Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger
THE VULTURES
A NOVEL
By Henry Seton Merriman
I
ALL AT SEA
Mr. Joseph P. Mangles, at his ease in a deck-chair on the broad
Atlantic, was smoking a most excellent cigar. Mr. Mangles was a tall,
thin man, who carried his head in the manner curtly known at a girls'
school as “poking.” He was a clean-shaven man, with bony forehead,
sunken cheeks, and an underhung mouth. His attitude towards the world
was one of patient disgust. He had the air of pushing his way, chin
first, doggedly through life. The weather had been bad, and was now
moderating. But Mr. Mangles had not suffered from sea-sickness. He was
a dry, hard person, who had suffered from nothing but chronic
dyspepsia--had suffered from it for fifty years or so.
“Fine weather,” he said. “Women will be coming on deck--hang the fine
weather.”
And his voice was deep and low like a growl.
“Joseph,” said Miss Mangles, “growls over his meals like a dog.”
The remark about the weather and the women was addressed to a man who
leaned against the rail. Indeed, there was no one else near--and the
man made no reply. He was twenty-five or thirty years younger than Mr.
Mangles, and looked like an Englishman, but not aggressively so. The
large majority of Britons are offensively British. Germans are no
better; so it must be racial, this offensiveness. A Frenchman is at
his worst, only comically French--a matter of a smile; but Teutonic
characteristics are conducive to hostility.
The man who leaned against the rail near to Joseph P. Mangles was six
feet high, and rather heavily built, but, like many big men, he seemed
to take up no more than his due share of room in this crowded world.
There was nothing distinctive about his dress. His demeanor was quiet.
When he spoke he was habitually asked to repeat his remark, which he
did, with patience, in the same soft, inaudible voice.
There were two men on board this great steamer who were not business
men--Joseph P. Mangles and Reginald Cartoner; and, like two ships on a
sea of commercial interests, they had drifted together during the four
days that had elapsed since their departure from New York. Neither made
anything, or sold anything, or had a card in his waistcoat-pocket ready
for production at a moment's notice, setting forth name and address and
trade. Neither was to be suspected of a desire to repel advances, and
yet both were difficult to get on with. For human confidences must
be mutual. It is only to God that man can continue telling, telling,
telling, and getting never a word in return. These two men had nothing
to tell their fellows about themselves; so the other passengers drifted
away into those closely linked corporations characteristic of steamer
life and left them to themselves--to each other.
And they had never said things to each other--had never, as it were, got
deeper than the surface of their daily life.
Cartoner was a dreamy man, with absorbed eyes, rather deeply sunk under
a strong forehead. His eyelids had that peculiarity which is rarely seen
in the face of a man who is a nonentity. They were quite straight, and
cut across the upper curve of the pupil. This gave a direct, stern look
to dreamy eyes, which was odd. After a pause, he turned slowly, and
looked down at his companion with a vague interrogation in his glance.
He seemed to be wondering whether Mr. Mangles had spoken. And Mangles
met the glance with one of steady refusal to repeat his remark. But
Mangles spoke first, after all.
“Yes,” he said, “the women will be on deck soon--and my sister Jooly.
You don't know Jooly?”
He spoke with a slow and pleasant American accent.
“I saw you speaking to a young lady in the saloon after luncheon,” said
Cartoner. “She had a blue ribbon round her throat. She was pretty.”
“That wasn't Jooly,” said Mr. Mangles, without hesitation.
“Who was it?” asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who
have no self-consciousness--who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as
are the majority of men and women.
“My niece, Netty Cahere.”
“She is pretty,” said Cartoner, with a spontaneity which would have
meant much to feminine ears.
“You'll fall in love with her,” said Mangles, lugubriously. “They all
do. She says she can't help it.”
Cartoner looked at him as one who has ears but hears not. He made no
reply.
“Distresses her very much,” concluded Mangles, dexterously shifting his
cigar by a movement of the tongue from the port to the starboard side
of his mouth. Cartoner did not seem to be very much interested in Miss
Netty Cahere. He was a man having that air of detachment from personal
environments which is apt to arouse curiosity in the human heart, more
especially in feminine hearts. People wanted to know what there was in
Cartoner's past that gave him so much to think about in the present.
The two men had not spoken again when Miss Netty Cahere came on deck.
She was accompanied by the fourth officer, a clean-built, clean-shaven
young man, who lost his heart every time he crossed the Atlantic. He
was speaking rather earnestly to Miss Cahere, who listened with an
expression of puzzled protest on her pretty face. She had wondering blue
eyes and a complexion of the most delicate pink and white which never
altered. She was slightly built, and carried herself in a subtly
deprecating manner, as if her own opinion of herself were small, and she
wished the world to accept her at that valuation. She made no sign
of having perceived her uncle, but nevertheless dismissed the fourth
officer, who reluctantly mounted the ladder to the bridge, looking back
as he went.
Mr. Mangles threw his cigar overboard.
“She don't like smoke,” he growled.
Cartoner looked at the cigar, and absent-mindedly threw his cigarette
after it. He had apparently not made up his mind whether to go or stay,
when Miss Cahere approached her uncle, without appearing to notice that
he was not alone.
“I suppose,” she said, “that that was one of the officers of the ship,
though he was very young--quite a boy. He was telling me about his
mother. It must be terrible to have a near relation a sailor.”
She spoke in a gentle voice, and it was evident that she had a heart
full of sympathy for the suffering and the poor.
“I wish some of my relations were sailors,” replied Mr. Mangles, in his
deepest tones. “Could spare a whole crew. Let me introduce my friend,
Mr. Cartoner--Miss Cahere.”
He completed the introduction with an old-fashioned and ceremonious wave
of the hand. Miss Cahere smiled rather shyly on Cartoner, and it was his
eyes that turned away first.
“You have not been down to meals,” he said, in his gentle, abrupt way.
“No; but I hope to come now. Are there many people? Have you friends on
board?”
“There are very few ladies. I know none of them.”
“But I dare say some of them are nice,” said Miss Cahere, who evidently
thought well of human nature.
“Very likely.”
And Cartoner lapsed into his odd and somewhat disconcerting
thoughtfulness.
Miss Cahere continued to glance at him beneath her dark lashes--dark
lashes around blue eyes--with a guileless and wondering admiration. He
certainly was a very good-looking man, well set up, with that quiet air
which bespeaks good breeding.
“Have you seen the ship on the other side?” she asked, after a pause; “a
sailing ship. You cannot see it from here.”
As she spoke she made a little movement, as if to show him the spot
from whence the ship was visible. Cartoner followed her meekly, and Mr.
Mangles, left behind in his deck-chair, slowly sought his cigar-case.
“There,” said Miss Cahere, pointing out a sail on the distant horizon.
“One can hardly see it now. When I first came on deck it was much
nearer. That ship's officer pointed it out to me.”
Cartoner looked at the ship without much enthusiasm.
“I think,” said Miss Cahere, in a lower voice--she had a rather
confidential manner--“I think sailors are very nice, don't you?
But . . . well, I suppose one ought not to say that, ought one?”
“It depends what you were going to say.”
Miss Cahere laughed, and made no reply. Her laugh and a glance seemed,
however, to convey the comfortable assurance that whatever she had been
about to say would not have been applicable to Cartoner himself. She
glanced at his trim, upright figure.
“I think I prefer soldiers,” she said, thoughtfully.
Cartoner murmured something inaudible, and continued to gaze at the ship
he had been told to look at.
“Did you know my uncle before you came on board, or were you brave
enough to force him to speak? He is so silent, you know, that most
people are afraid of him. I suppose you had met him before.”
“No. It was a mere accident. We were neither of us ill. We were both
hungry, and hurried down to a meal. And the stewards placed us next to
each other.”
Which was a long explanation, without much information in it.
“Oh, I thought perhaps you were in the diplomatic service,” said Miss
Cahere, carelessly.
For an instant Cartoner's eyes lost all their vagueness. Either Miss
Cahere had hit the mark with her second shot, or else he was making a
mental note of the fact that Mr. Mangles belonged to that amiable body
of amateurs, the American Diplomatic Corps.
Mr. Mangles had naturally selected the leeward side of the deck-house
for his seat, and Miss Cahere had brought Cartoner round to the weather
side, where a cold Atlantic breeze made the position untenable. Without
explanation, and for her own good, he led the way to a warmer quarter.
But at the corner of the deck-house a gust caught Miss Cahere, and held
her there in a pretty attitude, with her two hands upraised to her hat,
looking at him with frank and laughing eyes, and waiting for him to come
to her assistance. The same gust of wind made the steamer lurch so that
Cartoner had to grasp Miss Cahere's arm to save her from falling.
“Thank you,” she said, quietly, and with downcast eyes, when the
incident had passed. For in some matters she held old-fashioned notions,
and was not one of the modern race of hail-fellow-well-met girls who are
friendly in five minutes with men and women alike.
When she came within sight of her uncle, she suddenly hurried towards
him, and made an affectionate, laughing attempt to prevent his returning
his cigar-case to his jacket pocket. She even took possession of the
cigar-case, opened it, and with her own fingers selected a cigar.
“No,” she said, firmly, “you are going to smoke again at once. Do you
think I did not see you throw away the other? Mr. Cartoner--is it not
foolish of him? Because I once said, without reflecting, that I did not
care about the smell of tobacco, he never lets me see him smoke now.”
As she spoke she laid her hand affectionately on the old man's shoulder
and looked down at him.
“As if it mattered whether I like it or not,” she said. “And I do like
it--I like the smell of your cigars.”
Mr. Mangles looked from Cartoner to his niece with an odd smile, which
was perhaps the only way in which that lean countenance could express
tenderness.
“As if it mattered what I think,” she said, humbly, again.
“Always like to conciliate a lady,” said Mr. Mangles, in his deep voice.
“Especially when that lady is dependent on you for her daily bread and
her frocks,” answered Netty, in an affectionate aside, which Cartoner
was, nevertheless, able to overhear.
“Where is your aunt Jooly?” inquired the old man, hurriedly. “I thought
she was coming on deck.”
“So she is,” answered Netty. “I left her in the saloon. She is quite
well. She was talking to some people.”
“What, already?” exclaimed the lady's brother. And Netty nodded her head
with a mystic gravity. She was looking towards the saloon stairway, from
whence she seemed to expect Miss Mangles.
“My sister Jooly, sir,” explained Mr. Mangles to Cartoner, “is no doubt
known to you--Miss Julia P. Mangles, of New York City.”
Cartoner tried to look as if he had heard the name before. He had lived
in the United States during some months, and he knew that it is possible
to be famous in New York and quite without honor in Connecticut.
“Perhaps she has not come into your line of country?” suggested Mr.
Mangles, not unkindly.
“No--I think not.”
“Her line is--at present--prisons.”
“I have never been in prison,” replied Cartoner.
“No doubt you will get experience in course of time,” said Mr. Mangles,
with his deep, curt laugh. “No, sir, my sister is a lecturer. She gets
on platforms and talks.”
“What about?” asked Cartoner.
Mr. Mangles described the wide world, with a graceful wave of his cigar.
“About most things,” he answered, gravely; “chiefly about women, I take
it. She is great on the employment of women, and the payment of them.
And she is right there. She has got hold of the right end of the stick
there. She had found out what very few women know--namely, that when
women work for nothing, they are giving away something that nobody
wants. So Jooly goes about the world lecturing on women's employment,
and pointing out to the public and the administration many ways in which
women may be profitably employed and paid. She leaves it to the gumption
of the government to discover for themselves that there is many a nice
berth for which Jooly P. Mangles is eminently suited, but governments
have no gumption, sir. And--”
“Here is Aunt Julie,” interrupted Miss Cahere, walking away.
Mr. Mangles gave a short sigh, and lapsed into silence.
As Miss Cahere went forward, she passed another officer of the ship, the
second in command, a dogged, heavy man, whose mind was given to the ship
and his own career. He must have seen something to interest him in Netty
Cahere's face--perhaps he caught a glance from the dark-lashed eyes--for
he turned and looked at her again, with a sudden, dull light in his
face.
II
SIGNAL HOUSE
Where Gravesend merges into Northfleet--where the spicy odors of
chemical-fertilizing works mingle with the dry dust of the cement
manufactories which throw their tall chimneys into an ever-gray
sky--there stands a house known as the Signal House. Why it is so called
no one knows and very few care to inquire. It is presumably a square
house of the Jacobean period--presumably because it is so hidden by
trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get
at, that its outward form is no longer to be perceived.
It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of
the tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is
haunted. Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they
are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted
them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A
side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall,
up an alley, is labelled “Tradesman's Entrance,” but the tradesmen never
linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin,
blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at
the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His
clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them
wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The better-class
buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of
hair by a hat-pin.
The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds. He
goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before
he tips his measure.
This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could
live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it--a
noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a
family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as
a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash,
and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live
in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in
the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady
of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house
never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was the
mere invention of some kitchen-maid.
Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a
foreigner took it--a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice,
pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and
the river view. He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not
preposterously stout. There was nothing mysterious about him. He was
well known in the City. He had merely mistaken an undesirable suburb for
a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he was
delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old lawn,
the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.
He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his throat
in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had obviously
been designed by Providence, for he had no neck. He used the Signal
House occasionally from Saturday till Monday. Then he gave it up
altogether, and tried to sell it. It stood empty for some years, while
the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously elsewhere.
Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of recreation,
and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and their
foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.
And all these persons behaved in an odd, Continental way, and played
bowls on the lawn at the back of the house on Sundays. The neighbors
could hear them but could see nothing, owing to the thickness of the
grimy trees and the height of the old brick wall. But no one worried
much about the Signal House; for they were a busy people who lived all
around, and had to earn their living, in addition to the steady and
persistent assuagement of a thirst begotten of cement dust and the
pungent smell of bone manure. One or two local amateurs had made sure
of the fact that there was nothing in the house that would repay a
burglarious investigation, which, added to the fact that the police
station is only a few doors off, tended to allay a natural curiosity as
to the foreign gentleman's possessions.
When he came he drove in a close cab from Gravesend Station, and usually
told the cabman when his services would again be required. He came
thus with three friends one summer afternoon, some years ago, and came
without luggage. The servants, who followed in a second cab, carried
some parcels, presumably of refreshments. These grave gentlemen were,
it appeared, about to enjoy a picnic at the Signal House--possibly a
tea-picnic in the Russian fashion.
The afternoon was fine, and the gentlemen walked in the garden at the
back of the house. They were walking thus when another cab stopped at
the closed iron gate, and the banker hurried, as fast as his build would
allow, to open the side door and admit a seafaring man, who seemed to
know his bearings.
“Well, mister,” he said, in a Northern voice, “another of your little
jobs?”
The two men shook hands, and the banker paid the cabman. When the
vehicle had gone the host turned to his guest and replied to the
question.
“Yes, my fren',” he said, “another of my little jobs. I hope you are
well, Captain Cable?”
But Captain Cable was not a man to waste words over the social
conventions. He was obviously well--as well as a hard, seafaring life
will make a man who lives simply and works hard. He was a short man,
with a red face washed very clean, and very well shaven, except for a
little piece of beard left fantastically at the base of his chin. His
eyes were blue and bright, like gimlets. He may have had a soft heart,
but it was certainly hidden beneath a hard exterior. He wore a thick
coat of blue pilot-cloth, not because the July day was cold, but because
it was his best coat. His hat was carefully brushed and of hard, black
felt. It had perhaps been the height of fashion in Sunderland five years
earlier. He wore no gloves--Captain Cable drew the line there. As for
the rest, he had put on that which he called his shore-going rig.
“And yourself?” he answered, mechanically.
“I am very well, thank you,” replied the polite banker, who, it will
have been perceived, was nameless to Captain Cable, as he is to the
reader. The truth being that his name was so absurdly and egregiously
Russian that the plain English tongue never embarked on that sea of
consonants. “It is an affair, as usual. My friends are here to meet you,
but I think they do not speak English, except your colleague, the other
captain, who speaks a little--a very little.”
As he spoke he led the way to the garden, where three gentlemen were
awaiting them.
“This is Captain Cable,” he said, and the three gentlemen raised their
hats, much to the captain's discomfiture. He did not hold by foreign
ways; but he dragged his hat off and then expectorated on the lawn,
just to show that he felt quite at home. He even took the lead in the
conversation.
“Tell 'em,” he said, “that I'm a plain man from Sun'land that has a
speciality, an' that's transshipping cargo at sea, but me hands are
clean.”
He held them out and they were not, so he must have spoken
metaphorically.
The banker translated, addressing himself to one of his companions,
rather markedly and with much deference.
“You're speakin' French,” interrupted Captain Cable.
“Yes, my fren', I am. Do you know French?”
“Not me,” returned Captain Cable, affably. “They're all one to me.
They're all damn nonsense.”
He was, it seemed, that which is called in these days of blatant
patriotism a thorough Englishman, or a true Blue, according to the
social station of the speaker.
The gentleman to whom the translation had been addressed smiled. He was
a tall and rather distinguished-looking man, with bushy white hair and
mustache. His features were square-cut and strong. His eyes were dark,
and he had an easy smile. He led the way to some chairs which had been
placed near a table at the far end of the lawn beneath a cedar-tree, and
his manner had something faintly regal in it, as if in his daily life he
had always been looked up to and obeyed without question.
“Tell him that we also are plain men with clean hands,” he said.
And the banker replied:
“Oui, mon Prince.”
But the interpretation was taken out of his mouth by one of the others,
the youngest of the group--a merry-eyed youth, with a fluffy, fair
mustache and close-cropped, flaxen hair.
“My father,” he said, in perfect English, “says that we also are plain
men, and that your hands will not be hurt by touching ours.”
He held out his hand as he spoke, and refused to withdraw it until it
had been grasped, rather shame-facedly, by Captain Cable, who did not
like these effusive foreign ways, but, nevertheless, rather liked the
young man.
The banker ranged the chairs round the table, and the oddly assorted
group seated themselves. The man who had not yet spoken, and who sat
down last, was obviously a sailor. His face was burned a deep brown,
and was mostly hidden by a closely cut beard. He had the slow ways of a
Northerner, the abashed manner of a merchant skipper on shore. The mark
of the other element was so plainly written upon him that Captain Cable
looked at him hard and then nodded. Without being invited to do so they
sat next to each other at one side of the table, and faced the three
landsmen. Again Captain Cable spoke first.
“Provided it's nothing underhand,” he said, “I'm ready and willing.
Or'nary risks of the sea, Queen's enemies, act o' God--them's my risks!
I am uninsured. Ship's my own. I don't mind explosives--”
“There are explosives,” admitted the banker.
“Then they must be honest explosives, or they don't go below my hatches.
Explosives that's to blow a man up honest, before his face.”
“There are cartridges,” said the young man who had shaken hands.
“That'll do,” said the masterful sailor. And pointing a thick finger
towards the banker, added, “Now, mister,” and sat back in his chair.
“It is a very simple matter,” explained the banker, in a thick, suave
voice. “We have a cargo--a greater part of it weight, though there is
some measurement--a few cases of light goods, clothing and such. You
will load in the river, and all will be sent to you in lighters.
There is nothing heavy, nothing large. There is also no insurance, you
understand. What falls out of the slings and is lost overside is lost.”
The banker paused for breath.
“I understand,” said Captain Cable. “It's the same with me and my ship.
There is no insurance, no tricking underwriters into unusual risks. It's
neck or nothing with me.”
And he looked hard at the breathless banker, with whom it was, in this
respect, nothing.
“I understand right enough,” he added, with an affable nod to the three
foreigners.
“You will sail from London with a full general cargo for Malmo or
Stockholm, or somewhere where officials are not wide-awake. You meet in
the North Sea, at a point to be fixed between yourselves, the _Olaf_,
Captain Petersen--sitting by your side.”
Captain Cable turned and gravely shook hands with Captain Petersen.
“Thought you was a seafaring man,” he said. And Captain Petersen replied
that he was “Vair pleased.”
“The cargo is to be transshipped at sea, out of sight of land or
lightship. But that we can safely leave to you, Captain Cable.”
“I don't deny,” replied the mariner, who was measuring Captain Petersen
out of the corner of his eye, “that I have been there before.”
“You can then go up the Baltic in ballast to some small port--just a
sawmill, at the head of a fjord--where I shall have a cargo of timber
waiting for you to bring back to London. When can you begin loading,
captain?”
“To-morrow,” replied the captain. “Ship's lying in the river now, and if
these gentlemen would like to see her, she's as handy a--”
“No, I do not think we shall have time for that!” put in the banker,
hastily. “And now we must leave you and Captain Petersen to settle your
meeting-place. You have your charts?”
By way of response the captain produced from his pocket sundry folded
papers, which he laid tenderly on the table. For the last ten years
he had been postponing the necessity of buying new charts of certain
sections of the North Sea. He looked round at the high walls and the
overhanging trees.
“Hope the wind don't come blustering in here much,” he said,
apprehensively, as he unfolded the ragged papers with great caution.
The fair-haired young man drew forward his chair, and Cable, seeing the
action, looked at him sharply.
“Seafaring man?” he inquired, with a weight of doubt and distrust in his
voice.
“Not by profession, only for fun.”
“Fun? Man and boy, I've used the sea forty years, and I haven't yet
found out where the fun comes in!”
“This gentleman,” explained the banker, “his Ex--Mr.--” He paused, and
looked inquiringly at the white-haired gentleman.
“Mr. Martin.”
“Mr. Martin will be on board the _Olaf_ when you meet Captain Petersen
in the North Sea. He will act as interpreter. You remember that Captain
Petersen speaks no English, and you do not know his language. The
two crews, I understand, will be similarly placed. Captain Peterson
undertakes to have no one on board speaking English. And your crew, my
fren'?”
“My crew comes from Sun'land. Men that only speak English, and precious
little of that,” replied Captain Cable.
He had his finger on the chart, but paused and looked up, fixing his
bright glance on the face of the white-haired gentleman.
“There's one thing--I'm a plain-spoken man myself--what is there for us
two--us seafaring men?”
“There is five hundred pounds for each of you,” replied the white-haired
gentleman for himself, in slow and careful English.
Captain Cable nodded his grizzled head over the chart.
“I like to deal with a gentleman,” he said, gruffly.
“And so do I,” replied the white-haired foreigner, with a bow.
Captain Cable grunted audibly.
III
A SPECIALTY
A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind.
Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The
water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the
green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the
breeze--Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet
and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like
a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad
daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and
day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three
weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is
ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and
the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.
There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill
is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably
an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the
waste-places of the world--a place left clean on sailors' charts; no
one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have
earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never
relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their
embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp.
Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and
stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle
the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on
these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea,
where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the
world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on
these coasts.
“Barrin' fogs--always barrin' fogs!” Captain Cable had said as his last
word on leaving the Signal House. “If ye wait a month, never move in a
fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!”
And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one
of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or
reason.
At sunset the _Olaf_ had crept cautiously in from the west--a
high-prowed, well-decked, square-rigged steamer of the old school, with
her name written large amidships and her side-lights set aft. Captain
Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like
a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who
moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and
a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every
current.
Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon. He sighted the windmill
very carefully, very correctly, very cautiously. He described a
half-circle round the bank hidden a few feet below the muddy water. Then
he steamed slowly seawards, keeping the windmill full astern and the
beacon on his port quarter. When the beacon was bearing southeast he
rang the engine-room bell. The steamer, hardly moving before, stopped
dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then
Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high
forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The _Olaf_ was anchored at
the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no
vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went
down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into
night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below
the horizon now. Only the three-legged beacon stood near, turning its
winking, wondering eye round the waste of waters.
Here the _Olaf_ rode out the gale that raged all through the night, and
in the morning there was no peace, for it still rained and the northwest
wind still blew hard. There was no depth of water, however, to make a
sea big enough to affect large vessels. The _Olaf_ rode easily enough,
and only pitched her nose into the yellow sea from time to time,
throwing a cloud of spray over the length of her decks, like a bird at
its bath.
Soon after daylight the Prince Martin Bukaty came on deck, gay and
lively in his borrowed oilskins. His blue eyes laughed in the shadow of
the black sou'wester tied down over his eyes, his slight form was lost
in the ample folds of Captain Petersen's best oilskin coat.
“It remains to be seen,” he said, peering out into the rain and spray,
“whether that little man will come to us in this.”
“He will come,” said Captain Petersen.
Prince Martin Bukaty laughed. He laughed at most things--at the timidity
and caution of this Norse captain, at good weather, at bad weather, at
life as he found it. He was one of those few and happy people who find
life a joy and his fellow-being a huge joke. Some will say that it is
easy enough to be gay at the threshold of life; but experience tells
that gayety is an inward sun which shines through all the changes and
chances of a journey which has assuredly more bad weather than good. The
gayest are not those who can be pointed out as the happiest. Indeed, the
happiest are those who appear to have nothing to make them happy. Martin
Bukaty might, for instance, have chosen a better abode than the stuffy
cabin of a Scandinavian cargo-boat and cheerier companions than a grim
pair of Norse seamen. He might have sought a bluer sky and a bluer sea,
and yet he stood on the dripping deck and laughed. He clapped Captain
Petersen on the back.
“Well, we have got here and we have ridden out the worst of it, and we
haven't dragged our anchors and nobody has seen us, and that exceedingly
amusing little captain will be here in a few hours. Why look so gloomy,
my friend?”
Captain Petersen shook the rain from the brim of his sou'wester.
“We are putting our necks within a rope,” he said.
“Not your neck--only mine,” replied Martin. “It is a necktie that one
gets accustomed to. Look at my father! One rarely sees an old man so
free from care. How he laughs! How he enjoys his dinner and his wine!
The wine runs down a man's throat none the less pleasantly because there
is a loose rope around it. And he has played a dangerous game all his
life--that old man, eh?”
“It is all very well for you,” said Captain Petersen, gravely, turning
his gloomy eyes towards his companion. “A prince does not get shot or
hanged or sent to the bottom in the high seas.”
“Ah! you think that,” said Prince Martin, momentarily grave. “One can
never tell.”
Then he broke into a laugh.
“Come!” he said, “I am going aloft to look for that English boat. Come
on to the fore-yard. We can watch him come in--that little bulldog of a
man.”
“If he has any sense he will wait in the open until this gale is over,”
grumbled Petersen, nevertheless following his companion forward.
“He has only one sense, that man--a sense of infinite fearlessness.”
“He is probably afraid--” Captain Petersen paused to hoist himself
laboriously on to the rail.
“Of what?” inquired Martin, looking through the ratlines.
“Of a woman.”
And Martin Bukaty's answer was lost in the roar of the wind as he went
aloft.
They lay on the fore-yard for half an hour, talking from time to time in
breathless monosyllables, for the wind was gathering itself together for
that last effort which usually denotes the end of a gale. Then Captain
Petersen pointed his steady hand almost straight ahead. On the gray
horizon a little column of smoke rose like a pillar. It was a steamer
approaching before the wind.
Captain Cable came on at a great pace. His ship was very low in the
water, and kicked up awkwardly on a following sea. He swung round the
beacon on the shoulder of a great wave that turned him over till
the rounded wet sides of the steamer gleamed like a whale's back. He
disappeared into the haze nearer the land, and presently emerged again
astern of the _Olaf_, a black nozzle of iron and an intermittent fan
of spray. He was crashing into the seas at full speed--a very different
kind of sailor to the careful captain of the _Olaf_. His low decks were
clear, and each sea leaped over the bow and washed aft--green and white.
As the little steamer came down he suddenly slackened speed, and waved
his hand as he stood alone on the high bridge.
Then two or three oilskin-clad figures crept forward into the spray that
still broke over the bows. The crew of the _Olaf_, crowding to the rail,
looked down on the deeply laden little vessel from the height of their
dry and steady deck. They watched the men working quickly almost under
water on the low forecastle, and saw that it was good. Captain Cable
stood swaying on the bridge--a little, square figure in gleaming
oilskins--and said no word. He had a picked crew.
He passed ahead of the _Olaf_ and anchored there, paying out cable as if
he were going to ride out a cyclone. The steamer had no name visible, a
sail hanging carelessly over the stern completely hid name and port
of registry. Her forward name-boards had been removed. Whatever his
business was, this seaman knew it well.
No sooner was his anchor down than Captain Cable began to lower a boat,
and Petersen, seeing the action, broke into mild Scandinavian profanity.
“He is going to try and get to us!” he said, pessimistically, and went
forward to give the necessary orders. He knew his business, too, this
Northern sailor, and when, after a long struggle, the boat containing
Captain Cable and two men came within reach, a rope--cleverly
thrown--coiled out into the flying scud and fell across the captain's
face.
A few minutes later he scrambled on to the deck of the _Olaf_ and shook
hands with Captain Petersen. He did not at once recognize Prince Martin,
who held out his hand.
“Glad to see you, Captain Cable,” he said. Cable finished drying the
salt water from his face with a blue cotton handkerchief before he shook
hands.
“Suppose you thought I wasn't coming,” he said, suspiciously.
“No, I knew you would.”
“Glad to see me for my own sake?” suggested the captain, grimly smiling.
“Yes, it always does one good to see a man,” answered Prince Martin.
“They tell me you're a prince.”
“That is all.”
The captain measured him slowly with his eyes.
“Makings of a man as well, perhaps,” he said, doubtfully. Then he turned
to cast an eye over the _Olaf_.
“Tin-kettle of a thing!” he observed, after a pause.
“My little cargo won't be much in her great hold. Hatches are too small.
Now, I'm all hatch. Can't open up in this weather. We can turn to and
get our running tackle bent. It'll moderate before the evening, and if
it does we can work all night. Will your Rile Highnes' be ready to work
all night?”
“I shall be ready whenever your High Mightiness is.”
The captain gave a gruff laugh.
“Dammy, you're the right sort!” he muttered, looking aloft at the
rigging with that contempt for foreign tackle which is essentially the
privilege of the British sailor.
Cable gave certain orders, announced that he would send four men on
board in the afternoon to bend the running tackle “ship-shape and
Bristol fashion,” and refused to remain on board the _Olaf_ for
luncheon.
“We've got a bit of steak,” he said, conclusively, and clambered over
the side into his boat. In confirmation of this statement the odor of
fried onions was borne on the breeze a few minutes later from the small
steamer to the large one.
The men from Sunderland came on board during the afternoon--men who,
as Captain Cable had stated, had only one language and made singularly
small use of that. Music and seamanship are two arts daily practised in
harmony by men who have no common language. For a man is a seaman or
a musician quite independently of speech. So the running tackle was
successfully bent, and in the evening the weather moderated.
There was a half-moon, which struggled through the clouds soon after
dark, and by its light the little English steamer sidled almost
noiselessly under the shadow of her large companion. Captain Cable's
crew worked quickly and quietly, and by nine o'clock that work was begun
which was to throw a noose round the necks of Prince Bukaty, Prince
Martin, Captain Petersen, and several others.
Captain Cable divided the watches so that the work might proceed
continuously. The dawn found the smaller steamer considerably lightened,
and her captain bright and wakeful at his post. All through the day the
transshipping went on. Cases of all sizes and all weights were slung out
of the capacious hatches of the one to sink into the dark hold of the
other vessel, and there was no mishap. Through the second night the
creaking of the blocks never ceased, and soon after daylight the three
men who had superintended the work without resting took a cup of coffee
together in the cabin of the _Olaf_.
“Likely as not,” said Captain Cable, setting down his empty cup, “we
three'll not meet again. I have had dealings with many that I've never
seen again, and with some that have been careful not to know me if they
did see me.”
“We can never tell,” said Martin, optimistically.
“Of course,” the captain went on, “I can hold me tongue. That's
agreed--we all hold our tongues, whatever the newspapers may be likely
to pay for a word or two. Often enough I've read things in the newspaper
that I could put a different name to. And that little ship of mine has
had a hand in some queer political pies.”
“Yes,” answered Martin, with his gay laugh, “and kept it clean all the
same.”
“That's as may be. And now I'll say good-bye. I'll be calling on your
father for my money in three days' time--barrin' fogs. And I'll tell him
I left you well. Good-bye, Petersen; you're a handy man. Tell him he's a
handy man in his own langwidge, and I'll take it kindly.”
Captain Cable shook hands, and clattered out of the cabin in his great
sea-boots.
Half an hour later the _Olaf_ was alone on that shallow sea, which
seemed lonelier and more silent than ever; for when a strong man quits a
room he often bequeaths a sudden silence to those he leaves behind.
IV
TWO OF A TRADE
“His face reminds one of a sunny graveyard,” a witty Frenchwoman had
once said of a man named Paul Deulin. And it is probable that Deulin
alone could have understood what she meant. Those who think in French
have a trick of putting great thoughts into a little compass, and, as
the hollow ball of talk is tossing to and fro, it sometimes rings for a
moment in a deeper note than many ears are tuned to catch.
The careless word seized the attention of one man who happened to hear
it--Reginald Cartoner, a listener, not a talker--and made that man Paul
Deulin's friend for the rest of his life. As there is _point de culte
sans mystere_, so also there can be no lasting friendship without
reserve. And although these two men had met in many parts of the
world--although they had in common more languages than may be counted on
the fingers--they knew but little of each other.
If one thinks of it, a sunny graveyard, bright with flowers and the gay
green of spring foliage, is the shallowest fraud on earth, endeavoring
to conceal beneath a specious exterior a thousand tragedies, a whole
harvest of lost illusions, a host of grim human comedies. On the other
hand, this is a pious fraud; for half the world is young, and will
discover the roots of the flowers soon enough.
Cartoner had met Deulin in many strange places. Together they had
witnessed queer events. Accredited to a new president of a new republic,
they once had made their bow, clad in court dress, and official dignity,
to the man whom they were destined to see a month later hanging on his
own flagstaff, out over the plaza, from the spare-bedroom window of
the new presidency. They had acted in concert; they had acted in direct
opposition. Cartoner had once had to tell Deulin that if he persisted
in his present course of action the government which he (Cartoner)
represented would not be able to look upon it with indifference, which
is the language of diplomacy, and means war.
For these men were the vultures of their respective Foreign Offices, and
it was their business to be found where the carcass is.
“The chief difference between the gods and men is that man can only be
in one place at a time,” Deulin had once said to Cartoner, twenty years
his junior, in his light, philosophic way, when a turn of the wheel had
rendered a long journey futile, and they found themselves far from that
place where their services were urgently needed.
“If men could be in two places at the same moment, say once only during
a lifetime, their lives would be very different from what they are.”
Cartoner had glanced quickly at him when he spoke, but only saw a ready,
imperturbable smile.
Deulin was a man counting his friends among all nationalities. The
captain of a great steamship has perhaps as many acquaintances as may be
vouchsafed to one man, and at the beginning of a voyage he has to assure
a number of total strangers that he remembers them perfectly. Deulin,
during fifty-odd years of his life, had moved through a maze of men,
remembering faces as a ship-captain must recollect those who have sailed
with him, without attaching a name or being able to allot one saving
quality to lift an individual out of the ruck. For it is a lamentable
fact that all men and all women are painfully like each other; it is
only their faces that differ. For God has made the faces, but men have
manufactured their own thoughts.
Deulin had met a few who were not like the others, and one of these
was Reginald Cartoner, who was thrown against him, as it were, in a
professional manner when Deulin had been twenty years at the work.
“I always cross the road,” he said, “when I see Cartoner on the other
side. If I did not, he would go past.”
This he did in the literal sense the day after Cartoner landed in
England on his return from America. Deulin saw his friend emerge from
a club in Pall Mall and walk westward, as if he had business in that
direction. Like many travellers, the Frenchman loved the open air.
Like all Frenchmen, he loved the streets. He was idling in Pall Mall,
avoiding a man here and there. For we all have friends whom we are
content to see pass by on the other side. Deulin's duty was, moreover,
such that it got strangely mixed up with his pleasure, and it often
happens that discretion must needs overcome a natural sociability.
Cartoner saw his friend approaching; for Deulin had the good fortune,
or the misfortune, to be a distinguished-looking man, with a tall,
spare form, a trim white mustache and imperial, and that air of calm
possession of his environment which gives to some paupers the manner of
a great land-owner. He shook hands in silence, then turned and walked
with Cartoner.
“I permit myself a question,” he said. “When did you return from Cuba?”
“I landed at Liverpool last night.”
Cartoner turned in his abrupt way and looked his companion up and down.
Perhaps he was wondering for the hundredth time what might be buried
behind those smiling eyes.
“I am in London, as you see,” said Deulin, as if he had been asked a
question. “I am awaiting orders. Something is brewing somewhere, one may
suppose. Your return to London seems to confirm such a suspicion. Let us
hope we may have another little . . . errand together--eh?”
As he spoke, Deulin bowed in his rather grand way to an old gentleman
who walked briskly past in the military fashion, and who turned to look
curiously at the two men.
“You are dressed in your best clothes,” said Deulin, after a pause; “you
are going to pay calls.”
“I am going to call on one of my old chiefs.”
“Then I will ask your permission to accompany you. I, too, have put on a
new hat. I am idle. I want something to do. Mon Dieu, I want to talk to
a clean and wholesome Englishwoman, just for a change. I know all your
old chiefs, my friend. I know where you have been every moment since you
made your mark at this business. One watches the quiet men--eh?”
“She will be glad to see you,” said Cartoner, with his slow smile.
“Ah! She is always kind, that lady; for I guess where we are going. She
might have been a great woman . . . if she had not been a happy one.”
“I always go to see them when I am in town,” said Cartoner, who usually
confined his conversation to the necessaries of daily intercourse.
“And he--how is he?”
“He is as well as can be expected. He has worked so hard and so long in
many climates. She is always anxious about him.”
“It is the penalty a woman pays,” said Deulin. “To love and to be
consumed by anxiety--a woman's life, my friend. Oddly enough, I should
have gone there this afternoon, whether I had met you or not. I want her
good services--again.”
And the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders with a laugh, as if suddenly
reminded of some grievous error in his past life.