CHAPTER II
The Elsinore, fresh-loaded with coal, lay very deep in the water when
we came alongside. I knew too little about ships to be capable of
admiring her lines, and, besides, I was in no mood for admiration. I
was still debating with myself whether or not to chuck the whole
thing and return on the tug. From all of which it must not be taken
that I am a vacillating type of man. On the contrary.
The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I
been keen for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was
because there was nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life
had lost its savour. I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But
the zest had gone out of things. I had lost taste for my fellow-men
and all their foolish, little, serious endeavours. For a far longer
period I had been dissatisfied with women. I had endured them, but I
had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their
almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with
them. And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the
futility of art--a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that
deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners.
In short, I was embarking on the Elsinore because it was easier to
than not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy.
That was the curse of the condition into which I had fallen. That
was why, as I stepped upon the deck of the Elsinore, I was half of a
mind to tell them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain
West and his daughter good-day.
I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile
Miss West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the
cabin, and the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.
Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in
Erie Basin. He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be
painful, but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to
call orders to half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who
shambled up from somewhere in the waist of the ship. Mr. Pike had
been drinking. That was patent. His face was puffed and
discoloured, and his large gray eyes were bitter and bloodshot.
I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard
and chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the
few words that would put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who
were now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike
any concept I had ever entertained of sailors. Certainly, on the
liners, I had observed nothing that resembled them.
One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair
of remarkable Italian eyes. But he was a dwarf. So short was he
that he was all sea-boots and sou'wester. And yet he was not
entirely Italian. So certain was I that I asked the mate, who
answered morosely:
"Him? Shorty? He's a dago half-breed. The other half's Jap or
Malay."
One old man, who I learned was a bosun, was so decrepit that I
thought he had been recently injured. His face was stolid and ox-
like, and as he shuffled and dragged his brogans over the deck he
paused every several steps to place both hands on his abdomen and
execute a queer, pressing, lifting movement. Months were to pass, in
which I saw him do this thousands of times, ere I learned that there
was nothing the matter with him and that his action was purely a
habit. His face reminded me of the Man with the Hoe, save that it
was unthinkably and abysmally stupider. And his name, as I was to
learn, of all names was Sundry Buyers. And he was bosun of the fine
American sailing-ship Elsinore--rated one of the finest sailing-ships
afloat!
Of this group of aged men and boys that moved the luggage along I saw
only one, called Henry, a youth of sixteen, who approximated in the
slightest what I had conceived all sailors to be like. He had come
off a training ship, the mate told me, and this was his first voyage
to sea. His face was keen-cut, alert, as were his bodily movements,
and he wore sailor-appearing clothes with sailor-seeming grace. In
fact, as I was to learn, he was to be the only sailor-seeming
creature fore and aft.
The main crew had not yet come aboard, but was expected at any
moment, the mate vouchsafed with a snarl of ominous expectancy.
Those already on board were the miscellaneous ones who had shipped
themselves in New York without the mediation of boarding-house
masters. And what the crew itself would be like God alone could
tell--so said the mate. Shorty, the Japanese (or Malay) and Italian
half-caste, the mate told me, was an able seaman, though he had come
out of steam and this was his first sailing voyage.
"Ordinary seamen!" Mr. Pike snorted, in reply to a question. "We
don't carry Landsmen!--forget it! Every clodhopper an' cow-walloper
these days is an able seaman. That's the way they rank and are paid.
The merchant service is all shot to hell. There ain't no more
sailors. They all died years ago, before you were born even."
I could smell the raw whiskey on the mate's breath. Yet he did not
stagger nor show any signs of intoxication. Not until afterward was
I to know that his willingness to talk was most unwonted and was
where the liquor gave him away.
"It'd a-ben a grace had I died years ago," he said, "rather than to
a-lived to see sailors an' ships pass away from the sea."
"But I understand the Elsinore is considered one of the finest," I
urged.
"So she is . . . to-day. But what is she?--a damned cargo-carrier.
She ain't built for sailin', an' if she was there ain't no sailors
left to sail her. Lord! Lord! The old clippers! When I think of
'em!--The Gamecock, Shootin' Star, Flyin' Fish, Witch o' the Wave,
Staghound, Harvey Birch, Canvas-back, Fleetwing, Sea Serpent,
Northern Light! An' when I think of the fleets of the tea-clippers
that used to load at Hong Kong an' race the Eastern Passages. A fine
sight! A fine sight!"
I was interested. Here was a man, a live man. I was in no hurry to
go into the cabin, where I knew Wada was unpacking my things, so I
paced up and down the deck with the huge Mr. Pike. Huge he was in
all conscience, broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, and, despite the
profound stoop of his shoulders, fully six feet in height.
"You are a splendid figure of a man," I complimented.
"I was, I was," he muttered sadly, and I caught the whiff of whiskey
strong on the air.
I stole a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made
three of mine. His wrist would have made three of my wrist.
"How much do you weigh?" I asked.
"Two hundred an' ten. But in my day, at my best, I tipped the scales
close to two-forty."
"And the Elsinore can't sail," I said, returning to the subject which
had roused him.
"I'll take you even, anything from a pound of tobacco to a month's
wages, she won't make it around in a hundred an' fifty days," he
answered. "Yet I've come round in the old Flyin' Cloud in eighty-
nine days--eighty-nine days, sir, from Sandy Hook to 'Frisco. Sixty
men for'ard that WAS men, an' eight boys, an' drive! drive! drive!
Three hundred an' seventy-four miles for a day's run under
t'gallantsails, an' in the squalls eighteen knots o' line not enough
to time her. Eighty-nine days--never beat, an' tied once by the old
Andrew Jackson nine years afterwards. Them was the days!"
"When did the Andrew Jackson tie her?" I asked, because of the
growing suspicion that he was "having" me.
"In 1860," was his prompt reply.
"And you sailed in the Flying Cloud nine years before that, and this
is 1913--why, that was sixty-two years ago," I charged.
"And I was seven years old," he chuckled. "My mother was stewardess
on the Flyin' Cloud. I was born at sea. I was boy when I was
twelve, on the Herald o' the Morn, when she made around in ninety-
nine days--half the crew in irons most o' the time, five men lost
from aloft off the Horn, the points of our sheath-knives broken
square off, knuckle-dusters an' belayin'-pins flyin', three men shot
by the officers in one day, the second mate killed dead an' no one to
know who done it, an' drive! drive! drive! ninety-nine days from land
to land, a run of seventeen thousand miles, an' east to west around
Cape Stiff!"
"But that would make you sixty-nine years old," I insisted.
"Which I am," he retorted proudly, "an' a better man at that than the
scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of 'em would die
under the things I've been through. Did you ever hear of the Sunny
South?--she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an' changed her
name to Emanuela?"
"And you've sailed the Middle Passage!" I cried, recollecting the old
phrase.
"I was on the Emanuela that day in Mozambique Channel when the Brisk
caught us with nine hundred slaves between-decks. Only she wouldn't
a-caught us except for her having steam."
I continued to stroll up and down beside this massive relic of the
past, and to listen to his hints and muttered reminiscences of old
man-killing and man-driving days. He was too real to be true, and
yet, as I studied his shoulder-stoop and the age-drag of his huge
feet, I was convinced that his years were as he asserted. He spoke
of a Captain Sonurs.
"He was a great captain," he was saying. "An' in the two years I
sailed mate with him there was never a port I didn't jump the ship
goin' in an' stay in hiding until I sneaked aboard when she sailed
again."
"But why?"
"The men, on account of the men swearin' blood an' vengeance and
warrants against me because of my ways of teachin' them to be
sailors. Why, the times I was caught, and the fines the skipper paid
for me--and yet it was my work that made the ship make money.''
He held up his huge paws, and as I stared at the battered, malformed
knuckles I understood the nature of his work.
"But all that's stopped now," he lamented. "A sailor's a gentleman
these days. You can't raise your voice or your hand to them."
At this moment he was addressed from the poop-rail above by the
second mate, a medium-sized, heavily built, clean-shaven, blond man.
"The tug's in sight with the crew, sir," he announced.
The mate grunted an acknowledgment, then added, "Come on down, Mr.
Mellaire, and meet our passenger."
I could not help noting the air and carriage with which Mr. Mellaire
came down the poop-ladder and took his part in the introduction. He
was courteous in an old-world way, soft-spoken, suave, and
unmistakably from south of Mason and Dixon.
"A Southerner," I said.
"Georgia, sir." He bowed and smiled, as only a Southerner can bow
and smile.
His features and expression were genial and gentle, and yet his mouth
was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face. It was a
gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped,
shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously.
Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate's, they were
thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes
I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of
gentle kindness and cordiality, but behind that gloss I knew resided
neither sincerity nor mercy. Behind that gloss was something cold
and terrible, that lurked and waited and watched--something catlike,
something inimical and deadly. Behind that gloss of soft light and
of social sparkle was the live, fearful thing that had shaped that
mouth into the gash it was. What I sensed behind in those eyes
chilled me with its repulsiveness and strangeness.
As I faced Mr. Mellaire, and talked with him, and smiled, and
exchanged amenities, I was aware of the feeling that comes to one in
the forest or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting
animals are spying upon him. Frankly I was afraid of the thing
ambushed behind there in the skull of Mr. Mellaire. One so as a
matter of course identifies form and feature with the spirit within.
But I could not do this with the second mate. His face and form and
manner and suave ease were one thing, inside which he, an entirely
different thing, lay hid.
I noticed Wada standing in the cabin door, evidently waiting to ask
for instructions. I nodded, and prepared to follow him inside. Mr.
Pike looked at me quickly and said:
"Just a moment, Mr. Pathurst."
He gave some orders to the second mate, who turned on his heel and
started for'ard. I stood and waited for Mr. Pike's communication,
which he did not choose to make until he saw the second mate well out
of ear-shot. Then he leaned closely to me and said:
"Don't mention that little matter of my age to anybody. Each year I
sign on I sign my age one year younger. I am fifty-four, now, on the
articles."
"And you don't look a day older," I answered lightly, though I meant
it in all sincerity.
"And I don't feel it. I can outwork and outgame the huskiest of the
younglings. And don't let my age get to anybody's ears, Mr.
Pathurst. Skippers are not particular for mates getting around the
seventy mark. And owners neither. I've had my hopes for this ship,
and I'd a-got her, I think, except for the old man decidin' to go to
sea again. As if he needed the money! The old skinflint!"
"Is he well off?" I inquired.
"Well off! If I had a tenth of his money I could retire on a chicken
ranch in California and live like a fighting cock--yes, if I had a
fiftieth of what he's got salted away. Why, he owns more stock in
all the Blackwood ships . . . and they've always been lucky and
always earned money. I'm getting old, and it's about time I got a
command. But no; the old cuss has to take it into his head to go to
sea again just as the berth's ripe for me to fall into."
Again I started to enter the cabin, but was stopped by the mate.
"Mr. Pathurst? You won't mention about my age?"
"No, certainly not, Mr. Pike," I said.
