Dear Mrs Bunter used to worry a good deal after the Sapphire left for Calcutta. She would say to me: ‘It must be so awful for poor Winston’ - Winston is Burner’s name - and I tried to comfort her the best I could. Afterwards, she got some small children to teach in a family, and was half the day with them, and the occupation was good for her.
In the very first letter she had from Calcutta, Bunter told her he had had a fall down the poop-ladder, and cut his head, but no bones broken, thank God. That was all. Of course, she had other letters from him, but that vagabond Bunter never gave me a scratch of the pen the solid eleven months. I supposed, naturally, that everything was going on all right. Who could imagine what was happening?
Then one day dear Mrs Bunter got a letter from a legal firm in the City, advising her that her uncle was dead - her old curmudgeon of an uncle - a retired stockbroker, a heartless, petrified antiquity that had lasted on and on. He was nearly ninety, I believe; and if 1 were to meet his venerable ghost this minute, I would try to take him by the throat and strangle him.
The old beast would never forgive his niece for marrying Bunter; and years afterwards, when people made a point of letting him know that she was in London, pretty nearly starving at forty years of age, he only said: ‘Serve the little fool right!* I believe he meant her to starve. And, lo and behold, the old cannibal died intestate, with no other relatives but that very identical little fool. The Burners were wealthy people now.
Of course, Mrs Burner wept as if her heart would break. In any other woman it would have been mere hypocrisy. Naturally, too, she wanted to cable the news to her Winston in Calcutta, but I showed her, Gazette in hand, that the ship was on the homeward-bound list for more than a week already. So we sat down to wait, and talked meantime of dear old Winston every day. There were just one hundred such days before the Sapphire got reported ‘ All well’ in the chops of the Channel by an incoming mailboat.
‘I am going to Dunkirk to meet him,’ says she. The Sapphire had a cargo of jute for Dunkirk. Of course, I had to escort the dear lady in the quality of her ‘ingenious friend’. She calls me ‘our ingenious friend’ to this day; and I’ve observed some people - strangers - looking hard at me, for the signs of the ingenuity, I suppose.
After settling Mrs Burner in a good hotel in Dunkirk, I walked down to the docks - late afternoon it was - and what was my surprise to see the ship actually fast alongside. Either Johns or Burner, or both, must have been driving her hard up Channel. Anyway, she had been in since the day before last, and her crew was already paid off. I met two of her apprenticed boys going off home on leave with their dunnage on a Frenchman’s barrow, as happy as larks, and I asked them if the mate was on board.
There he is, on the quay, looking at the moorings,’ says one of the youngsters as he skipped past me.
You may imagine the shock to my feelings when I beheld his white head. I could only manage to tell him that his wife was at an hotel in town. He left me at once, to go and get his hat on board. I was mightily surprised by the smartness of his movements as he hurried up the gangway.
Whereas the black mate struck people as deliberate, and strangely stately in his gait for a man in the prime of life, this white-headed chap seemed the most wonderfully alert of old men. I don’t suppose Bunter was any quicker on his pins than before. It was the colour of the hair that made all the difference in one’s judgement.
The same with his eyes. Those eyes, that looked at you so steely, so fierce, and so fascinating out of a bush of a buccaneer’s black hair, now had an innocent, almost boyish expression in their good-humoured brightness under those white eyebrows.
I led him without any delay into Mrs Burner's private sitting-room. After she had dropped a tear over the late cannibal, given a hug to her Winston, and told him that he must grow his moustache again, the dear lady tucked her feet upon the sofa, and I got out of Burner’s way.
He started at once to pace the room, waving his long arms. He worked himself into a regular frenzy, and tore Johns limb from limb many times over that evening.
Tell down? Of course I fell down, by slipping backwards on that fool’s brass plates. Ton my word, I had been walking that poop in charge of the ship, and I didn’t know whether I was in the Indian Ocean or in the moon. I was crazy. My head spun round and round with sheer worry. I had made my last application of your chemist’s wonderful stuff.’ (This to me.) ‘All the store of bottles you gave me got smashed when those drawers fell out in the last gale. I had been getting some dry things to change, when I heard the cry: “All hands on deck!” and made one jump of it, without even pushing them in properly. Ass! When I came back and saw the broken glass and the mess, I felt ready to faint.
‘No; look here - deception is bad; but not to be able to keep it up after one has been forced into it. You know that since I’ve been squeezed out of the Western Ocean packets by younger men, just on account of my grizzled muzzle - you know how much chance I had to ever get a ship. And not a soul to turn to. We have been a lonely couple, we two - she threw away everything for me - and to see her want a piece of dry bread - ’
He banged with his fist fit to split the Frenchman’s table in two.
‘I would have turned a sanguinary pirate for her, let alone cheating my way into a berth by dyeing my hair. So when you came to me with your chemist’s wonderful stuff - ’
He checked himself.
‘By the way, that fellow’s got a fortune when he likes to pick it up. It is a wonderful stuff - you tell him salt water can do nothing
to it. It stays on as long as your hair will.’
‘All right/1 said. ‘Go on.’
Thereupon he went for Johns again with a fury that frightened his wife, and made me laugh till I cried.
‘Just you try to think what it would have meant to be at the mercy of the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship! Just fancy what a life that crawling Johns would have led me! And I knew that in a week or so the white hair would begin to show. And the crew. Did you ever think of that? To be shown up as a low fraud before all hands. What a life for me till we got to Calcutta! And once there - kicked out, of course. Half-pay stopped. Annie here alone without a penny - starving; and I on the other side of the earth, ditto. You see?
‘I thought of shaving twice a day. But could I shave my head, too? No way - no way at all. Unless I dropped Johns overboard; and even then - Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I didn’t know where I was putting down my foot that night? I just felt myself falling - then crash, and all dark.
‘When I came to myself that bang on the head seemed to have steadied my wits somehow. I was so sick of everything that for two days I wouldn’t speak to anyone. They thought it was a slight concussion of the brain. Then the idea dawned upon me as I was looking at that ghost-ridden, wretched fool. “Ah, you love ghosts,” I thought. “Well, you shall have something from beyond the grave.”
‘I didn’t even trouble to invent a story. I couldn’t imagine a ghost if I wanted to. I wasn’t fit to lie connectedly if I had tried. I just bulled him on to it. Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some way, and that - ’
‘Oh, the horrible man! ’ cried Mrs Bunter from the sofa. There was a silence.
‘And didn't he bore my head off on the home passage!’ began Bunter again in a weary voice. ‘He loved me. He was proud of me. I was converted. I had had a manifestation. Do you know what he was after? He wanted me and him “to make a seance,” in his own words, and to try to call up that ghost (the one that had turned my hair white - the ghost of my supposed victim), and, as he said, talk it over with him - the ghost - in a friendly way.
‘“Or else, Burner,” he said, “you may get another manifestation when you least expect it, and tumble overboard perhaps, or something. You ain’t really safe till we pacify the spirit-world in some way.”
‘Can you conceive a lunatic like that? No - say?’
&n
bsp; I said nothing. But Mrs Bunter did, in a very decided tone. ‘Winston, I don’t want you to go on board that ship again any more.’
‘My dear,’ says he, ‘I have all my things on board yet.’
‘You don’t want the things. Don’t go near that ship at all.’
He stood still; then, dropping his eyes with a faint smile, said slowly, in a dreamy voice:
‘The haunted ship.’
‘And your last,’ I added.
We carried him off, as he stood, by the night train. He was very quiet; but crossing the Channel, as we two had a smoke on deck, he turned to me suddenly, and, grinding his teeth, whispered: ‘He’ll never know how near he was being dropped overboard! ’ He meant Captain Johns. I said nothing.
But Captain Johns, I understand, made a great to-do about the disappearance of his chief mate. He set the French police scouring the country for the body. In the end, I fancy he got word from his owners’ office to drop all this fuss - that it was all right. I don’t suppose he ever understood anything of that mysterious occurrence.
To this day he tries at times (he’s retired now, and his conversation is not very coherent) - he tries to tell the story of a black mate he once had, ‘a murderous, gentlemanly ruffian,’ with raven-black hair which turned white all at once in consequence of a manifestation from beyond the grave.’ An avenging apparition. What with reference to black and white hair, to poop-ladders, and to his own feelings and views, it is difficult to make head or tail of it. If his sister (she’s very vigorous still) should be present she cuts all this short — peremptorily: ‘Don’t you mind what he says. He’s got devils on the brain.’
A MATTER OF FACT
Rudyard Kipling
Sea monsters have been part of the lore of the sea for centuries, and though a great many sightings have subsequently been put down to figments of the imagination or just mistaken identification, there are others that have defied all explanation. For with so much that is mysterious about the sea, who could deny that creatures beyond the normal might not lurk beneath the grey-green waves? In the next story, ‘A Matter of Fact9, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) takes just such a premise as the basis for his curious tale.
Although Kipling will forever be associated with children's stories -the two Jungle Books (1894-5), Stalky and Co. (1899), the Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) - his mind often dwelt on the sea, and the discerning reader will find some of his very best work tucked away in collections such as The Seven Seas (1896) and individual stories like 'A Matter of Fact' which he wrote in 1893.
Kipling was bom in India, though he settled in England after travelling a great deal between the Far East, Britain and America. Much of this travel was by ship, and according to one Kipling expert it was on such a voyage that he had a bizarre experience very similar to the one described in this story. If that is so, it would seem to be a most aptly titled contribution.
And if ye doubt the tale I tell,
Steer through the South Pacific swell;
Go where the branching coral hives
Unending strife of endless lives,
Where, leagued about the 'wildered boat,
The rainbow jellies fill and float;
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, ’neath his myriad spines ashock,
The sea-egg ripples down the rock;
An orange wonder dimly guessed,
From darkness where the cuttles rest,
Moored o’er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost ships
Let down through darkness to their lips.
—The Palms
Once a priest, always a priest; once a mason, always a mason; but once a journalist, always and for ever a journalist.
There were three of us, all newspaper men, the only passengers on a little tramp steamer that ran where her owners told her to go. She had once been in the Bilbao iron ore business, had been lent to the Spanish Government for service at Manilla; and was ending her days in the Cape Town coolie-trade, with occasional trips to Madagascar and even as far as England. We found her going to Southampton in ballast, and shipped in her because the fares were nominal. There was Keller, of an American paper, on his way back to the States from palace executions in Madagascar; there was a burly half-Dutchman, called Zuyland, who owned and edited a paper up country near Johannesberg; and there was myself, who had solemnly put away all journalism, vowing to forget that I had ever known the difference between an imprint and a stereo advertisement.
Ten minutes after Keller spoke to me, as the Rathmines cleared Cape Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a certain fixed point. Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession needing no introduction. We annexed the boat formally, broke open the passengers’ bath-room door - on the Manilla lines the Dons do not wash - cleaned out the orange-peel and cigar-ends at the bottom of the bath, hired a Lascar to shave us throughout the voyage, and then asked each other’s names.
Three ordinary men would have quarrelled through sheer boredom before they reached Southampton. We, by virtue of our craft, were anything but ordinary men. A large percentage of the tales of the world, the thirty-nine that cannot be told to ladies and the one that can, are common property coming of a common stock. We told them all, as a matter of form, with all their local and specific variants which are surprising. Then came, in the intervals of steady card-play, more personal histories of adventure and things seen and suffered: panics among white folk when the blind terror ran from man to man on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the people crushed each other to death they knew not why; fires, and faces that opened and shut their mouths horribly at red-hot window frames; wrecks in frost and snow, reported from the sleet-sheathed rescue-tug at the risk of frostbite; long rides after diamond thieves; skirmishes on the veldt and in municipal committees with the Boers; glimpses of lazy tangled Cape politics and the mule-rule in the Transvaal; card-tales, horse-tales, woman-tales, by the score and the half hundred; till the first mate, who had seen more than us all put together, but lacked words to clothe his tales with, sat open mouthed far into the dawn.
When the tales were done we picked up cards till a curious hand or a chance remark made one or other of us say, That reminds me of a man who - or a business which - ’ and the anecdotes would continue while the Rathmines kicked her way northward through the warm water.
In the morning of one specially warm night we three were sitting immediately in front of the wheel-house, where an old Swedish boatswain whom we called ‘Frithiof the Dane’ was at the wheel, pretending that he could not hear our stories. Once or twice Frithiof spun the spokes curiously, and Keller lifted his head from a long chair to ask, ‘What is it? Can’t you get any steerage-way on her?’
There is a feel in the water,’ said Frithiof, ‘that I cannot understand. I think that we run downhills or somethings. She steers bad this morning.’
Nobody seems to know the laws that govern the pulses of the big waters. Sometimes even a landsman can tell that the solid ocean is atilt, and that the ship is working herself up a long unseen slope; and sometimes the captain says, when neither full steam nor fair wind justifies the length of a day’s run, that the ship is sagging downhill; but how these ups and downs come about has not yet been settled authoritatively.
‘No, it is a following sea,’ said Frithiof; ‘and with a following sea you shall not get good steerage-way.'’
The sea was as smooth as a duck-pond, except for a regular oily swell. As I looked over the side to see where it might be following us from, the sun rose in a perfectly clear sky and struck the water with its light so sharply that it seemed as though the sea should clang like a burnished gong. The wake of the screw and the little white streak cut by the
log-line hanging over the stem were the only marks on the water as far as eye could reach.
Keller rolled out of his chair and went aft to get a pine-apple from the ripening stock that was hung inside the after awning.
‘Frithiof, the log-line has got tired of swimming. It’s coming home,’ he drawled.
‘What?’ said Frithiof, his voice jumping several octaves.
‘Coming home,’ Keller repeated leaning over the stern. I ran to his side and saw the log-line, which till then had been drawn tense over the stern railing, slacken, loop, and come up off the port quarter. Frithiof called up the speaking-tube to the bridge, and the bridge answered, ‘Yes, nine knots.’ Then Frithiof spoke again, and the answer was, ‘What do you want of the skipper?’ and Frithiof bellowed, ‘Call him up.’
By this time Zuyland, Keller, and myself had caught something of Frithiof’s excitement, for any emotion on shipboard is most contagious. The captain ran out of his cabin, spoke to Frithiof, looked at the log-line, jumped on the bridge, and in a minute we felt the steamer swing round as Frithiof turned her.
‘’Going back to Cape Town?’ said Keller.
Frithiof did not answer, but tore away at the wheel. Then he beckoned us three to help, and we held the wheel down till the Rathmines answered it and we found ourselves looking into the white of our own wake, with the still oily sea tearing past our bows, though we were not going more than half steam ahead.
The captain stretched out his arm from the bridge and shouted. A minute later I would have given a great deal to have shouted too, for one-half of the sea seemed to shoulder itself above the other half, and came on in the shape of a hill. There was neither crest, comb, nor curl-over to it; nothing but black water with little waves chasing each other about the flanks. I saw it stream past and on a level with the Rathmines’ bow-plates before the steamer hove up her bulk to rise, and I argued that this would be the last of all earthly voyages for me. Then we lifted for ever and ever and ever, till I heard Keller saying in my ear, ‘The bowels of the deep, good Lord!* and the Rathmines stood poised, her screw racing and drumming on the slope of a hollow that stretched downwards for a good half-mile.
Mysterious Sea Stories Page 16