Two babies in cabs pushed by their mothers met in a park. While the
mothers talked the babies eyed each other for a few moments, then set
up a blended scream of such volume and intensity as to break up the
conversation and separate the party.
Five years later they met again in a kindergarten, and the pair, not
knowing each other's names, but animated by a soul hatred coeval with
the beginning of emotion, tried to stare each other out of countenance.
Failing in this, they made faces, earnestly and spitefully, until
reproved by the teacher and separated. One was soon taken away, its
parents having removed their residence.
At eleven years of age they again faced one another, two vigorous boys
from different streets of the city, each a leader of his band. There
had been a "gang fight," a battle with sticks and stones, with charges
and countercharges, retreats and routs. There had been a challenge
from one leader, accepted by the other. They stood for a moment, each
backed by his following; then one reached down for a chip, which he
placed on his shoulder. All boyhood knows the consequences of knocking
off a chip; but this one was not knocked off. The other boy also
reached for a chip and placed it on his shoulder. And so they stood,
silent, scowling, each waiting for a move on the part of the other,
each dominated by a hate and a fear that he could not measure by any
experience, but which surpassed in strength and grip all other emotions
he had known.
"Soak him, Jonesy! Knock it off!" "Don't take that from any man,
Smithy! Hit him!" "What's the matter with you?" "Paste him!" came from
the combined following; but neither made a move. Slowly, like two
tomcats similarly placed, with baleful, glittering eyes, they backed
away until surrounded by their followers. Then came cries of derision
and contempt, ending in a vigorous onslaught by both leaders, in which
several critics bit the dust, and which partly restored their prestige.
But it took many days of such tutelage before the discredited leaders
regained their influence over the weaker spirits and impressed upon
them the fact that they were not afraid to fight. Their excuses and
explanations were many, but bore no relation to the real cause of the
delinquency.
There were no more gang fights, to the relief of the residents and
the police, and the enemies tried to avoid meeting; but when it was
unavoidable they passed with quick, defiant, and sullen glances into
each other's eyes. Once an involuntary raising of a hand by one was
construed into a menace by the other, but he got no farther than to
duplicate the gesture. Some intangible power seemed to paralyze his
tongue and his muscles. Yet neither boy was a coward in the ordinary
sense, nor lacking in the qualities of generosity and forgiveness.
Young Smith, while bathing with other boys in the East River at
Eighty-sixth Street, swam out into the swift current after a drowning
lad, larger than himself, and who had lately bullied him on land,
and, by diving again and again, secured him, only to find himself too
exhausted to bring him in. A passing tug rescued them, the bully
unconscious and Smith at his last gasp. The newspapers made him a hero,
and the grateful bully, knowing Smith's enemy, offered to thrash him;
but the same paralyzing inhibition prevented Smith from sanctioning
this.
Jones, employed as elevator boy in a high building, emulated the feat
a little later. Cool, and steady of nerve, he ran his car up and down
through the smoke of a fire that gutted the building, and brought down
to safety a half-hundred people, being rescued himself on the last
trip, suffocating on the floor of his car. He, too, was made a hero,
but bore his honors as modestly as Smith.
These experiences seemed to have a marked effect upon their future
development. The qualities of courage, endurance, and masculine
virility seemed of more importance than the intellectual and moral
attributes. Jones declined a clerical position in the office of the
skyscraper; and Smith, who could have been educated at college by the
father of the bully, chose to ship in the navy as seaman apprentice.
Shortly after, young Jones, unaware of Smith's step, yet influenced by
the fate that was guiding their paths in parallel lines, joined the
schoolship _St. Mary_, and on graduation entered the merchant marine as
able seaman, with a scholar's knowledge of navigation. Smith served his
time as apprentice, was honorably discharged as petty officer; and as
to reach this rating he must master the study of navigation, he faced
the world at twenty-one as well equipped in this as was Jones; then, as
under the existing laws he could never obtain a commission in the navy,
he chose a field where his knowledge was of use. About the same time
as Jones he, too, shipped before the mast, and the Seven Seas engulfed
them. But each learned of the other through letters from home.
Life in deep-water ships is a school of evolution in which the law
of the survival of the fittest has full play. Weaklings, mental or
physical, die on the first voyage, or quit at the end of it. Soft men
become hard men; hard men become iron men; iron men lose their human
attributes. As the stronger virtues of nerve, pluck, and stamina
increase, so do the softer qualities of mercy and kindness decline.
Both young men were starved and ill-treated before the mast, until,
accepting it as the law of the calling, they fought against it to the
after end of the ship, then to enforce it against the weaker spirits
they had distanced. Each in time became a competent second mate with a
growing sense of his importance; then a first mate, with a fixed and
accepted reputation for "buckoism" that reached across the thousand
miles of sea to the other. Smith, drinking in a saloon at Callao, heard
of Black Jones's feat in quelling the _Eldorado_ mutiny with a belaying
pin and cursed him mentally in furious envy. Jones, blackguarding a man
he had just ironed in the 'tween deck at sea, heard from the victim of
a man who could take him down--Bully Smith, who sailed out of New York.
Smith drank deeper from the news of Jones, and went to sea further
committed to the blind worship of force. Jones insanely struck the man
in irons, and in a week had ironed three others whom he had goaded
into mutinous resentment of his abuse. Two strong, positive souls at
the opposite ends of the earth, united by the first and lowest of
primordial emotions--hatred and fear--were reinforcing each other to
their mutual undoing. Had the kindergarten teacher done her duty and
brought them together in childhood, or had they fought it out as boys,
this might have been averted. Yet there came another chance in middle
life.
The fate which gripped them sent one east from San Francisco, and the
other west from New York, and the two ships sighted each other at the
crossing point of voyages. Here a vicious, biting cold south-westerly
gale blew the vessels against the rocky shores of Cape Horn, and in
the furious turmoil of surf, backed by mountainous antarctic seas that
picked both ships to pieces, but two men reached the shore alive--two
strong, hardy, and enduring mates, Smith and Jones. Bruised and
bleeding, drenched, freezing, and exhausted they painfully climbed the
rocks five miles apart, and struck inland over a hummocky plateau,
walking fast to keep out the cold while the moisture in their clothing
stiffened to ice, not knowing where they were going, but dimly hoping
for aid from the savages.
Through snow and sleet and raging polar wind they staggered on, making
for the cañonlike aperture in the hills to the north that showed
faintly in the lulls of the storm. Famished for want of food, tortured
with thirst that snow would not relieve, racked in every bone and
muscle with the awful pain of extreme fatigue, and not daring to halt
for fear of the drowsiness that fought the fatigue and presaged death,
with the name of God often on their lips--but not in prayer--they
degenerated in two nights and a day into a couple of unreasoning wild
beasts; but not yet insane, for they remembered one another when they
rounded a huge pinnacle of rock at the head of the cañon and met face
to face.
Two six-foot, bearded, ragged, and disheveled human brutes faced each
other a hundred miles from their kind. And instead of their common
suffering uniting them, their common soul mutually repelled them. But
instead of silently and scowlingly backing away like the tomcats of
boyhood, they snarled and growled incoherently like two rival polar
bears, then turned and walked apart, each with what dignity he could
assume under the circumstances. They did not enter the cañon; Smith
turned east, Jones west, and their further suffering has no place in
this story. They were on Hermite Island, and in time, with the help
of sealers, Smith reached the Falklands, where he shipped before the
mast for Liverpool; and Jones, Punta Arenas, where he got passage for
Valparaiso.
It is easy for believers in reincarnation to picture the history of
this warfare of soul. Back in the beginning of things two monera
collide, and, neither able to absorb the other, separate and remember.
Two ameboid organisms struggle for the mastery and rend each other to
death. Two monster fish battle in the warm, steaming sea, and swim
away, wounded, to be devoured by their kind. Two huge reptiles war to
the death. Two mammals fight and run. Two manlike apes grapple on the
bough of a tree, and, locked in vicious embrace, with teeth buried in
each other's flesh, fall to a common death on the ground. Two apelike
men battle with clubs and crack each other's skull. Two human beings
duel with sword or pistol and kill each other. Two babies meet in a
park and squall. And never, from the beginning, victory for one or
forgiveness from either.
Fate gave them another meeting and another chance. Four years later
both were paid off at San Francisco, and in looking for berths each
met a skipper looking for mates, but at different times. Smith met
him first, and, his credentials being good, while his reputation was
world-wide and splendid, from a skipper's viewpoint, he was gladly
accepted as first officer and sent aboard the ship, lying at anchor
in the bay. Jones, rather than wait indefinitely for a berth as first
mate, shipped as second, but only after a delay that brought him
aboard as the ship was lifting her anchor. Neither knew of the other's
presence in port, and their meeting on the poop as the tug was towing
the ship to the Golden Gate was a matter of speculation to Captain
Brown for some days after. They were introduced by the polite and
enthusiastic skipper, who congratulated himself at the moment on his
getting two such stars into his ship as Bully Smith and Black Jones of
New York--and they stood stock-still and silent, staring at each other,
while beads of perspiration gathered on their brows; then both wheeled
and walked away, as they had done on the frozen plateau of Cape Horn.
Mr. Smith to the forecastle, where the men, under the boatswains, were
catting and fishing the anchor; Mr. Jones, to his room off the forward
companion-alley. Here he sat on his chest, reviling Smith, his luck,
the skipper who had shipped him, and the God above who had created
him and brought him into contact with Smith and the things concerning
Smith that he could not understand. Why, he asked himself, had he not
thrashed him as a boy, or made friends with him?
Dimly, through this inquiry indexed by his curses, Jones at this moment
had a fleeting glimpse into the scientific basis of the Golden Rule,
ever a fallacy to him. But his past and his present would not permit of
a continuance of the mind process. Here he was, a competent first mate
with a master's certificate, second mate under a first mate, who was
Smith. And at this he listened to a message delivered by the steward
from the captain, that his presence was required on deck.
He went up, nervous as a cat in a strange place. Even though the ship
was on her way and far from the beach, he approached the captain to ask
that he be put ashore. But the captain quietly said, "Report to Mr.
Smith, sir," and Jones walked forward to report, meeting Smith coming
aft from the forecastle.
"Ready for work, sir," stammered Jones. "What do you wish?"
"No--nothing," answered Smith, equally embarrassed. They passed on,
Smith aft to speak to the captain, Jones forward, around the house,
meekly bearing the scrutiny of the men, and back to the main-rigging,
where he stood idly looking aloft for a moment or two; then he coiled
up a rope--a task that ordinarily he would have summoned a man to in a
burst of invective.
Mr. Smith walked up to the captain.
"Anchor's on the rail, sir," he said. "What next, sir?"
"What next?" queried the captain, sharply. "Don't you know? Get both
anchors inboard and stow them for sea. Pass that chain down into the
lockers. Send down the fish-tackle. Get chafing-gear aloft. Stow away
those fenders and clear up the decks. Get to work, Mr. Smith. Keep
those twenty-four rope-haulers busy. They're looking at you now."
"Yes, sir," answered the subdued Mr. Smith; and he went forward among
the men. Mr. Jones found other ropes to coil.
But the ship must be got ready for sea; and after a wearing day
of work, with tentative orders from the two mates, with sarcastic
comment from the captain, and insolent protest from the bewildered
"rope-haulers," this was finally accomplished; and at eight bells in
the evening, with the tug cast off and the towline coiled down to dry,
with canvas set and the course given to the helmsman, Smith and Jones
mustered the men into the waist to choose watches. They picked their
men, one after another, with less interest in the proceedings than
manifested by the men themselves. Then the first mate said, wearily:
"Relieve the wheel and lookout. That'll do the port watch," and went to
his berth demoralized and despondent, sick at heart--in the mind state
of a prize-fighter lately whipped. The second mate walked the deck in
about the same mood, until four bells struck, when, about the time that
Smith fell asleep, he roused up his individuality and proved himself a
competent and masterful second mate. The watch responded slowly to his
call to the main-brace, and he went among them with a belaying pin.
When Smith relieved him at midnight he, too, felt the inhibition until
Jones fell asleep, when his powers revived and his watch learned his
caliber. Neither man knew the cause of the change of mood. As far as
they could analyze their emotions they were nervous, broody, hateful,
revengeful, and cowardly, until some reluctancy or misdoing of the men
roused them to righteous rage. They did not, and could not, know that
this revulsion did not occur until the other was asleep. This brought
about a somewhat amusing condition of affairs a few days out.
An Orkney-Islander of Mr. Jones's watch--an intelligent,
self-respecting man, who was aloft on the mizzen with a
tar-pot--spilled a few drops on the clean white paintwork of the house;
and Mr. Jones, standing beside the window of the sleeping Mr. Smith,
witnessed the careless act, and shouted:
"Come down here, you long-headed billy-goat, and I'll make you smell
hell!"
"Ay, that I will," answered the man, scrambling down in a hurry.
Irreverent forecastle tradition has it that the Orkney Islands are
peopled by the descendants of a shipwrecked Dane and a nanny-goat. This
tradition found its birth and acceptance, no doubt, from the goatlike
characteristics of the heads, faces, and beards of this hardy race of
people. But to apply the epithet goat to an Orkneyman is like saying
Sawney to a Scot or nigger to a man-and-brother. Mr. Jones faced a
raging lunatic; but Mr. Smith had wakened at his shout, was intently
listening in the berth below, and Mr. Jones's efficiency left him. He
backed away from the enraged sailor, then incontinently fled, pelted in
the back by a hard and tarry fist, and occasionally kicked by a heavy
sea-boot. Around the house they went, the man in an unspent fury of
anger, Jones in an agony of fear and humiliation, until, at the second
lap, Mr. Smith appeared at the forward companion, which opened on to
the extension of the poop around which they had raced, with as much
disquiet in his face as was in Jones's.
"You, too," bellowed the man. "Stand still, an' I'll no eat my dinner
till I've licked you baith."
Mr. Smith stood for a moment or two, long enough to receive several
crashing blows in the face, which he only tried to shield with his
open, enfolding hands; then he, too, fled, but to his room, where he
locked himself in.
Mr. Jones had put the house between himself and the enemy, who, having
conquered both mates, now seemed to be looking for the captain; but
when the captain appeared with a revolver he quieted down, and tamely
went in irons. The captain's opinion of his mates must not be given;
and the two mates' experiences with the men before, by individual
action while the other slept, they had regained their ascendancy and
authority, need not be detailed.
The ship was bound for Melbourne, a long passage full of possibilities;
but they ate at separate tables, and after the first day's work seldom
met except at the change of watches, when one would report to the other
the happenings of the watch--the course, speed, direction and changes
of the wind, and the progress of routine work--in a strained tone that
was answered by the other with an equally embarrassed response. When
both were awake their attitude and behavior were such as to merit
the frankly expressed contempt of the skipper. When one was asleep,
the other earned and won the hatred of his own watch, and this, by
forecastle communion, was extended to the other.
There came a spell of bad weather, in which all hands were up
occasionally, and then it was noticeable that both mates would blurt
out the same order to the men at the same time. It only increased the
general strain, and each mate mentally cursed himself and the other for
the contretemps. Next, the men observed that the pet antipathies of
Mr. Smith among them received more or less of the unkind attention of
Mr. Jones, and _vice versa_. A Dutchman, kicked by the first mate in
the morning washing down the deck, for working his broom athwartwise
instead of fore and aft, was knocked down by the second mate in the
dog-watch for passing to windward of him. An Irishman, damned at the
wheel by Jones for bad steering, was set to work in his watch below
by Smith for the small matter of eating his breakfast on deck. Other
resemblances of thought and action occurred, more or less unfortunate,
such as both showing kindness to the sick steward until they met
at his bedside, then ignoring and neglecting him; and Mr. Jones's
untactful appearance with his sextant when Mr. Smith was taking the
sun at midday--an uncalled-for and regrettable piece of assumption on
his part; for a second mate is not shipped to navigate, no matter what
his proficiency. Again, each mate, unknown to the other, stopped the
morning coffee of his watch on the flimsiest pretexts.
This communion of soul, mutually strengthened, became a force which
pervaded the entire ship's company. The captain grew peevish, fretful,
suspicious, and unkind to all. The steward became insolent as he
recovered his health. The men quarreled and divided among themselves,
uniting only in their hatred of the mates. The cook was mobbed for
unprofessional treatment of the forecastle menu, and the carpenter and
sailmaker fought a drawn battle for choice of seats at the second-cabin
table--a matter that the steward might have decided, but would not. And
thus animated, the floating hell sailed slantingly across the Pacific
until hit by the outer fringe of a typhoon near the Society Islands, by
which time the Orkneyman was released.
Mr. Jones had the deck at the beginning of it, and skillfully got the
canvas in down to the maintopgallant sail, when the captain appeared,
and, with a falling barometer in mind, decided to call all hands and
shorten down to lower topsails. This brought the other mate on deck,
and trouble began. The maintopgallantsail and upper mizzentopsail,
however, came in easily, and were stowed before the evil genius of
the mates could get to work. But then--the port watch to the fore,
the starboard to the main--all hands manned the topsail downhauls and
weather-braces, while the two mates slacked away the halyards and
roared officerlike behests. It was a scene of wild confusion. The yards
had been braced for a beam wind; but this wind was hauling aft and
increasing rapidly to a screaming gale, which, bearing hard upon the
fixed ground-swell, raised an ugly cross-sea that occasionally lifted
a ton or two of green water over the rail. Captain Brown, to get his
topsails in the easier, followed the wind as it changed, keeping it
abeam; and, with a poor helmsman at the wheel, stood close beside him
and added his voice to the uproar of whistling wind, pounding seas, the
formless shouts of the four gangs at the downhauls, and the senseless
upbraiding of the mates.
"Don't part those rotten downhauls!" roared the captain. "Watch out up
aloft!" But the mates could not hear distinctly.
"Haul away on your downhauls!" shouted Mr. Jones at the main-rigging,
and "Haul away on your downhauls!" repeated Mr. Smith from forward,
each speech embellished with stock profanity. The yards were down, and
the tackles aloft "two blocks," but the fatuous mates did not see nor
hear.
"Belay your downhauls! Belay all!" yelled the furious skipper at the
wheel. "Man the spilling-lines, and send a man aft who can steer!"
"Haul on your downhauls!" thundered the mutual-minded mates, and the
exasperated men hauled with all their strength. There were six to a
gang, and they could have broken new manila under the circumstances.
The weather downhauls went first, and the wind within the hollow tube
of canvas lifted the yardarms. Then a sea hit the weather quarter,
boarded the ship, and washed the incompetent helmsman to the lee alley,
where he lay quiet for a time. The captain seized the wheel and ground
it up, yelling the while to "send a man aft, to haul away on the
spilling-lines, to shut up that d--d noise at the halyards, and 'tend
to business."
But in spite of his objurgations the mates could not obey. They ran
about the flooded waist of the ship, shouting futile instructions
to the demoralized crew to do this or that--and their orders were
curiously similar, though inapplicable. Then, in spite of the captain's
mighty heavings on the wheel, the ship broached to, spilling the
topsails first, next the courses. The first slatted back against the
masts, then forward against the strain of the bolt-ropes, started rents
here and there, and in three minutes were in rags and shreds, while
the yards, with slackened weather-braces, swung and banged about in a
manner to send the crew from under. They flocked to the break of the
poop, the two mates among them.
"Come aft here to me, you two hell-fired farmers!" bellowed the
captain, and the two came. "D--n your wretched, miserable hearts and
souls, if it wasn't for the law I'd slaughter you both! Look at my
ship! Just look at her, now! Call yourself competent mates? Someone
must have told you that. Take this wheel! Take it, both of you, and
steer! Get this ship dead before the wind and keep her so! You can't
shorten sail, but you can steer, and steer you will, straight and true,
or I'll put you 'fore the mast!"
They gripped the spokes meekly, Smith to starboard, Jones to port, and
with the aid of the shivered mizzentopsail got the ship before it,
and steered--beautifully, with no sign or word from one to assist the
other. Neither took charge, as is usual with two men at the wheel.
Their movements were simultaneous and harmonious, with no conflicting
judgments of pressure or release. They steered as one man with the
strength of two; and Captain Brown glared at them awhile, then, unable
to criticise, went forward among his men to secure his wabbly upper
topsailyards. He tautened the braces; then, as all the downhauls had
parted at or near the splices of the upper blocks, sent the whipped
ends aloft to be rove off and knotted. But the first man up the fore
had hardly reached the futtock rigging, when he sang out: "Land ho!
Land dead ahead! Breakers under the bow, sir! It's a reef--a barrier
reef. Hard a-port, sir, for God's sake!"
"Port your wheel!" yelled the captain from amidships. "Hard over! Port
main-braces, all of you!"
The wheel went over and the men rushed to the braces, but it was too
late. Hardly had the ship's head swung a point before there was a
crash and a jolt that shook every man from his feet; then came another
and heavier crash, and the stern lifted with a sea, swung through an
irregular arc of radius equal to the ship's length, and came down
with another crash that sent the wheel spinning and both helmsmen to
the deck. The foremast went by the board, snapping six feet above the
deck, and carrying with it the main-topgallantmast. It fell across the
reef that had caught the ship, and the royal and topgallant masts and
yards floated in the fairly quiet water of the lagoon within. The stern
lifted again, swung farther in, and came down with a jar that shook
out the main and mizzen topmasts; but these spars disintegrated as
they fell, and landed close aboard or on the reef. Then came a mighty
sea that swept over the dismantled wreck as over a breakwater; and the
two mates, bruised and half stunned--nearly shocked out of their now
limited faculties--were caught just as they stood erect, and carried
with it, high over the rail, high over the barrier reef, and dropped in
the swirling turmoil of yeasty water within it.
The captain had struggled aft to the starboard alley on the poop, and
saw them go. A following sea hit the ship and bore him back in its rush
along the alley. Recovering, he again scrambled aft to where, on the
house just forward of the wheel, hung a small, circular life-buoy to be
thrown by the helmsman in an emergency.
"Stand by!" he called. "Stand by for this life-buoy!" He could see
their two shaggy heads rising out of the froth, each of them apparently
uninjured, and swimming vigorously toward the reef. "Stand by!" he
shouted, encouragingly, and sent the circular ring of cork and canvas
whirling toward them with a round-arm throw. It fell near them, and
both swam toward it, each getting a grip.
The captain ran forward as he could between the sweeping seas to where
his crew clustered under the weather-rail, hanging on to coils of rope
and belaying pins.
"Go out there, some of you!" he shouted. "Go down the foremast and
throw them a line! I'll clear away the running-gear, so you can
overhaul enough. Bear a hand, now, or they can't get back!"
"To hell with them!" said the Orkney-Islander. "Think you, cappen, that
I or any man here would go down that spar after yon two buckos?"
Some there might have gone, for the captain was a naturally humane man
and very much in earnest. But the Orkneyman was a master spirit among
them, and his example prevailed. No one would go. The skipper mounted a
few ratlines of the main-rigging, and shouted to swim to the floating
wreck of the foremast, not far from where they struggled with the
life-buoy--an easy swim had they swum alone. They made no response, nor
did they cease their futile struggles. But they did not struggle with
each other, only with the life-buoy and with the sea. They drifted to
leeward into the lagoon, past the wreckage that might have saved them
both, and by which they could have regained the ship. With only their
heads showing occasionally, for their struggles kept them under, they
went out of sight in the smudge of rain and spindrift, gripping with
all their strength the small life-buoy that would have supported one,
but not two.
Cursed to the last with a fear of each other that matched their hate,
they would not fight, but died as they lived, with their problem
unsolved and their supremacy undetermined.