Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed
like leaves rustling."
"But where did you sleep last night?"
"I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very
sleepy now."
She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and Mother and Joyce
looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious
face.
"God help us," said Mother in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"
There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And
she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an
adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know
herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she
has believed in anything so childish as wood-ladies.
IV
A MAN BEFORE THE MAST
In Tom Mowbray's boarding-house, the sailors who sat upon the narrow
benches round the big room ceased their talk as the door opened and
Tom Mowbray himself entered from the street. The men in the room, for
all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their
faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude
of their bodies, the ineradicable hall-mark of the sea which was the
arena of their lives; they salted the barren place with its vigor and
pungency. Pausing within the door, Tom Mowbray sent his pale
inexpressive glance flickering along the faces they turned towards
him.
"Well, boys," he said; "takin' it easy fer a spell?"
There was a murmur of reply from the men; they watched him warily,
knowing that he was not genial for nothing. He was a man of fifty or
more, bloated in body, with an immobile grey face and a gay white
moustache that masked his gross and ruthless mouth. He was dressed
like any other successful merchant, bulging waistcoat, showy linen
and all; the commodity in which he dealt was the flesh and blood of
seamen, and his house was eminent among those which helped the
water-front of San Francisco "the Barbary Coast," as sailors call it
to its unholy fame. He stood among the sunburnt, steady-eyed seamen
like a fungus in fresh grass.
"An' now, who's for a good ship?" he inquired. There was a sort of
mirth in his voice as he spoke. "Good wages, good grub, an' a soft
job. Don't all of ye speak at once."
The sailors eyed him warily. From the end of the room a white-haired
American looked up wryly.
"What's her name?" he asked.
"Name?" Tom Mowbray kept his countenance, though the name was the
cream of the joke. He paused, watching the faces of those who had
been ashore a week and were due to ship again when he should give the
word. "Oh, you don't want to be scared of her name; her name's all
right. She's the Etna."
Somebody laughed, and Tom Mowbray gave him an approving glance; the
others interchanged looks. The Etna had a reputation familiar to
seamen and a nickname too; they called her the "Hell-packet." Of all
the tall and beautiful ships which maintained their smartness and
their beauty upon the agony of wronged and driven seamen, the Etna
was the most terrible, a blue-water penitentiary, a floating place of
torment. To enhance the strange terror of her, the bitter devil who
was her captain carried his wife on board; the daily brutalities that
made her infamous went on under the eyes and within the hearing of a
woman; it added a touch of the grotesque to what was otherwise
fearful enough.
Tom Mowbray stood enjoying the dumb consternation of his victims.
"Well, who's for it?" he inquired. "Ain't there none of you that
wants a good ship like that Noo York an' back here, an' eighteen
dollars a month? Well, I s'pose I'll have to take my pick of yer."
They knew he had proposed the matter to them only in mockery of their
helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would
have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages
as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert
penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no
remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so
commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and
violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek
face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee,
with his pipe in his mouth, spoke with assurance.
"I'm not goin' aboard of her," he said.
Tom Mowbray's heavy brows lowered a little; he surveyed the speaker.
It was a young man, sitting remote from the windows, whose face, in
the shadows of the big, bare room, showed yet a briskness of
coloring. His name Tom remembered it with an effort was Goodwin,
Daniel Goodwin; he had been paid off from a "limejuicer" little more
than a week before.
"Oh, you're not goin' aboard of her?" he queried slowly.
"No," answered the young man calmly. "I'm not."
It was defiance, it was insult; but Tom Mowbray could stand that. He
smoothed out his countenance, watching while the young man's neighbor
on the bench nudged him warningly.
"Well, I gotta find a crowd for her," he said in tones of
resignation. "I dunno how I'm goin' to do it, though."
He sighed, the burlesque sigh of a fat man pitying himself, and
passed through the room to the door at the far end. Not till it had
closed behind him did talk resume. A man who had been three weeks
ashore leant back against the wall and let his breath escape in a
sigh, which was not burlesque. For him there was no hope; he was as
much doomed as if a judge had pronounced sentence on him.
"Oh, hell!" he said. "Wonder if he'll let me have a dollar to get a
drink 'fore I go aboard of her?"
The others turned their eyes on him curiously; whatever happened to
them, he was a man who would sail in the Etna; already he was
isolated and tragic.
The neighbor who had nudged young Goodwin nudged him again.
"Come out," he breathed into the ear that the young man bent towards
him. "Come out; I want to speak t' ye."
In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man
who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently.
"Say, ain't ye got no sense?" he demanded. "Talkin' like that to Tom
Mowbray! Don't ye know that's the way to fix him to ship ye aboard
the 'Hell-packet?'"
"He can't ship me aboard any 'Hell-packet,'" answered Goodwin
serenely. "When I ship, I ship myself, an' I pay my board in cash.
There ain't any advance note to be got out o' me."
The other halted and drew Goodwin to halt, facing him at the edge of
the sidewalk, where a beetle-browed saloon projected its awning above
them. Like Goodwin, he was young and brown; but unlike Goodwin there
was a touch of sophistication, of daunting experience, in the
seriousness of his face. The two had met and chummed after the
fashion of sailors, who make and lose their friends as the hazard of
the hour directs.
"You don't know Tom Mowbray," he said in a kind of affectionate
contempt. "He's, he's a swine an' he's cute! Didn't you hear about
him shippin' a corpse aboard o' the Susquehanna, an' drawin' three
months' advance for it? Why, you ain't got a show with him if he's
got a down on ye."
Goodwin smiled. "Maybe I don't know Tom Mowbray," he said; "but it's
a sure thing Tom Mowbray don't know me. Come on an' have a drink,
Jim. This thing of the Etna it's settled. Come on!"
He led the way into the saloon beside them; Jim, growling warningly,
followed him.
At twenty-six, it was Goodwin's age, one should be very much a man.
One's moustache is confirmed in its place; one has the stature and
muscle of a man, a man's tenacity and resistance, while the heart of
boyishness still pulses in one's body. It is the age at which
capacity is the ally of impulse, when heart and hand go paired in a
perfect fraternity. One is as sure of oneself as a woman of thirty,
and with as much and as little reason. Goodwin, when he announced
that he, at any rate, would not be one of the crew of the Etna, spoke
out of a serene confidence in himself. He knew himself for a fine
seaman and a reasonably fine human being; he had not squandered his
wages, and he did not mean to be robbed of his earnings when he
shipped himself again. It was his first visit to San Francisco; the
ports he knew were not dangerous to a man who took care of himself,
who was not a drunkard, and would fight at need. He showed as
something under six feet tall, long in the limb and moving handily,
with eyes of an angry blue in a face tanned russet by wind and sun.
In the saloon he laughed down Jim's instances of Tom Mowbray's
treachery and cunning, lounging with an elbow on the bar, careless
and confident under the skeptical eyes of the white-jacketed barman.
"I reckon Tom Mowbray knows when he's safe," he said. "Why, if he was
to do any o' them things to me I'd get him if I had to dig for him.
Yes, sir!"
From thence the course of events ran as anyone familiar with the
Barbary Coast might have prophesied. They returned to the
boarding-house for supper and joined their fellows at the long table
in the back room, and were waited on by Tom Mowbray's "runners."
Mowbray himself, with his scared, lean wife and his wife's crippled
brother, had a table apart from the men; as he ate he entertained
himself by baiting the unhappy cripple, till the broken man stammered
tearfully across the table at him, shaking and grimacing in a nervous
frenzy, which Tom Mowbray always found comical. The woman between
them sat with her eyes downcast and her face bitter and still; they
made a picture of domesticity at which the sailors stared in a
fascination of perplexity, while the hard-faced "runners" in their
shirt-sleeves carried the plates to and from the kitchen, and the
ritual of the evening meal proceeded to its finish.
If there was in Goodwin a quality more salient than his youthful
force and his trust in his own capacity, it was the manner he had of
seeing absorbedly the men and things that presented themselves to his
eyes, so that even in dull and trivial matters he gathered strong
impressions and vivid memories. The three people at the little table
made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his
eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor
in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that
frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the
atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them
like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it
sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost
in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his
cup with coffee winked across his head to one of the others as though
in mirth at his abstraction.
In the ordinary way he would have gone for a walk up-town with his
friend after supper; but he was not in a mood for company that
evening and found himself sleepy besides. He went upstairs to the
bedroom he shared with two other men to get some tobacco he had
there, and discovered in himself so strong an inclination to slumber
that he decided to go to bed forthwith. He lit his pipe and sat down
on his bed to take his boots off. He had one boot unlaced but still
on his foot when his pipe dropped from his lips. Across his drugged
and failing brain there flickered for an instant the blurred shape of
a suspicion.
"What's the matter with me?" he half cried; and tried to rise to his
feet.
He knew he had failed to stand up and had fallen back on the bed.
With his last faculties he resisted the tides of darkness that rushed
in upon him; then his grasp upon consciousness loosened and his face,
which had been knitted in effort, relaxed. When half an hour later
Tom Mowbray and two of his "runners" came to find him, he lay,
scarcely breathing, in the appearance of a profound and natural
sleep.
It was thirty-six hours later when a vague consciousness of pain,
growing upon his poisoned nerves, sharpened to a climax, and he
opened his eyes, lying where he found himself without moving. It took
him some minutes before he brought his mind into co-ordination with
his senses to realize what he saw. Then it was plain to him that he
was lying upon the bare slats of a bunk in the narrow forecastle of a
ship. Its door, hooked open, made visible a slice of sunlit deck and
a wooden rail beyond it, from which the gear of the foremast slanted
up. Within the forecastle only three of the bunks contained
mattresses and blankets, and there was no heave and sway under him to
betoken a ship under sail in a seaway.
Slowly the sailor within him asserted itself. "This hooker's at
anchor!"
By degrees he began to account for himself. Recollection returned: he
had waked in a bare and bedless bunk, but it was at Tom Mowbray's he
had fallen asleep. He remembered going up to his room and the
sleepiness that had pressed itself upon him there. And there was a
thought, a doubt, that had been with him at the last. It eluded him
for a moment; then he remembered and sat up, in an access of vigor
and anger as he recalled it.
"Knock-out drops," he said. "Yes, by God! Tom Mowbray's shanghaied
me!"
His head ached, his skin and his mouth were parched as if by a fever.
Stiffly he swung himself over the edge of his bunk and went on feet
that were numb and uncertain through the door to the deck. He was
sore all over from lying on the bare slats of the bunk, and the dregs
of the drug still clogged his mind and muscles; but like the flame in
a foul lantern there burned in him the fires of anger.
"Shanghaied!" he repeated as he reeled to the rail and caught at a
backstay to steady himself. "Well, the man that did it wants to hide
when I get ashore again."
He cast his eyes aft over the ship on which he found himself, summing
her up with an automatic expertness. An American ship, it was plain,
and a three-skysail-yarder at that, with a magnificent stature and
spread of spars. Abeam of her San Francisco basked along its shore;
she was at an anchor well out in the bay. What ship was it that he
had viewed from a dock-head lying just there? The answer was on his
lips even before his eyes discovered the boat she carried on top of
the fo'c'sle, with her name lettered upon it. Tom Mowbray had proved
his power by shanghaiing him aboard the Etna!
He said nothing: the situation was beyond mere oaths, but wrath
surged in him like a flood.
Around the for'ard house, walking with measured steps, came Mr. Fant,
the mate of the Etna, and accosted him.
"Sobered up, have ye?" said Mr. Fant.
"Yes, sir," said Goodwin.
"That's right," said Mr. Fant, smiling, surveying him with an
appearance of gentle interest. "Knock-out drops?" he inquired.
"Yes, sir," answered Goodwin again, watching him.
"Ah!" Mr. Fant shook his head. "Well, you're all right now," he said.
"Stick yer head in a bucket an' ye'll be ready to turn to."
Mr. Fant had his share in the fame of the Etna; he was a part of her
character. Goodwin, though his mind still moved slowly, eyed him
intently, gauging the man's strange and masked quality, probing the
mildness of his address for the thing it veiled. He saw the mate of
the Etna as a spare man of middle-age, who would have been tall but
for the stoop of his shoulders. His shaven face was constricted
primly; he had the mouth of an old maid, and stood slack-bodied with
his hands sunk in the pockets of his jacket. Only the tightness of
his clothes across his chest and something sure and restrained in his
gait as he walked hinted of the iron thews that governed his lean
body; and, while he spoke in the accents of an easy civility, his
stony eyes looked on Goodwin with an unblinking and remorseless
aloofness. It was not hard to imagine him, when the Etna, with her
crew seduced or drugged to man her, should be clear of soundings and
the business of the voyage put in shape, when every watch on deck
would be a quaking ordeal of fear and pain, and every watch below an
interval for mere despair.
The vision of it made Goodwin desperate.
"I haven't signed on, sir," he protested. "I've been shanghaied here.
This ain't."
He paused under the daunting compulsion of Mr. Fant's eye.
"You've signed on all right," said Mr. Fant. "Your name's John Smith
an' you signed on yesterday. You don't want to make any mistake about
that, Smith."
He spoke as mildly as ever and yet was menacing and terrible. But
Goodwin was insistent.
"My name's Goodwin," he persisted. "Tom Mowbray drugged me and shoved
me on board. I want to go ashore."
Mr. Fant turned to go aft. "You get yer head into a bucket," he
counselled. "Hurry up, now. There's work waitin' to be done."
"I won't!" shouted Goodwin.
"Eh!" Mr. Fant's voice was still mild as he uttered the exclamation,
but before Goodwin could repeat himself he had moved. As if some
spring in him had been released from tension, the mild and prim Mr.
Fant whirled on his heel, and a fist took Goodwin on the edge of the
jaw and sent him gasping and clucking on to his back; while, with the
precision of a movement rehearsed and practiced, Mr. Fant's booted
foot swung forward and kicked him into the scuppers. He lay there on
his back, looking up in an extremity of terror and astonishment at
the unmoved face of the mate.
"Get up, Smith," commanded Mr. Fant. Goodwin obeyed, scarcely
conscious of the pain in his face and flank in the urgency of the
moment. "Now you get the bucket, same as I told you, and when you've
freshened yourself come aft an' I'll start you on a job. See?"
"Aye, aye, sir," responded Goodwin mechanically, and started for-ard.
The Etna had absorbed him into her system; he was initiated already
to his role of a driven beast; but tenacious as an altar fire there
glowed yet within him the warmth of his anger against Tom Mowbray. It
was secret, beyond the reach of Mr. Fant's fist; the fist was only
another item in Tom Mowbray's debt.
From his place on the crossjack-yard, to which Mr. Fant sent him,
Goodwin had presently a view of the captain's wife. She came to the
poop from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the
taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills,
dwarfed by the distance. It was when she turned to go down again that
Goodwin had a full view of her face, bleak and rigid, with greying
hair drawn tightly back from the temples, as formal and blank as the
face of a clock. It was told of her that she would sit knitting in
her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a
miserable man was being trodden and beaten out of the likeness of
humanity and never lift her head nor shift her attitude for all his
cries and struggles. It was her presence aboard that touched the
man-slaughtering Etna with her quality of the macabre.
"But she won't see me broken up," swore Goodwin to himself as her
head vanished in the hood of the companion. "No not if I've got to
set the damn ship alight!"
He made the acquaintance, when work was over for the day, of his
fellows in ill-fortune, the owners of the three occupied bunks in the
forecastle. As if the Etna had laid herself out to starve him of
every means of comfort, they proved to be "Dutchmen" that is to say,
Teutons of one nationality or another and therefore, by sea-canons,
his inferiors, incapable of sharing his feelings and not to be
trusted with his purpose. One question, however, they were able to
answer satisfactorily. It had occurred to him that since even Tom
Mowbray could only get men for the Etna by drugging them, her
officers would probably take special precautions to guard against
desertion.
"Do they lock us in here at night?" he asked of the three of them
when they sat at supper in the port fo'c'sle.
They stared at him uncomprehendingly. For them, helots of the sea,
the Etna's terrors were nothing out of the way; all ships used them
harshly; life itself was harsh enough. Their bland blond faces were
stupid and amiable.
"Log us in!" answered one of them. "No! For what shall they log us
in?"
"That's all right, then," said Goodwin and let them continue to stare
at him, ruminating his reasons for the question.
There was a fourth "Dutchman" who slumbered through the day in the
starboard fo'c'sle and sat all night in the galley, in the exercise
of his functions as night-watchman. His lamp shed a path of light
from the galley door to the rail when, his fellows in the fo'c'sle
being, audibly asleep, Goodwin rose from his bunk and came forth to
the deck. Far away, across the level waters of the great bay, the
lights of the city made an illumination against the background of the
night; overhead there was a sky bold with stars; the Etna floated
mute in a rustle of moving waters. There were no ships near her; only
now and again a towboat racing up from the Golden Gates went by with
the noise of a breaking wave on a steep shore. In the break of the
poop there showed the light of Mr. Fant's window, where he lay in his
bunk, relaxing his grisly official personality with a book and a
cigar.
In deft haste Goodwin stepped to the fore side of the fo'c'sle, where
he would be hidden should the watchman take a fancy to look out of
his galley. In him a single emotion was constant: he had a need to
find Tom Mowbray. It was more than an idea or a passion: it was like
the craving of a drug maniac for his poison. The shore that blinked
at him across the black waters was not inaccessible under the impulse
of that lust of anger; he was at all times a strong swimmer. Under
shelter of the deckhouse he stripped his clothes and made of them it
was only his shirt and trousers a bundle which the belt that carried
his sheath-knife fastened upon his head, descending under his chin
like a helmet-strap. With infinite precaution to be unheard he went
in this trim across the deck to the rail.
The Etna's chain-plates were broad as a frigate's; he had but to let
himself down carefully and he was in the water without a splash. A
dozen strokes took him clear of her, and presently he paused,
up-ending and treading water, to look back at her. She stood up over
her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the
sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her
beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his
colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness
to her by-name of "Hell-packet." He was clear of her now; he might
fail to reach the shore and drown, but at least the grey woman aft
would never see his humiliation and defeat. He turned over, setting
his face to the waterside lights of the city, and struck out.
It was a long swim, and it was fortunate for him that he took the
water on the turn of the tide, so that where the tail of the ebb set
him down the first of the flood bore him back. The stimulus of the
chill and the labor of swimming cleared the poison from his body and
brain; he swam steadily, with eyes fixed on the lights beading the
waterside and mind clenched on the single purpose to find Tom
Mowbray, to deal with him, to satisfy the anger which ached in him
like a starved appetite. How he would handle him, what he would do
with him, when he found him, did not occupy his thoughts; it was a
purpose and not a plan which was taking him ashore. He had the man's
pursy large face for ever in his consciousness; the vision of it was
a spur, an exasperation; he found himself swimming furiously, wasting
strength, in the thought of encountering it.
Good luck and not calculation brought him ashore on the broadside of
the Barbary Coast, in a small dock where a Norwegian barque lay
slumbering alongside the wharf. Her watchman, if she had one, was not
in sight; it was upon her deck that he dressed himself, fumbling
hurriedly into the shirt and trousers which he had failed, after all,
to keep dry. He jerked his belt tight about him and felt the
sheath-knife which it carried pressing against his back. He reached
back and slid it round to his right side, where his hand would drop
on it easily; it might chance that before the night was over he would
need a weapon.
He had no notion of the hour nor of the length of time he had been in
the water. As he passed bare-footed from the wharf he was surprised
to find the shabby street empty under its sparse lamps. It lay
between its mean houses vacant and unfamiliar in its quietude; it
seemed to him as though the city waited in a conscious hush till he
should have done what he had come to do. His bare feet on the
sidewalk slapped and shuffled, and he hurried along close to the
walls; the noise he made, for all his caution, appeared to him
monstrous, enough to wake the sleepers in the houses and draw them to
their windows to see the man who was going to find Tom Mowbray.