Complete Works of William Hope Hodgson

by Hodgson, William Hope

  “That got ye! I’ll teach ye, ye damned thieves — I’ll—”

  But what further lesson Mr. Buck Kessel wished to instill, was not told; for both Monkton and Cargunka emptied their guns at the sound of his voice, firing low, so as to avoid killing him, if possible.

  There came an ugly scream from out of the night, and then an absolute silence, broken presently by the sound of a paddle out in the darkness. There was a further space of silence, and then again the splash of a paddle, but further away.

  “He ain’t hit bad!” said Cargunka; “but I guess he’s bad enough. He’s off! Now, out oars, my lad, and maybe we’ll pick the ship up before yon other chap comes foolin’ round.”

  They pulled out into the open sea for ten minutes; and were getting well away from the shore, when suddenly Cargunka threw a low word or two over his shoulder: —

  “We’re bein’ stalked, my lad,” he said. “Watch the little twiddles of phosphor-light astern there in the water. That chap can use a paddle pretty good. He ain’t making no noise — not as much as you would if you winked, my lad. I reckon that’s the other canoe.”

  “There’s the ship, away yon,” said Monkton. “Maybe, if we tried, we could rush yon guy before he guessed we was wise to him. Then I reck’n we could fill him bang up to his back teeth with lead; an’ we’d be right then to make our getaway, an’ no one to know where we’d gone.”

  “Pull, my lad,” said Cargunka. “I’ll fix him in a bit.”

  He stood up and slipped off his coat.

  “Now, my lad,” he said, “take the two oars an’ keep on pullin’; but don’t sweat yourself, an’ when you ‘ear me whistle, come back for me.”

  He reached behind him, as he spoke, and pulled out his belt-knife. Then, with this in his hand, he caught the stern of the dingy and lowered himself, without a word further, into the sea.

  “Well, what’d you think of that!” muttered the big miner. But he obeyed orders, listening intently, and staring hard at the faint whirling of the phosphorescence in the water, some twenty fathoms astern, where the unseen paddle plied silently in the almost complete blackness. And somewhere, as Monkton guessed, between the canoe and the boat, Cargunka trod water quietly, and waited, knife in hand.

  Less than a minute later, there was a sudden yell, astern, and then a loud splash. And still Monkton pulled on, stolidly.

  A minute passed, during which odd sounds came to him, vague splashings, and once a desperate gasping; and finally there was only a very complete silence; broken presently by the slight sounds of someone swimming.

  Then a whistle.

  Monkton put the boat round, instantly, with savage strokes, and pulled back.

  “Way ‘nough!” said Cargunka’s voice, softly, out of the darkness ahead. Then, in a minute, Cargunka was climbing aboard, dripping prodigiously.

  “Did ye knife him?” asked Monkton, as Cargunka took his oar again, and bent his back once more to pulling.

  “Not me, my lad,” said Cargunka. “I ain’t built blood-thirsty, like you. I capsized the canoe. We ‘ad a bit of a scrap in the water, an’ then I cut a tidy lump out of her side. He’ll be too busy wiv this an’ that to do any more stalkin’ this night, I’m thinkin’.”

  For the first time since Cargunka had known him, the big miner laughed.

  “Je-hosh!” he said. “I’d sure have liked to see the boob get his head wet.”

  Half an hour later, they were safely aboard the brig.

  Chapter VIII

  The following day, as usual, Cargunka took up his duties as cook. But that evening, as was his custom, he went aft, in the second dog watch, to enjoy the coolness of the weather side of the poop, and the comfort of Captain Gell’s deck-chair.

  “You know, Cap’n,” he might have been heard explaining presently, “I’ve often thought as this dot-and-carry-one leg of mine was give to me as kind of a set-off against me other gifts. I dare bet that was ‘ow it was wiv Byron. Think what he might have been, if the Almighty hadn’t put the break on him, as you might say. An’ even then, the ladies worshipped him. Look at me, too, Cap’n; you mightn’t think it to look at me—”

  “No, Sir,” said Captain Gell, firmly, for the second time in this story… “What was all them lights ashore last night, Sir?” he added.

  “Them,” said Cargunka, still turning over in his mind how to convince the Captain of his perpetual error of opinion, without having to descend to crude self-flattery; “them, oh, I guess them was a torch-light procession as they was havin’ ashore yon…. It was a s’prisin’ pretty sight, Cap’n.”

  There was a little touch of vicious pleasure in his voice, at the look of silent unbelief in Captain Gell’s eyes.

  “You’re an obstinate old Jew, Cap’n,” he said, and sighed a little…. “Sing out for Monkton to come aft to me in my cabin.”

  And there, some minutes later, Cargunka shared out the gold, in the proportion of “half to you” and “half to me.”

  “Did you ever hear of Byron, the poet?” he asked in an earnest voice, as he concluded the division.

  “Sure, he’s the poetry guy, D.C.O.,” said the big miner. “Didn’t you tell me about him yourself?”

  THE BELLS OF THE “LAUGHING SALLY”

  “Ah!” said Cargunka to his reflection in the broken looking-glass under his office desk, “cleanliness may be next to Godliness; but I reckon good cooking is Godliness…. Leastaways, there’s precious little Godliness in a man wiv indisgestion!”

  He was sitting on a tea-chest in his office at the back of the dirty but important marine stores which fill half one side of Gallows Lane, in the town of Appledaulf, on the South coast. The marine stores belonged to him, as did the Red Lyon, public-house, next door.

  He sat on the tea-chest at this particular hour every morning, and peeled potatoes; for cooking was his hobby, almost his passion. The tea-chest had been hacked down to make a low seat, and he chose it, because — as he said — it “gave to his bones”; also, though of this he said nothing, the height of it brought his face below the level of his office desk, where reposed the broken mirror that I have already mentioned, and in which, from time to time, he looked at himself with infinite satisfaction, pushing back his hair from over his shaven temples, and taking great care not to damp the hair with his wet hand; for the curls were not Nature’s, but the curls of Hinde’s curlers, which he wore secretly every night.

  He finished peeling the last of his potatoes, and wiped his hands thoroughly on his apron. Then, he closed and pocketed the diminutive copy of Byron’s Poems which had been propped up on the chair, at the back of the basin into which he had put the peeled potatoes. He turned to a phonograph, which stood on the top of a Tate’s sugar box, and changed the wax cylinder. He wound the machine leisurely, and set it going. It was a new record, and he listened expectantly. There came a short prelude on a piano, and there burst out a splendid, rich contralto, so fine and good, that even the whir of the machine failed completely to destroy its essential humanity, which marked its quality.

  Cargunka leaned back contentedly.

  “My word!” he said; “that’s good! That’s fine!”

  “Eight bells!

  And the Laughing Sally sailed away,

  And the sound of the bells came back to me

  Across the sea

  Across the sea

  The sound of the bells came back to me

  As the Laughing Sally sailed that day

  Away and away with thee,

  My Man,

  Away with thee.”

  The deep contralto silenced, and there came the brief tinkle of the piano, as the phonograph ground away.

  “That’s sure the song they made up about old Cap’n Barstow’s ship,” muttered Cargunka, reflectively. “She never come back, an’ that’s three year, last Christmas as ever was… as ever was! Aye, they sure sail away. Like as I shall do someday, maybe…. They do say as he carried a sight of brass wiv him…. He never would trust no banks; I do k
now that….”

  The voice broke out again: —

  “And I stood on the shore and cried to thee

  That day Love sailed away from me….”

  And so to the end of the second stanza, which found Cargunka furtively rubbing one eye in sentimental fashion, with the corner of his dirty apron.

  “Aye!” he said, “an’ the bells of the Laughin’ Sally ring across the sea… I guess that’s how it’ll be wiv me.”

  He pulled out a notebook, and jotted down the rhyme; then blew his nose. He was thinking of the two brigs that he owned, and of the periodic trips he made in them, between Appledaulf and far off San Francisco, where he owned the Dot-And-Carry-One Saloon, on the Water Front. Someday, he felt, there would be a song about one of his ships, when she went missing. As he conned over possible rhymes, the phonograph gave out the beginning of the third stanza: —

  “The Laughing Sally sailed away

  Into the Evermore that day,

  And the sound of her bells came back to me

  Across the deep in the evening grey….”

  Cargunka wiped his eyes soberly, and made shift to jot down two fresh rhymes that had just occurred to him.

  “My word!” he muttered; “that’s first chop! That’s mag-ni-ficent: —

  “The Happy Return, she sailed away

  And her bell ting-tinged the livelong day….”

  he wrote down, labouriously. He was obviously thinking of one of his own brigs.

  The phonograph began the fourth stanza of the “Fate of the Laughing Sally,” and Cargunka lay back to enjoy it, with his eyes closed. He was interrupted in his æsthetic pleasures in an almost incomprehensible fashion; for Jensag, his quietly superior barman, ordinarily intensely silent and grave, had dashed suddenly in through the doorway that opened out of the back of the bar into Cargunka’s office.

  “Stop it!” shouted Jensag, in a voice of extraordinary energy. “Stop it!”

  “And the bells of the Laughing Sally ring,

  And die away forever….”

  sang the phonograph.

  “Stop it!” roared Jensag. “Stop it!” He barged crashing over the bucket of dirty water and peelings; then rose and kicked the bucket across the office. “Stop it!” he shouted, once more.

  Cargunka rose to his full height of five feet, two, and turned upon the big, clean-shaven, white-faced, strangely tensed-up barman.

  “Get — out — of — here!” he said, slowly; gritting out the words at spaced intervals.

  “And the bells grow faint and lost,”

  sang the phonograph.

  “Stop it!” roared Jensag. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Get out!” said Cargunka, still in a slow voice.

  “I’ll stop it myself!” said the bartender, in a voice that was suddenly quiet and quivering with an extraordinary, fierce suppression.

  He made one swift step towards the machine, swung up a quick foot, and the phonograph flew across the office, wailing the one word:— “Bells,” and fell with a crash into a ruin of broken woodwork, tin and disrupted clockwork.

  “My Oath!” said Cargunka, still in that slow, quiet voice. “My old man used ter reckon we was a saved family an’ he brought us up peaceful; but he always said as the Lord had no sort of use for worms….” He began to take off his coat, with a curious cheerful look shining in the back of his well-shaped, dark blue eyes.

  He stepped past the still quivering barman, and thrust his head through the open doorway into the back of the bar.

  “M’ria!” he shouted, “come an’ take the bar!”

  Then he walked back into his office, closed the door quietly after him, and spoke to the big bartender: —

  “Come along out into the big room, my lad,” he said, “an’ take your coat off. You can come in wiv the explanations after.”

  The bartender said something in a queer voice, that might have been a protest; then, as if realising the futility of anything that he might say, at this tense stage of affairs, he took off his coat, and followed the halting, “dot-and-carry” step of his master.

  In the big room, Cargunka wheeled round smartly: —

  “Put your hands up, my lad,” he said, quietly. “We’ll see if you’s as good at fightin’ as you is at bustin’ up good property.”

  The big barman, at this point, made an ineffectual effort to say something; but Cargunka headed him off. “Fight!” he said. “Talk afterwards! My Oath! I’ve not had a do for a month of Sundays!”

  Then they fought.

  * * *

  “I’m never friends to no man!” said Cargunka, five minutes later, as he pillowed the big barman’s head in the crook of his arm, and poured some very good brandy down his throat; “not till I’ve knocked the ‘ell out of ‘im.”

  He thrust one long, enormously muscular arm under the big man’s thighs, and lifted him easily to an old cabin settee, that stood against one wall of the big room.

  Chapter II

  “Now, my lad, we’ll talk,” said Cargunka, when the big barman came round from his knock-out. “What was wiv you, to come into my office like you did, bustin’ up things? You just talk to me as if I was your old man. I guess a bit of it, an’ you needn’t fear to tell it all straight out. Was it the lady in the phonygraft, or was she singin’ your donah’s song, that’s dead an’ gone this while back?”

  With further persuasion, of a rough but kindly sort, the big barman told the whole brief tale.

  “That was Stella Bavanga singing,” he said, in a strange voice. “That was her stage name. ‘The Fate of the Laughing Sally’ was her big song. It was written five years ago, when the four-masted schooner, Laughing Sally, was given up for lost. About a year and a half later, Stella got a fit of bad health, and the doctor said she’d have to go a sea voyage. She went for a trip in a barque of the same name as the schooner that was lost. A man named Barstow was the Captain; a queer sort of man. I hated her to go. Yes, I was the husband of Stella Bavangal and I was superstitious about the name… after the song, you know. My God! I heard the bell ring, as she went down the river. You know the rest; she never came back; and I lost all interest in life. I’ve come down now to bartending! She made that record. She did a lot of that work….”

  Dot-and-Carry-One Cargunka’s eyes shone, as the sympathy and sentiment rose in him: —

  “My Oath!” he muttered, gently. “My Oath! I’m glad you broke the bloomin’ phonygraft! I’d a broke the old bloomin’ shop up, if I’d been in your cloes!”

  Chapter III

  “Strike me pink!” said a burly-looking man to D.C.O. Cargunka, some weeks later. “I tell youse, old Dot-an’-Carry, I made no blame error. It was the barque herself. I recernised ‘er by the skullwork round the ‘house. We blew past, not twenty fathoms outside the reef. I thought we’d sure have our bottom scratched right off’n us, I did that, we was that close in. She was right in over the reef; close up agin the cliff face, as snug as a wop in a rug. However she come there, the Lord, He knows, I don’t.

  “No one else recernised ‘er, but me; an’ I kep’ it to tell you. I knowed you’d play fair, an’ give me the worf of the news, or a share; I don’t mind so which way it comes to me. Ole Barstow carried his brass wiv him, an’ there should be a pile; he didn’t trust no banks; same’s he didn’t trust no wimmin. I’ve heard him say so many a time, when I sailed wiv him. Once, when it was blame calm, I heard money chinkin’ down below, an’ I went an’ peeped down the cabin skylight; and there was the Ole Man wiv it in a bucket. Strike me! but I’m speakin’ trewth. The ole devil had it in a wooden poop-bucket, all sovrins, an’ he was runnin’ ‘is hands through it, like as you might run your fists through a bucket of peas. I guess he was just dotty on that oof of his. An’ it’ll be in her right this moment, if no blame thief han’t got to her first; an’ I doubt they’d find the cash; for she was middlin’ up to her rails; so I guess she’s full up wiv sea-water, an’ you’ll need to take a pump an’ a divin’ outfit. Now then, ole Do
t-an’-Carry, what’s it going to be?”

  “Where’s the island?” asked Dot-and-Carry-One Cargunka. “Give it a name, my lad.”

  “Not much, old D.C.O.! Not much! You fix up what it’s worf to me first!” said the man.

  “A quarter of all we get,” said Cargunka, after thinking a minute. “That’s if I decide to ‘ave a go at it.”

  “ ‘Arf!” said the man. “Make it ‘arf, D.C.O.?”

  “No,” said Cargunka. “You’ll get your quarter clear. I’ve got to stan’ all the expense. Turn up the name, or I’ll drop out!”

  “It’s yon Three Finger Island, out to the West of the Vardee Islands,” said the man. “You sign me on as the bo’sun, Dot-an’-Carry. They told me down to the wharf, as you was takin’ a run out to ‘Frisco, ‘s soon as the Happy Return was ready. She ain’t no bo’sun; an’ it won’t be much off our course to run in to them Vardee Islands, an’ lift the stuff. There should be a matter of thousands, by my reckoning.”

  And so it was settled.

  Chapter IV

  Cargunka stood on the lee side of the poop of the Happy Return, and stared away to leeward. They were a hundred and four days out from England, and had sighted Three Finger Island at daybreak.

  Through the telescope, Cargunka could now see the wreck of the Laughing Sally, inside the reef of the island, and close in-shore. She was almost submerged; yet Cargunka had recognised her at once, by a number of details, one of which was the quaint, white-painted skull-beading round the top of her poop-deck house.

  Suddenly, D.C.O. Cargunka walked away aft, and knocked three times on the deck with his heel. Immediately, as though he had been waiting only for the signal, there sprang up through the after scuttle, Jensag, Cargunka’s one-time barman at the Red Lyon. Cargunka had brought him with him on this trip, for the man had heard something of the truth from Durrit, the one who had brought the news; and he had begged so hard to be allowed to come, that Cargunka had at last signed him on as steward; felling that it might be kinder for the poor fellow to realise, by an actual sight of the wreck, that it was utterly useless to begin hoping any vague hopes concerning his long-dead wife.