We ran in this state all the morning, our men silent and brooding; Black smoked cigar after cigar with a dogged assumption of indifference; the German came to us often with his desperate gestures and his woe-begone face. It was well on in the afternoon before the position changed in any way, and I had gone down with the Captain to the lower saloon to make the pretence of lunching. There we sat—”Four-Eyes” with us—a miserable trio, cracking jokes, and expressing desperate hopes; sending up the black every other moment to learn how the ironclad lay, and much comforted when at the fifth coming he said—
“You gain, sar, plenty sar; you run right away, sar.”
“We do?” cried Black, who jumped from his seat and ran up the companion-way to confirm the tale, and he shouted down to us, “Crack another bottle, if it’s the last, and give it to the black; we’re leaving them!”
His elation was contagious. “Four-Eyes” awoke from his lethargy, and drank a pint of the wine at a draught. The black put out a glass with a satisfied leer. The Captain took a bottle and laid his hand on the cork. But there it stayed, for at that moment there came a horrible sound of grating and tearing from the engine-room, and it was succeeded by a moment of dead and chilling silence.
“The second engine’s gone,” said a man above, quite calmly, and we knew the worst, and went on deck again.
We found the crew sullen and muttering, but Friedrich, the engineer’s eldest son, sat at the top of the engine-room ladder, and tears rolled down his face. The great ship still trembled under the shock of the breakdown and was not showing ten knots. The foremost ironclad crept up minute by minute; and before we had realised the whole extent of the mishap, she was within gunshot of us; but her colleagues were some miles away, she outpacing them all through it.
“Bedad, she signals to us to let her come aboard,” said “Four-Eyes,” who watched her intently.
“Answer that we’ll see her in chips first,” said Black, and he called for Karl and made signs to him.
“If so be as ye don’t come to, he’ll be about to fire upon ye,” cried “Four-Eyes,” again, who stood at the flag-line, and this time Black thought before he answered—
“Then parley with ’em; we’ll come alongside and hear their jaw.”
There was a leer of positive devilry on his face as he said this, and he beckoned me into the conning-tower, when he closed the tower and bade me watch. Those on the battle-ship made quite sure of us now, for they steamed on and came within three hundred yards of us. Black watched them as a beast watches the unsuspecting prey. He stood, his face knit in savage lines, his hand upon the bell. I looked from the glass, and saw that no man was visible upon our decks, that our engines had ceased to move. We were motionless. Then in a second the bells rang out. There was again that frightful grating and tearing in the engine-room. The nameless ship came round to her helm with a mighty sweep: she foamed and plunged in the seas; she turned her ram straight at the other; and, groaning as a great stricken wounded beast, she roared onward to the voyage of death. I knew then the fearful truth: Black meant to sink the cruiser with his ram. I shall never forget that moment of terror, that grinding of heated steel, that plunge into the seas. Holding with all my strength to the seat of the tower, I waited for the crash, and in the suspense hours seemed to pass. At last, there was under the sea a mighty clap as of submarine thunder. Dashed headlong from my post, I lay bruised and wounded upon the floor of steel. The roof above me rocked; the walls shook and were bent; my ears rang with the deafening roar in them; seas of foam mounted before the glass; shrieks and the sound of awful rending and tearing drowned other shouts of men going to their death. And through all was the hysterical yelling of Black, his cursing, his defiance, his elation.
“Come and see,” he roared, dragging me by the collar to the gallery; “come and see. They sink, the lubbers! They go to blazes every one of them. Look at their faces, the crawling scum. Ha! ha! Die, you vermin! as you meant me to die; fill your skins with water, you sharks! I spit on you! Boys, do you hear them crying to you? Music, fine music! Who’ll dance when the devil plays? Dance, you lazy blacklegs; dance on nothing! Ha, ha!”
No man has ever looked on a more awful sight. We had struck the battleship low amidships—we had crashed through the thinnest coat of her steel. She had heeled right over from the shock, so that the guns had cast free from the carriages, and the sea had filled her. Thus for one terrible minute she lay, her men crowding upon her starboard side, or jumping into the sea, or making desperate attempts to get her boats free; and then, with a heavy lurch, she rolled beneath the waves; and there were left but thirty or forty struggling souls, who battled for their lives with the great rollers of the Atlantic. Of these a few reached the side of our ship and were shot there as they clung to the ladder; a few swam strongly in the desperate hope that the brutes about me would relent, and sank at last with piercing and piteous cries upon their lips; others died quickly, calling upon God as they went to their rest.
For ourselves we lay, our bows split with the shock, our engine-room in fearful disorder, our men drunk with ferocity and with despair. The other warships were yet some distance away; but they opened fire upon us at hazard, and, of the first three shells which fell, two cut our decks; and sent clouds of splinters, of wood, and of human flesh flying in the smoke-laden air. At the fifth shot, a gigantic crash resounded from below, and the stokers rushed above with the news that the fore stoke-hold had three feet of water in it. The hands received the news with a deep groan; then with curses and recriminations. They bellowed like bulls at Black; they refused all orders. He shot down man after man, while I crouched for safety in the tower; and they became but fiercer. Our end was evidently near; and, knowing this, they fell upon the liquor, and were worse than fiends. Anon they turned upon the captain and myself, and fired volleys upon the conning-tower; or, in their terrible frenzy, they pitched themselves into the sea, or raved with drunken songs, and vented their vengeance upon the Irishman, “Four-Eyes,” chasing him wildly, and stabbing him with many cuts, so that he dropped dying at our door, with no more reproach than the simple words—
“God help me! but had I died in me own counthry I would have known more pace.”
Through all this our one engine worked; and so slowly did the great ironclad draw upon us that the end of it all came before they could reach us. Suddenly the men rushed to the boats and cast them loose. Fighting with the dash of madmen, they crowded the launch, they swarmed the jolly-boat and the life-boat. Even the engineer’s son felt the touch of contagion, and joined the mêlée. We watched their insane efforts as boat after boat put away and was swamped, leaving the devilish men to drown as the worthier fellows had drowned before them; and amongst the last to die was “Dick the Ranter,” who went down with blasphemies gurgling upon his lips. When six o’clock came, Black and Karl and myself were alone upon the great ship; and in the stillness which followed there came another weird and wild and soul-stirring shriek—the cry of the dumb engineer, who found speech in the great catastrophe. Then Black pulled me by the arm and said—
“Boy, they’ve left nothing but the dinghy. The old ship’s done; and it’s time you left her.”
“And you?” I asked.
He looked at me and at Karl. He had meant to die with the ship, I knew; but the old magnetism of my presence held him again in that hour. He followed me slowly, as one in a dream, to the davits aft, and freed the last of the boats, overlooked by the hands in their frenzy and their panic. Then he went to his cabin, and to the rooms below; and I helped him to put a couple of kegs of water in the frail craft, with some biscuit, which we lashed, and a case of wine which he insisted on.
The preparation cost us half-an-hour of time, and when all was ready, the captain went to the engine-room and brought Karl to the top of the ladder; but there the German stayed, nor did threats or entreaties move him.
“He’ll die with the ship,” said Black, “and I don’t know that he isn’t wise;” but he held out his hand
to the genius of his crime, and after a great grip the two men parted.
For ourselves, we stepped on the frailest craft with which men ever faced the Atlantic, and at that moment the first of the ironclads fired another shell at the nameless ship. It was a crashing shot, but it had come too late to serve justice, or to wreck the ship of mystery; for Karl had let the hydrogen into the cylinders unchecked, and with a mighty rush of flame, and a terrific explosion, the craft of gold gave her “Vale!” And in a cascade of fire, lighting the sea for many miles, and making as day the newly-fallen night, the golden citadel hissed over the water for one moment, then plunged headlong, and was no more.
A fierce fire it was, lighting sea and sky—a mighty holocaust; the roar of a great conflagration; the end of a monstrous dream. And I thought of another fire and another face—the face of Martin Hall, who had seen the finger of Almighty God in his mission; and I said, “His work is done!”
But Black, clinging to the dinghy, wept as a man stricken with a great grief, and he cried so that the coldest heart might have been moved—
“My ship, my ship! Oh God, my ship!”
CHAPTER XXVI.
A PAGE IN BLACK’S LIFE.
I know not whether it was the amazing spectacle of the nameless ship’s end, or the sudden coming down of night, that kept attention from our boat when the great vessel had sunk; but those on the ironclads, which were at least two miles from us when we put off, seemed to be unaware that any boat from the ship lived; and, although they steamed for some hours in our vicinity, they saw nothing of us as we lay in the plunging dinghy. When night fell, and with it what breeze that had been blowing, we lost sight of them altogether, and knew for the first time the whole terror of the situation. Black had indeed recovered much of his old calm, and drank long draughts of champagne; but he sat silent, and uttered no word for many hours after the end of that citadel which had given him such great power. As for the little boat, it was a puny protection against the sweeping rollers of the Atlantic, and I doubt not that we had been drowned that very night if a storm of any moment had broken upon us.
About midnight a thunderstorm got up from the south, and the sea, rising somewhat with it, wetted us to the skin. The lightning, terribly vivid and incessant, lighted up the whole sea again and again, showing each the other’s face, the face of a worn and fatigue-stricken man. And the rain and the sea beat on us until we shivered, cowering, and were numbed; our hands stiffened with the salt upon them, so that we could scarce get the warming liquor to our lips. Yet Black held to his silence, moaning at rare intervals as he had moaned when the great ship sank. It was not until the sun rose over the long swell that we slept for an hour or more; and after sleep we were both calmer, looking for ships with much expectation, and that longing which the derelict only may know. The Captain was then very quiet, and he gazed often at me with the expression I had seen on his face when he saved me from his men.
“Boy,” he said, “look well at the sun, lest you never look at it again.”
“I am looking,” I replied; “it is life to me.”
“If,” he continued, very thoughtful, “you, who have years with you, should live when I go under, you’ll take this belt I’m wearing off me; it’ll help you ashore. If it happen that I live with you, it’ll help both of us.”
“We’re in the track of steamers,” said I; “there’s no reason to look at it that way yet. Please God, we’ll be seen.”
“That’s your way, and the right one,” he answered; “but I’m not a man like that, and my heart’s gone with my ship: we shall never see her like again.”
“You built her?” I said questioningly.
“Yes,” he responded. “I built her when I put my hand against the world, and, if it happened to me to go through it again, I’d do the same.”
“What did you go through?” I asked, as he passed me the biscuits and the cup with liquor in it, and as he sat up in the raft I saw that the man had death written on his face.
But at that time he told me nothing in answer to my question; and sat for many hours motionless, his glassy eyes fixed upon the bottom of the boat. In the afternoon, however, he suddenly sat up, and took up his thread as if he had broken it but a minute before.
“I went through much,” said he, gazing over the mirror-like surface of the trackless water-desert, “as boy and man. I lived a life which was hell; God knows it.”
I did not press him to tell me more, for in truth I shivered so and was so numbed that even my curiosity to know of this life of crime and of mystery was not so paramount as to banish that other thought: Shall we live when the sun sinks this night? But he found relief in his talk, and, as the liquor warmed him, he continued faster than before—
“I was a stepson, boy; bound to a brute with not as much conscience as a big dog, and no more human nature in him than a wild bull. My mother died three months after he took her, and I’m not going to speak about her, God help me; but if I had the man under my hands that treated her so, I’d crush his skull like I crush this biscuit. Well, that ain’t my tale; you ask me what I went through, and I’m trying to tell you. Have you ever wanted a meal? No, I reckon not; and you can’t get it in your mind to know what living on bones and bits for more than a couple of years means, can you, as I lived down in my home at Glasgow, and often since out West and at Colorado? I’d come out from Scotland as a bit of a lad not turned thirteen, and I sailed aboard the Savannah City to Montreal, and then to Rio, and in Japan waters; and for three years, until I deserted at ’Frisco, no devilry that human fiends could think of was unknown to me. But they made a sailor of me; and full-rigged ship or steamer I’d navigate with the best of ’em. After that, I went aboard a brig plying between ’Frisco and Yokohama, and there I picked up much, leaving her after two years to get across to Europe, and do the ocean trade with the Jackson line between Southampton and Buenos Ayres. It was in that city I met my wife. I married her in Mendoza; for she came of rich folk, who spat on me, and was only a bit of a girl who’d never wanted a comfort on this earth until that time, and who starved with me then and for years. My God! my whole body burns when I think of it—that bit of a creature who’d never known the lack of a gratification and who was dragged down to every degradation by my curse.”
I looked at him in surprise, and he answered me instinctively.
“Yes, by my curse. Maybe you don’t know what it was, for I’ve held it under a bit since she died, but I was a drunkard then—a maniac when I had the liquor on me, a devil from whom all men fled. Not that there isn’t work for any man in that country—work, and well paid—but I had the fever on me, and—well, we sank very low. How I lived I can’t tell you; but after a couple of years of it I worked a passage to New York, and there my son was born. When he grew up he was the very image of you. That’s why I gave you your life when you came on my ship.”
The words were spoken in that gentle voice he could command sometimes, and, as he uttered them, he took my hand and gave it a great grip. I understood then that curious look he had given me at our first meeting; his partisanship for me against the men; and that last great risk which had brought the end of it all, if it had not brought death to both of us. Somewhere down in that human well of crime and ferocity there was a spring of purer water. I had set it free when I brought old memories to him, and I owed it to him that amazing chance that I lived through the frenzies of Ice-haven.
“Yes,” said Black, observing my surprise, and passing me the liquor which he compelled me to drink; “my boy was your height, and your build, and he had your eyes. What’s more, he had your grit, and there was no cooler hand living. Not that he owed much to me, for I was mad drunk half his life; and, when sober, I lived as often as not in prison for what I had done in liquor. It was when he was nearly twenty that the change came; for he began to bring home money, do you see? and what with his work and the way he talked to me, I set myself to get the craving under; and I was a new man in one year, and in two my brain came back to me, an
d I made the discovery that I was not born a fool. You may reckon I worshipped the lad! God knows, he and his mother did for me more than man or woman ever did for a breathing body. And when my wits came back to me, and I thought what I might have done, and what I had done, and that my boy had borne it all only to drag me to my reason at last, I could have ended it there and then. Maybe I should have done it if a new turn hadn’t come in my life’s road. It was when I was at my lowest, and we were sore put to it to get food in New York, that I was taken up by a man who was going to Michigan seeking copper. My lad was then working with a Mike Leveston in the city—a land-agent for the up-country work, and the owner of a line of small brigs running between Boston and the Bahamas; but times had gone bad with him, and the boy, who had been getting good money, found himself with no more than enough to keep him, let alone his mother. Well, I thought the thing out, and, as my partner had some capital and agreed to let me have ten dollars a week any way, I made an agreement with Leveston that he should allow the wife and the boy enough to live on for six months, and I set out for the State where the copper find was beginning to attract notice, and in a year I was a made man. We found the ore as thick as clay, and, under the excitement of it, I kept my head, and the drink craze never touched me. When the money came in, I made Leveston my New York agent, and sent him enough to set up the woman who’d stood by me all through in more luxury than she’d known since she married me. For awhile her letters told me of her new life, and I kept them under my shirt as I would have kept leaves of gold. In the spring, I sent the agent twenty thousand dollars for her; and I got his acknowledgment, saying she’d gone down to Charleston to see about the boy’s work there, and I should hear from her on her return.
The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales Page 238