THE FREIGHTER
The sea grew bluer.
Day by day the Kiro Shiwo increased its splendour as the _Wear Jack_,
at a steady ten knot clip, left the latitude of Guadeloupe behind,
raising Eugenio Point and the heat-hazy coast that stretches to Cape
San Pablo.
The threatened difference between Hank and George had died out. The
reason of this release was not far to seek. Tommie, at that moment of
her life, was as destitute of all the infernal sex wiles of womanhood
as a melon. She had no idea of men as anything else than companions;
that was why the pocket Artemis failed a bit in love scenes. A year
ago she had signed a contract with the Wallack and Jackson Company by
which she received forty thousand dollars a year for five years, and
Wallack had reason sometimes to grumble. Tommie had no idea of how to
fling herself into the arms of movie heroes, or to do the face-work in
a close-up when the heroine is exhibiting to the audience the grin and
glad eye, or the “Abandon,” or the “Passionate Appeal” so dear to the
movie fan.
“Good God, that ain’t the way to make love,” would cry Scudder, her
first producer. “Nuzzle him—stop. Now then, make ready and get abandon
into it. He’s not the plumber come to mend the bath, nor your long-lost
brother you wished had remained in ’Urope and you’re hugging for the
sake of appearance. He’s the guy you’re in love with. Now then, put
some heart, punch and pep into it—now then! Camera!”
No good.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord!” the perspiring Scudder would cry, “looks as if you
were nursing a teddy bear. _Strain_ him to your heart. Stop flapping
your hands on his back. Now, look up in his face—so—astonished yet
almost fearful. Can’t you understand the wonder of love just born in
the human heart, the soul’s awakening? Lord! you’re not lookin’ at
an eclipse of the sun! That’s better, hang on so, count ten and then
nuzzle him.”
But despite all directions Tommie was somewhat a failure in passion.
Wallack summed the position up when he declared that it would be worth
paying ten thousand dollars a year to some man that would do the soul’s
awakening business with Tommie. She could laugh, weep, fly into a
temper, ride a mustang bare-backed, drive a motor car over a precipice,
be as funny in her diminutive way as Charlie Chaplin, but she couldn’t
make love worth a cent.
That was what Hank Fisher & Co. sensed, when the girl illusion
vanished, disclosing a jolly companion and nothing more; sensed,
without in the least sensing the fact that owing maybe to her small
size, she had a power almost as strong as the power that wakens the
wonder of love in the human heart.
Life was different on board, owing to this new importation; busier
too. This was an entirely new stunt, to Tommie, and just as she knew
everything about an automobile, an aëroplane, and a horse, she seemed
determined to know everything about the _Wear Jack_. Her capacity for
assimilating detail was phenomenal; the use of everything from the main
sheet buffer to the mast winch had to be explained, she had to learn
how to steer, and, having learned, she insisted on taking her trick at
the wheel. When she was not sitting with her nose in a book, she was
helping or hindering in the running of the ship. Then there was the
question of her clothes to keep them busy.
Drawing on to the tropics, it was more a question of shedding clothes,
especially when it came to the matter of tweed coats and skirts. Bud,
in his millionaire way, had come well provided; boxes and boxes had
arrived from Hewson & Loder’s and had been received by Hank and stowed
as “more of Bud’s truck.” White silk shirts, suits of white drill, they
all rose up like a white cloud in George’s mind one blue and burning
morning as he contemplated Tommie in her stuffy tweeds.
“Look here, T. C.,” said George, “you can’t get along in that toggery.
I’ve half a dozen suits of white down below and I’ll get one of the
Chinks to tailor a couple of them for you. Hank, roust out those boxes,
will you?”
They tried a white drill coat on her.
They had never really recognised her size till they saw her in that
coat, which would almost have done her for an overcoat. Then they
recognised that perfect proportion had given her stature and that, if
the gods had made her head an inch or so more in circumference, she
would have been a dwarf.
Then Hank started forward to find a tailor amongst the Chinks and
returned with a slit-eyed individual who contemplated his strange
customer, standing like Mr. Hyde in the garment of Dr. Jekyll, took eye
measurements of the length of her limbs and the circumference of her
waist and retired to the foc’sle with two pairs of white drill trousers
and two coats to work his works, also some white silk pajamas and
shirts, producing by the next morning an outfit which fitted, more or
less. She solved the question of shoes and stockings by discarding them
on deck.
That was on the morning when, across the sea to port, Cape San Lazaro
showed itself and the heat-hazy opening to Magdalena Bay.
The steady nor’westerly breeze that had held all night began to flicker
out at dawn; when they came up from breakfast the world had gone to
sleep. From the hazy coast to the hazy horizon nothing moved but the
vast marching glassy swell coming up from a thousand miles away and
unruffled by the faintest breeze.
Tommie, having come on deck and taken a sniff at the glacial condition
of things, curled herself in one of the deck chairs with a book.
The _Wear Jack_ was well provided with deck chairs and Hank, having
inspected the weather, dived below and brought one up; George followed
suit. Then, having placed the chairs about under the awning which had
been rigged, they sat and smoked and talked, Tommie, up to her eyes in
her confounded book, taking no part in the conversation.
T. C. was one of those readers who become absolutely dead to
surroundings. Curled there with her nose in “Traffics and Discoveries,”
she looked as if you might have knicked her without waking her, and
this fact somehow cast a pall over the conversation of Hank and Bud,
who, after a few minutes, found their conversation beginning to dry up.
“Lord,” said Hank, “I wonder how long this beastly calm’s going to
hold.”
“Don’t know,” said George.
Then Candon came on deck. He had no chair. He stood with his back to
the port rail cutting up some tobacco and filling a pipe.
“I wonder how long this beastly calm is going to hold,” said George.
“Lord knows,” said Candon.
Tommie chuckled. Something in the book had tickled her, she turned over
a page rapidly and plunged deeper into oblivion like a puffin after
smelts.
“What’s the current taking us?” asked George.
“Maybe three knots,” said Hank. “There’s no saying.” He yawned, then,
as though the idea had just struck him, “Say—what’s wrong with trying
the engine?”
“It’s too beastly hot for tinkering over engines,” yawned George, “and
B. C. says he can’t get the thing to go.”
“Go’n’ have another try, B. C.,” said Hank. “There’s no use in us
sitting here wagging our tails and waiting for the wind. Tell you what,
I’ll draw lots with you—give’s a piece of paper, Bud.”
George produced an old letter and Hank tore off three slips, one long
and two short.
Candon, with little interest in the business, drew a short slip, George
the long one.
“It’s me,” said George rising. “Well now, I’ll just tell you, if I
don’t get the thing to revolute I’ll stick there till I do. I’m not
going to be beat by a bit of machinery.” He moved towards the hatch.
“I’ll go with you,” said Tommie, suddenly dog’s-earing a page and
closing her book, as though she had been listening to the whole
conversation, which, in a way, she had.
Hank and Candon were left alone and Candon took his seat in the chair
vacated by George. Neither seemed in good humour; perhaps it was the
heat.
From down below, through the open hatch leading to the little engine
room, they could hear voices! George’s voice and the voice of T. C.
Then, as they sat yawning, another sound came, faint and far away,
rhythmical, ghostly.
Hank raised himself and looked. Away to the s’uth’ard, across the
glassy sea, a freighter was coming up. She was a great distance off,
but in the absolute stillness and across that glacial calm the thud of
her propellers could be felt by the ear.
Both men left their chairs and leaned on the rail watching her.
Said Candon, after a moment’s silence, “D’y’ know what I’ve been
thinking? I’ve been thinking we’ve played it pretty low-down on T. C.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s this way. McGinnis will be after us, sure, as soon as he
can get his hoofs under him. He’ll know we’re making for the Bay of
Whales and he’ll be after us. Question is, can he get the _Heart_
tinkered up in time, or would he take another boat. If he does and
catches us, there’s sure to be a fight. We should have told T. C. that.
I thought of it this morning at breakfast.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell her?”
“Well, I didn’t, somehow. There’s another thing, we’ve never told her
who I am. That’s worried me.”
“Well, it’s easy enough to tell her.”
“No, sir, it isn’t, not by a long chalk. I almost came to it yesterday.
It was when you two were down below and I had her here on deck showing
her how to make a fisherman’s bend. It came to me to tell her and I
opened out about Vanderdecken, saying he wasn’t maybe as bad as some
folk painted him, then she closed me up and put the lid on.”
“What did she say?”
“Said stealing was stealing and taking women’s jewelry was a dirty
trick.”
“Why didn’t you explain?”
“Because she was right. Right or wrong, how’s a fellow to explain?
Well, there it is. You’d better go down to her and say, ‘That lad
Candon’s Vanderdecken and Pat McGinnis is after him and there’ll maybe
be a dust-up when we get down to the Bay, and there’s a freighter
coming along that’ll take you back north and you’d better get aboard
her.’”
“Me!“
“Yes, you—it’s clean beyond me.”
Hank watched the freighter. She was away up now out of the water and
showing the white of her bridge screen. At her present speed she would
soon be level with them.
“She looks to be in ballast, don’t she?” said Hank.
“Yep.”
“Where’s she going, do you think?”
“’Frisco, sure.”
“That’s a long way from Los Angeles.”
“Maybe, but it’s nearer than the Bay o’ Whales.”
The freighter grew; she was making anything from twelve to fifteen
knots; she would pass the _Wear Jack_ and a signal would stop her as
sure as a bullet through the eye will stop a man.
Then, suddenly, something that had risen to Hank’s surface intelligence
like a bubble, burst angrily.
“You can go down and tell her yourself,” said he, “it’s no affair of
mine. If she wasn’t fooling there with Bud, she’d have seen the ship.
How’n the nation do you think I’m going to go down and give you away
like that?”
Candon hung silent, as if offended with the other. He wasn’t in the
least. His eyes were fixed on the water over the side. Right below, in
the bit of shadow cast by the ship against the morning sun, the water
lay, pure emerald, and showing fathom-deep glimpses of life, scraps of
fuci, hints of jelly fish and once, far down, like a moving jewel in a
world of crystal, an albacore passing swift as a sword thrust.
Ahead of them on the lifting swell a turtle was sunning itself awash in
the blue of that lazy silent sea, one polished plate of its carapace
showing like a spot of burnished steel.
Candon found himself wondering why one plate should shine like that.
It looked now like a little window in a roof, then it seemed to him
that out of that window came an idea, or rather a vision. A horrible
vision of the freighter going off with Tommie and vanishing beyond the
northern sky-line with her. Not till that moment had he recognised
that T. C. was at once the lynch-pin of their coach and the thing that
had suddenly come to lend reason to his own life. His whole existence
had led logically up to the Vanderdecken business and the Vanderdecken
business had led to her capture and her capture had given him something
to care for, not as a man cares for a girl, but more as a lonely man
cares for a child or a dog. It was her small size, maybe, that clinched
the thing with him and made him feel that he’d sooner do a dive
overside than lose touch with her.
Hank was feeling at that moment pretty much the same. The microscopic
Tommie had captured the leathery Hank as a chum.
The freighter drew on and they could see now the touch of white where
the spume rose in a feather at her fore foot. It was a huge brute of a
Coleman liner up from Callao or Valparaiso, a five thousand tonner with
a rust-red funnel.
If they stopped her, it would be necessary to get T. C. on deck right
away and the Chinks ready to man the boat. There would be scarcely
time to say good-bye—besides, it was ten to one T. C. wouldn’t want to
go—besides she was in those togs. The freighter was abreast of them
now. They watched her without a word. Suddenly a stream of bunting
fluttered up and blew out on the wind of her passage. Candon shaded
his eyes and looked.
“Wishing us a pleasant voyage,” said Candon.
They watched the flags flutter down and the great turtle backed stern
with the sunlight on it and the plumes of foam from the propellers.
Then, as the wash reached them, making the _Wear Jack_ groan and
clatter her blocks, came a new sound, a thrud-thrud-thrud right under
their feet, followed by the voice of George yelling, “Hi, you chaps,
get the helm on her, engine’s going.”
Candon sprang to the wheel and Hank came and stood beside him.
Hank said, “That freighter must have thought us awful swine not
acknowledging their signal.”
“Maybe they thought right,” said Candon.
At that moment, George appeared, triumphant from the engine room.
“She’s running a treat,” said he, “and T. C.’s looking after her.
What’s made the cross swell?” Without waiting for an answer and at a
call from Tommie, he dived below again.
Half an hour later when he came on deck, taking a look aft, George
said: “Now if we hadn’t an auxiliary engine and if it wasn’t running
well, this calm would have lasted a fortnight. Look there!”
They looked. Away to northward a vast expanse of the glassy swell had
turned to a tray of smashed sapphires.
It was the breeze.