back of the house he sought; he swung himself into the unsavory back
yard of it without delaying to seek for the gate. The house was over
him, blank and lightless, its roof a black heap against the night
sky. He paused to look up at it. He was still without any plan; not
even now did he feel the need of one. To go in to break in, if that
were the quickest way to stamp his stormy way up the room where Tom
Mowbray was sleeping, to wrench him from his bed and then let loose
the maniac fury that burned within him all that was plain to do. He
cast a glance at the nearest window, and then it was that the door of
the house opened.
He was standing to one side, a dozen paces from it; a single,
noiseless step took him to the wall, against which he backed,
screened by the darkness, and waited to see who would come forth. A
figure appeared and lingered in the doorway, and he caught the
sibilance of a whisper, and immediately upon it a dull noise of
tapping, as though someone beat gently and slowly against the door
with a clenched hand. It was a noise he had heard before; his
faculties strained themselves to identify it. Then a second figure
appeared, smaller than the first, moving with a strange gait, and he
knew. It was the cripple, Mowbray's brother-in-law, and it was his
leather-shod crutch which had tapped on the floor of the passage. The
two figures moved down the yard together, and presently, as they
passed from the shadow of the house and came within the feeble light
of a lamp that burned at the mouth of the alley, he saw that the
taller of the two was Tom Mowbray's wife. They found the gate in the
fence and opened it, manifestly hesitating at the strident creaking
it made, and passed through. At no moment were they clear to see, but
to Goodwin's eyes their very gait was in some way expressive of a
tragic solemnity that clad them.
He remained silent in his place as they went along the alley towards
the street, passing him at arm's length on the other side of the
fence. Their footsteps were muffled on the unpaved ground of the
alley, but there was another noise which he heard the noise of the
woman weeping weeping brokenly and openly. Then the cripple's harsh,
hopeless voice spoke.
"Anyway, we're alone together again for a bit, Sally," he croaked.
The woman checked her sobs to answer. "Yes, honey," she replied.
Goodwin waited till the tapping of the crutch had receded. "So
they've quit him at last," he reflected. "And" he stepped forth from
his hiding place briskly "they've left the door open. Now for Tom
Mowbray!"
Once within the door he was no longer careful to be silent. The house
was dark, and he had to grope his way to the stairs, or he would have
run at and up them at the top of his speed. The place seemed full of
doors closed upon sleeping people; someone on an upper floor was.
snoring with the noise of a man strangling. He moved among them
awkwardly, but he knew which was the room that harbored his man. The
door of it was before him at last. He fumbled and found the handle.
"Now!" he said aloud, and thrust it open.
His vision of vengeance had shown him the room that was to be its
arena, but this room was dark and he could not see it. He had not
allowed for that. He swore as the door swung to behind him.
"Mowbray!" he called. "Mowbray, you blasted robber! Wake up an' get
what's comin' to you!"
There was no answering stir to tell him the direction in which to
spring with hands splayed for the grapple. The room had a strange
stillness; in spite of himself he held his breath to listen for Tom
Mowbray's breathing. His right arm brushed the hilt of his
sheath-knife as he stood, tense and listening. There was no sound of
breathing, but there was something.
It was like the slow tick of a very quiet clock, measured and
persistent. He could not make it out.
"Mowbray!" he called once more, and the only answer was that
pat-a-pat that became audible again when he ceased to call.
"I bet I'll wake you," he said, and stepped forward feeling before
him with his hands. They found the surface of a table, struck and
knocked over a glass that stood upon it, and found a box of matches.
"Ah!" grunted Goodwin triumphantly.
The match-flame languished ere it stood steady and let the room be
seen. Goodwin had passed the bed and was standing with his back to
it. With the match in his fingers and his eyes dazzled by its light,
he turned and approached it. The face of Mowbray showed wide-open
eyes at him from the pillow. The bedclothes lay across his chest; one
arm hung over the edge of the bed with the hand loose and limp. And
above his neck his night-clothes and the linen of the bed were sodden
and dreadful with blood that had flowed from a frightful wound in the
throat. What had sounded like the ticking of a clock was now the
noise of its dripping. "Drip!" it went; "drip-drip!"
The match-flame stung his fingers and went out.
"Hell!" cried Goodwin, and out of the darkness panic swooped on him.
There was a moment when he tried to find the door and could not,
alone in the blackness of the room with the murdered man. He caught
at himself desperately to save himself from screaming, and found the
matchbox was in his hand. He failed to light two matches, standing
off the lunatic terror that threatened him.
Somewhere out of sight he knew that Tom Mowbray's eyes were open. The
third match fired and he had the door by the handle. It restored him
like a grip of a friendly hand.
He was able to pause in the door while the match burned and his mind
raced. There leaped to the eye of his imagination the two stricken
figures he had seen slinking from the house, the weeping of the
woman, the muffled tap of the man's crutch. There followed, in an
inevitable sequence, the memory of them in their torment as they sat
at meat with Tom Mowbray.
"I wonder which o' them done it?" he thought, and shuddered. Where he
stood he could see the still face of the dead man, with its shape of
power and pride overcast now by the dreadful meekness of the dead. He
could not pursue the thought, for another came up to drive it from
his mind.
"Supposin' somebody woke and come out and saw me here!"
To think of it was enough. Drawing the door to behind him he went
down the stairs. He had been careless of noise in ascending; now each
creak of the warped boards was an agony. The snorer had turned over
in bed; the awful house had a graveyard stillness. He held his breath
till he was clear of it and again in the hushed and empty street.
"The Etna for mine, if I can make it," he breathed to himself as he
went at a run in the shadow of the silent houses. "God! If anyone was
to see me!"
And thus it was that the first pallor of dawn beheld the incredible
and unprecedented sight of an able seaman, with his clothes strapped
upon his head, swimming at peril of his life in San Francisco bay, to
get aboard of the "Hell-packet."
V
THE GIRL
The little mission hall showed to the shabby waterside street of
Jersey City its humble face of brick and the modest invitation of its
open door, from which at intervals there overflowed the sudden music
of a harmonium within. Goodwin, ashore for the evening, with the
empty hours of his leisure weighing on him like a burden, heard that
music rise about him, as he moved along the saloon-dotted sidewalk,
with something of the mild surprise of a swimmer who passes out of a
cold into a warm current. For lack of anything better to do, he had
been upon the point of returning to his ship, where she lay in her
dock. He had not spoken to a soul since he had come ashore at
sundown, and the simple music was like a friendly prompting. He
hesitated a moment for he was not a frequenter of missions then
turned in at the entrance of the hall.
The music of the harmonium and of the voices that sang with it seemed
to swell at him as he pushed open the swing door and tiptoed in
toward a back seat, careful to be noiseless. But there were heads
that turned, none the less heads of tame sailors from the ships, for
whose service the mission struggled to exist, and a few sleek faces
of shore folk; and, on the low platform at the upper end of the hall,
the black-coated, whiskered missioner who presided over the gathering
craned his neck to look at the new-comer, without ceasing to sing
with vigor. It was, in short, such a meeting as an idle sailor might
drop in upon in any one of a hundred ports. Goodwin recognized the
very atmosphere of it its pervading spirit of a mild and very honest
geniality, the peculiar nasal tone of its harmonium, and the timidity
of the singing. Standing in his place in the back row of seats, he
was going on to identify it at further points, when he felt a touch
on his arm.
"Eh?" he demanded under his breath, turning.
A tall girl was offering him a little red, paper-covered hymn-book,
open at the hymn that was then being sung, her ungloved finger
pointing him the very verse and line. He did not at once take it. She
had come upon him surprisingly, and now, while he stared at her, he
was finding her surprising in herself. Under the brim of her hat her
face showed gentle and soft, with something of a special kindliness;
and, because others were watching her, she had a little involuntary
smile of embarrassment.
She glanced up at him shyly, and let her eyes fall before his. The
finger with which she pointed him the place on the page seemed to
Goodwin, whose hands were like hoofs for callousness and size,
exquisite and pathetic in its pink slenderness. It was not merely
that she was beautiful and feminine in that moment Goodwin could not
have been positive that she was beautiful but a dim allurement, a
charm made up of the grace of her bowed head, her timid gesture of
proffering him the book, her nearness, and her fragile delicacy of
texture, enhanced and heightened the surprise of her.
"Gosh!" breathed Goodwin, unthinking; then, "Thank you, miss," as he
took the hymn-book from her.
She smiled once more, and went back to her place at the farther end
of the row of seats in front of Goodwin's, where he could still see
her. He found himself staring at her in a sort of perplexity; she had
revealed herself to him with a suddenness that gave her a little the
quality of an apparition. The bend of her head above her book brought
to view, between the collar of her coat and her soft brown hair, a
gleam of white nape that fascinated him; she was remote, ethereal,
wondrously delicate and mysterious. He sprawled in his place, when
the hymn was over, with an arm over the back of his seat, intent
merely to see her and slake the appetite of his eyes.
"She's she's a looker, all right!" He had a need to make some comment
upon this uplifting experience of his, and this was the best he could
do.
He had come in late sailors' missions are used to late-comers and
early-goers and it was not long before the simple service came to a
close and the meeting began to break up. Goodwin took his cap and
rose, watching the tall girl as she went forward to join a couple of
older women. The black-coated man came down from the platform and
made his way toward Goodwin, amiable intentions visibly alight in his
whiskered face.
"Haven't seen you here before," he said at Goodwin's elbow. "What
ship d'you belong to?"
Goodwin, recalled to himself, looked down into the kindly, narrow
face of the missioner. He himself was tall, a long-limbed young man,
with a serious, darkly tanned face in which the blue of the eyes
showed up strongly; and in his bearing and the fashion of his address
there was a touch of that arrogance which men acquire who earn their
bread at the hourly hazard of their lives.
"Oh, I just dropped in," he said awkwardly. "I belong to th' Etna,
lyin' in the dock down yonder."
The missioner smiled and nodded.
"Etna, eh? Ah, yes. Somebody was tellin' me about the Etna. A hard
ship that's what you call her, eh?"
Goodwin nodded, and considered the face upturned toward his own
innocent, benevolent, middle-aged, worn, too, with hopes and
disappointments, yet unscarred by such bitter knowledge as men gained
early aboard the Etna.
"We call her the 'Hell-packet,'" he answered seriously.
The missioner nodded, and his smile, though it flickered, survived.
"It's an ugly name," he said; "but maybe she deserves it. An' so you
saw our door open and just stepped in? It's always open in the
evenin's and on Sundays, an' we'll always be glad to see you. Now,
I'd like to make you acquainted with one of our young ladies, so's
you won't feel you're a stranger, eh? An' then maybe you'll come
again."
"Oh, I dunno" began Goodwin, fidgeting.
But the missioner was already beckoning with a black-sleeved arm.
His pale elderly face seemed to shine.
Goodwin turned, looked to see whom he summoned, and forthwith dropped
his cap, so that he was bent double to pick it up when the young
lady, the tall girl who had offered him the hymn-book, arrived. He
came upright again face to face with her, abandoned by his faculties,
a mere sop of embarrassment before the softness of her eyes and the
smile of her lips.
The missioner's official voice brayed between them benevolently.
Goodwin had a momentary sense that there was a sort of indecency in
thus trumpeting forth the introduction; it should have been done
solemnly, gracefully, like a ceremony.
"Miss James," said the missioner noisily, "here's a friend that's
visitin' us for the first time. Now, I want you to persuade him to
come again, an' tell him he'll be welcome just as often as he likes
to come an' see us. His name's, er."
"Goodwin," replied the sailor awkwardly.
The missioner shook his hand warmly, putting eloquence into the
shake. He cut it short to intercept a brace of seamen who were making
for the door. Goodwin saw him bustle up and detain them with his
greeting: "Haven't seen you here before. What ship d'you belong to?"
Then he turned back to the girl.
"Do you belong to a ship?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered. "The Etna."
He had been eager to hear her speak. She had a voice with shadows in
it, a violin voice. Goodwin, relishing it like an apt gift, could
only tell himself that it fitted and completed that strange effect
she had of remoteness and unreality.
"What was your last port?" she asked.
He told her, and she went on with her conventional string of
questions to make talk, to carry out the missioner's purpose in
summoning her. The danger of seafaring, the strangeness of life in
ships, the charm of travel she went through the whole list, getting
answers as conventional as her queries. He was watching her, taking
pleasure in her quality and aspect; and at last he saw, with a small
thrill, that she was watching him likewise.
If he had been a vainer man, he might have been aware that he, in his
way, was as well worth looking at as she in hers. He was big and
limber, in the full ripeness of his youth, sunburned and level-eyed.
His life in ships had marked him as plainly as a branding-iron. There
was present in him that air which men have, secret yet visible, who
know familiarly the unchanging horizons, the strange dawns, the
tempest-pregnant skies of the sea. For the girl he was as
unaccountable as she for him.
"Say, Miss James," he asked suddenly, breaking in on her twentieth
polite question, "d'you come to this joint, I mean, to this meetin'
house every night?"
Her face seemed to shape itself naturally to a smile; she smiled now.
"I can't come every night," she answered; "but I come pretty often.
I, I hope you'll come sometimes, now."
Goodwin discounted that; it was no more than the missioner had bidden
her to say.
"Are you goin' to be here tomorrow?" he demanded.
Her mild, pretty face flushed faintly; the meaning of his question
was palpable.
"Ye-es," she hesitated; "I expect I'll be coming to-morrow."
"That's all right, then," said Goodwin cheerfully. "An' I'll be
along, too."
The elderly woman whom she had left at the missioner's summons was
hovering patiently. Goodwin held out his hand.
"Good night, Miss James," he said.
She gave him her hand, and he took it within his own, enveloping its
pale slenderness in his rope-roughened palm. He held it just long
enough to make her raise her eyes and meet his; then he released her,
and, avoiding the anti-climax of a further talk with the missioner,
passed out of the hall to the dark and sparsely peopled street.
At a small saloon whose lights spilled themselves across his path, he
got himself a glass of beer; he was feeling just such a thirst as a
man knows after nervous and exacting labor. The blond, white-jacketed
barman glanced at him curiously, marking perhaps something distraught
and rapt in his demeanor. Goodwin, ignoring him, took his beer and
leaned an elbow on the bar, looking round the place.
A couple of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A
man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty
glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner
and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of
things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the
Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco.
Their boundaries were the limits of lives; one had but to cross them,
to adventure beyond them, and all the world was different. A dozen
steps had taken him from the sidewalk into the mission hall and the
soft-glowing wonder of the girl; another dozen steps had replaced him
on the sidewalk. It almost seemed as if a man might choose what world
he would live in.
"Feelin' bad?" queried the barman softly; he could no longer contain
his curiosity.
"Me!" exclaimed Goodwin. "No!"
"Well," said the barman apologetically Goodwin was a big and
dangerous-looking young man "you're lookin' mighty queer, anyway."
And he proceeded to wipe the bar industriously.
The Etna had left San Francisco with a crew of fourteen men before
the mast, of whom twelve had been "Dutchmen." On her arrival in New
York, these twelve had deserted forthwith, forfeiting the pay due to
them rather than face the return voyage under the Etna's officers.
There remained in her forecastle now only Goodwin and one other, an
old seaman named Noble, a veteran who had followed the sea and shared
the uncertain fate of ships since the days of single topsails.
Noble was seated on his battered chest when Goodwin unhooked the
fo'c'sle door and entered. A globe-lamp that hung above him shed its
light upon his silver head as he bent over his work of patching a
pair of dungaree overalls, and he looked up in mild welcome of the
other's return. His placidity, his venerable and friendly aspect,
gave somehow to the bare forecastle, with its vacant bunks like empty
coffin-shelves in a vault, an air of domesticity, the comfortable
quality of a home. Save for brief intervals between voyages, in
sailors' boarding-houses, such places had been "home" to Noble for
fifty years.
Goodwin rehooked the door, and stood outside the globe-lamp's circle
of dull light while he took off his coat. Old Noble, sail needle
between his fingers, looked up from his work amiably.
"Well?" he queried. "Been havin' a hell of a good time uptown, eh?"
"That's so," retorted Goodwin shortly. "A hell of a time an' all."
The old man nodded and began to sew again, sailor fashion, thrusting
the big needle with the leather "palm" which seamen use instead of a
thimble. Goodwin, standing by his bunk, began to cut himself a fill
for his pipe.
"Ain't been robbed, have ye?" inquired old Noble.
In his view, and according to his experience, a sailor with money on
him ran peculiar risks when he went ashore. When Goodwin had been
"shanghaied" in San Francisco drugged and carried on board
unconscious while another man "signed on" for him and drew three
months of his wages in advance those who shipped him had omitted to
search him, and his money-belt was intact.
"Robbed? No!" answered Goodwin impatiently.
He lit his pipe, drawing strongly at the pungent ship's tobacco, and
seated himself on the edge of the lower bunk, facing old Noble. The
old man continued to sew, his hand moving rhythmically to and fro
with the needle, his work spread conveniently in his lap. But for the
rusty red of his tanned skin, he looked like a handsome and wise old
woman.
"Jim," said Goodwin at last.
"Yes?" The old man did not look up.
"There wasn't nothin' doin' ashore there," said Goodwin. "I just went
for a walk along the street, and then I well, there wasn't nothin'
doin', ye see, so I went into a sort o' mission that there was."
"Eh?" Old Noble raised his head sharply and peered at him. "Ye ain't
been an' got religion, Dan?"
"No, I haven't," answered Goodwin. "But say, Jim, I went into the
place, and there was a girl there. She come over to loan me a
hymn-book first of all, an' afterwards what ye laughin' at, blast
ye?"
Old Noble had uttered no sound, but he had bent his head over his
sewing and his broad shoulders were shaking. He lifted a face of
elderly, cynical mirth.
"It ain't nothin', Dan," he protested. "It's just me thinkin' first
ye'd bin robbed and then ye'd got religion; an' all the time it's
just a girl ye've seen. Go on, Dan; how much did she get out of ye?"
"Stow that!" warned Goodwin. "She wasn't that kind. This one was say,
Jim, if you was to see her just once, you'd know things ashore ain't
all as bad as you fancy. Sort of soft, she was all tender and gentle
and shining! Gosh, there ain't no words to put her in. I didn't know
there was any girls like that."
"Nor me," put in old Noble dryly. He inspected Goodwin with a shrewd
and suspicious eye. For him, a citizen of the womanless seas, beauty,
grace, femininity were no more than a merchandise. "Then, to put it
straight, she didn't get yer money from ye?" he demanded.
"No, she didn't," retorted Goodwin. "Not a cent, is that plain
enough? Ain't you ever known no women but the rotten ones, man?"
Noble shook his head.
"Then you don't know what you're talkin' about," said Goodwin. "This
one it ain't no use tellin' you, Jim. I seen her, that's all; an' I'm
goin' to quit. This sailorizin' game ain't the only game there is,
an' I'm done with it."
"Ah!" The old man sat with both gnarled and labor-stained hands lying
upon the unfinished work in his lap. The cynical, half-humorous
expression faded from his thin, strong face. He frowned at the
younger man consideringly, seriously.
"Then she did get something out o' ye," he said harshly. "You're
talkin' like a fool, Dan. This old ship ain't no soft berth, I know;
but then, you ain't no quitter, either. This girl's got ye goin'; ye
want to watch out."
"Quitter!" Goodwin took him up hotly. They faced each other across
the narrow fo'c'sle vehemently; their shadows sprawled on deck and
bulkhead as they bent forward and drew back in the stress of talk.
"When a man's shanghaied aboard a blasted hooker like this, with
three months of his wages stolen before he gets the knockout drops
out o' his head, is he a quitter when he takes his chance to leave
her an' look for a white man's job?"
"Yes, he is," answered Noble. "You're a sailor, ain't you? Then stick
by your ship."
"Oh, it ain't no use talkin' to you!" Goodwin rose to his feet. "You'd
make out that a man 'u'd go to heaven for stickin' to his ship, even
if he done forty murders. I'm goin' to quit, an' that's all there is
to it."
Old Noble looked up at him where he stood. The old face, that had
been mild and indulgent, was hardened to an angry contempt. He was
old and strong, dexterous in all seamanlike arts, a being shaped for
good and evil both by half a century of seafaring, of wrong and
hardship, or danger and toil, of scant food and poor pay. Never in
his life had he held back from a task because it was dangerous or
difficult, nor sided with an officer against a man before the mast,
nor deserted a ship. His code was simple and brief, but it was of
iron.
"Well, quit, then," he said. "Quit like the Dutchmen! There's no one
will stop ye."
"They better not," menaced Goodwin angrily.
He had been shanghaied, of course, without chest or bag, without even
bedding, so that he had worked his way around the Horn in shoddy
clothes and flimsy oilskins obtained from the ship's slop-chest.
There was little that he had a mind to take ashore with him; it went
quickly into a small enough bundle. While he turned out his bunk, old
Noble sat watching him without moving, with judgment in his face, and
sorrow. He was looking on at the death of a good seaman.