THE PASSAGE
It was the night of April 29, 1915, that Martin Blake, clerk, sat at
the _Cohasset’s_ cabin table and heard the tale of Fire Mountain. It
was on the morning of July 6, 1915, that Martin Blake, seaman, bent
over the _Cohasset’s_ foreroyal yardarm and fisted the canvas, with the
shrill whistle of the squall in his ears.
The interim had fashioned a new Martin Blake. In the bronzed and active
figure, dungaree clad, sheath-knife on hip, who so casually balanced
himself on the swaying foot-rope, there was little in common, so far as
outward appearance went, with the dapper, white-faced clerk of yore.
He completed furling the sail. Then he straightened and swept the sea
with keen, puckered eyes. It was a scrutiny that was rewarded. Ahead,
across the horizon sky, floated a dark smudge, like the smoke-trail
of a steamer, and beneath it was a black speck. It was no ship, but
land, he knew. It was the expected landfall, the volcanic island, there
ahead, and he, of all of the ship’s company, first perceived it from
his lofty perch.
He sent the welcome hail to the deck below——
“Land ho!”
He leaned over the lee yard-arm, grasped a back-stay, and commenced
a rapid and precipitous descent to the deck. A few months before, he
would have descended laboriously and fearfully by way of the shrouds;
sliding down a backstay would then have rubbed his palms raw, and
visited giddiness upon him. But now his hands were rope calloused, and
his wits height proof. He was now the equal, for agility and daring,
with any man on the ship. He had won, without much trouble, a seaman’s
niche on the ship.
In truth, Martin was to the life born, and he took to the sea like a
duck to water. He won quickly through the inevitable series of mishaps
that rubbed the greenhorn mark away; and he gleefully measured his
progress by his ever-growing ability to outpull, outclimb, and outdare
the polyglot denizens of the brigantine’s forecastle.
He had expert coaching to urge his education on apace. He knew the many
ropes and their various offices before he was two weeks on board; and
he was able to move about aloft, by day or night, quite fearlessly. By
the end of the first month he was standing his regular wheel trick.
And, as the weeks passed, he gained more than a cursory knowledge of
the leverages and wind surfaces that controlled and propelled his
little floating world.
He applied himself earnestly to master his new craft. It was the life
he had lusted for, and the mere physical spaciousness of his new
outlook was a delight. He contrasted it with his former city-cramped,
office-ridden existence.
He rejoiced openly as each day lengthened the distance between him and
his former slavery. On the very first day he had mounted to the deck
to commence work, the morning after the meeting in the cabin, he had
enacted a ceremony that, to his own rollicking mind, placed a definite
period to his old life. He came on deck bravely bedecked in his new
slop-chest clothes, a suit of shiny, unstained dungarees.
He held carefully in his hands a black derby hat, and a starched collar
of the “choker” variety. He carried the articles to the ship’s side and
cast them into the sea. Then he declaimed his freedom.
“They were the uniform of my servitude—badges of my clerkhood! I have
finished with them. Into the ocean they go! Now—ho for the life on the
billowy wave!”
“Very good!” the mate applauded his act and words. Her next words were
an incisive and frosty command. “You may commence at once your life on
the billowy wave! Go for’rd and stand by with the watch!”
Martin went forward, and he began to learn the why and wherefore of
things in his new world. He learned to jump to an order called out by
that baffling and entrancing person aft, learned to haul in unison, to
laugh at hard knocks and grin at pain.
He learned to cultivate humility, and to mount the poop on the lee side
when duty took him there. He learned the rigid etiquette of the sea,
and addressed that blooming, desirable woman with the formal prefix,
“mister.”
His body toughened, his mind broadened, his soul expanded. But his
heart also expanded, and it was unruly. Ruth was such a jolly chum—off
duty. On duty, she was a martinet. Below, she was the merry life of the
“happy family.” On deck, she lorded it haughtily from the high place of
the poop, and answered to the name of “mister”!
The _Cohasset_, Martin discovered, was manned by a total of eighteen
souls. Besides the five persons aft, there were a sailmaker, a
carpenter, a Chinese cook and ten forecastle hands. His first
impression—that the crew was composed of wild men—was partially borne
out. Of the ten men in the forecastle, but four were Caucasian—two
Portuguese from the Azores, a Finn and an Australian—and the quartet
were almost as outlandish in their appearance as the other six of the
crew.
The remaining six were foregathered from the length and breadth of the
Pacific. There was a Maori from New Zealand, a Koriak tribesman from
Kamchatka, two Kanakas, a stray from Ponape, and an Aleut. The six
natives, Martin discovered, had all been with the ship for years, were
old retainers of Captain Dabney. The four white men, and the cook, who
rejoiced in the name of Charley Bo Yip, had been newly shipped in San
Francisco.
Martin’s watchmates were five of the natives. Martin suspected they
composed the mate’s watch because they were all old, tractable hands.
They were the Maori, Rimoa, a strapping, middle-aged man, Oomak, the
Koriak, the man with the tattooed and scarified face whom Martin had
seen at the wheel the first day at sea, the two Kanakas, and the Aleut.
They talked to each other, he found, in a strange pidgin—a speech
composed mainly of verbs and profanity, a language that would have
shocked a purist to a premature grave. But Martin found his watchmates
to be a brave, capable, though rather silent group.
Martin’s initiation into the joys of sea life was a strenuous one. The
gale that had sent the _Cohasset_ flying from San Francisco, died out,
as Ruth had predicted. Followed a couple of days of calm.
Then came another heavy wind, in the boatswain’s words, “a snortin’
norther,” and for three days Martin’s watches on deck were cold, wet
and hazardous. He blindly followed his watchmates over lurching,
slippery decks, in obedience to unintelligible orders. He was rolled
about by shipped seas, and his new oilskins received a stern baptism.
His clerk’s hands became raw and swollen from hauling on wet ropes,
his unaccustomed muscles ached cruelly, the sea water smarted the
half-healed wound on his head, now covered with a strip of plaster. But
he stood the gaff, and worked on. And he was warmly conscious of the
unspoken approval of both forecastle and cabin.
During that time of stress he learned something of the sailor’s game
of carrying on of sail. The wind was fair, and by the blind captain’s
orders, they held on to every bit of canvas the spars would stand. The
little vessel rushed madly through the black, howling nights, and the
leaden, fierce days, with every timber protesting the strain, and every
piece of cordage adding its shrill, thrummed note to the storm’s mighty
symphony.
During that time Martin first proved his mettle. He fought down his
coward fears, and for the first time ventured aloft, feeling his way
through the pitch-black night to the reeling yard-arm, to battle, with
his watch, the heavy, threshing sail that required reefing. After the
test, when he came below to the warm cabin, he thrilled to the core at
his officer’s curt praise.
“You’ll do!” she muttered in his ear.
But it was not all storm and battle. Quite the reverse. The calm
succeeded the storm. Martin came on deck one morning to view a bright
sky and a sea of undulating glass. Astern, above the horizon, were
fleecy clouds—they afterwards rode high, and became his friends,
those mares’ tails—and out of that horizon, from the northeast, came
occasional light puffs of wind.
Captain Dabney, pacing his familiar poop with firm, sure steps, turned
his sightless face constantly to those puffs. There was upon the ship
an air of expectancy. And that afternoon Martin beheld an exhibition
of the old man’s sea-canniness; he suddenly stopped his steady pacing,
stood motionless a moment, sniffing of the air astern, and then wheeled
upon Ruth.
“To the braces, mister! Here she comes!” he snapped.
She came with tentative, caressing puffs at first, each one a little
stronger than the last. Then, with a sigh, a dark blue ripple dancing
before her, she arrived, enveloped and passed them.
The brig trembled to the embrace and careened gently, as if nestling
into a beloved’s arms. About the decks were smiling faces and joyous
shouts, and the sails were trimmed with a swinging chantey. For the
_Cohasset_ had picked up the northeast trades.
That night the wind blew, and the next day, and the next, and the
next week, and the weeks following. Ever strong and fresh, out of the
northeast, came the mighty trade-wind. Nine knots, ten knots, eleven
knots—the brig foamed before it, into the southwest, edging eleven
knots—the brig foamed before it, into the southwest, edging away always
to the westward.
Every sail was spread. Sails were even improvised to supplement
the vast press the ship carried, a balloon jib for the bows, and a
triangular piece of canvas that the boatswain labored over, and which
he spread above the square topsails on the main. He was mightily proud
of his handicraft, and walked about, rubbing his huge hands and gazing
up at the little sail.
“An inwention o’ my own,” he proudly confided to Martin. “Swiggle me
stiff, if the _Flyin’ Cloud_ ’as anything on us, for we’ve rigged a
bloody moons’il, says I.”
Day by day the air grew warmer, as they neared the tropics. One day
they sighted a school of skimming flying fish; that night several flew
on board and were delivered into Charley Bo Yip’s ready hands, and
Martin feasted for the first time upon that dainty morsel. Bonito and
porpoise played about the bows.
Martin could not at first understand how a ship that was bound for
a distant corner of the cold Bering Sea came to be sailing into the
tropics. But the boatswain enlightened him.
“It’s a case o’ the longest way being the shortest, lad. The winds,
says I. We ’ave to make a ’alf circle to the south, using these
trades, to make the Siberian coast this time o’ year. We’re makin’ a
good passage—swiggle me, if Carew an’ his _Dawn_ ’ave won past, the
way we’re sailin’! And the old man reckons seventy days, outside,
afore ’e makes ’is landfall o’ Fire Mountain. Coming ’ome, now, will
be different. We’ll sail the great circle, the course the mail-boats
follow, an’ we’ll likely make the passage in ’alf the time. We’ll run
the easting down, up there in the ’igh latitudes with the westerlies
be’ind us.”
They were bright, sunny days, those trade-wind days, and wonderful
nights. The ship practically sailed herself. A slackening and
tightening of sheets, night and morning, and a watch-end trimming of
yards, was all the labor required of the crew.
So, regular shipboard work, and Martin’s education, went forward.
“Chips” plied his cunning hand outside his workshop door; “Sails”
spread his work upon the deck abaft the house.
A crusty, talkative, kind-hearted fellow was Sails. He was an old
Scot, named MacLean; and the native burr in his speech had been
softened by many years of roving. He always took particular pains to
inform any listener that he was a MacLean, and that the Clan MacLean
was beyond doubt the foremost, the oldest, and the best family that
favored this wretched, hopeless world with residence. He hinted darkly
at a villainous conspiracy that had deprived him of his estates and
lairdships in dear old Stornoway, Bonnie Scotland. He was a pessimist
of parts, and he furnished the needed shade that made brighter Martin’s
carefree existence.
MacLean had followed Captain Dabney for six years—most of the crew were
even longer in the ship—and before joining the _Cohasset_, he had, to
Martin’s intense interest, made a voyage with Wild Bob Carew.
“Och, lad, ye no ken the black heart o’ the mon,” he would say to
Martin. “Wild Bob! Tis ‘Black Bob’ they should call the caird. The
black-hearted robber! Aye, I sailed a voyage wi’ the deil. Didna’ he
beach me wi’oot a penny o’ my pay on Puka Puka, in the Marquesas? An’
didna’ I stop there, marooned wi’ the natives, till Captain Dabney took
me off? Forty-six, five an’ thrippence he robbed me of.
“I am a MacLean, and a Laird by rights, but I could no afoord the
loss o’ that siller. Oh, he is the proud deil! His high stomach could
no stand my plain words. Forty quid, odd, he owed me, but I could no
hold my tongue when he raided the cutter and made off wi’ the shell.
The MacLeans were ne’er pirates, ye ken. They are honest men and
kirkgoers—though I’ll no pretend in the old days they didna’ lift a
beastie or so.
“I talked up to Carew’s face, an’ told him a MacLean could no approve
such work, an’ I told him the MacLeans were better folk than he, for
all his high head. Ye ken, lad, the MacLeans are the best folk o’
Scotland. When Noah came oot the ark, ’twas the MacLeans met him and
helped him to dry land.
“On Puka Puka beach he dumped me, wi’oot my dunnage, and wi’oot a cent
o’ the siller was due me. Och, he is a bad mon, yon Carew, wi’ many a
mon’s blood on his hands! He has sold his soul to the deil, and Old
Nick saves his own. He is a wild mon wi’ women, and he is mad aboot the
sweet lassie aft. Didna’ he try to make off wi’ her in Dutch Harbor,
three years ago? And didna’ the old mon stop him wi’ a bullet through
the shoulder? And now he tries again in Frisco!
“The lass blooms fairer each day—and Carew’s madness grows. Ye’ll meet
him again, lad, if you stay wi’ the ship. Wi’ Old Nick to help him,
’tis black fortune he’ll bring to the lass, ye’ll see.” And Sails
would croak out dismal prophecies concerning Wild Bob Carew’s future
activities, so long as Martin would listen.
Indeed, the adventurer of the schooner _Dawn_ was ever present in the
thoughts of the brig’s complement. He was a real and menacing shadow;
even Martin was affected by the lowering cloud. The old hands in the
crew all knew him personally, and knew of his mad infatuation for their
beloved mate. In the cabin, it was accepted that he would cross their
path again, though it was hoped that Fire Mountain would be reached
and the treasure secured before that event occurred. But, save for an
ever-growing indignation against the haughty Englishman, for daring to
aspire to Ruth LeMoyne’s hand, Martin gave the matter small thought; he
was too busy living the moment.
Concurrent with his education in seamanship, progressed Martin’s
instruction in the subtle and disquieting game of hearts. Ruth attended
to this particular instruction unconsciously, perhaps, but none the
less effectively.
Of course, it was inevitable. When a romantic-minded young man aids in
the thrilling rescue of an imprisoned maid, that young man is going
to look upon that young woman with more than passing interest. When
the maid in question happens to be extremely pretty, his interest is
naturally enhanced. When he is thrown into a close shipboard intimacy
with her, and discovers her to be at once an exacting tyrant and a
jolly chum, when the maid is possessed of a strange and exciting
history, and congenial tastes, when she is not unaware of her own
excellence, and, at times, not disinclined to coquet a trifle before
a young, virile male—then, the romantic young man’s blood experiences
a permanent rise in temperature, and there are moments when his heart
lodges uncomfortably in his throat, and moments when it beats a devil’s
own tattoo upon his ribs.
And when there are wonderful tropic nights, and bright eyes by his side
that outrival the stars overhead, and a glorious tenor voice softly
singing songs of love nearby—then, the heady wine of life works a
revolution in a romantic young man’s being, and in the turmoil he is
accorded his first blinding glimpse of the lover’s heaven of fulfilled
desire, and his first glimpse also of the lover’s hell of doubting
despair. A man, a maid, a soft, starry night upon the water, a song of
love—of course it was inevitable!
Martin’s previous experience with the tender passion was not extensive.
Circumstance, shyness and fastidiousness had caused him to ignore most
of the rather frequent opportunities to philander that his good looks
and lively imagination created, and upon the rare occasions when he had
paused, it was because of curiosity—a curiosity quickly sated.
Of course, he had been in love. At twelve years he had betrothed
himself to the girl who sat across the aisle, at fifteen, he exchanged
rings and vows with a lady of fourteen who lived in the next block, at
seventeen he conceived a violent affection for the merry Irish girl
who presided over his uncle’s kitchen—but Norah scoffed, and remained
true to the policeman on the beat, and Martin, for a space, embraced
the more violent teachings of anarchy and dreamed with gloomy glee of
setting off a dynamite bomb under a certain uniformed prop of law and
order.
The uncle died, and Martin was henceforth too busy earning a living to
indulge in sentimental adventures. After a time, as he grew to manhood
and his existence became more assured, he became a reader of stories;
and unconsciously he commenced to measure the girls he met with the
entrancing heroines of his fiction. The girls suffered by comparison,
and Martin’s interest in them remained Platonic.
By degrees he became possessor of that refuge of lonely bachelorhood,
an ideal—a dream girl, compounded equally of meditation and books.
She was a wonderful girl, Martin’s dream girl; she possessed all the
virtues, and no faults, and she was very, very beautiful. At first she
was a blond maid, and when she framed herself before his eyes, out of
the smoke curling upward from his pipe, she was a vision of golden
tresses, and rosy cheeks, and clear blue eyes.
But then came Miss Pincher, the manicure maid, to reside at Martin’s
boarding-house. Miss Pincher’s hair was very, very yellow—there were
dark hints about that boarding-house board anent royal colors coming
out of drug-store bottles—and her eyes were a cold, hard blue. She cast
her hard, bold eyes upon Martin. She was a feminist in love. Martin
fled horrified before her determined, audacious wooing.
His blood idol was overthrown, his ideal slain. He went to bed with the
stark corpse, and awoke to contemplate with satisfaction a new image, a
brooding, soulful brunette.
Then, Martin suddenly discovered that his ideal was neither a rosy
Daughter of the _Dawn_, nor a tragic Queen of the Night—she was a
merry-faced, neutral-tinted Sister of the Afternoon, a girl with
brown hair, so dark as to be black by night, and big brown eyes. A
girl with a rich contralto voice that commanded or cajoled in a most
distracting fashion. A girl who commanded respect by her mastery of a
masculine profession, yet who thereby sacrificed none of her appealing
femininity. A girl named Ruth LeMoyne.
There was nothing staid or conservative about the manner of Martin’s
receiving this intelligence. It was his nature to fall in love with
a hard bump, completely and without reservation. He recognized Ruth
as the girl of his dreams the very first moment he obtained a good
daylight look at her—that is, upon the afternoon he first mounted to
the _Cohasset’s_ deck, and was welcomed by the smiling, lithesome queen
of the storm. Blonde and brunette had in that instant been completely
erased from his memory; he had recognized in the mate of the _Cohasset_
the companion of his fanciful hours, in every feature she was the girl
of his dreams.
There are people who say that every person has his, or her, preordained
mate somewhere in the world. They say that the true love, the big love,
is only possible when these predestined folk meet. They say that love
flames instantly at such a meeting, and that the couple will recognize
each other though the whole social scale divide them. They say that
Love will conquer all obstacles and unite the yearning pair. They are a
sentimental, optimistic lot, who thus declaim. Martin, when he thought
the matter over, inclined to their belief. Only—the trouble was that
Ruth did not seem to exactly recognize or welcome her predestined fate.
But there is another theory of love. Any shiny-pated wise man will give
the formula.
“Love at first sight! Bosh!” says the wise man. “Love is merely a
strong, complex emotion inspired in persons by propinquity plus
occasion!”
Perhaps. Certainly, the emotion Martin felt from the time he spoke
his first word to Ruth LeMoyne, was strong enough and complex enough
to tinge his every thought. And the propinquity was close enough and
piquant enough to flutter the heart of a monk—which Martin was not. And
a headlong young man like Martin Blake could be trusted to make the
occasion.
He made several occasions. His journey along Cupid’s path was filled
with the sign-posts of those occasions.
Off duty, Ruth and he were boon companions, during the rather rare
hours when she was not in attendance upon the blind captain or asleep.
Martin stinted himself of rest, Ruth was too old a sailor for that.
The dog-watches, and, after they had gained the fine weather, the early
hours of the first watch, were their hours of communion. They eagerly
discussed books, plays, dreams, the sea, their quest, and themselves.
They called each other by their first names, in comradely fashion.
Oftentimes Little Billy joined them and enlivened the session with his
pungent remarks, or, on the fine evenings, treated them with wonderful,
melting songs.
Martin had the uneasy feeling that Little Billy, of all the men on
the ship, divined his passion for Ruth. He seemed to feel, also, that
Little Billy was, in a sense, a rival; with a lover’s insight, he read
the dumb adoration in the hunchback’s eyes whenever the latter looked
at, or spoke of, the mate.
But, of course, Ruth knew what was in Martin’s mind and heart. Trust
a daughter of Eve to read the light in a man’s eyes, be she ever so
unpractised by experience. It is her heritage. Nor did Martin attempt
concealment of his love for very long. A dashing onslaught was Martin’s
nature.
Ruth teased him and deftly parried his crude attempts to make the grand
passion the sole topic of their chats. She would hold him at arm’s
length, and then for a swift moment drop her guard. It would be but a
trifle—a fugitive touching of shoulders, perhaps—but it would shake
Martin to his soul.
She would hold their talk to commonplaces, and then, as their hour
ended, would transfix him with a fleeting glance that seemed to bear
more than a message of friendship, and he would stand looking after
her, weak and gasping, with thumping heart.
One evening they stood together on the forecastle head, watching the
setting sun. Sky and sea, to the west, were ablaze for a brief space
with ever-changing gorgeous colors. The sheer beauty of the scene,
added to the disturbing nearness of his heart’s wish, forced Martin’s
rose-tinted thoughts to speech.
“I see our future there, Ruth,” he said, pointing to the rioting sunset
colors. “See—that golden, castle-shaped cloud! We shall live there.
Those orange-and-purple billows surrounding are our broad meadows. It
is the country we are bound for, the land of happiness, and its name
is——”
“Its name is ‘dreamland’!” finished Ruth, with a light laugh. “And
never will you arrive at your voyage’s end, friend Martin, for
‘dreamland’ is always over the horizon.”
She looked directly into Martin’s eyes; the brief dusk was upon them,
and her face was a soft, wavering outline, but her eyes were aglow with
the gleam that set Martin’s blood afire. Her eyes seemed to bear a
message from the Ruth that lived below the surface Ruth—from the newly
stirring woman beneath the girlish breast.
It was a challenge, that brief glance. It made Martin catch his breath.
He choked upon the words that tried tumultuously to burst from his lips.
“Oh, Ruth, let me tell you—” he commenced.
Her laugh interrupted him again, and the eyes he looked into were
again the merry, teasing eyes of his comrade. With her next words she
wilfully misunderstood him and his allusion concerning the sunset.
“Indeed, Martin, that cloud the sunset lightened is shaped nothing
like Fire Mountain, which is a very gloomy looking place, and one I
should not like to take up residence in. And no bright meadows surround
it—only the gray, foggy sea. Hardly a land of happiness. Though,
indeed, if we salvage that treasure, we will have the means, each of
us, to buy the happiness money provides.”
“Confound Fire Mountain and its treasure!” exclaimed Martin. “You know
I didn’t mean that, Ruth! I was talking figuratively, poetically, the
way Little Billy talks. I meant just you and I, and that sunset was the
symbol of our love.”
But he was talking to the air. Ruth was speeding aft, her light
laughter rippling behind her.
Another night, when the brig was near the southern limit of her long
traverse, they stood in the shadow, at the break of the poop, and
together scanned the splendid sky. Ruth was the teacher; she knew
each blazing constellation, and she pointed them out for Martin’s
benefit. But Martin, it must be admitted, was more interested by the
pure profile revealed by a slanting moonbeam than by the details
of astronomy and his mumbled, half-conscious replies revealed his
inattention.
After a while, she gave over the lesson, and they stood silent, side
by side, leaning on the rail, captivated by the witchery of the tropic
night.
The heavens were packed with the big, blazing stars of the low
latitudes, and the round moon, low on the horizon, cut the dark, quiet
sea with a wide path of silver light. Aloft, the steady breeze hummed
softly; and the ship broke her way through the water with a low, even
purr, and the sea curled away from the forefoot like an undulating
silver serpent. The wake was a lane of moonlight, barred by golden
streaks of phosphorescence.
On the ship, the decks were a patchwork of bright, eerie light and
black shadow. The bellying sails and the woof of cordage aloft, seemed
unsubstantial, like a gossamer weaving. The quiet ship noises, and the
subdued murmur of voices from forward seemed unreal, uncanny.
The unearthly beauty of the night touched strange fancies to life in
Martin’s mind—he was on a phantom ship, sailing on an unreal sea.
The desirable, disturbing presence so close to his side enhanced his
agitation.
His shoulder touched her shoulder, and he could feel the gentle rise
and fall of her breast, as she breathed. The bodily contact made his
head swim. When she raised her head to stare at the sky, a fugitive
moonbeam caressed her face and touched her briefly with a wondrous
beauty. Her curved, parted lips were almost within reach of his own
at such instants; he had but to bend swiftly forward! Martin was all
atremble at the daring thought, and he clutched the rail to steady
himself.
Behind them, a golden voice suddenly commenced to sing an age-old song
of love, “Annie Laurie.”
Softly the hunchback sang; his voice seemed to melt into and become
one with the hum of the breeze aloft and the snore of the forefoot
thrusting apart the waters. It seemed to Martin that the whole world
was singing, singing of love. His heart thumped, his breath came
quickly, pin-points of light swam before his eyes.
The girl trembled against his shoulder. Martin leaned eagerly forward,
and their eyes met. They both stiffened at that electric contact.
His eyes were ablaze with passion, purposeful, masterful; and in her
eyes he again glimpsed the fresh-awakened woman, beckoning, elusive,
fearful. For a brief instant they stared at each other, man and woman,
souls bared. But that blinding moment seemed to Martin to encompass
eternity. The songster’s liquid notes fell about them, and they were
enthralled.
The song ended. Quite without conscious movement, Martin put his arms
about Ruth and drew her into a close embrace. He pressed his hot lips
to hers, and with a thrill so keen it felt like a stab, he realized her
lips returned the pressure.
It lasted but a second, this heaven. The girl burst backward out of
his embrace. Martin’s arms fell to his sides, nerveless, and he stood
panting, tongue-tied with emotion. Nor did he have the chance to master
himself and speak the words he wished, for Ruth, with a half sob, half
laugh, turned and sped across the deck, and through the open alleyway
door, into the cabin.
The next watch Ruth stood upon her dignity, and her manner was
unusually haughty toward her slave. And the next day, in the dog-watch,
he discovered that the old comradeship was fled. She was shy and
silent, and she listened to his stammered apology with averted eyes and
pink ears.
When Martin attempted to supplement his apology with ardent words, she
fled straightway. And never again during the passage did Martin find
an opportunity to avow his love. He discovered that somehow Little
Billy, or the boatswain, or Captain Dabney was always present at their
talks. Her elusiveness made him very wretched at times. But then,
occasionally, he would surprise her looking at him, and the light in
her eyes would send him to the seventh heaven of delight.
There came the day when the little vessel reached the southern point of
the great arc she was sailing across the Pacific. Martin came on deck
to find the bows turned northward, toward the Bering, and the yards
braced sharp to catch the slant from the dying trades.
The _Cohasset_ raced northward, though not as swiftly as she had raced
southward. The winds were light, though generally fair, and the brig
made the most of them.
The weather grew steadily cooler; the brilliant tropics were left
behind, and they entered the gray wastes of the North Pacific. Forward
and aft were smiling faces and optimistic prophecies, for the ship was
making a record passage. The captain’s original estimate of seventy
days between departure and landfall was steadily pared by the hopeful
ones. The boatswain, especially, was delighted.
“Seventy days! Huh!” he declared. “Why, swiggle me stiff, we’ll take
the days off that, or my name ain’t Tom ’Enery! ’Ere we are, forty-one
days out, an’ already we’re in sight o’ ice, an’ runnin’ free over the
nawstiest bit o’ water between ’ere an’ the ’Orn! It’ll be Bering Sea
afore the week out, lad! And afore another week, we’ll ’ave fetched
the bloody wolcano and got away again with that grease! Bob Carew?
Huh—the _Dawn_ may ’ave the ’eels of us—though, swiggle me, what with
my moons’il, an’ that balloon jib, I’d want a tryout afore admitting it
final—but it ain’t on the cards that Carew ’as ’ad our luck with the
winds. ’E’s somewhere a week or two astern o’ us, I bet. We’ll ’ave the
bleedin’ swag, an’ be ’alf way ’ome, before ’e lifts Fire Mountain—if
he does know where the bloomin’ place is!
“Ow, lad, just think o’ all that money in a lump o’ ruddy grease! Ow,
what a snorkin’ fine time I’ll ’ave, when we get back to Frisco! ’Am
an’ eggs, an’ a bottle o’ wine every bloomin’ meal for a week! Regular
toff, I’ll be, swiggle me—with one of them fancy girls adancin’, and
one o’ them longhaired blokes afiddlin’ while I scoffs!”
Only old Sails declined to be heartened by bright expectations. He
wagged his gray head solemnly.
“The passage is no made till we are standing off yon Island,” he warned
Martin. “Aye, well I remember the smoking mountain. Didna’ that big,
red loon aft split a new t’gan’-s’il the very next day, wi’ his crazy
carrying on of sail? Aye, I mind the place—a drear place, lad, wi’ an
evil face. I dinna like to see the lassie gang ashore there, for all
the siller ye say the stuff is worth, an’ I ken well she’ll be in the
first boat. ’Tis a wicked place, the fire mount, and I ha’ dreamed
thrice o’ the feyed. Nay, I’ll tell ye no more, lad. But do you give no
mind to yon talk o’ Bob Carew being left behind. He is the de’il’s son,
and the old boy helps his own. But keep ye a sharp eye on the lass.”
No more than this half mystical jargon could Martin extract from the
dour Scot. MacLean would shake his head and mumble that feydom brooded
over the brig and hint darkly of battle and bloodshed.
That night, in the privacy of their berth, Martin mentioned MacLean’s
dismal croakings to Little Billy. He was minded to jest about the
pessimist, but, to his great surprise, the hunchback listened to his
recountal with a very grave face. But after a moment Little Billy’s
smile returned, and he explained.
“Sails is a Highland Scot,” he told Martin. “Of course he is
superstitious, as well as a constitutional croaker. He claims to be
a seventh son, or something like that, and to be able to foretell
death. When he speaks of a ‘feyed’ man, he means one over whom he sees
hovering the shadow of death. He didn’t say who was feyed, did he?”
“No, he wouldn’t talk further,” answered Martin. “What bosh!”
“Yes, of course,” assented Little Billy. “You and I, with our minds
freed of superstition, may laugh—but Sails, I think, believes in his
visions. And, to tell you the truth, your words gave me something of
a start at first. I have known MacLean a long time, you know. Last
voyage, he told me one day that Lomai, a Fiji boy, was feyed, and that
very night Lomai fell from the royal yard and was smashed to death
on the deck. And once before that, before I became one of the happy
family, he foretold a death to the captain. I am glad you told me about
this. He didn’t mention a name?”
“No. Just said he had dreamed three times of the feyed,” said Martin,
impressed in spite of himself.
“I’ll speak to him, myself,” went on Little Billy. “Won’t do any good,
though. He only tells one person of his foresight, and he has chosen
you this time. But I wish—oh, what is wrong with us! Of course it is
bosh! The old grumbler has indigestion from eating too much. I am going
to read awhile, Martin, if the light won’t bother you. Don’t feel
sleepy.”
The hunchback clambered into his upper bunk and composed himself,
book in hand. Martin finished his disrobing and rolled into his bunk,
beneath the other. He was tired, but he didn’t go to sleep directly.
His mind was busy. Not with thoughts of Sails and his ghostly
warning—Martin had not been long enough at sea to be tinged with the
sailor’s inevitable superstition, and he was stanchly skeptical of
supernatural warnings. Martin lay awake thinking of the deformed little
man, ostensibly reading, a few feet above him.
For some nights, now, the hunchback had read late of nights, because he
“didn’t feel sleepy.” Daily, Little Billy’s lean face grew more lined
and aged; in the past week his appearance had taken on a half-score
years. He still retained his smile, but it was even wan at times. In
his eyes lurked misery. Martin knew that the books he took to bed were
mainly a subterfuge to enable Little Billy to keep the light burning.
For Little Billy was waging a battle with his ancient enemy, and he had
grown afraid of the dark.
A week before, he had abruptly said to Martin:
“I gave the key of the medicine-chest to Ruth today. I won’t be able to
get at _that_ booze, anyway.” To Martin’s startled look, he added: “I
want you to know, so you won’t be surprised by the capers I am liable
to cut for a while. You see, I am dancing to old Fiddler Booze’s tune.
I want to go on a drunk—every part of me craves alcohol. And I am
determined to keep sober.
“Oh, it is nothing to startle you, Martin. I never get violent. Only,
I’ll be in plain hell for a couple of weeks. Then the craving will go
away, to return at ever shorter intervals, until I do get ashore on a
good bust. No, I’ll keep sober till I reach shore again—whatever comes.
No raiding the bosun’s locker for shellac or wood-alcohol this voyage.”
“Good Lord, you wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Martin.
“Oh, yes—I did it once,” confessed Little Billy easily. “Indeed, a swig
of shellac punch is drink for the gods; my very soul writhes now at
the thought of it. But, I’ll admit, the wood-alcohol beverage conceals
complications. It was the captain, and his little stomach-pump, that
brought me to that time. But no more of such frolicking on board
ship. That episode occurred during my first year with Captain Dabney.
Never since have I succumbed to the craving while at sea. Oh, I’ll be
all right this time—only don’t be startled if you hear me talking to
myself, or roaming about in the middle of the night.”
That was all that passed between them. But during the days following
Martin’s eyes often rested on the other with curiosity and sympathy. It
was a new experience for Martin, to be room-mated with a dipsomaniac,
and besides Little Billy had grown to be a very dear friend, indeed.
Everybody on the ship loved the sunny hunchback.
Little Billy’s happy face grew bleak, and many fine lines appeared
about the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was suffering keenly,
Martin knew. Even now, he could hear the uneasy, labored breathing of
the man in the bunk above.
It was a strange, changeable, eager face, Little Billy had. It seemed
to vary in age according to the hunchback’s mood; these days he
looked forty, but Martin had seen him appear a youthful twenty during
an exceptionally happy moment. Actually, Martin learned during the
passage, Little Billy Corcoran’s age was thirty-one.
He learned, moreover, that Little Billy was the son, and sole surviving
relative, of Judge Corcoran, a famous California politician in his day.
Judge Corcoran had been a noted “good fellow” and a famous man with the
bottle. And his son was a hunchback and a dipsomaniac. Little Billy
was blessed with a fine mind, and he had taken his degree at Yale,
but throughout his hectic life the thirst he was born with proved his
undoing.
“I am an oddity among a nation of self-made men,” Little Billy once
told Martin. “They all commenced at the bottom and ascended fortune’s
ladder, whereas I started at the top and descended. And what a descent!
I hit every rung of that ladder with a heavy bump, and jarred Old Lady
Grundy every time. I was the crying scandal, the horrible example, of
my native heath. That old rogue, my father, used to boast that he never
got drunk—I used to boast that I never got sober. Finally, I bumped my
last bump and found myself at the bottom. And there I stayed, until
Captain Dabney, and the dear girl, pulled me out of the mire.”
Almost literally true, this last, for Martin learned that five years
before, Captain Dabney had salvaged Little Billy off the beach at Suva,
a dreadful scarecrow of a man, and Ruth’s nursing, and the clean sea
life, had built a new William Corcoran. But the appetite for the drink
was uneradicable, and the genial hunchback’s life was a series of
losing battles with his hereditary curse.
But the boatswain was proved a poor prophet. Not that week, nor the
next, did they reach Fire Mountain. The _Cohasset_ crossed the path of
the Orient mail-packets, the great circle sailers, and they entered
their last stretch of Pacific sailing, above the forty-eighth parallel.
Captain Dabney’s objective was the little-used gateway to the Bering
that lies between Copper Island and the outlying Aleuts. They sailed
upon a wild and desolate waste of leaden sea; a sea shrouded frequently
with fog, and plentifully populated with those shipmen’s horrors,
foot-loose icebergs. And their fair sailing abruptly terminated.
It began in the space of a watch. The glass tumbled, the wind hauled
around to foul, and it began to blow viciously. For days they rode hove
to.
That was but the beginning. For weeks, they obtained only an occasional
favorable slant of wind, and these, as often as not, in the shape of
short, sharp gales. They made the most of them; the blind man on the
poop coached cannily, and Ruth and the boatswain carried on to the
limit.
Martin, once again, as in the days leaving San Francisco, saw the
smother of canvas fill the decks with water. But such sailing was rare,
and of short duration. Always, succeeding, came the heavy slap in the
face from the fierce wind god of the North.
Martin labored mightily, in company with his fellows, it being a
constant round of “reef, shake out, and come about.” The days were
sharp, and the nights bitter cold—though, as they won northward, and
the season advanced, the days grew steadily longer.
Went glimmering, as the weeks passed, the high hopes of a record
passage. Disappeared, also, the assurance of recovering the treasure.
The shadow of Wild Bob Carew fell between them and their destination.
When one day the capricious wind drove them fairly past Copper Island,
and they plunged into the foggy, ill-charted reaches of the Bering,
their jubilation was tempered with a note of pessimism. They debated,
in the _Cohasset’s_ cabin, whether the adventurer of the _Dawn_ had
been beforehand; and Captain Dabney discussed his plans for proceeding
on to the Kamchatka coast for trading in case they discovered Fire
Mountain to be despoiled.
The situation, it seemed to Martin, resolved itself to this: If Carew
knew the latitude and longitude of the smoking mountain—and being
familiar with the Bering Sea, all hands admitted that he might well
know it—the ambergris was most certainly lost to them, unless, as was
most unlikely, the _Dawn_ had had even worse luck with the weather than
the _Cohasset_. But if Carew did not know Fire Mountain’s location,
they had a chance, though Carew was probably cruising adjacent waters,
on the lookout for them—and if they encountered him, they might prepare
to resist a piracy.
Martin, in truth, had a secret hope that they might encounter Carew’s
schooner. He had a healthy lust for trouble and a scorn bred of
ignorance for the Japanese crew of the _Dawn_. He harbored a grudge
against the _Dawn’s_ redoubtable skipper. Ruth was the kernel of that
grudge.
And, oddly enough, he had a queer companion also wishing they might be
compelled to battle the Japanese. It was none other than Charley Bo
Yip, the cook.
Yip hated the Japanese with a furious hatred, if the garbled words
that dropped from his smiling lips were to be believed. He hated them
individually and nationally. And he sharpened, ostentatiously, a
meat-cleaver, and proclaimed his intention of procuring a Jap’s head as
a trophy, should they have trouble.
“Me China boy, all same Melican,” he told Martin, as he industriously
turned the grindstone beneath the cleaver’s edge. “Me like all same
lepublic—me fight like devil all same time when China war. Now Jap he
come take China. No good. Me kill um Jap. Velly good. All same chop um
head, chop, chop!”
And Yip waved his cleaver over his head, and a seraphic smile lighted
his bland, unwarlike face.
At last, on the sixty-eighth day of the passage, Martin came on deck
for the morning watch and found the vessel bouncing along under
unaccustomed blue skies, and with a fair breeze. The boatswain went
below, swiggling himself very stiff with the fervent hope that no
bleeding Jonah would interrupt the course before the next eight bells,
and Ruth took up an expectant watch with the glasses handy. Captain
Dabney also kept the deck. Martin knew the landfall was expected.
At the middle of the watch, a squall sent Martin racing aloft to furl
the royal. It was then that his sea-sharpened sight raised the land.
His hail to the deck aroused the ship. By the time he had finished his
descent from aloft, all hands were at the rail, endeavoring each to
pick up the distant speck.
Four bells had gone while he was aloft, and he strode aft to take his
wheel. As he passed along the poop, he heard Ruth say—
“If the breeze holds, we’ll be inside in a couple of hours.”
Captain Dabney turned his old, sea-wise face to the wind. After a
moment, he shook his head.
“I feel fog,” he said.