CHAPTER XXXIX
There is so much to write about all at once. In the first place,
Captain West. Not entirely unexpected was his death. Margaret tells
me that she was apprehensive from the start of the voyage--and even
before. It was because of her apprehension that she so abruptly
changed her plans and accompanied her father.
What really happened we do not know, but the agreed surmise is that
it was some stroke of the heart. And yet, after the stroke, did he
not come out on deck? Or could the first stroke have been followed
by another and fatal one after I had helped him inside through the
door? And even so, I have never heard of a heart-stroke being
preceded hours before by a weakening of the mind. Captain West's
mind seemed quite clear, and must have been quite clear, that last
afternoon when he wore the Elsinore and started the lee-shore drift.
In which case it was a blunder. The Samurai blundered, and his heart
destroyed him when he became aware of the blunder.
At any rate the thought of blunder never enters Margaret's head. She
accepts, as a matter of course, that it was all a part of the
oncoming termination of his sickness. And no one will ever undeceive
her. Neither Mr. Pike, Mr. Mellaire, nor I, among ourselves, mention
a whisper of what so narrowly missed causing disaster. In fact, Mr.
Pike does not talk about the matter at all.--And then, again, might
it not have been something different from heart disease? Or heart
disease complicated with something else that obscured his mind that
afternoon before his death? Well, no one knows, and I, for one,
shall not sit, even in secret judgment, on the event.
At midday of the day we clawed off Tierra Del Fuego the Elsinore was
rolling in a dead calm, and all afternoon she rolled, not a score of
miles off the land. Captain West was buried at four o'clock, and at
eight bells that evening Mr. Pike assumed command and made a few
remarks to both watches. They were straight-from-the-shoulder
remarks, or, as he called them, they were "brass tacks."
Among other things he told the sailors that they had another boss,
and that they would toe the mark as they never had before. Up to
this time they had been loafing in an hotel, but from this time on
they were going to work.
"On this hooker, from now on," he perorated, "it's going to be like
old times, when a man jumped the last day of the voyage as well as
the first. And God help the man that don't jump. That's all.
Relieve the wheel and lookout."
And yet the men are in terribly wretched condition. I don't see how
they can jump. Another week of westerly gales, alternating with
brief periods of calm, has elapsed, making a total of six weeks off
the Horn. So weak are the men that they have no spirit left in them-
-not even the gangsters. And so afraid are they of the mate that
they really do their best to jump when he drives them, and he drives
them all the time. Mr. Mellaire shakes his head.
"Wait till they get around and up into better weather," he astonished
me by telling me the other afternoon. "Wait till they get dried out,
and rested up, with more sleep, and their sores healed, and more
flesh on their bones, and more spunk in their blood--then they won't
stand for this driving. Mr. Pike can't realize that times have
changed, sir, and laws have changed, and men have changed. He's an
old man, and I know what I am talking about."
"You mean you've been listening to the talk of the men?" I challenged
rashly, all my gorge rising at the unofficerlike conduct of this
ship's officer.
The shot went home, for, in a flash, that suave and gentle film of
light vanished from the surface of the eyes, and the watching,
fearful thing that lurked behind inside the skull seemed almost to
leap out at me, while the cruel gash of mouth drew thinner and
crueller. And at the same time, on my inner sight, was grotesquely
limned a picture of a brain pulsing savagely against the veneer of
skin that covered that cleft of skull beneath the dripping sou'-
wester. Then he controlled himself, the mouth-gash relaxed, and the
suave and gentle film drew again across the eyes.
"I mean, sir," he said softly, "that I am speaking out of a long sea
experience. Times have changed. The old driving days are gone. And
I trust, Mr. Pathurst, that you will not misunderstand me in the
matter, nor misinterpret what I have said."
Although the conversation drifted on to other and calmer topics, I
could not ignore the fact that he had not denied listening to the
talk of the men. And yet, even as Mr. Pike grudgingly admits, he is
a good sailorman and second mate save for his unholy intimacy with
the men for'ard--an intimacy which even the Chinese cook and the
Chinese steward deplore as unseamanlike and perilous.
Even though men like the gangsters are so worn down by hardship that
they have no heart of rebellion, there remain three of the frailest
for'ard who will not die, and who are as spunky as ever. They are
Andy Fay, Mulligan Jacobs, and Charles Davis. What strange, abysmal
vitality informs them is beyond all speculation. Of course, Charles
Davis should have been overside with a sack of coal at his feet long
ago. And Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs are only, and have always
been, wrecked and emaciated wisps of men. Yet far stronger men than
they have gone over the side, and far stronger men than they are laid
up right now in absolute physical helplessness in the soggy
forecastle bunks. And these two bitter flames of shreds of things
stand all their watches and answer all calls for both watches.
Yes; and the chickens have something of this same spunk of life in
them. Featherless, semi-frozen despite the oil-stove, sprayed
dripping on occasion by the frigid seas that pound by sheer weight
through canvas tarpaulins, nevertheless not a chicken has died. Is
it a matter of selection? Are these the iron-vigoured ones that
survived the hardships from Baltimore to the Horn, and are fitted to
survive anything? Then for a De Vries to take them, save them, and
out of them found the hardiest breed of chickens on the planet! And
after this I shall always query that phrase, most ancient in our
language--"chicken-hearted." Measured by the Elsinore's chickens, it
is a misnomer.
Nor are our three Horn Gypsies, the storm-visitors with the dreaming,
topaz eyes, spunkless. Held in superstitious abhorrence by the rest
of the crew, aliens by lack of any word of common speech,
nevertheless they are good sailors and are always first to spring
into any enterprise of work or peril. They have gone into Mr.
Mellaire's watch, and they are quite apart from the rest of the
sailors. And when there is a delay, or wait, with nothing to do for
long minutes, they shoulder together, and stand and sway to the heave
of deck, and dream far dreams in those pale, topaz eyes, of a
country, I am sure, where mothers, with pale, topaz eyes and sandy
hair, birth sons and daughters that breed true in terms of topaz eyes
and sandy hair.
But the rest of the crew! Take the Maltese Cockney. He is too
keenly intelligent, too sharply sensitive, successfully to endure.
He is a shadow of his former self. His cheeks have fallen in. Dark
circles of suffering are under his eyes, while his eyes, Latin and
English intermingled, are cavernously sunken and as bright-burning as
if aflame with fever.
Tom Spink, hard-fibred Anglo-Saxon, good seaman that he is, long
tried and always proved, is quite wrecked in spirit. He is whining
and fearful. So broken is he, though he still does his work, that he
is prideless and shameless.
"I'll never ship around the Horn again, sir," he began on me the
other day when I greeted him good morning at the wheel. "I've sworn
it before, but this time I mean it. Never again, sir. Never again."
"Why did you swear it before?" I queried.
"It was on the Nahoma, sir, four years ago. Two hundred and thirty
days from Liverpool to 'Frisco. Think of it, sir. Two hundred and
thirty days! And we was loaded with cement and creosote, and the
creosote got loose. We buried the captain right here off the Horn.
The grub gave out. Most of us nearly died of scurvy. Every man Jack
of us was carted to hospital in 'Frisco. It was plain hell, sir,
that's what it was, an' two hundred and thirty days of it."
"Yet here you are," I laughed; "signed on another Horn voyage."
And this morning Tom Spink confided the following tome:
"If only we'd lost the carpenter, sir, instead of Boney."
I did not catch his drift for the moment; then I remembered. The
carpenter was the Finn, the Jonah, the warlock who played tricks with
the winds and despitefully used poor sailormen.
Yes, and I make free to confess that I have grown well weary of this
eternal buffeting by the Great West Wind. Nor are we alone in our
travail on this desolate ocean. Never a day does the gray thin, or
the snow-squalls cease that we do not sight ships, west-bound like
ourselves, hove-to and trying to hold on to the meagre westing they
possess. And occasionally, when the gray clears and lifts, we see a
lucky ship, bound east, running before it and reeling off the miles.
I saw Mr. Pike, yesterday, shaking his fist in a fury of hatred at
one such craft that flew insolently past us not a quarter of a mile
away.
And the men are jumping. Mr. Pike is driving with those block-square
fists of his, as many a man's face attests. So weak are they, and so
terrible is he, that I swear he could whip either watch single-
handed. I cannot help but note that Mr. Mellaire refuses to take
part in this driving. Yet I know that he is a trained driver, and
that he was not averse to driving at the outset of the voyage. But
now he seems bent on keeping on good terms with the crew. I should
like to know what Mr. Pike thinks of it, for he cannot possibly be
blind to what is going on; but I am too well aware of what would
happen if I raised the question. He would insult me, snap my head
off, and indulge in a three-days' sea-grouch. Things are sad and
monotonous enough for Margaret and me in the cabin and at table,
without invoking the blight of the mate's displeasure.
