SOME PASSAGES FROM A DIARY
Mansfield was right. The pages of this diary struck the essentially
human note of frank self-avowal. They were as fragrant as May orchards,
their sweetness of personality made one think of brave young dreams
among dewy blossoms. But I confessed to him the feeling that we were
trespassers into these secrets, and after that he either laid the book
by altogether or read it only when alone.
The _Wastrel_ was cruising at her cripple's pace southeast by east,
through those hot waters which lie directly above the equator. After
some days we sloped across the line, but still clung to the hideous
swelter of the next meridian. Our course lay among groups of lush
islands which simmered in steam and fever, and the merciless, overhead
sun beat upon us, as if focused through a burning glass until the pitch
oozed from the deck cracks, and the sweat from our pores, and the
self-control from our curdled tempers. Faces that had been sullen at
Sandakan grew malevolent and menacing at 150 degrees, east, where, if I
remember rightly, we crossed the equator.
The scowls of the men dwelt hatefully upon Captain Coulter as he paced
the bridge. From scraps of information picked up here and there in
fo'castle disparagement, I pieced together a lurid abstract of his
history. I knew how wild and unsavory were the reputations of many of
the men of the eastern beaches. I had listened to tales of _lanai_ and
_bund_, but even in such company our skipper stood out as uniquely
wicked.
The sheer and hypnotic force of his masterful will lay over and silenced
the ship. From the first, he dominated. But if he had dominated at the
latitude of 120 he domineered at 150, and to this domineering he brought
all those extremes of tyranny which lie at the hand of a ship's captain
on the high seas. At times the sheer, undiluted brutality of this
control compelled my unwilling admiration. Every pair of eyes that met
his from the fo'castle, were eyes of smoldering hatred and fear, and
though he assumed scornful unconsciousness of this attitude, he knew
that his security was no greater than that of the lion-tamer, whose
beasts have begun to go bad. He must appear to invite attack, and upon
its first intimation of outbreak, he must punish, and punish memorably.
Captain Coulter was little above the average in physical pattern and he
walked with a slight defect of gait, throwing one foot out with an
emphatic stamp. His face was always clean-shaven, and it might have
served a sculptor for a type of the uncompromising Puritan, so hidden
were its brutalities and so strong its note of implacable resoluteness.
Over a high and rather protrusive forehead, long hair of iron gray was
always swept back. Bushy and aggressive brows shaded eyes singularly
piercing and of the same depth and coldness as polar ice. His nose was
large and straight, and his lips set tight and unyielding like the jaws
of a steel trap. The chin was square and close-shaven. Our captain was a
silent man, yet in his own fashion bitterly passionate. Heffernan, the
first mate, was a tawdry courtier, who studiously considered his chief
in every matter, and maintained his position of concord by ludicrous
care to risk no disagreement. In the stuffy cabin where three times a
day we sweltered over bad food Mansfield and I studied the attitudes of
the officers.
Coulter grimly amused himself over his eating by making absurd
statements for the sheer pleasure of seeing his next in command, fall
abjectly into agreement. The second mate, however, was impenetrably
silent. He was without fear, but a life which had evidently brought him
down a steep declivity from a lost respectability, had taught him
consideration for odds. If he did not contradict the dogmatic utterances
of his chief in table conversation, he at least refused to agree.
Mansfield and I were convinced that if this prematurely gray fellow with
the dissipated face, cut in a patrician mould, could ever be brought to
the point of personal narrative, he would have a stirring story to tell.
We also knew that he would never tell it.
Once before the feud between after-watch and fo'castle drove the
officers into an alliance of self-defense. A grave clash between the
captain and the second mate seemed inevitable. It was a night of
intolerable heat, and a sky spangled with stars hung over us low and
smothering. Lawrence, the second mate, was off watch, and joined us,
carrying a violin. Then under the weird depression and melancholy
lassitude which burdened us all, he began to improvise. Mansfield and I
listened, spell-bound. Under his touch the catgut gave off such strains
as could come only from the sheer genius of a gifted musician who had
suffered miserably. It was almost as if he were giving without words the
story which his lips would never tell, and into the improvised music
crept infinite pathos and somber tragedy. No one could have listened
unmoved, but the manner in which Captain Coulter was affected was
startling.
He came over with an advent like that of a maniac. The lame foot was
pounding the deck with the stressful stamp that was always his
indication of rage. He halted before us with fists clenched and his eyes
glittering. Upon Lawrence he vented an outpouring of blasphemous and
unquotable wrath.
"Throw that damned fiddle overboard," was the command with which he
capped his fierce tirade. "Don't let me hear its hell-tortured
screeching on my ship again."
For a moment Lawrence stood silent and cold in a petrifaction of anger.
Then he laid the instrument carefully on a hatch and stepped forward.
Obviously it was in his mind at that moment to kill the captain, but
after a pause he thought better of it. The odds against him were too
heavy.
"I'll stow the violin in my box, sir," he said with a voice so quiet it
was almost gentle, "but so help me God, if ever we meet after this
voyage is ended, I mean to kill you." Coulter laughed disdainfully and
strode away, but for ten minutes Lawrence sat silent, his breath coming
in deep gasps while he wrestled with the murder madness. We learned
later that the captain was one of those persons whom music frenzies, and
from that time on we did not even permit ourselves the consolation of
whistling a favorite air.
Of all the restless men in the fo'castle, Coulter most keenly watched
one John Hoak, a gigantic seaman from Liverpool, in whom he
instinctively recognized a potential ringleader of mutiny. One evening
Hoak vindicated this appraisement by defiantly and loudly playing a
music-hall tune on an accordion. A strain of it reached the bridge and
Coulter, who was on watch, ordered the offender forward. After a violent
and profane denunciation, under which the giant writhed in silent fury,
Coulter lashed out to the sailor's mouth with his clenched fist and sent
him sprawling to the deck. But lest this conduct should appear too
irresolute, he added the punishment of twenty-four hours in irons. A
fellow seaman plucked up the heroism to demand that the incident be
entered on the log for admiralty investigation and Coulter's only reply
was to send the insurgent into the inferno of the stoke hold for an
extra shift at the shovels. In the stokehold the thermometer registered
130 degrees Fahrenheit, and the white and brown torsos that strained
under the trembling dials were black with the sooty sweat of their
effort and red with the pitiless glare from the grates.
From these beginnings the cloud on the horizon of our affairs steadily
gathered and blackened until an ominous pall of impending mutiny
overhung us. Only an occasional coral reef or atoll now broke the
monotony of a dead and oily sea. No shred of cloud relieved the
emptiness of a devitalized sky. Mansfield and I went about in canvas
shoes and pajamas. The ship was more disheveled than we, and its
discipline more slovenly than its dress. The churlish silence of the
fo'castle was met by the braggart autocracy of the officers. Conditions
grew tenser and thicker with each day, yet no specific rupture came to
fire the waiting explosion. Slowly it brewed and gathered menace, while
the air hung pulseless and heavy under its shadow. Mansfield and I knew
it needed only a lightning flash to loose all the artillery of the
thunders and set them about their hell's fury. By tacit consent we did
not often talk of it, but we remained close together and placed our
revolvers, belts and sheath-knives where they could be readily caught
up. Under the silent horror of foreboding our nerves became raw and our
tempers, like those of the others, short and raspy. On one sultry
afternoon when the trade wind was dead, I came upon Mansfield sprawling
in the shadow of a life-boat, diligently reading entries from the
unknown girl's diary, touching the incidents of her sheltered and
untroubled life. He glanced up shamefacedly, then began in exculpation:
"See here, you know you're quite wrong about the guiltiness of reading
this. I'm sure she wouldn't mind. She's not that sort. Here we are
menaced by the inferno of a mutiny. We are no better than mice waiting
the pleasure of a cat, which means to crush them.... The atmosphere
will drive us mad. This book is like a breeze off the heather.... I tell
you it helps."
In abnormal times men entertain abnormal ideas and warped notions. I sat
cross-legged on the deck beside him and stuffed tobacco into my pipe. I
said nothing.
"It's all getting on my nerves. I'm losing my grip!" he admitted. "Last
night I dreamed of a nasty row and all day a bit of rhyme has been
running through my brain." He paused a moment, then quoted:
"''Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead
Or a yawning hole in a battered head,
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red.
"'And there they lay while the soggy skies
Dreened all day long in upstaring eyes,
At murk sunset and at foul sunrise.'"
He broke off and laughed at himself unsteadily.
"Get your mind off it," I commanded shortly. "Fetch out the blank-book.
Let's read about her debut party."
But the passage at which the book fell open dealt with a time prior to
debuts. At the head of the page was pasted a newspaper clipping hinting
at personalities but giving no names.
"One of the most beautiful and popular members of the younger set in the
summer colony" had been capsized while sailing in the harbor. The youth
who accompanied her had been seized with cramps and she had kept not
only herself but her helpless escort above water until the tardy arrival
of help. Beneath, in her own hand, was scrawled:
"Did they expect me to drown him? I had to stand by, of course. What
else could a fellow do? But I spoiled a dress I look nice in. I'm sorry
for that."
Appended to this was a postscript so badly written that it was hard to
decipher. I could guess that her cheeks had colored as she wrote it.
"Maybe after all, I am a grandstander. I did get awfully tired--and I
pretended that _he_ was looking on, and was swimming out to help me."
"By Jove" snorted Mansfield, "she's a ripping good sort. I wonder who
she pretended was looking on."
"Turn back," I suggested. "It may tell."
But it was only after some searching that we found him duly catalogued,
and even then she gave him no name. Yet in trailing him through the
pages, we came to know her quite well, and to render sincere allegiance.
She was not at all conventional. She was one of those rare discoveries
upon which the prospector in life comes only when he strikes an El
Dorado. She dared to think her own thoughts and did not grow into the
stereotyped mold of imitation. We felt from the clean, instinctive
courage of her tone and view-point that if ill chance had marooned her
with us on this imperiled ship, she would bear herself more gallantly
than we could hope to do, and that she would tread these filthy decks
with no spots on the whiteness of her skirts.
In her early writings she had shown for something of a tomboy and there
were hints of elderly exhortation to tread more primly the paths which
were deemed maidenly. Yet from these tattered scraps of life and
outlook, we could piece together some concept of her soul fabric. This
girl was woven of pure silk, but not of flimsy silk; there were strength
and softness--resoluteness and tenderness--a warp and woof for the loom
of noble things--and charm. Often I felt as though I were invading a
temple in which I had no place as communicant, and into whose fanes and
outer areas I should wish to come reverently, with the shoes of my
grosser soul in my hands. One night she had been sitting in the
moonlight on the beach, and the sea had talked to her. What she wrote
that night was pure poetry. I shall not try to reproduce it from my
faulty memory. My heavy masculine hand would mar its gossamer beauty.
One might as well undertake to restore the iridescent subtleties of a
broken bubble. On this occasion she was thinking of the mysterious man
she had so quaintly idealized. Had the lucky beggar, whoever he was,
read those lines he must have felt that, in the lists of life, there
rested on him the sacred obligation to bear a spotless shield and a true
lance. She transcribed as one to whom the magic and delicate nuances of
life are revealed. Besides these passages there were others sparkling
with the merriment of spontaneous humor. Our writer was no Lady
Dolorosa. She was as many-sided and many-hued as the diamond whose
facets break light into color. She frankly admitted to these pages,
intended only for herself, that she was beautiful, though she wished
that her eyes were blue instead of gray-brown, and that her type were
different. Evidently she had cut her teeth on compliment and fed from
childhood on that type of admiration which beauty exacts. She seemed to
be a little hungry for tributes of a different and deeper sort. In her
society days, as in the more youthful period, we found frequent
references to the unnamed man who still held his undeserved and
paramount place as an idealized personality; a human touchstone by which
she tested the intrinsicness of other men--always to the detriment of
those on trial.