CHAPTER VIII
Having lighted my cigarette, I strolled for'ard along the deck to
where work was going on. Above my head dim shapes of canvas showed
in the starlight. Sail was being made, and being made slowly, as I
might judge, who was only the veriest tyro in such matters. The
indistinguishable shapes of men, in long lines, pulled on ropes.
They pulled in sick and dogged silence, though Mr. Pike, ubiquitous,
snarled out orders and rapped out oaths from every angle upon their
miserable heads.
Certainly, from what I had read, no ship of the old days ever
proceeded so sadly and blunderingly to sea. Ere long Mr. Mellaire
joined Mr. Pike in the struggle of directing the men. It was not yet
eight in the evening, and all hands were at work. They did not seem
to know the ropes. Time and again, when the half-hearted suggestions
of the bosuns had been of no avail, I saw one or the other of the
mates leap to the rail and put the right rope in the hands of the
men.
These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones. Up aloft,
from sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who
were at least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails.
But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope
that hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with
painfully slow movements. "Walk away with it!" Mr. Pike would yell.
And perhaps for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the
rope ere they came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill. And yet,
did either of the mates spring in and add his strength, they were
able to move right along the deck without stopping. Either of the
mates, old men that they were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of
the wretched creatures.
"This is what sailin's come to," Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
"This ain't the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling.
But what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?"
"I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled," I said.
"Sure they do. Want to hear 'em?"
I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered
that I'd like to very much.
"Here, you bosun!" Mr. Pike snarled. "Wake up! Start a song!
Topsail halyards!"
In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite
bleakness freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.
Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it
should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness,
for the words poor Nancy sang were:
"Away, way, way, yar,
We'll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots."
"Quit it! Quit it!" Mr. Pike roared. "This ain't a funeral! Ain't
there one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It's a topsail-yard--
"
He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out
of the men's hands to put into them the right rope.
"Come on, bosun! Break her out!"
Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy
and even more lugubrious than Nancy's:
"Then up aloft that yard must go,
Whiskey for my Johnny."
The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:
"Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue."
Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin
and lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:
"And whiskey killed the old man, too,
Whiskey for my Johnny."
He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
work and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for my Johnny."
And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
until he interrupted the song to cry "Belay!"
And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling
and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
first. Skulkers there were among them, too; and once, from for'ard
of the 'midship house, I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and
out of the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on their heels Mr.
Pike, who chanted a recital of the distressing things that would
befall them if he caught them at such tricks again.
The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further,
so I strolled aft and climbed the poop. In the lee of the chart-
house Captain West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down.
Passing on aft, I saw steering at the wheel the weazened little old
man I had noted earlier in the day. In the light of the binnacle his
small blue eyes looked more malevolent than ever. So weazened and
tiny was he, and so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they
seemed of a height. His face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled,
and in all seeming he was fifty years older than Mr. Pike. He was
the most remarkable figure of a burnt-out, aged man one would expect
to find able seaman on one of the proudest sailing-ships afloat.
Later, through Wada, I was to learn that his name was Andy Fay and
that he claimed no more years than sixty-three.
I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared
up at the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there.
No, I decided I was not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of
it was wrong. There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-
ends. There was Miss West coming along. There was the crew of
broken men and lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek in the
'midship house still gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up;
and I was quite sure I would not care to witness such a transaction
in surgery.
Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of
the voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in
sailing-ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not
exist. And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she
could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had
always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always
live and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious
personality.
Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition
that the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to
me--for I knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be.
And for five months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a
pound of tobacco or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent
on the same ship with her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap,
just that sure was I that ere the voyage was over I should be
pestered by her making love to me. Please do not mistake me. My
certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own
desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of
women as instinctive huntresses of men. In my experience women
hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit
of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by
the tendrils of the grapevine.
Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-
weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a
young man of thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these
things--weary and in doubt. It was because of this state that I was
undertaking the voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away
from all these things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter
over.
It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness
had been brought about by the success of my play--my first play, as
every one knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the
doubt in my own mind, just as the success of my several volumes of
verse had raised doubts. Was the public right? Were the critics
right? Surely the function of the artist was to voice life, yet what
did I know of life?
So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that
afflicted me. Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts
of isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me. I had
even canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of
my years to the lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and
strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I
knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the
lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that
mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.
Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very
well. Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an
incontrovertible fact--my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness,
and a fact. This I knew: I had reached an intellectual and artistic
climacteric, a life-climacteric of some sort. And I had diagnosed my
own case and prescribed this voyage. And here was the atrociously
healthy and profoundly feminine Miss West along--the very last
ingredient I would have considered introducing into my prescription.
A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by
their persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of
age, not entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in
the world, and an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue
me? They would have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake
of my artistic place alone, for the sake of my income alone.
Yes; and love! Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and
sung and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead.
But it was so long ago. How young I was--turned twenty-four! And
after that I had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief
may die; and I had laughed again and done my share of philandering
with the pretty, ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of
my fortune and artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired
disgusted from the lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking
adventures in the realm of mind. And here I was, on board the
Elsinore, unhorsed by my encounters with the problems of the
ultimate, carried off the field with a broken pate.
As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as
she made her little nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the
everlasting mystery of woman. Yes, I, with all the futuristic
contempt for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.
Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than
Lucifer and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid,
attraction for the thinker. What is this flame of her, blazing
through all her contradictions and ignobilities?--this ruthless
passion for life, always for life, more life on the planet? At times
it seems to me brazen, and awful, and soulless. At times I am made
petulant by it. And at other times I am swayed by the sublimity of
it. No; there is no escape from woman. Always, as a savage returns
to a dark glen where goblins are and gods may be, so do I return to
the contemplation of woman.
Mr. Pike's voice interrupted my musings. From for'ard, on the main
deck, I heard him snarl:
"On the main-topsail-yard, there!--if you cut that gasket I'll split
your damned skull!"
Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he
called to I concluded was the training-ship boy.
"You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!" he cried. "Don't make those
gaskets up! Fetch 'em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!"
Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my
hand went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate's
voice rang out:
"Come on, you gentlemen's sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively now!"
