“Damned cheek, surely, to chuck yourself down in me bunk without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave?” inquired Captain O’Hara.
“Yes,” said William. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t think I knew quite what I was doing.”
Captain O’Hara raised the other eyebrow. “Women an’ dope?” he inquired.
“Yes, sir,” said William.
“Damn fool,” said Captain O’Hara equably.
“Yes, sir,” said William.
“So you’re a seaman, are ye?” said Captain O’Hara. “In the Merchant Service, I don’t doubt by the look o’ ye. Grandest service in the world. What was your ship, eh?”
William flushed scarlet to the roots of his hair, choked a little, and did not answer, for it seemed to him now that even to mention either the Orion or the Royal Navy in connection with himself would be to tarnish the fair fame of them both. His shocked, exhausted mind was so morbidly branded by his shame that he thought of himself as one of those vile reptiles who leave a track of slime upon whatever they touch. . . . He wondered now how he had ever dared crawl aboard the glorious Green Dolphin.
“Never mind, son,” said Captain O’Hara. “I’ll not be troublin’ ye with questions. The past is the past. The future’s the thing. What of it?”
“You’re an apprentice short, aren’t you, sir?” asked William humbly.
“Aye, a little fool of an apprentice got himself washed overboard off Madagascar,” said Captain O’Hara. “You can take his place. But you’ll have to sleep in the apprentice half deck an’ swab the decks with the rest. How’ll ye like that? Eh? You’ve been an officer this year or so past, I don’t doubt. It’ll be puttin’ the clock back, eh?”
“Serve me right,” said William stoutly.
“That’s the spirit,” said the old man with approval. “Start again. An’ mind ye, son, if ye can take a fall, an’ then start to climb the blasted ladder all over again with a good heart, you’re a seaman. If you can’t, you’re nothin’ but a bloody landsman. Now ye can get out. I’ve me work to do.”
“For where are we bound, sir?” asked William, getting up.
“For New Zealand with a cargo o’ tea,” said Captain O’Hara briefly.
Chapter II
1
William took up his abode in the apprentice half deck, an apartment six foot by twelve, in which the five other apprentices, young boys of half William’s size, received him with something of dismay, for he entirely blocked the whole place. And he did not know his work either. As an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy he was inexperienced in the holystoning of decks and the cleaning out of hencoops and had to be instructed in these things. The rest of the crew viewed him with strong suspicion; for what was a grown man doing masquerading as an apprentice? He was a gentleman, too, and yet possessed not even a coat to his back. They had to fit him out with clothes and bedding, and resented it, even though he gave them his pay in exchange. They took it out of him in every way they could think of, and they knew a good many ways of tormenting the body and soul of a man. Captain O’Hara took not the slightest notice of him, apart from cursing him volubly for his stupidity whenever he set eyes on him. He knew better, of course. Any sign of favoritism on the part of the Old Man, and the crew would have taken it out of William more than ever. Only Nat of all the crew was kindly disposed, though he dared show it in no way except an occasional gleam of the eye and an abstention from active persecution. And they ran into dirty weather almost as soon as they left China, and dirty weather for an apprentice on a merchantman was a blacker kind of misery than that endured by a sublieutenant on a man-of-war. It was sheer hell to mount to the heights of the topsail yard in a storm and cling there a hundred feet above the hissing fury of the sea, clawing with bleeding hands at the cracking, ballooning canvas, feeling with benumbed feel for the one-inch footrope, aware always that one false movement meant a sickening fall, with death or fatal injury at the end of it.
William himself would have found it hard to say when it was that he began to gain the liking of the crew. It came slowly, won by the fact that whatever they did to him, he never lost his patient good humor. And he never shirked, never boasted, never refused any demand made on his generosity. And yet within the limits set by his decency and kindliness, he always gave as good as he got. If he was struck, he struck back, with a smile and above the belt, but with most effective accuracy. And tired though he was, he was still as strong as an ox, and physical strength was to them a worshipful thing. It was perhaps when he picked up the two largest apprentices, one in each hand, carried them the length of the ship and deposited them side by side upon the spanker boom, that they really began to love him. The change took place so slowly, yet by the time the Philippines had been left behind, with Mindanao a blue smudge on the horizon, William was once more in the position to which he was accustomed, securely enthroned as the most popular member of the community.
The storms were behind them now, and so was the suffocating heat of the equator, with the endless days of sweating labor, pulling the yards round to catch every breath of vagrant, baffling wind. And the grim dangers of the Great Barrier Reef had faded away too. The ship was gracefully bowing now to a favorable breeze, her fair-weather sails all set, dipping through water so clear that one could lean on the bulwarks and see the fungi and coral of the ocean bed scintillating with every color imaginable, and the exquisite little rainbow fish who would be phosphorescent when the darkness came. This was the weather that the seamen loved, when they could wash their shirts and hang them to dry in the sun, and tell yarns beneath the blaze of the tropic stars, and catch the silvery flying fish and fry them for their supper. Upon this ship they were not allowed to catch dolphins, and it seemed the dolphins knew it, for they followed their namesake in perpetual delight, rolling and tumbling mirthfully about her, every roll a shout of unheard laughter, every tumble a silent yet roistering oath that life is good. This was the true Green Dolphin weather; joyful, comradely, serene. The great ship was herself in weather like this. Her motion was joyous as that of the dolphins, her rigging a harp for the wind to strum upon, the swell of her sails the lifting of her breast in sheer delight.
The port watch was lazing in the bows. Among the group of men William was conspicuous by reason of his fair curly head and the immense difficulty he was encountering in sewing a patch on a pair of trousers.
“Hey!” bellowed Captain O’Hara. “You there! Ozanne! I’ll have a word with ye on the subject o’ the deckhouse skylight. Come below, damn ye, an’ look sharp.”
Then he stumped down to his cabin again, and William, amid the jeers of the port watch, followed in a condition of abject humility. In cleaning the skylight that morning he had contrived to smash it. He had a great gift for injuring inanimate objects, toward which his intentions were always wholly good. He was, he told himself, the most blundering ass who ever lived.
Yet when the delinquent stood before him Captain O’Hara’s tone was surprisingly gentle. “I’ve watched ye for weeks, me lad,” he said, “an’ you’ve about as much idea as to how to holystone a deck as to how to put a neat patch upon a pair of trousers or clean a skylight. You’ve done well, son, this voyage, you’ve done your damned best an’ I’ve been proud o’ ye, begorra, but you’ve done it in a hard school o’ which ye had no previous knowledge. It was not in the Merchant Service, son, that ye learned to be a seaman.”
They were standing facing each other, the old teak table between them. The old man’s tone was questioning and kindly, but it was only the dumb pain in William’s eyes that gave him answer.
“Ye held a commission in Her Majesty’s Navy, son,” he stated gently. “I thought as much, watchin’ the blunderin’ fool that ye are with a swab an’ a bucket of water. It’s all been gold braid, an’ dinin’ with the Admiral, an’ makin’ eyes at the ladies with you, son; not the sweat an’ blood an’ curses that are the merchant seamen’s probation to the se
a.”
William flushed crimson, but he let the gibe at the Navy go by. They were approaching the crux of the conversation, and his throat and chest felt so tight with apprehension that he could not speak.
“If I’d known, son, when I found ye sleepin’ in me bunk, that ye were a naval officer, I’d ’ave turned right round an’ taken ye back to China,” said Captain O’Hara. “There’d ’ave been time then; it’s too late now. Why didn’t ye tell me, ye young fool?”
William swallowed hard. “It would have been to tarnish the reputation of the service, sir,” he said at last.
“Fiddlesticks!” said Captain O’Hara. “It takes a darn sight more than unpunctuality on the part of her junior officers to tarnish the reputation of Her Majesty’s Navy. You take yourself too seriously, me lad. You know the damn fool thing you’ve done, don’t ye? If you’d gone straight to Her Majesty’s Consul at the port an’ made a clean breast of it, you’d ’ave been sent back to England, reprimanded and reinstated. Instead o’ that you chose to desert an’ join another ship. If you go back to England now, or to that little Island o’ yours, you’ll be nabbed an’ court-martialed. A fine mess you’ve made o’ things, son—a fine mess entirely.”
It had been put into words. That terrible bit of knowledge, that had been gradually eating into William’s mind throughout the voyage, was now brought out into the open. He had thought that that was how it was, but he had not been quite sure. Now he knew. There was a certain relief in knowing for certain.
Captain O’Hara looked at his blanched and stricken face with compassion. The boy had no idea what to do with himself, he realized; not the faintest ghost of a notion. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down an’ we’ll talk it over.”
They sat down, Captain O’Hara in the teak chair and William on the bench.
“Maybe ye don’t remember, son,” said the old man, “that when we sat like this seven years ago, one on each side o’ this very table, I told ye a yarn or two about New Zealand.”
“Yes,” said William.
“Ye thought then, hearin’ me yarns, that it must be a grand land, surely. Ye said it ought to belong to old England.”
“Yes,” said William dully, but as out of a far-off dream he remembered how he had thrilled at the thought of the beautiful land. He remembered about the kauri trees and the great ferns that reached above a man’s shoulder.
“Maybe ye were too busy, son, dinin’ with the Admiral, to take note o’ the fact that on January twenty-ninth o’ this year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and forty a representative o’ the British Government landed at the Bay of Islands an’ took possession o’ the country for the Queen. An’ ye may have lacked opportunity, son, whilst makin’ eyes at the ladies, to gain information as to the foundin’ o’ the New Zealand Company, an’ the grand job it is doin’ establishin’ white settlers on New Zealand shores. The Company has purchased nearly a third o’ New Zealand, son. There’s been no stealing from the bloody natives, mind ye, but a fair price given. Two hundred muskets has the company paid down, begorra, three hundred red blankets, a ton o’ baccy, seventy-two writin’ slates, four hundred an’ eight pocket handkerchiefs, twenty-four combs, an’ no less than one hundred an’ forty-four Jew’s harps. What do you think o’ that for a fair price, eh? An’ the settlers purchased their land from the Company at one pound an acre. If that’s not dirt cheap, I don’t know what is, bedad. At a rough computation, son, there must be between two an’ three thousand Britishers in New Zealand now. It is to take ’em their tea that the Green Dolphin is sailin’ through the tropics at this very moment.”
He leaned back in his chair, his eyes holding William’s. There was a faint sparkle of interest, he noted, in the boy’s face.
“Who are those settlers?” asked William. “Whalers and escaped convicts?”
“Faith, no! These new fellows are as different from the old settlers as chalk from cheese. There’s every sort an’ kind of fellow among ’em, but all good fellows. There’s crofters an’ squires an’ parsons, an Free Kirkers an’ trade unionists, with wives an’ children complete, most of ’em wantin’ to get away from somethin’ they calls injustice to somethin’ they calls freedom, an’ all of ’em, for this reason or that, wantin’ to make a fresh start, an’ with the guts to make it an’ not just set thinkin’ about it. I take off me hat to ’em, son, though it seems many of ’em ain’t got the sense they were born with when they landed in a cannibal country in crinolines an’ silk shawls, frock coats, beaver top hats, an’ tall canes with tassels on ’em. That’s no sort of costume in which to leg it when there’s a Maori after ye with his club an’ knife.” He paused and puffed at his pipe, smiling. “Begorra, but they’ve got the right stuff in ’em. It’ll be a hard fight for years to come, a damn hard fight, but if there’s a thing better worth doin’ in this world than goin’ straight to earth an’ sun an’ water for salvation of body an’ soul, then, bedad, I’ve yet to be told of it. That’s what pioneerin’ is, son, an’ seafarin’ too. You’ve nothin’. Ye stand on bare earth, or set sail on the deep, an’ ye wrestle with ’em as Jacob wrestled with his God, for your very life.”
Captain O’Hara’s ideas of God were peculiar to himself. His God spoke with the voice of winds and waters, sat enthroned among the snows, crowned with the stars, His sword the lightning and His shield the sun. His garment was the green of upland forests, and kneeling amongst the bladed wheat, amongst the flowers and grass, one touched the hem of it. And with this God one fought for physical existence, and was lamed and scarred by the fight even as Jacob; and with the pain of the fighting, though Captain O’Hara could not have explained to you how, one somehow bought one’s soul.
William’s eyes kindled as he said shyly, “Do you think one of those pioneers would let me work for him just for my keep? And then, maybe, one day I could have a bit of land of my own.”
Captain O’Hara eyed William’s proportions. “I should say that biceps like yours, goin’ dirt cheap too, would be at a premium in any pioneerin’ country, son. An’ you’re a friendly fellow, too, an’ good company when you aren’t payin’ too much attention to your damn conscience.”
“It’ll be hard to leave the sea,” said William slowly.
“You’ll be near it, son, for all the settlements cling to the coast as yet. You’ll hear its voice, an’ there’ll be the tradin’ ships comin’ an’ goin’.”
“What about the Maoris?” asked William.
“Bound to cause a deal o’ trouble sooner or later,” boomed Captain O’Hara cheerfully. “They’ve signed a treaty with us, cedin’ to Her Majesty all powers of sovereignty, an’ in return we’ve guaranteed ’em full possession o’ their own lands. But they’ll not see the white folk encroachin’ further an’ further into their country without showin’ fight. It’s not to be expected that they should. Faith, no. They’re a grand people, the Maoris. They’ll give ye some fun, me lad. If your head don’t adorn some native pa one o’ these fine days, the natives’ll not have the sense I give ’em credit for. Fine lot o’ meat on ye.”
With this dreadful prognostication Captain O’Hara brought the interview to a close and William went on deck. The tropic night had come. The wheeling stars were like great suns, and the fiery fishes streaked the sea with flame.
2
The Green Dolphin was standing in toward the coast. William, leaning over the bulwarks, felt his heart beat high with excitement. This was New Zealand, this was Aotearoa, the Long White Cloud. They were approaching Cook Strait, and he could see both the islands. He was glad there were two of them, not one. It was more homelike, somehow. Wellington harbor was not likely to bear much resemblance to St. Pierre, yet it would be a little like. All harbors have the same welcoming arms for the wanderer, promise the same shelter, have the same small ripples slapping musically against the hulls of quiet ships. Always the bells seem ringing on the land, and the air is all movement with the wings of gulls
.
Slowly, with sails reduced, they glided nearer. It was very early, and sea and sky alike were tinctured with rose and amethyst upon the blue. It was a strange, primordial landscape that William looked upon. The strong outlines and the cool colors of a clear dawn seemed inherent in it. The harbor was ringed round with mountains, the nearer saffron-colored, streaked with the colors of morning, shining here and there with patches of pure gold where the sun lit the gorse, the great peaks behind them a clear, translucent green reaching up to the wonder of the snow. The lower slopes of the hills were clothed with bright green grass, contrasting with red earth and golden sand and the darker green of trees, and here where the belt of vivid color linked the colder, paler colors of mountain and sea there was a settlement of mud and daub or wooden houses, smoke curling up from their chimneys, the wooden steeple of a little church, a jetty running out into the water, a few ships rocking at anchor. So clear was the air that one could see cattle moving far up on the green slopes, the streams that watered their pastures, the weathercock upon the steeple, and the tiny figures running out from their toy houses to watch the glorious ship glide into her anchorage. A chill air blew down from the mountains, and so deep was the silence that one could hear the chime of bird song; not the warm melody of bustling English coppices but music as unearthly and remote as the mountains, true dawn music, beautiful, lonely, and cold.
“Back the mainyard!” came the order, and then, in Captain O’Hara’s most deep and cheerful boom, “Let go the anchor!”
And suddenly all was joyful noise: the rattling of the hawser, the trampling of feet, shouts and laughter, the rush of wings overhead. The toylike figures that had come out of the houses were life-size now and running quickly down the jetty to welcome them in, the women with their skirts bunched up in their hands, the children leaping and scampering with joyful cries, the men cheering. A bell rang joyfully out from the wooden steeple, and the rising sun lit the weathercock upon its summit to a fiery gold.
Green Dolphin Street Page 23