“Captain,” said Miss Jenny, when the breathless, but triumphant, skipper returned to the poop, putting on his coat. “Captain, will you shake hands. That man deserved it.” She held out her hand, and the skipper, a delighted conquering hero, grasped it, and shook warmly.
“I was afraid, Miss Jenny,” he said, “you’d think I’d been a bit hard. But he needed it. I’ve had to speak to him before,” he added virtuously.
“He certainly needed it,” said Miss Jenny. “I’m sure you would never strike a defenceless boy.” Tommy was thinking of that bucket the skipper had thrown, besides odd and sundry kicks received in person. But the skipper replied manfully:
“Never, miss.” And, somehow the young lady pardoned him the lie without contempt. He had done her heart’s desire that day, and she could forgive much.
It was the following morning that Miss Jenny learned the fate of Tommy, and returned from the ’prentices berth to the poop to play mourner to her own death. “What a dreadful thing, captain,” she said. “And I believe the poor boy was driven to it by the brutality of the third mate. I can never sit at table again with that man. I shall always feel he is a murderer!”
And the skipper was sufficiently alarmed at this view of the matter, and his own possible responsibility in the case, not to remove any of the latter from the shoulders of the third mate; but made that much-hammered young man sit down later to his meals alone. Thus did Tommy go forward along the path of virtue, leaving vengeance unto those best able to dispense it.
In the meantime, he shifted his attention to considering the case of the bo’sun, who had been somewhat over-attentive in the days of Tommy’s ’prenticeship.
Incidentally, while he was turning this matter over in his brain, he improved the condition of the ’prentices’ berth by insisting on having his tea there every evening with the watch below, to which the reluctant captain found himself forced to give consent, and to add, privately, unusual dietary luxuries to the normal bill of fare of the glory hole, so that he should not fail to stand well with his young enchanter; Certainly the skipper was not coming off scot-free in the scheme of retribution which Master Tommy Dodd had introduced. As for the steward, he groaned in his soul, or his apology for that article, for in verity the boys in the ’prentices’ berth were living almost as well as the cabin. Truly, Tommy Dodd was a great man!
One day, whilst Tommy and the skipper were pacing the poop together, the latter waxed paternal. Tommy had been speaking of the ’prentices—a common topic of his— for, when not with the captain, Miss Jenny was sure to be found in the ’prentices’ berth.
“You mustn’t let them boys be too free with you, Miss Jenny,” said the captain.
“No,” said Miss Jenny demurely.
“They’ve never—er—any of ’em tried to kiss you, or any nonsense o’ that sort?” asked the skipper, a little hesitatingly.
“Never!” said Miss Jenny emphatically, which was in every way true.
“You just tell me, Miss Jenny, if anyone ever bothers you. I’ll deal with ’em!” the captain assured her fervently. And Tommy thought he might venture to put the first spoke in the bo’sun’s wheel.
“I—I don’t like the bo’sun,” said Tommy, in a shy voice. “He looks rudely at me,” which was likely enough; for it is to be doubted whether the bo’sun had ever looked otherwise at any woman.
“I’ll settle him—quick!” said the captain, and began to walk towards the break of the poop. “The dirty scum! I beg pardon, miss; but the very idea!”
“No,” said Tommy simply, “don’t touch him, please; but I do wish you’d make him clean out that pigsty forrard. It smells horridly whenever I go past. I’ve told him once. I told him he ought to get inside and clean it properly himself, instead of making the boys. Don’t you think it’s a man’s work, captain? It needs such hard scrubbing, I should think. He was so rude when I told him.”
“Come along forrid with me, miss,” said the captain. “I’ll just have a look at that pigsty. I’ll learn him to so rude!”
The captain went forrard with the girl, and together they inspected the pigsty, Like most stys, it smelled on the “strong side”; but to the infatuated skipper this was sufficient. It smelled. He sent for the bo’sun, meaning to make the pigsty an excuse for letting off his wrath at the bo’sun because that man of tar and sin had dared even to look in the direction of his pretty companion.
“Get a bucket an’ broom, smart now,” said the skipper, harshly, when the man arrived. “Get some of the boys to fetch water along for you, an’ give that sty a proper clean out. It’s a disgrace to any ship, a foul, stinkin’ thing like this. Makes the young lady sick every time she passes it. An’ I don’t wonder!”
The bo’sun glared angrily at the girl, for whom already he had achieved a strong antipathy; but he obeyed the skipper, in silence, for the skipper was a “tough,” and notorious, at that, with his fists. When the water came, the man began to clean out the sty in the usual sailor-man fashion; that is, with buckets of salt water and a long-handled deck broom.
“Why don’t you go in, bo’sun, like you make the boys?” asked Miss Jenny, quietly.
“You stow it, miss,” said the bo’sun, nearly bursting. “You don’t understand ship work, you don’t!”
“Silence, you clod-foot” roared the skipper. “The lady’s right; you get inside, an’ do it on your hands and knees.”
The bo’sun straightened up, and Tommy, to his joy, perceived that there was going to be bad trouble. The skipper saw it in the same moment, else he had never earned his title as a bucko, and he hit the bo’sun hard and solid in the wind, then bundled him, limp and gasping, into the iron-barred sty. He shouted to a man to go aft to the steward for a padlock, and with this he secured the iron-barred door, which closed the only entrance to the sty.
“Now, my lad,” said the skipper, “I’ll learn you to be civil; you stays in there, ’long o’ the pigs, till you’ve scrubbed that sty out good on your hands and knees; an’ if you wants water, here’s water!” And he hove a dozen buckets of salt water over the cooped man.
And as Tommy went aft and ascended the poop ladder with the skipper, he heard the sounds of stifled mirth proceeding evidently from the ’prentices’ berth, and be knew that joy reigned in the glory hole, for all the ship was aware that the skipper had locked the bo’sun in the pigsty.
From now onward, so far, at least, as the ’prentices were concerned, the voyage was very pleasant, for Miss Jenny held the skipper religiously to his “paternal and benevolent” attitude towards his “young gentlemen,” whilst that same captain, though the father of a large family, grew daily more enamoured of his fair passenger. One morning, when the decks were being wet down, and Miss Jenny was paddling about gaily with bare feet in the cool water, the captain’s affections got the better of his discretion, for having gallantly offered to hold Miss Jenny’s shoes for her, whilst she sat and dried her feet, be so far forgot himself as to stoop quickly and kiss her “pretty toes,” as he termed them.
At once Miss Jenny was all dignity, and rose from the captain’s chair to display this new attribute to full advantage, being the better able to act with feeling because of the snigger from the man at the wheel that had followed the skipper’s act.
“I’m ashamed of you, captain!” said Miss Jenny, with superb simpleness, and, taking her shoes from his now limp hand, she descended to the cabin.
“I’d said I’d make him,” said Tommy, righteously to himself, as he entered his cabin. “And I guess I’m square all round now.”
It was on the day that the “Lady Hannibal” entered London docks that Miss Jenny took the captain on one side, as it were, and made known the plain, unvarnished truth.
“I’d not have told you at all, captain,” she said, “for you’ve really been a brick, the way you hammered the third and the bo’sun, but I couldn’t have you writing home to my people that I was drowned; besides there might be other complications. All the same, if you lik
e to shake hands, and be friends, I’ll not tell a soul, then no one can laugh at you. But I guess I got level with you all.”
And the skipper, dumb with emotion of a strong and varied kind, shook hands, speechlessly, with this pretty girl, who assured him that she was Tommy Dodd, his youngest ’prentice.
“The other fellows will see about my chest, sir,” said Tommy, “and I’ll change into my ordinary togs ashore; then no one here’ll know.”
The skipper nodded, still silent; and Tommy went up out of the cabin.
“Lord!” muttered the skipper, maybe half an hour later. “Good Lord!” He scratched his rough head. “An’ I kissed his blessed feet!”
The Sea Horses
“An’ we’s under the sea, b’ys,
Where the wild Horses go,
Horses wiv tails
As big as ole whales
All jiggin’ around in a row,
An’ when you ses Whoa!
Them divvels does go!”
1
How was it you catched me one, Granfer?” asked Nebby, as he had asked the same question any time during the past week, whenever his burly, blue-guernseyed grandfather crooned out the old Ballade of the Sea-Horses, which, however, he never carried past the portion given above.
“Like as he was a bit weak, Nebby b’y; an’ I gev him a smart clip wiv the axe, ’fore he could bolt off,” explained his grandfather, lying with inimitable gravity and relish.
Nebby dismounted from his curious-looking go-horse, by the simple method of dragging it forward from between his legs. He examined its peculiar, unicorn-like head, and at last put his finger on a bruised indentation in the black paint that covered the nose.
“ ’S that where you welted him, Granfer?” he asked, seriously.
“Aye,” said his Granfer Zacchy, taking the strangely-shaped go-horse, and examining the contused paint. “Aye, I shore hit ’m a turrible welt.”
“Are he dead, Granfer?” asked the boy.
“Well,” said the burly old man, feeling the go-horse all over with an enormous finger and thumb, “betwixt an’ between, like.” He opened the cleverly hinged mouth, and looked at the bone teeth with which he had fitted it, and then squinted earnestly, with one eye, down the red-painted throat. “Aye,” he repeated, “betwixt an’ between, Nebby. Don’t you never let ’m go to water, b’y; for he’d maybe come alive ag’in, an’ ye’d lose ’m sure.”
Perhaps old Diver-Zacchy, as he was called in the little sea-village, was thinking that water would prove unhealthy to the glue, with which he had fixed-on the big bonito’s tail, at what he termed the starn-end of the curious looking beast. He had cut the whole thing out of a nice, four-foot by ten-inch piece of soft, knotless yellow pine; and, to the rear, he had attached, thwart-ship, the aforementioned bonito’s tail; for the thing was no ordinary horse, as you may think; but a gen-u-ine (as Zacchy described it) Sea-Horse, which he had brought up from the sea bottom for his small grandson, whilst following his occupation as diver.
The animal had taken him many a long hour to carve, and had been made during his spell-ohs, between dives, aboard the diving-barge. The creature itself was a combined production of his own extremely fertile fancy, plus his small grandson’s Faith. For Zacchy had manufactured unending and peculiar stories of what he saw daily at the bottom of the sea, and during many a winter’s evening, Nebby had “cut boats” around the big stove, whilst the old man smoked and yarned the impossible yarns that were so marvellously real and possible to the boy. And of all the tales that the old diver told in his whimsical fashion, there was none that so stirred Nebby’s feelings as the one about the Sea-Horses.
At first it had been but a scrappy and a fragmentary yarn, suggested, as like as not, by the old ballade which Zacchy so often hummed, half-unconsciously. But Nebby’s constant questionings had provided so many suggestions for fresh additions, that at last it took nearly the whole of a long evening for the Tale of the Sea-Horses to be told properly, from where the first Horse was seen by Zacchy, eatin’ sea-grass as nat’rel as ye like, to where Zacchy had seen li’l Martha Tullet’s b’y ridin’ one like a reel cow-puncher; and from that tremendous effort of imagination, the Horse Yarn had speedily grown to include every child that wended the Long Road out of the village.
“Shall I go ridin’ them Sea-Horses, Granfer, when I dies?” Nebby had asked, earnestly.
“Aye,” Granfer Zacchy had replied, absently, puffing at his corncob. “Aye, like’s not, Nebby. Like as not.”
“Mebbe I’ll die middlin’ soon, Granfer?” Nebby had suggested, longingly. “There’s plenty li’l boys dies ’fore they gets growed up.”
“Husht! b’y! Husht!” Granfer had said, wakening suddenly to what the child was saying.
Later, when Nebby had many times betrayed his exceeding high requirement of death, that he might ride the Sea-Horses all round his Granfer at work on the sea-bottom, old Zacchy had suddenly evolved a less drastic solution of the difficulty.
“I’ll ketch ye one, Nebby, sure,” he said, “an’ ye kin ride it round the kitchen.”
The suggestion pleased Nebby enormously, and practically nullified his impatience regarding the date of his death, which was to give him the freedom of the sea and all the Sea-Horses therein.
For a long month, old Zacchy was met each evening by a small and earnest boy, desirous of learning whether he had “catched one” that day, or not. Meanwhile, Zacchy had been dealing honestly with that four-foot by ten-inch piece of yellow pine, already described. He had carved out his notion of what might be supposed to constitute a veritable Sea-Horse, aided in his invention by Nebby’s illuminating questions as to whether Sea-Horses had tails like a real horse or like real fishes; did they wear horseshoes; did they bite?
These were three points upon which Nebby’s curiosity was definite; and the results were definite enough in the finished work; for Granfer supplied the peculiar creature with “reel” bone teeth and a workable jaw; two squat, but prodigious legs, near what he termed the “bows”; whilst to the “starn” he affixed the bonito-tail which has already had mention, setting it the way Dame Nature sets it on the bonito, that is, “thwart-ships,” so that its two flukes touched the ground when the go-horse was in position, and thus steadied it admirably with this hint taken direct from the workmanship of the Great Carpenter.
There came a day when the horse was finished and the last coat of paint had dried smooth and hard. That evening, when Nebby came running to meet Zacchy, he was aware of his Grandfather’s voice in the dusk, shouting:—“Whoa, Mare! Whoa, Mare!” followed immediately by the cracking of a whip.
Nebby shrilled out a call, and raced on, mad with excitement, towards the noise. He knew instantly that at last Granfer had managed to catch one of the wily Sea-Horses. Presumably the creature was somewhat intractable; for when Nebby arrived, he found the burly form of Granfer straining back tremendously upon stout reins, which Nebby saw vaguely in the dusk were attached to a squat, black monster:—
“Whoa, Mare!” roared Granfer, and lashed the air furiously with his whip. Nebby shrieked delight, and ran round and round, whilst Granfer struggled with the animal.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” shouted Nebby, dancing from foot to foot. “Ye’ve catched ’m, Granfer! Ye’ve catched ’m Granfer!”
“Aye,” said Granfer, whose struggles with the creature must have been prodigious; for he appeared to pant. “She’ll go quiet now, b’y. Take a holt!” And he handed the reins and the whip over to the excited, but half-fearful Nebby. “Put y’r hand on ’er, Neb,” said old Zacchy. “That’ll quiet ’er.”
Nebby did so, a little nervously, and drew away in a moment.
“She’s all wet ’s wet!” he cried out.
“Aye,” said Granfer, striving to hide the delight in his voice. “She ’m straight up from the water, b’y.”
This was quite true; it was the final artistic effort of Granfer’s imagination; he had dipped the horse overside, just before leaving the diving
barge. He took his towel from his pocket, and wiped the horse down, hissing as he did so.
“Now, b’y,” he said, “welt ’er good, an’ make her take ye home.”
Nebby straddled the go-horse, made an ineffectual effort to crack the whip, shouted:—“Gee-up! Gee-up!” And was off—two small, lean bare legs twinkling away into the darkness at a tremendous rate, accompanied by shrill and recurrent “Gee-ups!”
Granfer Zacchy stood in the dusk, laughing happily, and pulled out his pipe. He filled it slowly, and as he applied the light, he heard the galloping of the horse, returning. Nebby dashed up, and circled his Granfer in splendid fashion, singing in a rather breathless voice:—
“An’ we’s under the sea, b’ys,
Where the Wild Horses go,
Horses wiv tails
As big as ole whales
All jiggin’ around in a row,
An’ when you ses Whoa!
The debbils does go!”
And away he went again at the gallop.
This had happened a week earlier; and now we have Nebby questioning Granfer Zacchy as to whether the Sea-Horse is really alive or dead.
“Should think they has Sea-Horses ’n heaven, Granfer?” said Nebby, thoughtfully, as he once more straddled the go-horse.
“Sure,” said Granfer Zacchy.
“Is Martha Tullet’s li’l b’y gone to heaven?” asked Nebby.
“Sure,” said Granfer again, as he sucked at his pipe.
Nebby was silent a good while, thinking. It was obvious that he confused heaven with the Domain of the Sea-Horses; for had not Granfer himself seen Martha Tullet’s li’l b’y riding one of the Sea-Horses? Nebby had told Mrs. Tullet about it; but she had only thrown her apron over her head, and cried, until at last Nebby had stolen away, feeling rather dumpy.
“Has you ever seed any angels wiv wings on the Sea-Horses, Granfer?” Nebby asked, presently; determined to have further information with which to assure his ideas.
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions Page 7