* * * * *
It was a strange ship's company we made after that. I speak only of the
Crows and myself. We carried a scant crew of stokers, and there was also
a chief engineer. But we saw so little of him that he did not count. The
Crows and I gloomed on the quarterdeck from dawn to dark, silent,
irritable, working upon each other's nerves till the creak of a block
would make a man jump like cold steel laid to his flesh. We quarreled
over absolute nothings, glowered at each other for half a word, and each
one of us, at different times, was at some pains to declare that never
in the course of his career had he been associated with such a
disagreeable trio of brutes. Yet we were always together, and sought
each other's company with painful insistence.
Only once were we all agreed, and that was when the cook, a Chinaman,
spoiled a certain batch of biscuits. Unanimously we fell foul of the
creature with so much vociferation as fishwives till he fled the cabin
in actual fear of mishandling, leaving us suddenly seized with noisy
hilarity--for the first time in a week. Hardenberg proposed a round of
drinks from our single remaining case of beer. We stood up and formed an
Elk's chain and then drained our glasses to each other's health with
profound seriousness.
That same evening, I remember, we all sat on the quarterdeck till late
and--oddly enough--related each one his life's history up to date; and
then went down to the cabin for a game of euchre before turning in.
We had left Strokher on the bridge--it was his watch--and had forgotten
all about him in the interest of the game, when--I suppose it was about
one in the morning--I heard him whistle long and shrill. I laid down my
cards and said:
"Hark!"
In the silence that followed we heard at first only the muffled lope of
our engines, the cadenced snorting of the exhaust, and the ticking of
Hardenberg's big watch in his waistcoat that he had hung by the arm-hole
to the back of his chair. Then from the bridge, above our deck,
prolonged, intoned--a wailing cry in the night--came Strokher's voice:
"Sail oh-h-h."
And the cards fell from our hands, and, like men turned to stone, we sat
looking at each other across the soiled red cloth for what seemed an
immeasurably long minute.
Then stumbling and swearing, in a hysteria of hurry, we gained the deck.
There was a moon, very low and reddish, but no wind. The sea beyond the
taffrail was as smooth as lava, and so still that the swells from the
cutwater of the _Glarus_ did not break as they rolled away from the
bows.
I remember that I stood staring and blinking at the empty ocean--where
the moonlight lay like a painted stripe reaching to the horizon--stupid
and frowning, till Hardenberg, who had gone on ahead, cried:
"Not here--on the bridge!"
We joined Strokher, and as I came up the others were asking:
"Where? Where?"
And there, before he had pointed, I saw--we all of us saw--And I heard
Hardenberg's teeth come together like a spring trap, while Ally Bazan
ducked as though to a blow, muttering:
"Gord 'a' mercy, what nyme do ye put to' a ship like that?"
And after that no one spoke for a long minute, and we stood there,
moveless black shadows, huddled together for the sake of the blessed
elbow touch that means so incalculably much, looking off over our port
quarter.
For the ship that we saw there--oh, she was not a half-mile distant--was
unlike any ship known to present day construction.
She was short, and high-pooped, and her stern, which was turned a little
toward us, we could see, was set with curious windows, not unlike a
house. And on either side of this stern were two great iron cressets
such as once were used to burn signal-fires in. She had three masts with
mighty yards swung 'thwart ship, but bare of all sails save a few
rotting streamers. Here and there about her a tangled mass of rigging
drooped and sagged.
And there she lay, in the red eye of the setting moon, in that solitary
ocean, shadowy, antique, forlorn, a thing the most abandoned, the most
sinister I ever remember to have seen.
Then Strokher began to explain volubly and with many repetitions.
"A derelict, of course. I was asleep; yes, I was asleep. Gross neglect
of duty. I say I was asleep--on watch. And we worked up to her. When I
woke, why--you see, when I woke, there she was," he gave a weak little
laugh, "and--and now, why, there she is, you see. I turned around and
saw her sudden like--when I woke up, that is."
He laughed again, and as he laughed the engines far below our feet gave
a sudden hiccough. Something crashed and struck the ship's sides till we
lurched as we stood. There was a shriek of steam, a shout--and then
silence.
The noise of the machinery ceased; the _Glarus_ slid through the still
water, moving only by her own decreasing momentum.
Hardenberg sang, "Stand by!" and called down the tube to the
engine-room.
"What's up?"
I was standing close enough to him to hear the answer in a small, faint
voice:
"Shaft gone, sir."
"Broke?"
"Yes, sir."
Hardenberg faced about.
"Come below. We must talk." I do not think any of us cast a glance at
the Other Ship again. Certainly I kept my eyes away from her. But as we
started down the companion-way I laid my hand on Strokher's shoulder.
The rest were ahead. I looked him straight between the eyes as I asked:
"Were you asleep? Is that why you saw her so suddenly?"
It is now five years since I asked the question. I am still waiting for
Strokher's answer.
Well, our shaft was broken. That was flat. We went down into the
engine-room and saw the jagged fracture that was the symbol of our
broken hopes. And in the course of the next five minutes' conversation
with the chief we found that, as we had not provided against such a
contingency, there was to be no mending of it. We said nothing about the
mishap coinciding with the appearance of the Other Ship. But I know we
did not consider the break with any degree of surprise after a few
moments.
We came up from the engine-room and sat down to the cabin table.
"Now what?" said Hardenberg, by way of beginning.
Nobody answered at first.
It was by now three in the morning. I recall it all perfectly. The ports
opposite where I sat were open and I could see. The moon was all but
full set. The dawn was coming up with a copper murkiness over the edge
of the world. All the stars were yet out. The sea, for all the red moon
and copper dawn, was gray, and there, less than half a mile away, still
lay our consort. I could see her through the portholes with each slow
careening of the _Glarus_.
"I vote for the island," cried Ally Bazan, "shaft or no shaft. We rigs a
bit o' syle, y'know----" and thereat the discussion began.
For upward of two hours it raged, with loud words and shaken
forefingers, and great noisy bangings of the table, and how it would
have ended I do not know, but at last--it was then maybe five in the
morning--the lookout passed word down to the cabin:
"Will you come on deck, gentlemen?" It was the mate who spoke, and the
man was shaken--I could see that--to the very vitals of him. We started
and stared at one another, and I watched little Ally Bazan go slowly
white to the lips. And even then no word of the ship, except as it might
be this from Hardenberg:
"What is it? Good God Almighty, I'm no coward, but this thing is getting
one too many for me."
Then without further speech he went on deck.
The air was cool. The sun was not yet up. It was that strange, queer
mid-period between dark and dawn, when the night is over and the day not
yet come, just the gray that is neither light nor dark, the dim dead
blink as of the refracted light from extinct worlds.
We stood at the rail. We did not speak; we stood watching. It was so
still that the drip of steam from some loosened pipe far below was
plainly audible, and it sounded in that lifeless, silent grayness
like--God knows what--a death tick.
"You see," said the mate, speaking just above a whisper, "there's no
mistake about it. She is moving--this way."
"Oh, a current, of course," Strokher tried to say cheerfully, "sets her
toward us."
Would the morning never come?
Ally Bazan--his parents were Catholic--began to mutter to himself.
Then Hardenberg spoke aloud.
"I particularly don't want--that--out--there--to cross our bows. I don't
want it to come to that. We must get some sails on her."
"And I put it to you as man to man," said Strokher, "where might be your
wind."
He was right. The _Glarus_ floated in absolute calm. On all that slab of
ocean nothing moved but the Dead Ship.
She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed toward us,
the water turning from her forefoot. She came on; she was near at hand.
We saw her plainly--saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the
rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could
imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent
wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No
single thing stirred aboard the hulk of her--but she moved.
We were helpless. The _Glarus_ could stir no boat in any direction; we
were chained to the spot. Nobody had thought to put out our lights, and
they still burned on through the dawn, strangely out of place in their
red-and-green garishness, like maskers surprised by daylight.
And in the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light between
dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the dead to the
bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless,
voiceless, the Dead Ship crossed our bows.
I do not know how long after this the Ship disappeared, or what was the
time of day when we at last pulled ourselves together. But we came to
some sort of decision at last. This was to go on--under sail. We were
too close to the island now to turn back for--for a broken shaft.
The afternoon was spent fitting on the sails to her, and when after
nightfall the wind at length came up fresh and favourable, I believe we
all felt heartened and a deal more hardy--until the last canvas went
aloft, and Hardenberg took the wheel.
We had drifted a good deal since the morning, and the bows of the
_Glarus_ were pointed homeward, but as soon as the breeze blew strong
enough to get steerageway Hardenberg put the wheel over and, as the
booms swung across the deck, headed for the island again.
We had not gone on this course half an hour--no, not twenty
minutes--before the wind shifted a whole quarter of the compass and took
the _Glarus_ square in the teeth, so that there was nothing for it but
to tack. And then the strangest thing befell.
I will make allowance for the fact that there was no centre-board nor
keel to speak of to the _Glarus_. I will admit that the sails upon a
nine-hundred-ton freighter are not calculated to speed her, nor steady
her. I will even admit the possibility of a current that set from the
island toward us. All this may be true, yet the _Glarus_ should have
advanced. We should have made a wake.
And instead of this, our stolid, steady, trusty old boat was--what shall
I say?
I will say that no man may thoroughly understand a ship--after all. I
will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and seasoned
ships have their little crochets, their little fussinesses that their
skippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything out of them;
that even the best ships may sulk at times, shirk their work, grow
unstable, perverse, and refuse to answer helm and handling. And I will
say that some ships that for years have sailed blue water as soberly and
as docilely as a street-car horse has plodded the treadmill of the
'tween-tracks, have been known to balk, as stubbornly and as
conclusively as any old Bay Billy that ever wore a bell. I know this has
happened, because I have seen it. I saw, for instance, the _Glarus_ do
it.
Quite literally and truly we could do nothing with her. We will say, if
you like, that that great jar and wrench when the shaft gave way shook
her and crippled her. It is true, however, that whatever the cause may
have been, we could not force her toward the island. Of course, we all
said "current"; but why didn't the log-line trail?
For three days and three nights we tried it. And the _Glarus_ heaved and
plunged and shook herself just as you have seen a horse plunge and rear
when his rider tries to force him at the steam-roller.
I tell you I could feel the fabric of her tremble and shudder from bow
to stern-post, as though she were in a storm; I tell you she fell off
from the wind, and broad-on drifted back from her course till the
sensation of her shrinking was as plain as her own staring lights and a
thing pitiful to see.
We roweled her, and we crowded sail upon her, and we coaxed and bullied
and humoured her, till the Three Crows, their fortune only a plain sail
two days ahead, raved and swore like insensate brutes, or shall we say
like mahouts trying to drive their stricken elephant upon the tiger--and
all to no purpose. "Damn the damned current and the damned luck and the
damned shaft and all," Hardenberg would exclaim, as from the wheel he
would catch the _Glarus_ falling off. "Go on, you old hooker--you tub of
junk! My God, you'd think she was scared!"
Perhaps the _Glarus_ was scared, perhaps not; that point is debatable.
But it was beyond doubt of debate that Hardenberg was scared.
A ship that will not obey is only one degree less terrible than a
mutinous crew. And we were in a fair way to have both. The stokers, whom
we had impressed into duty as A.B.'s, were of course superstitious; and
they knew how the _Glarus_ was acting, and it was only a question of
time before they got out of hand.
That was the end. We held a final conference in the cabin and decided
that there was no help for it--we must turn back.
And back we accordingly turned, and at once the wind followed us, and
the "current" helped us, and the water churned under the forefoot of the
_Glarus_, and the wake whitened under her stern, and the log-line ran
out from the trail and strained back as the ship worked homeward.
We had never a mishap from the time we finally swung her about; and,
considering the circumstances, the voyage back to San Francisco was
propitious.
But an incident happened just after we had started back. We were perhaps
some five miles on the homeward track. It was early evening and Strokher
had the watch. At about seven o'clock he called me up on the bridge.
"See her?" he said.
And there, far behind us, in the shadow of the twilight, loomed the
Other Ship again, desolate, lonely beyond words. We were leaving her
rapidly astern. Strokher and I stood looking at her till she dwindled to
a dot. Then Strokher said:
"She's on post again."
And when months afterward we limped into the Golden Gate and cast anchor
off the "Front" our crew went ashore as soon as discharged, and in half
a dozen hours the legend was in every sailors' boarding-house and in
every seaman's dive, from Barbary Coast to Black Tom's.
It is still there, and that is why no pilot will take the _Glarus_ out,
no captain will navigate her, no stoker feed her fires, no sailor walk
her decks. The _Glarus_ is suspect. She will never smell blue water
again, nor taste the trades. She has seen a Ghost.