by Jack London
“And I’ve seen father sea-sick on occasion,” she answered. “Yes, and some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known.”
Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.
Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck below us. To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing than ever.
“A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike,” Miss West remarked.
“The worst ever,” he growled, “and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones. We’re teachin’ them the ropes just now—most of ’em.”
“They look starved,” I commented.
“They are, they almost always are,” Miss West answered, and her eyes roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer’s fashion I had marked in Mr. Pike. “But they’ll fatten up with regular hours, no whiskey, and solid food—won’t they, Mr. Pike?”
“Oh, sure. They always do. And you’ll see them liven up when we get ’em in hand . . . maybe. They’re a measly lot, though.”
I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed to have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us, under Mr. Mellaire’s direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these small sails led me to ask:
“But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?”
He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head from both sides of a street.
“Do?” Miss West answered for him. “We’d get the sail off. Oh, it can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn’t, I should have been drowned long ago.”
“Sure,” Mr. Pike upheld her. “So would I.”
“The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors, in a pinch,” Miss West went on.
Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted fresh abrasions on the knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from some recollection.
“I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most hopeless crew. It was in the Lallah Rookh —you remember her, Mr. Pike?”
“Your father’s fifth command,” he nodded. “Lost on the West Coast afterwards—went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave. Parted her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell on her.”
“That’s the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where the boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number of them were shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them when they were first sent aloft.” Again she laughed. “It was better than circus clowns. And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside the Heads, when it began to blow up and we began to shorten down. And then our mates performed miracles. You remember Mr. Harding—Silas Harding?”
“Don’t I though!” Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically. “He was some man, and he must have been an old man even then.”
“He was, and a terrible man,” she concurred, and added, almost reverently: “And a wonderful man.” She turned her face to me. “He was our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But Mr. Harding got the sail off the Lallah Rookh just the same. What I wanted to tell you was this:
“I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail. How far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?”
“Let me see . . . the Lallah Rookh .” Mr. Pike paused to consider. “Oh, say around a hundred feet.”
“I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp—and he must already have got a taste of Mr. Harding—fell off the lower-topsail-yard. I was only a little girl, but it looked like certain death, for he was falling from the weather side of the yard straight down on deck. But he fell into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall, turned a somersault, and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt. And he landed right alongside of Mr. Harding, facing him. I don’t know which was the more astonished, but I think Mr. Harding was, for he stood there petrified. He had expected the man to be killed. Not so the man. He took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump for the rigging and climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.”
Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard me say:
“Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man’s nerves, falling to apparent death that way.”
“He’d been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess,” was Mr. Pike’s remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.
Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by what I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary. But that a young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of such things and be so saturated in this side of ship life was not nice. It was not nice for me, though it interested me, I confess,—and strengthened my grip on reality. Yet it meant a hardening of one’s fibres, and I did not like to think of Miss West being so hardened.
I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and firmness of her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her eyes were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression, intelligent and alive. Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most noteworthy expression of it was a great calm. She seemed always in repose, at peace with herself and with the external world. The most beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows and hair. The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight, very straight, and just the slightest trifle too long. In this it was reminiscent of her father’s nose. But the perfect modelling of the bridge and nostrils conveyed an indescribable advertisement of race and blood.
Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous mouth—generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but generous rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter. All the health and buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes. She rarely exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed chiefly to employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong white teeth, even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm, sensible, normal size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal as she.
I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many of the factors that go to compose feminine beauty. She had all the beauty of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was emphasized by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair. And, in the same way, the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of skin set off the warm gray of her eyes. The forehead was, well, medium-broad and medium high, and quite smooth. No lines nor hints of lines were there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of depression and white nights of insomnia. Oh, she bore all the marks of the healthy, human female, who never worried nor was vexed in the spirit of her, and in whose body every process and function was frictionless and automatic.
“Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet,” I said to the mate. “Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?”
“She ought to be,” was Mr. Pike’s reply as he lifted his glance across the smooth swell of sea to the sky. “This ain’t the first time she’s been on the North Atlantic in winter.” He debated a moment, as he studied the sea and sky. “I should say, considering the high barometer, we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with the chances in favour of the calm.”
She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail as the Elsinore lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the trough with a roll from w
indward that flapped all the sails in hollow thunder.
“The calm has it,” Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness. “And if this keeps up I’ll be in my bunk in about five minutes.”
She waved aside all sympathy. “Oh, don’t bother about me, Mr. Pathurst. Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy weather, and poison ivy; besides, I’d rather be sea-sick than have the hives.”
Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire’s raised voice. Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly unpleasant to the ear.
On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One, in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.
“Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark,” I observed.
Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West’s eyes to Mr. Pike’s big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. She knew .
CHAPTER X
That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the table, while the Elsinore rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to her room.
“You won’t see her for a couple of days,” Captain West told me. “Her mother was the same way—a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of a voyage.”
“It’s the shaking down.” Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest observation I had yet heard him utter at table. “Everybody has to shake down when they leave the land. We’ve got to forget the good times on shore, and the good things money’ll buy, and start watch and watch, four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York , Mr. Pathurst?”
I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.
“Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato, every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch.”
“You don’t like the sea?” I queried.
He sighed.
“I don’t know. But of course the sea is all I know—”
“Except music,” I threw in.
“Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of the music I oughta have had coming to me.”
“I suppose you’ve heard Schumann Heink?”
“Wonderful, wonderful!” he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an eager wistfulness. “I’ve half-a-dozen of her records, and I’ve got the second dog-watch below. If Captain West don’t mind . . . ” (Captain West nodded that he didn’t mind). “And if you’d want to hear them? The machine is a good one.”
And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed on the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph. His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and every shade of expression was visible to me.
In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records were only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation. He handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping it and brushing it with a fine camel’s hair brush while it revolved and ere he placed the needle on it. For a time all I could see was the huge brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the knuckles, that expressed love in their every movement. Each touch on the discs was a caress, and while the record played he hovered over it and dreamed in some heaven of music all his own.
During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face was expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music. I almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I watched him I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him perform any. Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board. I had not seen him give an order. It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did the work. All Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully oblivious of the Elsinore’s crew.
When Mr. Pike had played the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Messiah , and “He Shall Feed His Flock,” he mentioned to me, almost apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason, perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he had been a choir boy.
“And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and sneaked off to sea again,” he concluded with a harsh laugh.
And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer’s “King of Heaven,” and Mendelssohn’s “O Rest in the Lord.”
When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all carefully wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.
“I’ve got a lot more good things,” he said confidentially: “Coenen’s ‘Come Unto Me,’ and Faure’s ‘Crucifix’; and there’s ‘O Salutaris,’ and ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ by the Trinity Choir; and ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’ would just melt your heart. I’ll play ’em for you some night.”
“Do you believe in them?” I was led to ask by his rapt expression and by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from my consciousness.
He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:
“I do . . . when I’m listening to them.”
* * * * *
My sleep that night was wretched. Short of sleep from the previous night, I closed my book and turned my light off early. But scarcely had I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my hives. All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up. Wada had not yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of tartar. It was useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the watch changing, I partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and went up on to the poop.
I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours’ watch, pacing up and down the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the wheel-house.
Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and experienced premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore , a cargo-carrier that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate. The voyage had gone wrong from the first. In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman could have dreamed.
I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no doubts but what she would always live. I thought of the killing and driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of his own creating.
Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and lying gibbering between the steel walls of the ’midship-house. This picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew. Certainly I could go back to Baltimore . Thank God I had the money to humour my whims. Had not Mr. Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the running expenses of the Elsinore at two hundred dollars a da
y? I could afford to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the several days that might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot tug, or any inbound craft to Baltimore .
I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to tell him my decision, when another presented itself: Then are you, the thinker and philosopher, the world-sick one, afraid to go down, to cease in the darkness ? Bah! My own pride in my life-pridelessness saved Captain West’s sleep from interruption. Of course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and lunatics—and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and Semitic ones who had aroused Mr. Pike’s ire and who had laughed so terribly and silently.
Night thoughts! Sleepless thoughts! I dismissed them all and started below, chilled through by the cold. But at the chart-room door I encountered Mr. Mellaire.
“A pleasant evening, sir,” he greeted me. “A pity there’s not a little wind to help us off the land.”
“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, after a moment or so.
Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ve seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst. But I never saw one as queer as this—boys, old men, cripples and—you saw Tony the Greek go overboard yesterday? Well, that’s only the beginning. He’s a sample. I’ve got a big Irishman in my watch who’s going bad. Did you notice a little, dried-up Scotchman?”
“Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the evening before last?”
“The very one—Andy Fay. Well, Andy Fay’s just been complaining to me about O’Sullivan. Says O’Sullivan’s threatened his life. When Andy Fay went off watch at eight he found O’Sullivan stropping a razor. I’ll give you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:
“‘Says O’Sullivan to me, “Mr. Fay, I’ll have a word wid yeh?” “Certainly,” says I; “what can I do for you?” “Sell me your sea-boots, Mr. Fay,” says O’Sullivan, polite as can be. “But what will you be wantin’ of them?” says I. “’Twill be a great favour,” says O’Sullivan. “But it’s my only pair,” says I; “and you have a pair of your own,” says I. “Mr. Fay, I’ll be needin’ me own in bad weather,” says O’Sullivan. “Besides,” says I, “you have no money.” “I’ll pay for them when we pay off in Seattle ,” says O’Sullivan. “I’ll not do it,” says I; “besides, you’re not tellin’ me what you’ll be doin’ with them.” “But I will tell yeh,” says O’Sullivan; “I’m wantin’ to throw ’em over the side.” And with that I turns to walk away, but O’Sullivan says, very polite and seducin’-like, still a-stroppin’ the razor, “Mr. Fay,” says he, “will you kindly step this way an’ have your throat cut?” And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent lunatic.’