ON THE EVE.
It was five days later, and in that time the _Mowbray_ had drawn four
hundred miles closer to the Equator, still leaving a wide expanse of
water to be measured. The weather had been of a constant tropic beauty.
The heave of the Atlantic swell had the wide and solemn indolence of the
South Pacific fold.
Mr. Vanderholt's face was crimson with the sea. He certainly looked
extremely well; so, too, did his daughter. The sun had caught her, spite
of a diligent use of her parasol and swift flights from his scorching
eye to the shelter of the awning. It had delicately spangled the fair
flesh of her face with some golden freckles, which somehow gave an
archness to her looks, and a whiter flash to her teeth, when the play
of her lips exposed them.
This fifth day following the meeting with the _Wife's Hope_ had glowed
through a cloudless splendour of sky into a glorious sunset, and a
promise of cool heavens, full of rich stars, with the Southern Cross--
'Memorial reverenced by a thousand storms'--
low down over the jib-boom end.
Mr. Vanderholt came on deck when the sun was gone, though all the west
was swimming in the fast waning crimson. A number of stars sparkled in
the east. Mr. Vanderholt looked at them with delight, for they reminded
him of the twinkling of the sky in windy summer trees.
A pleasant air of wind was blowing. Now that the sun was gone, the
breeze seemed to fan over the bulwark-rail with the fragrance of a land
of flowers. It was a sweetness that made you think of the Arabian gale
of the poet, but the African land was leagues and leagues distant, and
that sweet breath, therefore, was old Ocean's own.
The schooner, with every stitch upon her, saving the foretopmast
studding-sail, to the setting of which Mr. Vanderholt had an objection,
glided through the gathering dusk to the music of broken waters. Miss
Vanderholt sat in the cabin, under the lamp. She was reading, and
appeared to be interested. Mr. Vanderholt filled his pipe from a pouch
whose size corresponded with the bowl it was to feed, and whilst he did
this he looked about him.
Glew stood between him and the lingering scarlet, and his body, black as
indigo, rose and fell. What was the matter? It seemed to Mr. Vanderholt
that an unnatural stillness was in the little vessel. He still preserved
the forecastle faculties, and carried the eye, whilst he could bend the
ear, of a sailor. Eight bells had been struck. The second dog-watch was
therefore over. The watch below would, or would not, have gone to bed.
All this Mr. Vanderholt knew; but so bright, flushed, and sweet a night,
after the roasting and blinding glories of the day, might well prove a
temptation to the hands whose turn it was to take rest till midnight to
linger to converse and suck out yet another pipe of tobacco.
But the silence forward was so deep that Vanderholt, hearkening with his
forefinger pressed upon his bowl of unlighted tobacco, thought it
ominous. At intervals somebody away in the bows would speak. The voice
was a growl, and it would be answered by a growl, and it seemed to the
owner of the _Mowbray_ that, whoever it might be that broke the silence
in his little ship, made utterance with the throat of a sleeping
mastiff.
Mr. Vanderholt lighted his pipe, seated himself, and called to Captain
Glew, who immediately crossed the deck.
'The men seem very quiet, Glew.'
'And a good job too, sir. This is a yacht, and we've got a lady aboard.'
'Ay, ay, man, that's so. But, yacht or no yacht, lady or no lady, surely
I'm the last man to be opposed to a little harmless dog-watch jollity
whenever my sailors have a mind to it.'
The man at the helm was not far off, and Vanderholt spoke low.
'They're a crew that want keeping under,' said Captain Glew. 'They're
not used to pleasure-sailing of this sort. I singled them out myself,
and had good hopes of them, and there's no fault to be found with them
as seamen. This light cruising job is fast spoiling them. They need the
heavy work of a full-rigged ship.'
'If they find the job an easy one, then I suppose they're satisfied?'
said Mr. Vanderholt.
'I'm very much afraid that there's no kind treatment, and no easy job
under the sun, that's going to satisfy an English sailor,' said Captain
Glew.
'You're hard upon the calling, Glew. You're talking to a man who has had
to work hard and fare hard.'
'Sir, if you'd been in command, you'd know that I speak the truth.'
'Aren't you rather a taut hand, Glew? Not that I object to a strict
discipline on board ship; but there is a manner of talking to
sailors.... I've heard of a captain who never would address a sailor if
he could help it, but if he had anything to give him he'd put it down
upon the deck and kick it at him.'
'And I've heard of sailors, sir, who've scuttled their ship, broken the
captain's heart by ruining the voyage, and made a widow of his wife by
sending him adrift in an open boat. I've had charge of seamen, and I
know their natures, and I'm sorry that you should think I'm a taut hand,
sir.'
'Understand me,' said Vanderholt soothingly: 'you are, perhaps, a taut
hand, but I do not say unnecessarily taut. Frankly, I do not think the
men love you.'
'What's a sailor's love like?' said Captain Glew.
Here Miss Vanderholt came on deck. Captain Glew placed a chair for her
beside her father.
'What a heavenly sweet and silent night!' exclaimed the young lady. 'Is
that a ship on fire down there?'
'It's the moon rising, miss,' exclaimed Captain Glew.
Her upper limb floated blood-red on the sea-line like a glowing ember.
She sailed up, large, swollen, stately, the face rusty, as though the
luminary had been a mighty casting in the African sands, and was now
sent aloft red-hot by some thrust of giant shoulders. At her coming the
wind freshened in a damp gust, the schooner strained, and the sound
arose of water broken quickly into froth.
'Glew and I have been talking about the men, Vi,' said Mr. Vanderholt,
after contemplating for a few minutes the hot lunar dawn.
'They don't look a very happy crew,' answered Miss Vanderholt; 'but heat
will make people sullen. The sailors have to work in the sun, and, after
all, there is very little money for them to receive apiece when they
reach home.'
Vanderholt laughed, and said:
'Quite as much as they shall get out of my pocket. Four pounds and five
pounds a month, Vi. Why, I've been signing on, when a fine young man,
for two pounds five, and glad to get it.'
'Are the crew dissatisfied?' inquired Miss Violet.
'Well, I don't mind owning to you, Mr. Vanderholt,' said the captain,
'that they've been trying to make a trouble about the stores. But I
wouldn't allow it.'
He stopped short, with a vibratory note in his voice, as though a piece
of catgut had been twanged.
'The stores ought to be good,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'The cheque that was
made payable to Mr. Lyons was a liberal one.'
'Do they grumble at one thing more than another?' said Miss Vanderholt.
'Oh, first it's the pork, then it's the beef; they'll work their way
right through till they come to the pickles,' said Glew, with a short,
nervous laugh.
'This is the first time I've heard that the men are dissatisfied,'
exclaimed Mr. Vanderholt.
'What is the good of worrying you with fo'c's'le troubles, sir? You're
on a cruise for your health, and the worries of the ship should be mine,
not yours.'
'It is well meant, Glew,' said Vanderholt, a little uneasily. 'They are
a rough body of men, mind. I was long fed on pork and beef, and my
palate has memory enough to distinguish, I think. Tell Allan to-morrow
to cook samples of both kinds, and I will lunch off them.'
This being said, Mr. Vanderholt smoked for awhile in silence. The
question of pork and beef and sailors' grievances is uninteresting at
all times, and peculiarly uninviting on a fine moonlight night. The
subject was dropped. Captain Glew moved off, and father and daughter sat
alone in the moonlight.
The atmosphere was now misty with the silver of the satellite; she was
nearly a full moon, and rained her glory most abundantly. She made a
fairy vision of the _Mowbray_, etherealizing her into a fabric of white
vapour and fountain-like lines as she leaned, purring at her cutwater,
from the delicate wind.
'I don't think Glew treats the men well,' said Miss Vanderholt, turning
her knuckles to the moon to see the diamonds in her rings sparkle. 'He
is restrained when I'm on deck; I judge him by the demeanour of the
crew.'
'They are not yachtsmen; they are not fresh-watermen. I, too, have eyes
in my head, and I'll not condemn Glew off-hand for being what the
Americans call a "hard case,"' answered Mr. Vanderholt. 'They are rough
fellows, got out of low sailors' boarding-houses. I know the breed--the
right sort of men for a jaunt of this kind--and I'm very well satisfied
with them. But they have the look of growlers, and the man Jones, who
should be the most trustworthy of the lot, has the very best genius for
putting on a surly, dangerous face, and posturing in the mutineer style
when hotly called to of any sea-dog that I can recall. So, Vi, I'm not
for interfering with the duties of the captain.'
He smoked, and his little eyes dwelt upon the face of the beautiful
moon.
'If the sea,' said he musingly, 'were a silver shield it could not flash
more brightly. How mysterious does the moon make the world of waters!
They speak of the awe bred of darkness--the awe, the uncertainty--yes, I
have known it; but how much more must this lighted ocean stir one's
spiritual pulses than if it were a bed of darkness!'
'You are certainly better,' said Miss Violet; 'you are seldom poetical
at home.'
'No man who has been to sea can help being a poet,' said the old
gentleman complacently, smoothing his beard. 'He beholds many strange
appearances; he dreams strangely. Mysterious fancies thicken upon the
drowsy vision of his lonely midnight look-out, and with him _then_ it is
as the great poet sublimely sings:
'"But shapes that come not at an earthly call,
Will not depart when mortal voices bid;
Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid,
Once raised, remains aghast, and will not fall."'
He relighted his pipe, and smiled at the moon, and seemed very well
pleased with the acuteness of his memory.
'Those are noble lines,' said the girl.
'They are Wordsworth's. Ach! What delight that man has given me.'
'How much pleasanter it is,' said Miss Violet, 'on a glorious night like
this to talk of poetry, and the visionary shapes of the sea, than of
sailors' beef and pork!'
'You would not think so if you had been stuck here for ten days on a
raft.'
'Well,' exclaimed the girl, heaving a sigh, 'the Equator is not very far
off now, and then we shall turn and go home.'
'I hope that our forefoot will cut the Line by the 25th,' answered Mr.
Vanderholt. 'We shall be home in February, brown, and in the best of
spirits.'
'And George will have started--will be coming.'
They talked for a little while about this gentleman. It was ten o'clock
before they quitted the deck. A man struck four bells on the forecastle.
Immediately a figure arose from the deep shadow cast by the deck-house
on the planks, and went aft to relieve the helm. Captain Glew stood on
the yacht's quarter, and was as visible in the moonshine as though the
bright dawn had broken. There was a muttering about the course at the
helm, and then the man who had been relieved took a step or two forward,
looking at the captain.
'What are you staring at?' said Glew.
The man, continuing to walk but slowly, persisted in staring, so that
his head revolved.
'What are you staring at?' repeated Glew, in a soft but threatening
voice.
The skylight and companion-way were wide open; he had no wish that his
note of temper should penetrate.
'Mayn't a man use his eyesight aboard this bloody ship?' said the
seaman, coming to a halt.
'Go forward!' exclaimed the captain, stiffening himself at the rail.
The man seemed to hesitate, then went slowly towards the forecastle,
audibly muttering. This man's name was Joseph Dabb.
When he was close to the deck-house, a sailor, who was squatting in the
shadow of it, exclaimed gruffly:
'What was he a-saying of?'
'Asked me what I was a-staring at because I was looking at him.'
'S'elp me, all angels!' exclaimed the squatting figure, after spitting
right across the deck, 'if I don't feel sometimes like cutting the
scab's heart out of him! We're not men in _his_ sight. We're muck. He
thinks of us as muck, and he talks of us as muck. He speaks to us as if
we was muck, and it's muck he's shipped aboard this vessel for us muck
to eat.'
He stood up, and the whites of his eyes glistened in the reflected
moonlight that whitened off the edges of the stay-foresail, as he turned
his gaze aft, where the figure of the captain walked. A man came out of
the deck-house and joined the company. Immediately after, a fourth man
approached from the forecastle, and stood listening.
'They've been a-yarning about us half my trick,' said Dabb. 'The captain
said this pleasuring was a-spoiling of us.'
All four united in a low, dismal laugh, which would have been a loud,
defiant, mirthless roar but for the sleepers in the deck-house, hard by
which they were talking. Sleep is counted a sacred thing at sea.
'Ay,' exclaimed one of the men, who proved to be Mike Scott, 'you lay a
man's going to be spoilt by the pleasuring that's to be done under
_him_. What was said, Joe?'
'That blarsted Dutchman talks in his beard. That and his pipe smothered
up his voice. I couldn't hear him. T'other was more clear. He spoke of
sailors as had scuttled their ships, as had broke the cap'n's heart by
ruinating his voyage, and made a widder of his wife by sending him
adrift. T'other speaks, and then the cap'n says, "What's a sailor's love
like?"'
Silence followed.
'What do he mean by "a sailor's love"?' exclaimed the third man, Maul.
'Is it a belaying-pin or a handspike? You'll find he's a-trying to
excite a disgust against us sailors in the mind of that old Dutchman, so
that he may make a difficulty about paying us at the end of the voyage.'
''Ow d'ye know,' said Dabb, 'that it ain't the Dutchman who's put the
skipper up to ill-treating of us, reckoning upon sailing into the Thames
with some of us in irons? D'ye mean to say----'
'Whisper, you crow!'
'D'ye mean to say,' continued the man, lowering his voice, 'that the
stores were shipped without the Dutchman knowing of their character?
I'm a-beginning to smell blue hell in this business.'
All this while the moon shone sweetly and piercingly. A divine peace was
upon the sea, and the light noises of the wind were as fresh as dew on
grass, with the sound as of the plashing of many fountains. In the cabin
they talked of poetry--and one of the sailors forward was for cutting
the captain's heart out!
The little royal and top-gallant sail were half aback; the luffs of the
jibs were trembling.
'Trim sail!' shouted Captain Glew; and he continued to bawl as he walked
slowly forwards: 'Brace forward the topsail-yard! Ease away the weather
braces! Get a drag on your jib-sheets!' And it was clear, by the manner
in which he delivered these orders to the men, that he had been watching
and thinking of them all the time they had been talking about him.
All was quiet after this. The moon rolled down into the sea, the shadow
of the earth slipped off the eastern horizon, and the schooner floated
into another tropical morning, wide and high with cloudless splendour.
Nothing was in sight.
The date was December 15, 1837.
At half-past eleven, the steward, a man named Gordon, who had been
shipped for cabin duty, but who had sailed on many occasions as an able
seaman, so that his sympathies were wholly with the forecastle, went to
the harness-cask, and, unlocking it, picked over some pieces of meat,
brine-whitened, and carried two cubes of the flesh forward to the cook.
'What's this for?' says Allan. 'Here's stink enough. The pork's measly
bad to-day!'
'Samples for the cabin table,' said the steward, Gordon, dabbing the
flabby offal down on the dresser.
'Ho!' says the cook. 'They'd best be cooked separate, I suppose. The
stench'll break the young lady's heart if they're boiled in them
coppers.'
'Cook 'em as you like. That's your business,' said Gordon. 'It's for one
o'clock.'
'Who's going to eat 'em?'
'How big's a man's windpipe?' asked Gordon. The cook eyed him. 'Would
about that lump,' said Gordon, snatching up a knife and slightly scoring
a corner off one of the pieces, 'fit a man's windpipe?'
'Ah! would it?' muttered the cook. 'And if you'll let me guess whose
pipe it is you're a-thinking of, I wouldn't mind telling you that I'm
game--s'elp me God!--to ram it down with this--a clean job!'
And seizing a long, black, sharp-ended poker, he flourished it at
Gordon's mouth, poising it as though he meant to do for the steward.
Gordon rounded out of the little caboose with a laugh.
Mr. Tweed walked the weather side of the quarter-deck; his sextant lay
upon the skylight cover. The seaman named Legg was at the helm. His
figure, airily clad in duck and calico and wide straw hat, stood out
like a painted figure of marble, as it slightly rose and slightly fell
against the hot pale-blue sky in the north.
Miss Vanderholt was seated in a deck-chair under the awning, beside a
quarter-boat. A book lay upon her lap, but her hands were clasped upon
it, and her eyes were bent upon the sea. She viewed it listlessly. The
monotony of that eternal girdle was growing shocking. It seemed to bind
up her very soul. She thought to herself: 'They speak of the freedom of
the sea. But doesn't its sense of freedom come only when motion is
swift, when the roar of the white water is strong, and when one's home
is not very far off?'
It was the men's dinner-hour. Miss Violet had often, during the warm
weather, from her comfortable quarter-deck chair, observed a couple of
men a little before noon stagger with sweating faces out of the galley,
bearing in their hands a sort of wooden washing-tub, which sent up a
great deal of steam. This she knew was the crew's dinner.
She had sometimes wondered how they ate: whether they spread a
table-cloth; whether they planted a cruet-stand in their midst, and
placed knives and forks on either hand, for the hearts to cut and come
again. Who carved? She supposed that the boatswain took the head of the
table.
She had never felt so curious, however, in this matter as to ask
questions, and as, moreover, she had not caught so much as a glimpse of
the interior of the crew's dwelling-house, she had figured into
conviction a comfortable little sea-parlour in which the men dined just
as she and Glew and the mate and her father dined.
'After all,' she mused, keeping her hands clasped upon her open book,
with her eyes fastened upon the sailors' house, 'it is the monotony of
the sea that repels. It must have its good side. Plenty to eat and
drink, and, as father says, most of the wonders of the world--islands,
harbours, inland scenes of beauty--to be visited at the cost of others.'
Whilst she thus moralized, she beheld a head with a very savage and
malicious look upon its face in the deck-house door. The figure of the
man was exposed to the waist, and two great hands grasped for support
each side of the opening. It was the head of the boatswain of the
schooner, James Jones, carpenter and second mate--but as second mate he
had never been called upon to serve. He was uncovered, and his hair was
wild. His expression was devilish. Though at some distance from the
man, the young lady could clearly distinguish a look of fury upon the
seaman's face, as though he had just slain a shipmate, and was in the
act of leaping on deck.
He stood in the doorway, and continued to stare aft. Miss Vanderholt
glanced uneasily at the skylight. She waited for her father and Captain
Glew to appear. The captain was bound to arrive in a minute or two, for
already Mr. Tweed, who had glanced at the boatswain without appearing to
see anything unusual in the man's fixed, half-in and half-out posture,
and dark, endevilled face, had picked up his sextant, and was ogling the
sun.
Mr. Vanderholt was the first of the two to come on deck. His daughter
called to him softly, and said:
'Father, did you ever see, in all your life, such a wicked expression as
that man wears?'
'What man?' exclaimed Mr. Vanderholt, lancing his teeth with a silver
toothpick, and gazing along the decks with an expression of bland
benevolence.
'That man there, in the door of the galley,' said the girl. 'He's been
standing like that for the last three or four minutes, hatless, looking
aft, with that face of fury, as if they'd tied him in the doorway and
were goading him.'
'I certainly see a man lounging in the doorway,' said Mr. Vanderholt,
who was a little short-sighted. 'Does he look angry?'
He spoke somewhat uneasily, and turned his head to see if the captain
was on deck. Glew at that moment rose through the hatch, armed with his
sextant. Vanderholt went up to him, and said:
'There is a man leaning in the door of the caboose--now I look again I
see it is the boatswain--whose face my daughter tells me is formidable
with temper. I do not clearly see all that way off. I hope it will mean
no fresh trouble about the stores. Let them know I have ordered pieces
of the pork and beef to be boiled for our mid-day meal.'
Whilst he was speaking, Glew's eyes were fixed upon the boatswain, who,
at the moment that Vanderholt ceased, withdrew. Glew's attitude was
immediately and insensibly charged with malice and danger, with
passions quickly growing and contending, by the odd, crouching air he
carried, whilst he had watched the boatswain and listened to his
employer.
'That Jones,' he said, 'is the right sort of forecastle scoundrel to
breed a mutiny, and if he troubles me to-day we must have him out of it,
Mr. Vanderholt, in the approved old method. Mr. Tweed, can you lay your
hands readily upon a set of irons for that fellow?'
The mate answered:
'The carpenter has charge of the irons, sir, and the carpenter is,
unfortunately, the boatswain himself.'
'Go forward,' said Captain Glew, 'and ask the man to give you a set of
irons.'
'Stop!' exclaimed Mr. Vanderholt, glancing at the helmsman, whose eyes
were upon Glew, and who was clearly a listener. 'We must have no talk of
irons in this vessel, until something has been done to warrant their
introduction.'
'If there should come a difficulty,' was the captain's answer, 'we may
find it impossible to get forward so as to procure the irons. I like to
be beforehand.'
'I'll not have it!' said Mr. Vanderholt, with warmth.
Captain Glew simply said, 'Ay, ay, sir,' and turned his face to the sun,
with his sextant lifted.
Now it was that the boatswain reappeared, still without his hat, his
head very shaggy, his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows, disclosing
the muscles of a carthorse. He sprang, in a single bound, through the
door of the deck-house, grasping his mess-kid. The seaman Dabb followed;
he, too, grasped a mess-kid. Then the rest of the crew appeared--Gordon,
Allan, Toole, Scott, Maul.
'Now, bullies, are we ready?' exclaimed Jones, in a voice of thunder;
and he put the kid upon the deck. Dabb did likewise.
'Hurrah for a hot male of mate for the cabin!' shouted Simon Toole.
The boatswain and Dabb, each man in his boots, kicked. They kicked at
the kids with all their might, and the wooden vessels rushed aft to the
very feet of Captain Glew and Vanderholt, scattering their precious
contents of pork and pea-soup over the smooth planks. Never was an
uglier affront offered to the master of a ship. Never had mutinous
insolence been carried to a greater height. Captain Glew turned white as
milk, but not with fear. Well for him had he felt fear. Mr. Vanderholt
was ashy pale. He called to his daughter to go below. She sprang up,
but, instead of going below, went and stood right aft, beside the
helmsman, to whom she said:
'What do those men want?'
'Their rights!' he answered, with a diabolical leer.
The frightened girl made a quick step to the companion-hatch, and stood
beside the cover; she was afraid to go below.