HELL'S HATCHES
NEW FICTION
THE CURTAIN
_By Alexander Macfarlan_
THE SYRENS
_By Dot Allan_
OLD MAN'S YOUTH
_By William de Morgan_
THE PURPLE HEIGHTS
_By M. C. Oemler_
HAGAR'S HOARD
_By George Kibbe Turner_
THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK
_By Richard Dehan_
IN CHANCERY
_By John Galsworthy_
SNOW OVER ELDEN
_By Thomas Moult_
EUDOCIA
_By Eden Phillpotts_
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21, Bedford Street, W.C. 2
HELL'S HATCHES
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
Author of "In the Tracks of the Trades," etc.
[Illustration: 1921]
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A REPUTATION QUESTIONED 1
II HARD-BIT DERELICTS 10
III THE GIRL HERSELF 25
IV "SLANT" ALLEN RETIRES AGAIN 38
V A SHIP OF DEATH 50
VI COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING 65
VII RONA COMES ABOARD 80
VIII I LEAVE THE ISLAND 93
IX A GRIM TALE OF THE SEA 106
X ART AND SUSPENSE 124
XI A HERO'S HOMECOMING 142
XII A BAD MAN'S PLEA 180
XIII THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA 193
XIV HELL'S HATCHES OFF 206
XV THE FACE 220
XVI A SUDDEN VISITOR 231
XVII DOWN THE FLUME 255
XVIII THE MASTERPIECE 268
XIX AFTER ALL 282
HELL'S HATCHES
CHAPTER I
A REPUTATION QUESTIONED
"Slant" Allen and I, between us, had been monopolizing a good share of
the feature space in the Queensland and New South Wales papers for a
week or more--he as "the Hero-Ticket-of-Leave-Man" and I as "the gifted
Franco-American painter whose brilliant South Sea marines have taken the
Australian art world by storm"--and now that it was definitely reported
that he had left Brisbane on his way to connect with the reception the
boyhood home from which he had been shipped in disgrace five years
before had prepared for him, I knew it was but a matter of hours before
he would be doing me the honour of a call.
He simply _had_ to see me, I figured; that was all there was to it: for
with Bell and the girl dead (that much seemed certain, both from the
newspaper accounts of the affair and from what I had been able to pick
up in the few minutes I had been ashore during the stop of my southbound
packet at Townsville) I was the only living person who knew _he_ was not
the hero of the astonishing _Cora Andrews_ affair, the audacious daring
and almost sublime courage characterizing which had touched the
imagination of the whole world; that, far from having _volunteered_ to
navigate a shipload of plague-stricken blacks through some hundreds of
miles of the worst reef-beset--and likewise the most ill-charted--waters
of the Seven Seas on the off chance of saving the lives of perhaps one
in ten of them, he had been brought off and forced to mount the gangway
of that ill-fated schooner at the point of a knife in the hands of a
slender slip of a Kanaka girl.
To be sure, two or three of the blacks who were hanging over the rail at
the end of that accursed afternoon may have been among the survivors
(for it could have been only the strongest of them that had been able to
fight their way up to the air when Bell chopped open the hatches they
had been battened under ever since the _Cora's_ officers had succumbed
who knows how many hours before); but, even so, their rolling, bloodshot
eyes could have fixed on nothing to have led them to believe that the
greasy shawl of Chinese embroidery the girl appeared to have thrown
affectionately over the shoulder of the belated passenger in the leaking
outrigger concealed the diminutive Malay _kris_ whose point she was
pressing into the fleshy part of his neck above the jugular.
No, there could be no doubt that I was all that stood between "Slant"
Allen, "Ticket-of-Leavester," beachcomber, black-birder, pearl-pirate
and (more or less incidentally to all of the foregoing) murderer, and
the Hon. Hartley Allen, second son of the late James Allen, Bart.,
racing man, polo player and once the greatest gentleman jockey on the
Australian turf. Pardon for the comparative peccadilloes--a "pulled"
horse or two, a money fraud in connection with a "sweep," and the rather
rough treatment of a chorus girl, who had foolishly asked for "time to
consider" his proposal that she come to him _at once_ from the
Queensland stockman who was only just finishing refurnishing her George
Street flat--which, cumulatively, had been responsible for his being
packed off to "The Islands," was already assured, and it looked as
though more was to come--that his "spectacular and self-sacrificing
heroism" was going to wipe out the unpleasant memories that had barred
him from sporting and social circles even before the law stepped in. A
sporting writer in that morning's _Herald_ had speculated as to whether
or not he would be seen again riding "Number 1" for the unbeaten
"Boomerang" Four, with whom he had qualified for his handicap of "8,"
still standing as the highest ever given an Australian polo player; and
the racing column of the latest _Bulletin_ had devoted a good part of
its restricted space to a discussion of the possibility that the weight
he had put on in his years of "easy life in 'The Islands'" might force
him to confine his riding to steeplechases. Of the record which had made
the name of "Slant" Allen a byword for all that was desperate and
devilish from Port Moresby to Papeete, from Yap to Suva, little seemed
to be known and nothing at all was said. But then, that old
beach-combers' maxim to the effect that "What a man does in 'The
Islands' don't figure in St. Peter's 'dope sheet,'" was one from which
even I myself had been wont to extract no little solace.
With nothing but my fever-wracked and absinthe-soaked (I may as well
confess at the outset that I was "in the grip of the green" at this
time) anatomy standing between, on the one hand, and Allen more
despicable than even I, who was fairly familiar with the lurid swath he
had cut across Polynesia, had ever dreamed he could be, and, on the
other hand, an Allen who might easily become more the idol of sporting
(which is, of course, the real) Australia than he had ever been at the
zenith of his meteoric career as a turfman and athlete, it was plain
enough that he would not--nay, could not--ignore for long my presence in
a city that was standing on tiptoe to acclaim him as a native son whose
deed had done it honour in the eyes of the world. It was something like
that the _Telegraph_ had it, I believe.
Where a word from me (and Allen would know that my friendship for Bell,
to say nothing of the girl, would impel me to speak it in my own good
time) would dash him from the heights to depths which even he had not
yet sounded--there were degrees of treachery which "The Islands"
themselves would not stand for--it was only to be expected that a man of
his stamp would make some well-thought-out move calculated to impose
both immediate and eventual silence upon me. If we were still "north of
twenty-two" I would have had no doubt what form that "move" would take,
and even here in the heart of the Antipodean metropolis--well, that I
was leaving no unnecessary loop-holes of attack open was attested by the
fact that I was awaiting his coming wearing a roomy old shooting jacket,
in the wide pockets of which a man's fingers could work both freely and
unobtrusively. I had shot away a good half-dozen patch pockets from that
old jacket in practising "unostentatious self-defence," and when a man
gets to a point where he can spatter a sea-slug at five paces from his
hip he really hasn't a great deal to fear from the frontal attack of
anyone--or anything--that hunts by daylight.
Yes, though I hardly expected to have to shoot Allen, at least on this
first showdown, I was quite prepared to do so if he gave me any excuse
at all for it; indeed, I may as well admit that I was going to be
disappointed if he did not furnish me such an excuse. There need be
nothing on my conscience, that was sure, for, if the fellow had had his
deserts according to civilized law, he would have been put out of the
way something like twenty times already. I had heard him make that boast
himself one night in Kai, just before he went under Jackson's table as a
consequence of trying to toss off three-fingers of "Three Star" for
every man he claimed to have killed. Moreover, I had a sort of a feeling
that old Bell would have liked to have seen his score evened up that
way, for he, more than almost anyone I could recall, had marvelled at
what he called the tricks I had tucked away in my "starboard trigger
pocket." But--I may as well own it--my principal reason for hoping for a
decisive showdown straightaway was that I felt sure I could see my way
through an affair of that kind, even with so cool and resourceful a hand
as I knew Allen to be. As an absinthe drinker, what I dreaded was to
have the crisis postponed, knowing all the while that during only about
from four to six hours of the twenty-four would I be fit in mind or body
to oppose a child, let alone a man who, for five years and among as
desperate a lot of cut-throats as the South Pacific had ever known, had
lived up to his boast that he drew the line at no act under heaven to
gain his end.
It had struck me as just a bit providential that Allen almost certainly
would be coming to see me in the early afternoon--the very time at
which, physically and mentally, I would be best prepared for him. It
varies somewhat with different addicts of the drug, but with me the
"hour of strength"--the interval of the swinging back of the pendulum,
when all the faculties are as much above normal as they have been below
it during the preceding interval of depression--was mid-afternoon. From
about ten in the morning I was just about my natural self--just about at
the turn of the tide between weakness and strength--for three or four
hours; but from about three to five, when the renewed cravings began to
stir and it had long been my custom to pour my first thin trickle of
green into the cracked ice, I was preternaturally alive in hand and
brain. The rigorous restriction of my painting to these brief hours of
physical and spiritual exaltation must share with my colours the credit
for the fact that I had already done work that was to win me a niche
distinctively my own as a painter of tropical marines. How much
absinthe--or the reaction from absinthe--had to do with my earlier
successes was conclusively proven by the way my work at first fell off
when those colourful years I was later to spend with the incomparable
Huntley Rivers in the Samoas and Marquesas began to bring me back
manhood of mind and body and to rid me--I trust for good and all--of the
curse saddled upon me in my student days in Paris. But that is neither
here nor there as regards the present story.
I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at ten
in the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station to
the Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out of
consideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the _Herald_ had it) was
"still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured as
a consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of the
day was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program--in
which His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to take
part--would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modest
hero" had been consulted.
A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on--or an inquiry of
almost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for that
matter--would apprise Allen that I was staying at the _Australia_, and
there I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself free
from his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure,
but--especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to get
back to riding weight--I felt sure this would not detain him long. "It
will be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office that
any man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to my
rooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X---- and begged off
from showing her and a party of friends from Government House my
pictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Being
borne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoon
teas--or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from very
shortly after five--was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spell
of lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival in
Sydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal--gay,
cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid at
her feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, asking
not how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languid
beauty fawning to my own feet for a day--even for an hour, my
hour--_that_ would be something worth living--or dying--for. For many
years I had been telling myself that (between three and five in the
afternoon, of course) and now--quite aside from my nocturnal flights
there on the wings of the "Green Lady"--it seemed that the end so long
striven for was almost in sight.
I lunched lightly--a planked red snapper and a couple of alligator
pears--in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side)
slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready;
just that--ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding the
palette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubing
pigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in the
embrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of my
wrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steady
like the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand or
nerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxation
rather than tenseness. Tenseness--with a man who has himself in hand--is
for the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedes
it. My whole feeling was that of complete _adequacy;_ but then, the
sensation was no new one to me--at that time of day.
Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to a
table in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted linings
from the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining my
attentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent inner
surface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that had
filtered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coral
caverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in a
mortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting the
gradations of colour--ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron--as
the more indurated particles stood out the longer against the friction
of the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentative
stage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety of
media than had hitherto been available with which to express in colour
the interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of my
contribution to art--not yet complete after five years--will have to be
judged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the part
these colours played in my later and more permanent success (to
differentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame upon
the threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I can
only say that had I been confined to the pigments with which my
predecessors had been forced to express themselves, I should never have
risen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.