then you'll berth forward with the niggers! Walk

right out of this cabin.'

'Oh, I dessay!' said Huish. 'See any green in my eye? A lark's a lark.'

'Well, now, I'll explain this business, and you'll see (once for all)

just precisely how much lark there is to it,' said Davis. 'I'm captain,

and I'm going to be it. One thing of three. First, you take my orders

here as cabin steward, in which case you mess with us. Or second, you

refuse, and I pack you forward--and you get as quick as the word's said.

Or, third and last, I'll signal that man-of-war and send you ashore

under arrest for mutiny.'

'And, of course, I wouldn't blow the gaff? O no!' replied the jeering

Huish.

'And who's to believe you, my son?' inquired the captain. 'No, sir!

There ain't no lark about my captainising. Enough said. Up with these

blankets.'

Huish was no fool, he knew when he was beaten; and he was no coward

either, for he stepped to the bunk, took the infected bed-clothes

fairly in his arms, and carried them out of the house without a check or

tremor.

'I was waiting for the chance,' said Davis to Herrick. 'I needn't do the

same with you, because you understand it for yourself.'

'Are you going to berth here?' asked Herrick, following the captain into

the stateroom, where he began to adjust the chronometer in its place at

the bed-head.

'Not much!' replied he. 'I guess I'll berth on deck. I don't know as I'm

afraid, but I've no immediate use for confluent smallpox.'

'I don't know that I'm afraid either,' said Herrick. 'But the thought of

these two men sticks in my throat; that captain and mate dying here, one

opposite to the other. It's grim. I wonder what they said last?'

'Wiseman and Wishart?' said the captain. 'Probably mighty small

potatoes. That's a thing a fellow figures out for himself one way, and

the real business goes quite another. Perhaps Wiseman said, “Here old

man, fetch up the gin, I'm feeling powerful rocky.” And perhaps Wishart

said, “Oh, hell!”'

'Well, that's grim enough,' said Herrick.

'And so it is,' said Davis. 'There; there's that chronometer fixed. And

now it's about time to up anchor and clear out.'

He lit a cigar and stepped on deck.

'Here, you! What's YOUR name?' he cried to one of the hands, a

lean-flanked, clean-built fellow from some far western island, and of a

darkness almost approaching to the African.

'Sally Day,' replied the man.

'Devil it is,' said the captain. 'Didn't know we had ladies on board.

Well, Sally, oblige me by hauling down that rag there. I'll do the same

for you another time.' He watched the yellow bunting as it was eased

past the cross-trees and handed down on deck. 'You'll float no more

on this ship,' he observed. 'Muster the people aft, Mr Hay,' he added,

speaking unnecessarily loud, 'I've a word to say to them.'

It was with a singular sensation that Herrick prepared for the first

time to address a crew. He thanked his stars indeed, that they were

natives. But even natives, he reflected, might be critics too quick

for such a novice as himself; they might perceive some lapse from that

precise and cut-and-dry English which prevails on board a ship; it was

even possible they understood no other; and he racked his brain, and

overhauled his reminiscences of sea romance for some appropriate words.

'Here, men! tumble aft!' he said. 'Lively now! All hands aft!'

They crowded in the alleyway like sheep.

'Here they are, sir,' said Herrick.

For some time the captain continued to face the stern; then turned with

ferocious suddenness on the crew, and seemed to enjoy their shrinking.

'Now,' he said, twisting his cigar in his mouth and toying with the

spokes of the wheel, 'I'm Captain Brown. I command this ship. This is

Mr Hay, first officer. The other white man is cabin steward, but he'll

stand watch and do his trick. My orders shall be obeyed smartly. You

savvy, “smartly”? There shall be no growling about the kaikai, which

will be above allowance. You'll put a handle to the mate's name, and

tack on “sir” to every order I give you. If you're smart and quick, I'll

make this ship comfortable for all hands.' He took the cigar out of his

mouth. 'If you're not,' he added, in a roaring voice, 'I'll make it a

floating hell. Now, Mr Hay, we'll pick watches, if you please.'

'All right,' said Herrick.

'You will please use “sir” when you address me, Mr Hay,' said the

captain. 'I'll take the lady. Step to starboard, Sally.' And then he

whispered in Herrick's ear: 'take the old man.'

'I'll take you, there,' said Herrick.

'What's your name?' said the captain. 'What's that you say? Oh, that's

no English; I'll have none of your highway gibberish on my ship. We'll

call you old Uncle Ned, because you've got no wool on the top of your

head, just the place where the wool ought to grow. Step to port, Uncle.

Don't you hear Mr Hay has picked you? Then I'll take the white man.

White Man, step to starboard. Now which of you two is the cook? You?

Then Mr Hay takes your friend in the blue dungaree. Step to port,

Dungaree. There, we know who we all are: Dungaree, Uncle Ned, Sally Day,

White Man, and Cook. All F.F.V.'s I guess. And now, Mr Hay, we'll up

anchor, if you please.'

'For Heaven's sake, tell me some of the words,' whispered Herrick.

An hour later, the Farallone was under all plain sail, the rudder hard

a-port, and the cheerfully clanking windlass had brought the anchor

home.

'All clear, sir,' cried Herrick from the bow.

The captain met her with the wheel, as she bounded like a stag from

her repose, trembling and bending to the puffs. The guard boat gave a

parting hail, the wake whitened and ran out; the Farallone was under

weigh.

Her berth had been close to the pass. Even as she forged ahead Davis

slewed her for the channel between the pier ends of the reef, the

breakers sounding and whitening to either hand. Straight through the

narrow band of blue, she shot to seaward: and the captain's heart

exulted as he felt her tremble underfoot, and (looking back over the

taffrail) beheld the roofs of Papeete changing position on the shore and

the island mountains rearing higher in the wake.

But they were not yet done with the shore and the horror of the yellow

flag. About midway of the pass, there was a cry and a scurry, a man was

seen to leap upon the rail, and, throwing his arms over his head, to

stoop and plunge into the sea.

'Steady as she goes,' the captain cried, relinquishing the wheel to

Huish.

The next moment he was forward in the midst of the Kanakas, belaying pin

in hand.

'Anybody else for shore?' he cried, and the savage trumpeting of his

voice, no less than the ready weapon in his hand, struck fear in all.

Stupidly they stared after their escaped companion, whose black head

was visible upon the water, steering for the land. And the schooner

meanwhile slipt like a racer through the pass, and met the long sea of

the open ocean with a souse of spray.

'Fool that I was, not to have a pistol ready!' exclaimed Davis. 'Well,

we go to sea short-handed, we can't help that. You have a lame watch of

it, Mr Hay.'

'I don't see how we are to get along,' said Herrick.

'Got to,' said the captain. 'No more Tahiti for me.'

Both turned instinctively and looked astern. The fair island was

unfolding mountain top on mountain top; Eimeo, on the port board, lifted

her splintered pinnacles; and still the schooner raced to the open sea.

'Think!' cried the captain with a gesture, 'yesterday morning I danced

for my breakfast like a poodle dog.'

Chapter 5. THE CARGO OF CHAMPAGNE

The ship's head was laid to clear Eimeo to the north, and the captain

sat down in the cabin, with a chart, a ruler, and an epitome.

'East a half no'the,' said he, raising his face from his labours. 'Mr

Hay, you'll have to watch your dead reckoning; I want every yard she

makes on every hair's-breadth of a course. I'm going to knock a hole

right straight through the Paumotus, and that's always a near touch.

Now, if this South East Trade ever blew out of the S.E., which it don't,

we might hope to lie within half a point of our course. Say we lie

within a point of it. That'll just about weather Fakarava. Yes, sir,

that's what we've got to do, if we tack for it. Brings us through this

slush of little islands in the cleanest place: see?' And he showed

where his ruler intersected the wide-lying labyrinth of the Dangerous

Archipelago. 'I wish it was night, and I could put her about right now;

we're losing time and easting. Well, we'll do our best. And if we don't

fetch Peru, we'll bring up to Ecuador. All one, I guess. Depreciated

dollars down, and no questions asked. A remarkable fine institootion,

the South American don.'

Tahiti was already some way astern, the Diadem rising from among broken

mountains--Eimeo was already close aboard, and stood black and strange

against the golden splendour of the west--when the captain took his

departure from the two islands, and the patent log was set.

Some twenty minutes later, Sally Day, who was continually leaving

the wheel to peer in at the cabin clock, announced in a shrill cry

'Fo'bell,' and the cook was to be seen carrying the soup into the cabin.

'I guess I'll sit down and have a pick with you,' said Davis to Herrick.

'By the time I've done, it'll be dark, and we'll clap the hooker on the

wind for South America.'

In the cabin at one corner of the table, immediately below the lamp, and

on the lee side of a bottle of champagne, sat Huish. 'What's this? Where

did that come from?' asked the captain.

'It's fizz, and it came from the after-'old, if you want to know,' said

Huish, and drained his mug.

'This'll never do,' exclaimed Davis, the merchant seaman's horror of

breaking into cargo showing incongruously forth on board that stolen

ship. 'There was never any good came of games like that.'

'You byby!' said Huish. 'A fellow would think (to 'ear him) we were

on the square! And look 'ere, you've put this job up 'ansomely for me,

'aven't you? I'm to go on deck and steer while you two sit and guzzle,

and I'm to go by nickname, and got to call you “sir” and “mister.” Well,

you look here, my bloke: I'll have fizz ad lib., or it won't wash. I

tell you that. And you know mighty well, you ain't got any man-of-war to

signal now.'

Davis was staggered. 'I'd give fifty dollars this had never happened,'

he said weakly.

'Well, it 'as 'appened, you see,' returned Huish. 'Try some; it's

devilish good.'

The Rubicon was crossed without another struggle. The captain filled a

mug and drank.

'I wish it was beer,' he said with a sigh. 'But there's no denying it's

the genuine stuff and cheap at the money. Now, Huish, you clear out and

take your wheel.'

The little wretch had gained a point, and he was gay. 'Ay, ay, sir,'

said he, and left the others to their meal.

'Pea soup!' exclaimed the captain. 'Blamed if I thought I should taste

pea soup again!'

Herrick sat inert and silent. It was impossible after these months of

hopeless want to smell the rough, high-spiced sea victuals without

lust, and his mouth watered with desire of the champagne. It was no less

impossible to have assisted at the scene between Huish and the captain,

and not to perceive, with sudden bluntness, the gulf where he had

fallen. He was a thief among thieves. He said it to himself. He could

not touch the soup. If he had moved at all, it must have been to leave

the table, throw himself overboard, and drown--an honest man.

'Here,' said the captain, 'you look sick, old man; have a drop of this.'

The champagne creamed and bubbled in the mug; its bright colour, its

lively effervescence, seized his eye. 'It is too late to hesitate,'

he thought; his hand took the mug instinctively; he drank, with

unquenchable pleasure and desire of more; drained the vessel dry, and

set it down with sparkling eyes.

'There is something in life after all!' he cried. 'I had forgot what it

was like. Yes, even this is worth while. Wine, food, dry clothes--why,

they're worth dying, worth hanging, for! Captain, tell me one thing: why

aren't all the poor folk foot-pads?'

'Give it up,' said the captain.

'They must be damned good,' cried Herrick. 'There's something here

beyond me. Think of that calaboose! Suppose we were sent suddenly back.'

He shuddered as though stung by a convulsion, and buried his face in his

clutching hands.

'Here, what's wrong with you?' cried the captain. There was no reply;

only Herrick's shoulders heaved, so that the table was shaken. 'Take

some more of this. Here, drink this. I order you to. Don't start crying

when you're out of the wood.'

'I'm not crying,' said Herrick, raising his face and showing his dry

eyes. 'It's worse than crying. It's the horror of that grave that we've

escaped from.'

'Come now, you tackle your soup; that'll fix you,' said Davis kindly.

'I told you you were all broken up. You couldn't have stood out another

week.'

'That's the dreadful part of it!' cried Herrick. 'Another week and I'd

have murdered someone for a dollar! God! and I know that? And I'm still

living? It's some beastly dream.'

'Quietly, quietly! Quietly does it, my son. Take your pea soup. Food,

that's what you want,' said Davis.

The soup strengthened and quieted Herrick's nerves; another glass of

wine, and a piece of pickled pork and fried banana completed what the

soup began; and he was able once more to look the captain in the face.

'I didn't know I was so much run down,' he said.

'Well,' said Davis, 'you were as steady as a rock all day: now you've

had a little lunch, you'll be as steady as a rock again.'

'Yes,' was the reply, 'I'm steady enough now, but I'm a queer kind of a

first officer.'

'Shucks!' cried the captain. 'You've only got to mind the ship's course,

and keep your slate to half a point. A babby could do that, let alone

a college graduate like you. There ain't nothing TO sailoring, when you

come to look it in the face. And now we'll go and put her about. Bring

the slate; we'll have to start our dead reckoning right away.'

The distance run since the departure was read off the log by the

binnacle light and entered on the slate.

'Ready about,' said the captain. 'Give me the wheel, White Man, and you

stand by the mainsheet. Boom tackle, Mr Hay, please, and then you can

jump forward and attend head sails.'

'Ay, ay, sir,' responded Herrick.

'All clear forward?' asked Davis.

'All clear, sir.'

'Hard a-lee!' cried the captain. 'Haul in your slack as she comes,' he

called to Huish. 'Haul in your slack, put your back into it; keep your

feet out of the coils.' A sudden blow sent Huish flat along the deck,

and the captain was in his place. 'Pick yourself up and keep the wheel

hard over!' he roared. 'You wooden fool, you wanted to get killed, I

guess. Draw the jib,' he cried a moment later; and then to Huish, 'Give

me the wheel again, and see if you can coil that sheet.'

But Huish stood and looked at Davis with an evil countenance. 'Do you

know you struck me?' said he.

'Do you know I saved your life?' returned the other, not deigning to

look at him, his eyes travelling instead between the compass and the

sails. 'Where would you have been, if that boom had swung out and

you bundled in the clack? No, SIR, we'll have no more of you at the

mainsheet. Seaport towns are full of mainsheet-men; they hop upon one

leg, my son, what's left of them, and the rest are dead. (Set your boom

tackle, Mr Hay.) Struck you, did I? Lucky for you I did.'

'Well,' said Huish slowly, 'I daresay there may be somethink in that.

'Ope there is.' He turned his back elaborately on the captain, and

entered the house, where the speedy explosion of a champagne cork showed

he was attending to his comfort.

Herrick came aft to the captain. 'How is she doing now?' he asked.

'East and by no'the a half no'the,' said Davis. 'It's about as good as I

expected.'

'What'll the hands think of it?' said Herrick.

'Oh, they don't think. They ain't paid to,' says the captain.

'There was something wrong, was there not? between you and--' Herrick

paused.

'That's a nasty little beast, that's a biter,' replied the captain,

shaking his head. 'But so long as you and me hang in, it don't matter.'

Herrick lay down in the weather alleyway; the night was cloudless, the

movement of the ship cradled him, he was oppressed besides by the first

generous meal after so long a time of famine; and he was recalled from

deep sleep by the voice of Davis singing out: 'Eight bells!'

He rose stupidly, and staggered aft, where the captain gave him the

wheel.

'By the wind,' said the captain. 'It comes a little puffy; when you get

a heavy puff, steal all you can to windward, but keep her a good full.'

He stepped towards the house, paused and hailed the forecastle.

'Got such a thing as a concertina forward?' said he. 'Bully for you,

Uncle Ned. Fetch it aft, will you?'

The schooner steered very easy; and Herrick, watching the moon-whitened

sails, was overpowered by drowsiness. A sharp report from the cabin

startled him; a third bottle had been opened; and Herrick remembered

the Sea Ranger and Fourteen Island Group. Presently the notes of the

accordion sounded, and then the captain's voice:

'O honey, with our pockets full of money,

We will trip, trip, trip, we will trip it on the quay,

And I will dance with Kate, and Tom will dance with Sall,

When we're all back from South Amerikee.'

So it went to its quaint air; and the watch below lingered and listened

by the forward door, and Uncle Ned was to be seen in the moonlight

nodding time; and Herrick smiled at the wheel, his anxieties a while

forgotten. Song followed song; another cork exploded; there were voices

raised, as though the pair in the cabin were in disagreement; and

presently it seemed the breach was healed; for it was now the voice of

Huish that struck up, to the captain's accompaniment--

'Up in a balloon, boys,

Up in a balloon,

All among the little stars

And round about the moon.'

A wave of nausea overcame Herrick at the wheel. He wondered why the air,

the words (which were yet written with a certain knack), and the voice

and accent of the singer, should all jar his spirit like a file on a

man's teeth. He sickened at the thought of his two comrades drinking

away their reason upon stolen wine, quarrelling and hiccupping and

waking up, while the doors of the prison yawned for them in the near

future. 'Shall I have sold my honour for nothing?' he thought; and

a heat of rage and resolution glowed in his bosom--rage against his

comrades--resolution to carry through this business if it might be

carried; pluck profit out of shame, since the shame at least was now

inevitable; and come home, home from South America--how did the song

go?--'with his pockets full of money':

'O honey, with our pockets full of money,

We will trip, trip, trip, we will trip it on the quay:'

so the words ran in his head; and the honey took on visible form, the

quay rose before him and he knew it for the lamplit Embankment, and

he saw the lights of Battersea bridge bestride the sullen river. All

through the remainder of his trick, he stood entranced, reviewing the

past. He had been always true to his love, but not always sedulous

to recall her. In the growing calamity of his life, she had swum

more distant, like the moon in mist. The letter of farewell, the

dishonourable hope that had surprised and corrupted him in his distress,

the changed scene, the sea, the night and the music--all stirred him

to the roots of manhood. 'I WILL win her,' he thought, and ground his

teeth. 'Fair or foul, what matters if I win her?'

'Fo' bell, matey. I think um fo' bell'--he was suddenly recalled by

these words in the voice of Uncle Ned.

'Look in at the clock, Uncle,' said he. He would not look himself, from

horror of the tipplers.

'Him past, matey,' repeated the Hawaiian.

'So much the better for you, Uncle,' he replied; and he gave up the

wheel, repeating the directions as he had received them.

He took two steps forward and remembered his dead reckoning. 'How has

she been heading?' he thought; and he flushed from head to foot. He had

not observed or had forgotten; here was the old incompetence; the slate

must be filled up by guess. 'Never again!' he vowed to himself in silent

fury, 'never again. It shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry.' And

for the remainder of his watch, he stood close by Uncle Ned, and read

the face of the compass as perhaps he had never read a letter from his

sweetheart.

All the time, and spurring him to the more attention, song, loud talk,

fleering laughter and the occasional popping of a cork, reached his ears

from the interior of the house; and when the port watch was relieved

at midnight, Huish and the captain appeared upon the quarter-deck with

flushed faces and uneven steps, the former laden with bottles, the

latter with two tin mugs. Herrick silently passed them by. They hailed

him in thick voices, he made no answer, they cursed him for a churl,

he paid no heed although his belly quivered with disgust and rage. He

closed-to the door of the house behind him, and cast himself on a locker

in the cabin--not to sleep he thought--rather to think and to despair.

Yet he had scarce turned twice on his uneasy bed, before a drunken voice

hailed him in the ear, and he must go on deck again to stand the morning

watch.

The first evening set the model for those that were to follow. Two cases

of champagne scarce lasted the four-and-twenty hours, and almost the

whole was drunk by Huish and the captain. Huish seemed to thrive on the

excess; he was never sober, yet never wholly tipsy; the food and the sea

air had soon healed him of his disease, and he began to lay on flesh.

But with Davis things went worse. In the drooping, unbuttoned figure

that sprawled all day upon the lockers, tippling and reading novels;

in the fool who made of the evening watch a public carouse on the

quarter-deck, it would have been hard to recognise the vigorous seaman

of Papeete roads. He kept himself reasonably well in hand till he had

taken the sun and yawned and blotted through his calculations; but from

the moment he rolled up the chart, his hours were passed in slavish

self-indulgence or in hoggish slumber. Every other branch of his duty

was neglected, except maintaining a stern discipline about the dinner

table. Again and again Herrick would hear the cook called aft, and see

him running with fresh tins, or carrying away again a meal that had been

totally condemned. And the more the captain became sunk in drunkenness,

the more delicate his palate showed itself. Once, in the forenoon, he

had a bo'sun's chair rigged over the rail, stripped to his trousers,

and went overboard with a pot of paint. 'I don't like the way this

schooner's painted,' said he, 'and I've taken a down upon her name.' But

he tired of it in half an hour, and the schooner went on her way with

an incongruous patch of colour on the stern, and the word Farallone part

obliterated and part looking through. He refused to stand either the

middle or the morning watch. It was fine-weather sailing, he said;

and asked, with a laugh, 'Who ever heard of the old man standing watch

himself?' To the dead reckoning which Herrick still tried to keep, he

would pay not the least attention nor afford the least assistance.

'What do we want of dead reckoning?' he asked. 'We get the sun all

right, don't we?'

'We mayn't get it always though,' objected Herrick. 'And you told me

yourself you weren't sure of the chronometer.'

'Oh, there ain't no flies in the chronometer!' cried Davis.

'Oblige me so far, captain,' said Herrick stiffly. 'I am anxious to keep

this reckoning, which is a part of my duty; I do not know what to allow

for current, nor how to allow for it. I am too inexperienced; and I beg

of you to help me.'

'Never discourage zealous officer,' said the captain, unrolling the

chart again, for Herrick had taken him over his day's work and while he

was still partly sober. 'Here it is: look for yourself; anything from

west to west no'the-west, and anyways from five to twenty-five miles.

That's what the A'm'ralty chart says; I guess you don't expect to get on

ahead of your own Britishers?'

'I am trying to do my duty, Captain Brown,' said Herrick, with a dark

flush, 'and I have the honour to inform you that I don't enjoy being

trifled with.'

'What in thunder do you want?' roared Davis. 'Go and look at the blamed

wake. If you're trying to do your duty, why don't you go and do it? I

guess it's no business of mine to go and stick my head over the ship's

rump? I guess it's yours. And I'll tell you what it is, my fine fellow,

I'll trouble you not to come the dude over me. You're insolent, that's

what's wrong with you. Don't you crowd me, Mr Herrick, Esquire.'

Herrick tore up his papers, threw them on the floor, and left the cabin.

'He's turned a bloomin' swot, ain't he?' sneered Huish.

'He thinks himself too good for his company, that's what ails Herrick,

Esquire,' raged the captain. 'He thinks I don't understand when he comes

the heavy swell. Won't sit down with us, won't he? won't say a civil

word? I'll serve the son of a gun as he deserves. By God, Huish, I'll

show him whether he's too good for John Davis!'

'Easy with the names, cap',' said Huish, who was always the more sober.

'Easy over the stones, my boy!'

'All right, I will. You're a good sort, Huish. I didn't take to you at

first, but I guess you're right enough. Let's open another bottle,'

said the captain; and that day, perhaps because he was excited by the

quarrel, he drank more recklessly, and by four o'clock was stretched

insensible upon the locker.

Herrick and Huish supped alone, one after the other, opposite his

flushed and snorting body. And if the sight killed Herrick's hunger, the

isolation weighed so heavily on the clerk's spirit, that he was scarce

risen from table ere he was currying favour with his former comrade.

Herrick was at the wheel when he approached, and Huish leaned

confidentially across the binnacle.

'I say, old chappie,' he said, 'you and me don't seem to be such pals

somehow.'

Herrick gave her a spoke or two in silence; his eye, as it skirted

from the needle to the luff of the foresail, passed the man by without

speculation. But Huish was really dull, a thing he could support with

difficulty, having no resources of his own. The idea of a private talk

with Herrick, at this stage of their relations, held out particular

inducements to a person of his character. Drink besides, as it renders

some men hyper-sensitive, made Huish callous. And it would almost have

required a blow to make him quit his purpose.

'Pretty business, ain't it?' he continued; 'Dyvis on the lush? Must say

I thought you gave it 'im A1 today. He didn't like it a bit; took on

hawful after you were gone.--“'Ere,” says I, “'old on, easy on the

lush,” I says. “'Errick was right, and you know it. Give 'im a chanst,”

I says.--“Uish,” sezee, “don't you gimme no more of your jaw, or I'll

knock your bloomin' eyes out.” Well, wot can I do, 'Errick? But I tell

you, I don't 'arf like it. It looks to me like the Sea Rynger over

again.'

Still Herrick was silent.

'Do you hear me speak?' asked Huish sharply. 'You're pleasant, ain't

you?'

'Stand away from that binnacle,' said Herrick.

The clerk looked at him, long and straight and black; his figure seemed

to writhe like that of a snake about to strike; then he turned on his

heel, went back to the cabin and opened a bottle of champagne. When

eight bells were cried, he slept on the floor beside the captain on the

locker; and of the whole starboard watch, only Sally Day appeared upon

the summons. The mate proposed to stand the watch with him, and let

Uncle Ned lie down; it would make twelve hours on deck, and probably

sixteen, but in this fair-weather sailing, he might safely sleep between

his tricks of wheel, leaving orders to be called on any sign of squalls.

So far he could trust the men, between whom and himself a close relation

had sprung up. With Uncle Ned he held long nocturnal conversations, and

the old man told him his simple and hard story of exile, suffering, and

injustice among cruel whites. The cook, when he found Herrick messed

alone, produced for him unexpected and sometimes unpalatable dainties,

of which he forced himself to eat. And one day, when he was forward,

he was surprised to feel a caressing hand run down his shoulder, and to

hear the voice of Sally Day crooning in his ear: 'You gootch man!' He

turned, and, choking down a sob, shook hands with the negrito. They were

kindly, cheery, childish souls. Upon the Sunday each brought forth

his separate Bible--for they were all men of alien speech even to each

other, and Sally Day communicated with his mates in English only, each

read or made believe to read his chapter, Uncle Ned with spectacles on

his nose; and they would all join together in the singing of missionary

hymns. It was thus a cutting reproof to compare the islanders and the

whites aboard the Farallone. Shame ran in Herrick's blood to remember

what employment he was on, and to see these poor souls--and even Sally

Day, the child of cannibals, in all likelihood a cannibal himself--so

faithful to what they knew of good. The fact that he was held in

grateful favour by these innocents served like blinders to his

conscience, and there were times when he was inclined, with Sally Day,

to call himself a good man. But the height of his favour was only now to

appear. With one voice, the crew protested; ere Herrick knew what they

were doing, the cook was aroused and came a willing volunteer; all hands

clustered about their mate with expostulations and caresses; and he was

bidden to lie down and take his customary rest without alarm.

'He tell you tlue,' said Uncle Ned. 'You sleep. Evely man hae he do all

light. Evely man he like you too much.'

Herrick struggled, and gave way; choked upon some trivial words of

gratitude; and walked to the side of the house, against which he leaned,

struggling with emotion.

Uncle Ned presently followed him and begged him to lie down.

'It's no use, Uncle Ned,' he replied. 'I couldn't sleep. I'm knocked

over with all your goodness.'

'Ah, no call me Uncle Ned no mo'!' cried the old man. 'No my name! My

name Taveeta, all-e-same Taveeta King of Islael. Wat for he call that

Hawaii? I think no savvy nothing--all-e-same Wise-a-mana.'

It was the first time the name of the late captain had been mentioned,

and Herrick grasped the occasion. The reader shall be spared Uncle Ned's

unwieldy dialect, and learn in less embarrassing English, the sum of

what he now communicated. The ship had scarce cleared the Golden Gates

before the captain and mate had entered on a career of drunkenness,

which was scarcely interrupted by their malady and only closed by death.

For days and weeks they had encountered neither land nor ship; and

seeing themselves lost on the huge deep with their insane conductors,

the natives had drunk deep of terror.

At length they made a low island, and went in; and Wiseman and Wishart

landed in the boat.

There was a great village, a very fine village, and plenty Kanakas in

that place; but all mighty serious; and from every here and there in

the back parts of the settlement, Taveeta heard the sounds of island

lamentation. 'I no savvy TALK that island,' said he. 'I savvy hear

um CLY. I think, Hum! too many people die here!' But upon Wiseman and

Wishart the significance of that barbaric keening was lost. Full of

bread and drink, they rollicked along unconcerned, embraced the girls

who had scarce energy to repel them, took up and joined (with drunken

voices) in the death wail, and at last (on what they took to be

an invitation) entered under the roof of a house in which was a

considerable concourse of people sitting silent. They stooped below the

eaves, flushed and laughing; within a minute they came forth again with

changed faces and silent tongues; and as the press severed to make way

for them, Taveeta was able to perceive, in the deep shadow of the house,

the sick man raising from his mat a head already defeatured by disease.

The two tragic triflers fled without hesitation for their boat,

screaming on Taveeta to make haste; they came aboard with all speed

of oars, raised anchor and crowded sail upon the ship with blows and

curses, and were at sea again--and again drunk--before sunset. A week

after, and the last of the two had been committed to the deep. Herrick

asked Taveeta where that island was, and he replied that, by what he

gathered of folks' talk as they went up together from the beach, he

supposed it must be one of the Paumotus. This was in itself probable

enough, for the Dangerous Archipelago had been swept that year from east

to west by devastating smallpox; but Herrick thought it a strange course

to lie from Sydney. Then he remembered the drink.

'Were they not surprised when they made the island?' he asked.

'Wise-a-mana he say “dam! what this?”' was the reply.

'O, that's it then,' said Herrick. 'I don't believe they knew where they

were.'

'I think so too,' said Uncle Ned. 'I think no savvy. This one mo'

betta,' he added, pointing to the house where the drunken captain

slumbered: 'Take-a-sun all-e-time.'

The implied last touch completed Herrick's picture of the life and death

of his two predecessors; of their prolonged, sordid, sodden sensuality

as they sailed, they knew not whither, on their last cruise. He held but

a twinkling and unsure belief in any future state; the thought of one

of punishment he derided; yet for him (as for all) there dwelt a horror

about the end of the brutish man. Sickness fell upon him at the image

thus called up; and when he compared it with the scene in which himself

was acting, and considered the doom that seemed to brood upon the

schooner, a horror that was almost superstitious fell upon him. And

yet the strange thing was, he did not falter. He who had proved his

incapacity in so many fields, being now falsely placed amid duties

which he did not understand, without help, and it might be said without

countenance, had hitherto surpassed expectation; and even the shameful

misconduct and shocking disclosures of that night seemed but to nerve

and strengthen him. He had sold his honour; he vowed it should not be in

vain; 'it shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry,' he repeated. And

in his heart he wondered at himself. Living rage no doubt supported him;

no doubt also, the sense of the last cast, of the ships burned, of all

doors closed but one, which is so strong a tonic to the merely weak, and

so deadly a depressant to the merely cowardly.

For some time the voyage went otherwise well. They weathered Fakarava

with one board; and the wind holding well to the southward and

blowing fresh, they passed between Ranaka and Ratiu, and ran some days

north-east by east-half-east under the lee of Takume and Honden, neither

of which they made. In about 14 degrees South and between 134 and 135

degrees West, it fell a dead calm with rather a heavy sea. The captain

refused to take in sail, the helm was lashed, no watch was set, and the

Farallone rolled and banged for three days, according to observation, in

almost the same place. The fourth morning, a little before day, a breeze

sprang up and rapidly freshened. The captain had drunk hard the night

before; he was far from sober when he was roused; and when he came on

deck for the first time at half-past eight, it was plain he had already

drunk deep again at breakfast. Herrick avoided his eye; and resigned the

deck with indignation to a man more than half-seas over.

By the loud commands of the captain and the singing out of fellows at

the ropes, he could judge from the house that sail was being crowded on

the ship; relinquished his half-eaten breakfast; and came on deck again,

to find the main and the jib topsails set, and both watches and the cook

turned out to hand the staysail. The Farallone lay already far over;

the sky was obscured with misty scud; and from the windward an ominous

squall came flying up, broadening and blackening as it rose.

Fear thrilled in Herrick's vitals. He saw death hard by; and if not

death, sure ruin. For if the Farallone lived through the coming squall,

she must surely be dismasted. With that their enterprise was at an end,

and they themselves bound prisoners to the very evidence of their crime.

The greatness of the peril and his own alarm sufficed to silence him.

Pride, wrath, and shame raged without issue in his mind; and he shut his

teeth and folded his arms close.

The captain sat in the boat to windward, bellowing orders and insults,

his eyes glazed, his face deeply congested; a bottle set between his

knees, a glass in his hand half empty. His back was to the squall, and

he was at first intent upon the setting of the sail. When that was done,

and the great trapezium of canvas had begun to draw and to trail the

lee-rail of the Farallone level with the foam, he laughed out an empty

laugh, drained his glass, sprawled back among the lumber in the boat,

and fetched out a crumpled novel.

Herrick watched him, and his indignation glowed red hot. He glanced to

windward where the squall already whitened the near sea and heralded its

coming with a singular and dismal sound. He glanced at the steersman,

and saw him clinging to the spokes with a face of a sickly blue. He saw

the crew were running to their stations without orders. And it seemed

as if something broke in his brain; and the passion of anger, so long

restrained, so long eaten in secret, burst suddenly loose and shook him

like a sail. He stepped across to the captain and smote his hand heavily

on the drunkard's shoulder.

'You brute,' he said, in a voice that tottered, 'look behind you!'

'Wha's that?' cried Davis, bounding in the boat and upsetting the

champagne.

'You lost the Sea Ranger because you were a drunken sot,' said Herrick.

'Now you're going to lose the Farallone. You're going to drown here the

same way as you drowned others, and be damned. And your daughter shall

walk the streets, and your sons be thieves like their father.'

For the moment, the words struck the captain white and foolish. 'My

God!' he cried, looking at Herrick as upon a ghost; 'my God, Herrick!'

'Look behind you, then!' reiterated the assailant.

The wretched man, already partly sobered, did as he was told, and in the

same breath of time leaped to his feet. 'Down staysail!' he trumpeted.

The hands were thrilling for the order, and the great sail came with

a run, and fell half overboard among the racing foam. 'Jib

topsail-halyards! Let the stays'l be,' he said again.

But before it was well uttered, the squall shouted aloud and fell, in

a solid mass of wind and rain commingled, on the Farallone; and she

stooped under the blow, and lay like a thing dead. From the mind of

Herrick reason fled; he clung in the weather rigging, exulting; he was

done with life, and he gloried in the release; he gloried in the wild

noises of the wind and the choking onslaught of the rain; he gloried to

die so, and now, amid this coil of the elements. And meanwhile, in the

waist up to his knees in water--so low the schooner lay--the captain

was hacking at the foresheet with a pocket knife. It was a question of

seconds, for the Farallone drank deep of the encroaching seas. But the

hand of the captain had the advance; the foresail boom tore apart the

last strands of the sheet and crashed to leeward; the Farallone leaped

up into the wind and righted; and the peak and throat halyards, which

had long been let go, began to run at the same instant.

For some ten minutes more she careered under the impulse of the squall;

but the captain was now master of himself and of his ship, and all

danger at an end. And then, sudden as a trick change upon the stage, the

squall blew by, the wind dropped into light airs, the sun beamed forth

again upon the tattered schooner; and the captain, having secured the

foresail boom and set a couple of hands to the pump, walked aft, sober,

a little pale, and with the sodden end of a cigar still stuck between

his teeth even as the squall had found it. Herrick followed him; he

could scarce recall the violence of his late emotions, but he felt

there was a scene to go through, and he was anxious and even eager to go

through with it.

The captain, turning at the house end, met him face to face, and averted

his eyes. 'We've lost the two tops'ls and the stays'l,' he gabbled.

'Good business, we didn't lose any sticks. I guess you think we're all

the better without the kites.'

'That's not what I'm thinking,' said Herrick, in a voice strangely

quiet, that yet echoed confusion in the captain's mind.

'I know that,' he cried, holding up his hand. 'I know what you're

thinking. No use to say it now. I'm sober.'

'I have to say it, though,' returned Herrick.

'Hold on, Herrick; you've said enough,' said Davis. 'You've said what I

would take from no man breathing but yourself; only I know it's true.'

'I have to tell you, Captain Brown,' pursued Herrick, 'that I resign my

position as mate. You can put me in irons or shoot me, as you please; I

will make no resistance--only, I decline in any way to help or to obey

you; and I suggest you should put Mr Huish in my place. He will make a

worthy first officer to your captain, sir.' He smiled, bowed, and turned

to walk forward.

'Where are you going, Herrick?' cried the captain, detaining him by the

shoulder.

'To berth forward with the men, sir,' replied Herrick, with the same

hateful smile. 'I've been long enough aft here with you--gentlemen.

'You're wrong there,' said Davis. 'Don't you be too quick with me; there

ain't nothing wrong but the drink--it's the old story, man! Let me get

sober once, and then you'll see,' he pleaded.

'Excuse me, I desire to see no more of you,' said Herrick.

The captain groaned aloud. 'You know what you said about my children?'

he broke out.

'By rote. In case you wish me to say it you again?' asked Herrick.

'Don't!' cried the captain, clapping his hands to his ears. 'Don't make

me kill a man I care for! Herrick, if you see me put glass to my lips

again till we're ashore, I give you leave to put bullet through me;

I beg you to do it! You're the only man aboard whose carcase is worth

losing; do you think I don't know that? do you think I ever went back on

you? I always knew you were in the right of it--drunk or sober, I knew

that. What do you want?--an oath? Man, you're clever enough to see that

this is sure-enough earnest.'

'Do you mean there shall be no more drinking?' asked Herrick, 'neither

by you nor Huish? that you won't go on stealing my profits and drinking

my champagne that I gave my honour for? and that you'll attend to your

duties, and stand watch and watch, and bear your proper share of the

ship's work, instead of leaving it all on the shoulders of a landsman,

and making yourself the butt and scoff of native seamen? Is that what

you mean? If it is, be so good as to say it categorically.'

'You put these things in a way hard for a gentleman to swallow,' said

the captain. 'You wouldn't have me say I was ashamed of myself? Trust me

this once; I'll do the square thing, and there's my hand on it.'

'Well, I'll try it once,' said Herrick. 'Fail me again...'

'No more now!' interrupted Davis. 'No more, old man! Enough said. You've

a riling tongue when your back's up, Herrick. Just be glad we're friends

again, the same as what I am; and go tender on the raws; I'll see as you

don't repent it. We've been mighty near death this day--don't say whose

fault it was!--pretty near hell, too, I guess. We're in a mighty bad

line of life, us two, and ought to go easy with each other.'

He was maundering; yet it seemed as if he were maundering with some

design, beating about the bush of some communication that he feared to

make, or perhaps only talking against time in terror of what Herrick

might say next. But Herrick had now spat his venom; his was a kindly

nature, and, content with his triumph, he had now begun to pity. With

a few soothing words, he sought to conclude the interview, and proposed

that they should change their clothes.

'Not right yet,' said Davis. 'There's another thing I want to tell you

first. You know what you said about my children? I want to tell you why

it hit me so hard; I kind of think you'll feel bad about it too. It's

about my little Adar. You hadn't ought to have quite said that--but of

course I know you didn't know. She--she's dead, you see.'

'Why, Davis!' cried Herrick. 'You've told me a dozen times she was

alive! Clear your head, man! This must be the drink.'

'No, SIR,' said Davis. 'She's dead. Died of a bowel complaint. That was

when I was away in the brig Oregon. She lies in Portland, Maine. “Adar,

only daughter of Captain John Davis and Mariar his wife, aged five.”

I had a doll for her on board. I never took the paper off'n that doll,

Herrick; it went down the way it was with the Sea Ranger, that day I was

damned.'

The Captain's eyes were fixed on the horizon, he talked with an

extraordinary softness but a complete composure; and Herrick looked upon

him with something that was almost terror.

'Don't think I'm crazy neither,' resumed Davis. 'I've all the cold sense

that I know what to do with. But I guess a man that's unhappy's like a

child; and this is a kind of a child's game of mine. I never could act

up to the plain-cut truth, you see; so I pretend. And I warn you square;

as soon as we're through with this talk, I'll start in again with

the pretending. Only, you see, she can't walk no streets,' added the

captain, 'couldn't even make out to live and get that doll!'

Herrick laid a tremulous hand upon the captain's shoulder.

'Don't do that,' cried Davis, recoiling from the touch. 'Can't you see

I'm all broken up the way it is? Come along, then; come along, old

man; you can put your trust in me right through; come along and get dry

clothes.'

They entered the cabin, and there was Huish on his knees prising open a

case of champagne.

''Vast, there!' cried the captain. 'No more of that. No more drinking on

this ship.'

'Turned teetotal, 'ave you?' inquired Hu'sh. 'I'm agreeable. About time,

eh? Bloomin' nearly lost another ship, I fancy.' He took out a bottle

and began calmly to burst the wire with the spike of a corkscrew.

'Do you hear me speak?' cried Davis.

'I suppose I do. You speak loud enough,' said Huish. 'The trouble is

that I don't care.'

Herrick plucked the captain's sleeve. 'Let him free now,' he said.

'We've had all we want this morning.'

'Let him have it then,' said the captain. 'It's his last.'

By this time the wire was open, the string was cut, the head of glided

paper was torn away; and Huish waited, mug in hand, expecting the usual

explosion. It did not follow. He eased the cork with his thumb; still

there was no result. At last he took the screw and drew it. It came out

very easy and with scarce a sound.

''Illo!' said Huish. ''Ere's a bad bottle.'

He poured some of the wine into the mug; it was colourless and still. He

smelt and tasted it.

'W'y, wot's this?' he said. 'It's water!'

If the voice of trumpets had suddenly sounded about the ship in the

midst of the sea, the three men in the house could scarcely have been

more stunned than by this incident. The mug passed round; each sipped,

each smelt of it; each stared at the bottle in its glory of gold paper

as Crusoe may have stared at the footprint; and their minds were swift

to fix upon a common apprehension. The difference between a bottle of

champagne and a bottle of water is not great; between a shipload of one

or the other lay the whole scale from riches to ruin.

A second bottle was broached. There were two cases standing ready in a

stateroom; these two were brought out, broken open, and tested. Still

with the same result: the contents were still colourless and tasteless,

and dead as the rain in a beached fishing-boat.

'Crikey!' said Huish.

'Here, let's sample the hold!' said the captain, mopping his brow with

a back-handed sweep; and the three stalked out of the house, grim and

heavy-footed.

All hands were turned out; two Kanakas were sent below, another

stationed at a purchase; and Davis, axe in hand, took his place beside

the coamings.

'Are you going to let the men know?' whispered Herrick.

'Damn the men!' said Davis. 'It's beyond that. We've got to know

ourselves.'

Three cases were sent on deck and sampled in turn; from each bottle,

as the captain smashed it with the axe, the champagne ran bubbling and

creaming.

'Go deeper, can't you?' cried Davis to the Kanakas in the hold.

The command gave the signal for a disastrous change. Case after case

came up, bottle after bottle was burst and bled mere water. Deeper

yet, and they came upon a layer where there was scarcely so much as

the intention to deceive; where the cases were no longer branded, the

bottles no longer wired or papered, where the fraud was manifest and

stared them in the face.

'Here's about enough of this foolery!' said Davis. 'Stow back the cases

in the hold, Uncle, and get the broken crockery overboard. Come with

me,' he added to his co-adventurers, and led the way back into the

cabin.

Chapter 6. THE PARTNERS

Each took a side of the fixed table; it was the first time they had sat

down at it together; but now all sense of incongruity, all memory of

differences, was quite swept away by the presence of the common ruin.

'Gentlemen,' said the captain, after a pause, and with very much the air

of a chairman opening a board-meeting, 'we're sold.'

Huish broke out in laughter. 'Well, if this ain't the 'ighest old rig!'

he cried. 'And Dyvis, 'ere, who thought he had got up so bloomin' early

in the mornin'! We've stolen a cargo of spring water! Oh, my crikey!'

and he squirmed with mirth.

The captain managed to screw out a phantom smile.

'Here's Old Man Destiny again,' said he to Herrick, 'but this time I

guess he's kicked the door right in.'

Herrick only shook his head.

'O Lord, it's rich!' laughed Huish. 'It would really be a scrumptious

lark if it 'ad 'appened to somebody else! And wot are we to do next? Oh,

my eye! with this bloomin' schooner, too?'

'That's the trouble,' said Davis. 'There's only one thing certain: it's

no use carting this old glass and ballast to Peru. No, SIR, we're in a

hole.'

'O my, and the merchand' cried Huish; 'the man that made this shipment!

He'll get the news by the mail brigantine; and he'll think of course

we're making straight for Sydney.'

'Yes, he'll be a sick merchant,' said the captain. 'One thing: this

explains the Kanaka crew. If you're going to lose a ship, I would ask

no better myself than a Kanaka crew. But there's one thing it don't

explain; it don't explain why she came down Tahiti ways.'

'Wy, to lose her, you byby!' said Huish.

'A lot you know,' said the captain. 'Nobody wants to lose a schooner;

they want to lose her ON HER COURSE, you skeericks! You seem to think

underwriters haven't got enough sense to come in out of the rain.'

'Well,' said Herrick, 'I can tell you (I am afraid) why she came so

far to the eastward. I had it of Uncle Ned. It seems these two unhappy

devils, Wiseman and Wishart, were drunk on the champagne from the

beginning--and died drunk at the end.'

The captain looked on the table.

'They lay in their two bunks, or sat here in this damned house,' he

pursued, with rising agitation, 'filling their skins with the accursed

stuff, till sickness took them. As they sickened and the fever rose,

they drank the more. They lay here howling and groaning, drunk and

dying, all in one. They didn't know where they were, they didn't care.

They didn't even take the sun, it seems.'

'Not take the sun?' cried the captain, looking up. 'Sacred Billy! what a

crowd!'

'Well, it don't matter to Joe!' said Huish. 'Wot are Wiseman and the

t'other buffer to us?'

'A good deal, too,' says the captain. 'We're their heirs, I guess.'

'It is a great inheritance,' said Herrick.

'Well, I don't know about that,' returned Davis. 'Appears to me as if it

might be worse. 'Tain't worth what the cargo would have been of course,

at least not money down. But I'll tell you what it appears to figure up

to. Appears to me as if it amounted to about the bottom dollar of the

man in 'Frisco.'

''Old on,' said Huish. 'Give a fellow time; 'ow's this, umpire?'

'Well, my sons,' pursued the captain, who seemed to have recovered his

assurance, 'Wiseman and Wishart were to be paid for casting away this

old schooner and its cargo. We're going to cast away the schooner right

enough; and I'll make it my private business to see that we get paid.

What were W. and W. to get? That's more'n I can tell. But W. and W. went

into this business themselves, they were on the crook. Now WE'RE on

the square, we only stumbled into it; and that merchant has just got to

squeal, and I'm the man to see that he squeals good. No, sir! there's

some stuffing to this Farallone racket after all.'

'Go it, cap!' cried Huish. 'Yoicks! Forrard! 'Old 'ard! There's your

style for the money! Blow me if I don't prefer this to the hother.'

'I do not understand,' said Herrick. 'I have to ask you to excuse me; I

do not understand.'

'Well now, see here, Herrick,' said Davis, 'I'm going to have a word

with you anyway upon a different matter, and it's good that Huish should

hear it too. We're done with this boozing business, and we ask your

pardon for it right here and now. We have to thank you for all you did

for us while we were making hogs of ourselves; you'll find me turn-to

all right in future; and as for the wine, which I grant we stole from

you, I'll take stock and see you paid for it. That's good enough, I

believe. But what I want to point out to you is this. The old game was

a risky game. The new game's as safe as running a Vienna Bakery. We just

put this Farallone before the wind, and run till we're well to looard

of our port of departure and reasonably well up with some other place,

where they have an American Consul. Down goes the Farallone, and

good-bye to her! A day or so in the boat; the consul packs us home,

at Uncle Sam's expense, to 'Frisco; and if that merchant don't put the

dollars down, you come to me!'

'But I thought,' began Herrick; and then broke out; 'oh, let's get on to

Peru!'

'Well, if you're going to Peru for your health, I won't say no!'

replied the captain. 'But for what other blame' shadow of a reason you

should want to go there, gets me clear. We don't want to go there with

this cargo; I don't know as old bottles is a lively article anywheres;

leastways, I'll go my bottom cent, it ain't Peru. It was always a doubt

if we could sell the schooner; I never rightly hoped to, and now I'm

sure she ain't worth a hill of beans; what's wrong with her, I don't

know; I only know it's something, or she wouldn't be here with this

truck in her inside. Then again, if we lose her, and land in Peru, where

are we? We can't declare the loss, or how did we get to Peru? In that

case the merchant can't touch the insurance; most likely he'll go bust;

and don't you think you see the three of us on the beach of Callao?'

'There's no extradition there,' said Herrick.

'Well, my son, and we want to be extraded,' said the captain.

'What's our point? We want to have a consul extrade us as far as San

Francisco and that merchant's office door. My idea is that Samoa would

be found an eligible business centre. It's dead before the wind; the

States have a consul there, and 'Frisco steamers call, so's we could

skip right back and interview the merchant.'

'Samoa?' said Herrick. 'It will take us for ever to get there.'

'Oh, with a fair wind!' said the captain.

'No trouble about the log, eh?' asked Huish.

'No, SIR,' said Davis. 'Light airs and baffling winds. Squalls and

calms. D. R.: five miles. No obs. Pumps attended. And fill in the

barometer and thermometer off of last year's trip.' 'Never saw such a

voyage,' says you to the consul. 'Thought I was going to run short...'

He stopped in mid career. 'Say,' he began again, and once more stopped.

'Beg your pardon, Herrick,' he added with undisguised humility, 'but did

you keep the run of the stores?'

'Had I been told to do so, it should have been done, as the rest was

done, to the best of my little ability,' said Herrick. 'As it was, the

cook helped himself to what he pleased.'

Davis looked at the table.

'I drew it rather fine, you see,' he said at last. 'The great thing was

to clear right out of Papeete before the consul could think better of

it. Tell you what: I guess I'll take stock.'

And he rose from table and disappeared with a lamp in the lazarette.

''Ere's another screw loose,' observed Huish.

'My man,' said Herrick, with a sudden gleam of animosity, 'it is still

your watch on deck, and surely your wheel also?'

'You come the 'eavy swell, don't you, ducky?' said Huish.

'Stand away from that binnacle. Surely your w'eel, my man. Yah.'

He lit a cigar ostentatiously, and strolled into the waist with his

hands in his pockets.

In a surprisingly short time, the captain reappeared; he did not look at

Herrick, but called Huish back and sat down.

'Well,' he began, 'I've taken stock--roughly.' He paused as if for

somebody to help him out; and none doing so, both gazing on him instead

with manifest anxiety, he yet more heavily resumed. 'Well, it won't

fight. We can't do it; that's the bed rock. I'm as sorry as what you can

be, and sorrier. We can't look near Samoa. I don't know as we could get

to Peru.'

'Wot-ju mean?' asked Huish brutally.

'I can't 'most tell myself,' replied the captain. 'I drew it fine; I

said I did; but what's been going on here gets me! Appears as if the

devil had been around. That cook must be the holiest kind of fraud. Only

twelve days, too! Seems like craziness. I'll own up square to one thing:

I seem to have figured too fine upon the flour. But the rest--my land!

I'll never understand it! There's been more waste on this twopenny

ship than what there is to an Atlantic Liner.' He stole a glance at his

companions; nothing good was to be gleaned from their dark faces; and he

had recourse to rage. 'You wait till I interview that cook!' he roared

and smote the table with his fist. 'I'll interview the son of a gun so's

he's never been spoken to before. I'll put a bead upon the--'

'You will not lay a finger on the man,' said Herrick. 'The fault is

yours and you know it. If you turn a savage loose in your store-room,

you know what to expect. I will not allow the man to be molested.'

It is hard to say how Davis might have taken this defiance; but he was

diverted to a fresh assailant.

'Well!' drawled Huish, 'you're a plummy captain, ain't you? You're a

blooming captain! Don't you, set up any of your chat to me, John Dyvis:

I know you now, you ain't any more use than a bloomin' dawl! Oh, you

“don't know”, don't you? Oh, it “gets you”, do it? Oh, I dessay! W'y,

we en't you 'owling for fresh tins every blessed day? 'Ow often 'ave I

'eard you send the 'ole bloomin' dinner off and tell the man to chuck it

in the swill tub? And breakfast? Oh, my crikey! breakfast for ten, and

you 'ollerin' for more! And now you “can't 'most tell”! Blow me, if it

ain't enough to make a man write an insultin' letter to Gawd! You dror

it mild, John Dyvis; don't 'andle me; I'm dyngerous.'

Davis sat like one bemused; it might even have been doubted if he heard,

but the voice of the clerk rang about the cabin like that of a cormorant

among the ledges of the cliff.

'That will do, Huish,' said Herrick.

'Oh, so you tyke his part, do you? you stuck-up sneerin' snob! Tyke it

then. Come on, the pair of you. But as for John Dyvis, let him look out!

He struck me the first night aboard, and I never took a blow yet but

wot I gave as good. Let him knuckle down on his marrow bones and beg my

pardon. That's my last word.'

'I stand by the Captain,' said Herrick. 'That makes us two to one, both

good men; and the crew will all follow me. I hope I shall die very soon;

but I have not the least objection to killing you before I go. I should

prefer it so; I should do it with no more remorse than winking. Take

care--take care, you little cad!'

The animosity with which these words were uttered was so marked in

itself, and so remarkable in the man who uttered them that Huish stared,

and even the humiliated Davis reared up his head and gazed at his

defender. As for Herrick, the successive agitations and disappointments

of the day had left him wholly reckless; he was conscious of a pleasant

glow, an agreeable excitement; his head seemed empty, his eyeballs

burned as he turned them, his throat was dry as a biscuit; the least

dangerous man by nature, except in so far as the weak are always

dangerous, at that moment he was ready to slay or to be slain with equal

unconcern.

Here at least was the gage thrown down, and battle offered; he who

should speak next would bring the matter to an issue there and then; all

knew it to be so and hung back; and for many seconds by the cabin clock,

the trio sat motionless and silent.

Then came an interruption, welcome as the flowers in May.

'Land ho!' sang out a voice on deck. 'Land a weatha bow!'

'Land!' cried Davis, springing to his feet. 'What's this? There ain't no

land here.'

And as men may run from the chamber of a murdered corpse, the three ran

forth out of the house and left their quarrel behind them, undecided.

The sky shaded down at the sea level to the white of opals; the sea

itself, insolently, inkily blue, drew all about them the uncompromising

wheel of the horizon. Search it as they pleased, not even the practisect

eye of Captain Davis could descry the smallest interruption. A few filmy

clouds were slowly melting overhead; and about the schooner, as around

the only point of interest, a tropic bird, white as a snowflake, hung,

and circled, and displayed, as it turned, the long vermilion feather of

its tall. Save the sea and the heaven, that was all.

'Who sang out land?' asked Davis. 'If there's any boy playing funny dog

with me, I'll teach him skylarking!'

But Uncle Ned contentedly pointed to a part of the horizon, where a

greenish, filmy iridescence could be discerned floating like smoke on

the pale heavens.

Davis applied his glass to it, and then looked at the Kanaka. 'Call that

land?' said he. 'Well, it's more than I do.'

'One time long ago,' said Uncle Ned, 'I see Anaa all-e-same that, four

five hours befo' we come up. Capena he say sun go down, sun go up again;

he say lagoon all-e-same milla.'

'All-e-same WHAT?' asked Davis.

'Milla, sah,' said Uncle Ned.

'Oh, ah! mirror,' said Davis. 'I see; reflection from the lagoon. Well,

you know, it is just possible, though it's strange I never heard of it.

Here, let's look at the chart.'

They went back to the cabin, and found the position of the schooner well

to windward of the archipelago in the midst of a white field of paper.

'There! you see for yourselves,' said Davis.

'And yet I don't know,' said Herrick, 'I somehow think there's something

in it. I'll tell you one thing too, captain; that's all right about the

reflection; I heard it in Papeete.'

'Fetch up that Findlay, then!' said Davis. 'I'll try it all ways. An

island wouldn't come amiss, the way we're fixed.'

The bulky volume was handed up to him, broken-backed as is the way with

Findlay; and he turned to the place and began to run over the text,

muttering to himself and turning over the pages with a wetted finger.

'Hullo!' he exclaimed. 'How's this?' And he read aloud. 'New Island.

According to M. Delille this island, which from private interests would

remain unknown, lies, it is said, in lat. 12 degrees 49' 10” S. long.

113 degrees 6' W. In addition to the position above given Commander

Matthews, H.M.S. Scorpion, states that an island exists in lat. 12

degrees 0' S. long. 13 degrees 16' W. This must be the same, if such

an island exists, which is very doubtful, and totally disbelieved in by

South Sea traders.'

'Golly!' said Huish.

'It's rather in the conditional mood,' said Herrick.

'It's anything you please,' cried Davis, 'only there it is! That's our

place, and don't you make any mistake.'

“'Which from private interests would remain unknown,”' read Herrick,

over his shoulder. 'What may that mean?'

'It should mean pearls,' said Davis. 'A pearling island the government

don't know about? That sounds like real estate. Or suppose it don't mean

anything. Suppose it's just an island; I guess we could fill up with

fish, and cocoanuts, and native stuff, and carry out the Samoa scheme

hand over fist. How long did he say it was before they raised Anaa? Five

hours, I think?'

'Four or five,' said Herrick.

Davis stepped to the door. 'What breeze had you that time you made Anaa,

Uncle Ned?' said he.

'Six or seven knots,' was the reply.

'Thirty or thirty-five miles,' said Davis. 'High time we were shortening

sail, then. If it is an island, we don't want to be butting our head

against it in the dark; and if it isn't an island, we can get through it

just as well by daylight. Ready about!' he roared.

And the schooner's head was laid for that elusive glimmer in the sky,

which began already to pale in lustre and diminish in size, as the stain

of breath vanishes from a window pane. At the same time she was reefed

close down.

Part II

THE QUARTETTE