Seagulls in My Soup

by Tristan Jones

  “De seguro, señor. Es solo por las mujéres, no?” he cackled, showing his tooth again. It was as if he’d been reading my mind. “Sure, pain is only for women, isn’t it?”

  Then, with the patriarch holding one arm and his son the other, and the old lady carrying the bag of supplies, I made my way through the door and out into the sunshine again.

  “Go with God,” said the gentle patriarch as he took the bag from his good wife and placed it in my numbed arms.

  I staggered along the street. All I could think of was getting back onboard my boat and sleeping off this dreadful morning. I remember slightly weaving down the town quay. I recall hazily being halted by a big, fat Civil Guard sergeant who sternly demanded to know what I was doing drunk at that early hour. Apparently my bag broke as I fell forward against his bulging stomach, sending a cloud of fine white flour over his immaculate uniform, a stream of sugar into his boot-lace holes, and a dozen egg yolks dripping down his sharply pressed trousers. These things I do not remember. Later I was assured time and again by fishermen acquaintances who witnessed it, that all this did, in fact, happen. They assured me on the lives of their mothers, so I know it must be true.

  What I do remember, though—and this memory will never leave me—was waking up that night to find myself safely onboard the dark Cresswell, tucked into my berth. Most of my purchases—those that had not been lost in the unfortunate accident—were on the table in front of me. Also on the table was an unopened bottle of red wine, with a note scribbled in Spanish: “For when you arise. Your dog is tied up. Sergeant Alfredo Lopez, G.C.”

  One man in a thousand, Solomon says,

  Will stick more dose than a brother.

  And it’s worth while seeking him half your days

  If you find him before the other.

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend

  On what the world sees in you,

  But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend

  With the whole round world agin you.

  ’Tis neither promise nor prayer nor show,

  Will settle the promise for ’ee.

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine of ’em go

  By your looks, your acts, or your glory.

  But if he finds you and you find him,

  The rest of the world don’t matter;

  For the Thousandth Man will sink or swim

  With you in any water.

  His wrong’s your wrong, and his right’s your right,

  In season or out of season.

  Stand up and back it in all men’s sight—

  With that for your only reason!

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide

  The shame or mocking or laughter,

  But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side

  To the gallows-foot-and after!

  from “The Thousandth Man”

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Editor’s Note: Chapters 10 and 11 were originally combined in a single story entitled “The Saga of Dreadnaught,” which appeared in slightly different form in Tristan Jones’ Yarns, a collection first published by SAIL books in 1983, and reissued by Sheridan House in 1990.

  10. The Thousandth Man

  Sundays are what you make of them. They can be days of holiness and gloom if you go to chapel, sacrifice and misery if you go visit your in-laws, a sports day if you think that chasing a ball around, or watching it being done, is the acme of human endeavor—or you can rest and read. Not being Scottish, Irish, English, or Continental, I decided on the last pursuit on the day following my visit to the diabolical dentist.

  That Sunday was to be, I thought, ambrosial. Despite the cavernous hole on the starboard side of my upper jaw, when I awoke I was elated. It was the first time in months that Cresswell, Nelson, and I had been alone, to do as we pleased. I could lounge around in my underpants, without having to sluice my face in the water bucket; I could burn the bacon and eat an egg raw in milk and throw my pillow playfully at Nelson, and he could jump around as best he could on his three legs, with his tongue hanging out, and pant and grin at me, and not worry if his tail brushed a damned china cup off the table. By the time breakfast was over we had, both of us, sloughed off, in half an hour, months of weary fair manners-at-table, and Oh-deah-we-really-jolly-well-ought-to-buy-a-decent-bally-tea-towel, which was Sissie’s plaint every breakfast time. Now Nelson could hop onto the starboard berth, which had been his favorite lounging place before the days of Nemesis, in the shape of the bishop’s sister, had overtaken us in the vineyards of France. Now he could lie there, with his head on his paw, grinning at me, until I gave him my tin bacon plate to clean with his eager tongue before I restowed it, by throwing it at the stove and letting it find its own resting place, just like the good old days.

  After breakfast and the daily exercise just described, as it was yet cool topsides, I chose a book to enjoy. Shakespeare isn’t for the morning, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson I decided to save for the next day. Conrad’s Nostromo tempted me, but in the end I settled for my old friend, The Oxford Book of English Verse. I made another pot of tea and subsided onto my berth, with my head on piled pillow and oilskin jacket, my back to the hatchway, whence came the daylight. Now, after I lit a cigarette, I was in my own version of paradise. Here was bliss, a quiet ecstasy, perfect contentment, supreme happiness. Now I was as near to Avalon or the Fortunate Isles as I could ever expect to be in this life—and probably after. No one had ever told me, in those days, that a “man of action” was not supposed to enjoy poetry. No one had ever tried to insinuate into my consciousness that poetry and action were completely inimical, one to the other. In my Welsh innocence it never occurred to me that poetry was anything else but the expression of action, nor that action could be other than the expression of poetry. True, years before, in my navy days, when Hollywood films had been shown on deck to the lads in the less-cold Arctic nights of Heflavik fiord, I had sometimes wondered why none of the heroes ever seemed to look at a book, unless it was a cattle-baron totting up his profits and losses; but this I had put down to the ignorance of the film-makers.

  As for real life and as for sailors, I’ve never met a real sailor yet who wasn’t, at heart at least, a poet—and as a general rule, the more of a rough-and-tumble scallywag he was, the more of a poet. They must have been poets-at-heart; none of them ever had any justification for doing what they were doing. I’m not saying that sailors are all working poets—God saved us from that debacle by making most of them mute; but I never met one of them, no matter how roguish he was, who did not have a sense of the rhythms of the ocean, of life; the mystery, the ineffable surging song that is born wherever and whenever a boat meets the water of the sea. No one could live the life we live without being a poet at heart, at least not for long, and certainly not happily. Those who try to, exist like aliens in a strange land, trying to speak and understand an incomprehensible tongue, an insane babble. They cannot fathom that the very act of sailing is an act of pure poetry; that the sanity of sail is not, cannot be presumed, as is the sanity of the land. At sea it either is or it isn’t, and there’s nothing in between—and nothing can be saner than that.

  That morning, turning the pages of Wyatt and Spenser, Byron and Donne; tasting and savoring each spicy morsel, in between winks at Nelson and sips of tea, I imagined the shadow of a landsman on my shoulder, asking the eternal question that landsmen have always asked of voyagers—Why? I looked around the cabin again, all gray paint and smoky from the stove-smuts. I saw the shining brass oil lamps jiggling in their gimbals every time a fishing boat rumbled past, entering port from her night labors, with the crew (I knew in my mind’s eye) already changed into their best black suits for church. I gazed at the pictures on the bulkheads—Nansen and Scott, Shackleton and the Queen; they stern and intrepid, she smiling. I felt the warmth of the sun as it slowly climbed into the sky and the rays streaming into the cabi
n, and their angle, without my even looking at them, telling me the time as precisely as any clock ever made, even as I read. I heard the low groan of the mooring lines and the anchor rode every time the boat was disturbed, and I heard a voice . . . from the direction of my new neighbor, Dreadnaught.

  “Cresswell! Hello there!” It was a high-pitched halloo. Nelson started. He jerked his head up and stared at the companionway, his tongue hanging out. Again the voice. “Anyone home?”

  I stuck a teaspoon in the page I was reading and quickly donned my pants. It was a man’s voice, but you never knew if there were women around at that late hour of the morning—or any hour, come to that, especially on Ibiza’s outer mole. I made my way up the companionway ladder, and gazed around and saw him.

  “Morning,” said I.

  He was a stocky man with a round, red face, which was decorated with one of the biggest mustaches seen around since General Kitchener was a lad. It was black-gray and huge. It was so big and droopy and magnificent, with its ends curled up, that the first impression I had was that the mustache was wearing him. At each end of the mustache were ears which stuck out from his head as if they were about to flap as soon as the mustache whirled into a propelling motion. Under the mustache, so far as I could see, all he wore was a pair of overalls, so begrimed that if he’d doffed them I think they would have stood up on their own. His feet, black and grimy, were bare. On his head he wore a white-covered peaked yachting cap. It was the only clean thing about him. That cap was pristine. Its gold badge gleamed in the morning sun. He looked like a cross between an admiral, a British army sergeant (Boer War vintage), and an unshod, overworked omnibus-workshop mechanic. I scanned his face and guessed he was about sixty-five.

  “Ah, yes, ’morning, old chap,” he said in a Midlands accent. “I was just making a cup of tea, as it were, and I wondered if you’d like a drop? I saw your boat yesterday over the way, there . . .” He threatened the old-hulk berth, far away on the other side of the harbor, with his mustache. The mustache appeared to resent being pointed at the hulks and trembled in seeming anger. Then, as it was pointed at Cresswell, it subdued its annoyance. “Lovely old girl, isn’t she? Royal National Lifeboat Institute?”

  I nodded, both to the mustache and the man. He was standing on a once-blue-and-white-striped mattress, which was now gray and black and sodden with rain and damp, and which lay thrown across the foredeck of the tiny Dreadnaught.

  “Must introduce myself, as it were . . . Amyas Cupling.”

  “Tristan Jones.”

  “Yes, I know . . . I met your mate Peter Kelly in Monaco.”

  He gets around, I thought to myself in a flash.

  Amyas Cupling looked up at Cresswell’s masthead, then as he spoke he slowly took in every inch of her rig and hull. “Beach-launched heavy weather rescue vessel. Lovely jobs . . . real engineering. Put them together like steamers, like battleships, as it were.” Both he and his mustache smiled with genuine pleasure. “Let’s see, let me guess her year . . .” He frowned. The mustache drooped in deep contemplation as it followed the line of Cresswell’s forestay. Suddenly his blue eyes smiled. The mustache lagged a little behind the eyes, as if waiting for an order over the ship’s telegraph. Then it, too, curled its ends up even further, an order was somehow passed, and the ears wiggled. I fully expected to hear the tinkle of a telegraph bell, and the roar of an accelerated forced-draft fan, followed by the whine of whizzing steam-turbines. “Hmm.. let’s see, couldn’t be before oh-five . . . they had the thirty-footers until then . . . I’d say oh-seven or oh-eight.”

  “Dead right,” said I. “Spot on, Amyas.” I would have congratulated the mustache, too, had I known its name.

  “Thames Ironworks?”

  “Absolutely hundred-aye-one,” said I, truly impressed with his knowledge of small craft.

  “Marvelous craftsmen,” said Amyas Cupling. “Really knew their stuff, eh?” Without waiting for my comment he went on. “Double diagonal mahogany on grown oak frames? Goodness me, they really took their time, as it were. Do you realize that if you take into consideration the years it took to grow the oak frames into the exact shapes needed for . . .”

  Amyas checked my boat’s name again. Cresswell, as he leaned over to read the name on the lifebelt hanging on the port shroud, seemed to purr. By now Nelson was at the top of the companionway, staring at the mustache. He looked as if he’d at first imagined it was some kind of tomcat perched on Amyas’ upper lip.

  Mister Cupling went on. “Ah, yes, Cresswell. Named after a place in Northumberland, eh? Yes, it took them about eighty years to grow those oak frames into shape, as it were. They had plantations in Portugal, you know, and that means . . . let’s see . . . she really started building in about 1828! That’s when they planted the oaks for the frames, as it were.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” I said. I already knew what he was telling me, but I didn’t want to be impolite. He was evidently enjoying himself and his view of Cresswell.

  Amyas Cupling and his mustache both looked at Nelson. My dog shook his shoulders for a second in consideration, as if he expected the mustache to leap onto the jetty and race away toward the town.

  “Your mutt?” asked Amyas.

  I introduced Nelson. Amyas approached close to Dreadnaught’s guardrail, which consisted of one rusty wire that undulated around the ship as it passed through stanchions which leaned this way and that, like drunken derelicts around a hostel door.

  “Lovely boy,” said Amyas. Nelson wagged his tail in pleasure at the wagging of the mustache. “Had a dog myself until a few months ago—of course not a thoroughbred like yours, just a little old sort of cross between a wire-haired terrier and a King Charles spaniel, as it were. Found him in an alley in Tangier, and those blessed brutes were kicking him and throwing stones. Couldn’t let them get away with that, could I? Boxed their ears, as it were, and brought the poor old thing home to Dreadnaught. Had him for a year. Nice little chap. Teddy, I called him . . .”

  Amyas meditated for a moment, until a high-pitched whistle broke into our requiem for Teddy. Amyas Cupling and his mustache immediately perked up. “Ah, there’s the kettle singing. Do come onboard. I’ll have tea made in a jiffy. No need to remove your shoes . . . I’m refitting, as it were. Bring the dog if you wish,” he called as he lowered himself down through a rusting steel hatchway at the after end of Dreadnaught’s rusting steel coachroof.

  Nelson, of course, would not accompany me. He was very jealous of his duty to guard Cresswell whenever I left her. It would have taken a whole panzer division to have shifted him once I was off my boat. How the police sergeant had gone onboard the previous day was still a wonder to me, except that Nelson must have known that I was ill and incapable. But he must have had an ugly attitude to the sergeant, else why would he have been tied up?

  As I scrambled over Cresswell’s taut, shining guardrails and Dreadnaught’s rusty, drooping wire, I inspected the one sail that was still bent on the rusty steel lifeboat’s black, unpainted, half-rotten, stubby mainmast. The mainsail was in the same state, and half its parrel clews had been ripped away from the canvas. It looked as if it had been savaged by a drunken pterodactyl. I gingerly danced over the damp mattress on deck, scrambled across and through a jumble of rusty one-inch wire cable, picked my way through a collection of oily cans and barrels, all rusting, and finally reached the hatchway.

  The scene below was almost indescribable. It was as if I had been hiking on the Yorkshire moors, and had come across the wrecked relics of some early Victorian underground workings—a tin or copper mine, which had petered out and been abandoned long, long ago.

  Down in the gloom, in the dim yellowish light of one small electric bulb (there were no portholes) was a mass of dismantled machinery—eccentrics and connecting rods, valves and tappets, pistons, nuts, bolts, oil pumps, water pumps—all dead bone dry and rusty; electric wires sprawled every which way, all anci
ent and discolored; batteries—a battery of them—all dirty black and dusty; and tools—spanners, socket wrenches, drills, pliers, screwdrivers—scattered everywhere, mostly corroded. In the center of the rust-streaked steel cabin, with condensation sweat gleaming on all sides and dripping from the roof, was Amyas’ obvious pride and joy—a gray, rust-patchy box with great thick black cables sprouting from it and disappearing into the dark gloom of the forward end of the boat. I stared at the box until, just as my foot slipped off a rusty cylinder-head lying at the bottom of the rusty steel ladder, I figured out that it was, in fact, a portable welding set.

  Recovering my balance, I peered around. Apart from the engine bits, tools, batteries and electric cables, welding set, the steaming kettle that Amyas, beaming, held in his hand, and Amyas himself, everything in the cabin seemed to be welded. The cabin table was a steel plate welded onto two bent steel pipes that were welded onto the steel hull frames; the berths, one piled with rusty engine pieces and tools, were steel plate welded together and to the boat; the shelves, all quarter-inch steel plates, were welded to the damp steel ship’s sides.

  I spotted the library shelf. Fully expecting to find rusting steel books welded to the shelf, I clambered my way over to it. I inspected the titles: The Sea Engineer’s Manual; Emergency Repairs at Sea; Marine Engines and their Maintenance; The Marine Engineer’s Practical Handbook, and so on.

  I turned from reading the book spines to see both Amyas and the mustache smiling at me. The whole scene, in the dim glow of the one tiny bulb, was as if the manacles workshop in some gloomy corner of Dante’s inferno had gone on strike some five years before, and was now in the custody of a benevolent Victorian ironmaster. If Isambard Kingdom Brunei had come aboard that moment, I imagined, he would have doffed his top hat and for once in his life smiled.

  Amyas was now pouring tea into two rust-spotted metal mugs on the steel table. He cocked one bushy eyebrow and the mustache at me. “Like it, eh?” Without waiting for my response he went on. “Of course, I’m refitting at the moment, as it were. I started this one in Gibraltar. Of course I don’t stay in one place while I refit; sort of sail around anyway, as it were. Been to Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, south of France, and Majorca while this refit’s going on. Can’t stand to be in one place for too long. I was in the merchant service for thirty eight years . . . got to second engineer. Then Suez came along and the old Line folded up and sort of left me high and dry, as it were.”