THE END OF THE "WASTREL"
When sleep came to me it was fitful with a thousand nightmare
impossibilities, I saw, in my dreams, the face of the stale sea and sky
translated into a broad human visage paralyzed and smiling unendingly in
that hideous grin which stamps the tortured teeth of the lockjaw victim.
Then the monster of the dream broke out of its fixity and with a shriek
of hurricanes aimed a terrific blow at the prow of the _Wastrel_. The
ship shivered, trembled and collapsed. With a stifled gasp I woke. Our
sickly lantern was guttering in a sooty stream of smoke. Young Mansfield
stood in the center of the cabin buckling his pistol belt. From
somewhere came a sound of rushing water and a medley of shouts and oaths
and pistol shots. A dingy rat scuttled wildly out from between my feet
and whisked away through the crack under our bolted door. While I stood
there stupidly inactive, hardly as yet untangling fact and dream,
Mansfield handed me my belt and revolver.
"Slip on your shoes and fetch along a life-belt," he commanded steadily.
"It has come."
We jerked open the door and groped along the alley-way in darkness, and,
as we guided our steps with hands fumbling the walls, water washed about
our ankles. The lights there had gone out. With one guiding hand on the
wall and one on Mansfield's shoulder, I made my labored way toward the
deck ladder.
Without a word and as of right, the young Englishman, who had heretofore
lacked initiative, now assumed command of our affairs. We needed no
explanation to tell us that the pandemonium which reigned above was not
merely the result of mutiny. A hundred patent things testified that this
shambling tramp of the seas had received a mortal hurt. The stench of
bilge sickened us as the rising water in her hull forced up the heavy
and fetid gases. The walls themselves were aslant under a dizzy
careening to starboard.
She must have steamed full front on to a submerged reef and destruction.
It was palpably no matter of an opening seam. She had been torn and
ripped in her vitals. She was dying fast and in inanimate agony. In the
rickety engine-room something had burst loose under the strain. Now as
she sank and reeled there came a hissing of steam; a gasping, coughing,
hammering convulsion of pistons, rods and driving shafts, suddenly
turned into a junk heap running amuck.
It is questionable whether there would have been time to lower away
boats had the most perfect discipline and heroism prevailed. There was
no discipline. There were no available boats, except the two hanging
from the bridge davits, and about them, as we stumbled out on the decks,
raged a fierce battle of extermination, as men, relapsed to brutes,
fought for survival.
I have since that night often and vainly attempted to go back over that
holocaust and arrange its details in some sort of chronology. I saw such
ferocity and confusion, turning the deck into a shambles in an
inconceivably short space, that even now I cannot say in what sequence
these things happened. I have a jumbled picture in which certain
unimportant details stand out distinctly while great things are vague. I
can still see, in steel-black relief, the silhouetted superstructure,
funnels and stanchions; the indigo shadows and ghostly spots of white
under a low-swinging half-moon and large softly-glowing stars. The sky
was clear and smiling, in the _risor sardonicus_ of my dream.
I have sometimes felt that all the difference between the courageous and
craven lies in the chance of the instant with which the numbers fall on
the dice of life. To-day's coward may be to-morrow's hero. For an
instant, with an unspeakable babel in my ears and a picture of human
battle in my eyes, I knew only the chaotic confusion that comes of
panic. Then I caught a glimpse of one detail and all physical fear fell
away from me. I found myself conscious only of contempt for the
struggling, clawing terror of these men who were as reasonless and
ineffective as stampeding cattle. The detail which steadied me like a
cold shower was the calmness of young Mansfield as he waited at my side,
his face as impersonally puzzled as though he were studying in some
museum cabinet a new and strange specimen of anthropological interest.
We both stood in the shadow of the forward superstructure as yet unseen.
All the ferocity of final crisis swirled and eddied about the bridge
upon which we looked as men in orchestra chairs might look across the
footlights on a stage set for melodrama. Apparently the crew had already
discovered to its own despair that Coulter's inhuman orders for
scuttling the boats had been carried out, and that of all the emergency
craft carried by the _Wastrel_, only those ridiculously insufficient
ones hanging by the port and starboard lights of the bridge offered a
chance of escape. At all events, the other boats hung neglected and
unmanned. That the whole question was one of minutes was an unescapable
conclusion. One could almost feel the settling of the crazy, ruptured
hull as the moments passed and each time I turned my head to glance
back with a fascinated impulse at the smoke-stack I could see that its
line tilted further from the vertical.
Heffernan was in charge of the starboard boat, already beginning to run
down its lines, and over that on the port side, Coulter himself held
command.
It seemed that when the moment of final issue came, a few of the
foremast men had preferred entrusting their chances to obeying the
captain, whose effectiveness had been proven, to casting their lots with
their mates. These were busy at the tackle. On the deck level howled and
fought the mutineers. Already corpses were cluttering the space at the
foot of the steep ladder that gave--and denied--access to the bridge.
Probably the revolver shots we had heard as we groped our way from our
cabin had been the chief officer's terse response to the first mad rush
for that stairway. Now as he awaited the lowering away, Coulter stood
above, looking down on the sickening confusion with a grim expression
which was almost amusement. The fighting went on below where the
frantic, terror-stricken fellows swarmed and grappled and swayed and
disabled each other in the effort to gain the ladder. But when someone
rose out of the maelstrom and struggled upward it was only to be knocked
back by the ax, upon which, in the brief intervals between assaults,
Coulter leaned contemplating the battle-royal. The revolver he had put
back in his pocket. It was not needed, and he was conserving its
effectiveness for another moment.
In telling it, the picture seems clear enough, but in the seeing, it was
a thing of horrible and tangled details, enacted as swiftly as a
moving-picture film run too rapidly on its reel.
There were shouts and quick staccato orders piercing the blending of
terrorized voices--an oath snapped out--a shriek--a struggling mass--a
desperate run up the ladder--hands straining aloft to pull down the
climber and clear the way--a swift blow from above, a thud on the deck
below--a sickening vision of slaughter. Over it all pounded the
hammering racket from the disorganized engines. Soon came the stench of
smoke and out of one of the after hatches mounted a thin tongue of
orange flame, snapping and sputtering vengefully for a moment, then
leaping up with a suddenly augmented roar. The twin elements of
destruction, water and fire, were vying in the work of annihilation.
I turned my head for an instant to look back at the new menace, and
clutched Mansfield's arm. Aloof with folded arms against the rail,
making no effort to participate in the riot, stood young Lawrence. The
fast-spreading flames lit up his face. His attitude and expression were
those of quiet disgust. His lips were set in scorn for the superlative
excitement of his fellows. He was the stoic awaiting the end, with a
smile of welcome for the acid test which held, for him, no fear. It was
as though the rising rim of water brought a promise of grateful rest. He
saw ahead nothing except release from all the wild turmoil and misery
which had spoken itself without words that evening when Coulter had
silenced the improvisation of his violin.
But if the end was a thing of quiet philosophy to Lawrence, it was not
so to others. The lurid flare, which turned the impassioned picture in a
moment from a silhouette of blacks and cobalts to a crimson hell, seemed
to inflame to greater madness men already mad. There was a rush for the
rails. We saw figures leaping into the sea. There had been some hitch on
the bridge, due no doubt to the miserable condition of everything aboard
the disheveled tramp. The boats were not yet launched, but now the men
were embarking. Coulter himself was the last to leap for the swinging
boat, and a moment before he did so Hoak appeared. He had miraculously
made his way alive out of the engine-room's inferno, and his coming was
that of a maniac. His huge body, bare to the waist, sweat-streaked and
soot-blackened and fire-blistered, was also dark with blood. His voice
was raised in demented laughter and every vestige of reason had
deserted eyes that were now agleam only with homicidal mania. From the
companionway to the bridge, his course was as swift and sure as a homing
pigeon's. He brandished the shovel with which he had been shamefully
forced to feed the maws of the furnaces. The struggling men fell back
before his onslaught. But Hoak had no care for self-preservation. His
sole mission was reprisal.
The fight about the ladder's foot had waned. With a leap that carried
him half-way up and an agility that knew no thwarting the madman made
the upper level. The tyrannical despot of the vessel, standing poised
for his swing to the boat raised the pistol which had already halted
other mad rushes during the last sanguinary minutes. At its bark Hoak
staggered to his knees, but was up again and charging forward with the
impetus of a wounded rhinoceros. He had one deed to do before he died
and would not be denied. The flying shovel narrowly missed the captain's
head as he jumped for the boat, but the seaman with his lips parted over
the snarl of clenched teeth fought his painful way to the davit,
gripping a knife which he had brought in his belt. His eyes glowed with
the strange light that madness lends and his muscles were tensed in the
brief exaggerated strength of a supreme effort. He hurled himself to the
out-swung support and seizing the stern line began hacking at its tarred
tautness as he bellowed ghastly laughter and blasphemies. Coulter from
his place below sent two more bullets into the great hulk of flesh that
hung tenaciously and menacingly above him, but, as the second spat out,
the rope, none too good at best, parted and the boat, held only by its
bow line, swung down with a mighty snap, spilling its occupants into the
sea like apples tossed from an overturned plate. We had a momentary
glimpse of the captain clinging to the gunwale, his legs lashing out
flail-like. Then his hold loosened and he fell with a splash into the
phosphorus water where the sharks were already gathering. And at the
same moment, his mission performed, Hoak slowly slid around the curving
davit and dropped limply after him.
Young Mansfield's voice came vaguely to my ear. "They've overlooked the
life-raft," he said. "Let's have a try at that. There's not much time
now."
The starboard scuppers were letting in sea water and the flames were
creeping close, as we turned together, holding to the shadows of the
superstructure, and ran forward.
We were tearing our fingers raw over stiffened knots when a rush of feet
interrupted us. The next instant I saw my companion lashing out with the
butt of his pistol, and surrounded by a quartette of assailants. In the
moonlight he loomed gigantic and heroic of proportion. I, too, was
surrounded and conscious only of a wild new elation and battle-lust, as
I fought.
Suddenly there came a terrific shock, preceded by a wildly screaming
hiss in the bowels of the _Wastrel's_ hull. The torn shell quivered in
an insensate death-rattle, and under a detonation at once hollow and
loud a mass of timbers shot upward amidships. The boilers had let go and
we hung wavering for the final plunge, yet it did not come at once. Then
I suppose I was struck by falling debris. With a dizzy sense of stars
dancing as lawlessly as rocket sparks and dying as quickly into
blackness, I lost all hold on consciousness.