Alfred Henry Lewis

“ On they crawl, broadside talking to broadside; only the Americans are smarter with their guns, and fire three to the Drake’s two.
Twilight now invests the scene in gray, as the sun sinks behind the close, dark Irish headlands to the west. Night, cloudless and serene, comes down; the round, full moon shines out, and its mild rays mingle and merge with the angry glare of the battle-lanterns. Captain Paul Jones from his narrow quarterdeck watches the Drake through his night glass.
“Good! Very good!” he murmurs, as the Drake’s foremast is splintered by a round shot. ”

“ Sixty lionhearts, who gave their lives for victory, are laid side by side on the deck. The petticoat flag flies proudly from the ensign gaff. Commodore Paul Jones, from the deck of the Serapis, watches the Richard to the last. The tears dim his sight, and he is driven more than once to dash them away; for a sailor loves his ship as though it were a woman. ”

“ Norfolk’s public hall is candle-lighted to a pitch of unusual brilliancy; the waxed floors are thronged with the beauty and gentility of the Old Dominion, as the same find Norfolk expression. It is indeed a mighty social occasion; for the local élite have seized upon the officers of the sloop of war, and are giving a ball in their honor. The honored ones attend to a man—which accounts for the deserted look of their sloop—and their gold lace blazes bravely by the light of the candles, and with tremendous gala effect.
Planter Paul Jones is also among the guests. ”

“ After an hour with the Duke and the girl-Duchess, Commodore Paul Jones goes back to the good Marchioness de Marsan and to Aimee. As an excuse for his own idleness, he travels down to l’Orient and, albeit the Alliance is as fit as a fiddle, sets Lieutenant Dale, “Dick the practical,” to overhauling the ship from truck to keel. Then he returns to the good Marsan and Aimee.
Now he spends sunny hours in the beautiful Aimee’s company, and his love creeps and grows upon him like ivy on a wall. The conqueror is conquered; the invincible is overthrown. ”

“ It is as though they would convince Captain Jack Paul of their tame and sheep-like frame of thought. The fate of Mungo has instructed them; for one and all they are of that criminal, coward brood, best convinced by a club and with whom death is the only conclusive argument. As they stand uncovered about the rigid one in the clouted hammock, they realize in full the villainy of mutiny, and abandon that ship-rebellion which has been forecastle talk and plan since ever the Plymouth lights went out astern. ”

“ When the hammock sewing is over, the cook aids in bringing the corpse on deck. As the body slips from the grating into the sea, a thirty-two pound shot at the heels, the cook laughs overboard at the sharks, still hanging, like hounds upon a scent, to the brig’s wake.
“Ye’ll have to dive for the skipper, lads!” sings out the cook.
Offended by this ribaldry, first mate Jack Paul is on the brink of striking the cook down with a belaying pin. For his own nerves are a-jangle, and that misplaced merriment rasps. It is the look in the man’s face which stays his hand. ”

“ Commodore Paul Jones has been too well trained as a courtier to let fall the polite mask which he wears, and nothing could be more elaborately suave than are the manners he assumes. The ferocious Catherine gets some glimmer of his inward thought for all that. Every inch the Empress, she is even more the woman. To the day of her death the unpardonable offence in any male of her species is a failure to fall in love with her. She receives some chilling touch of her new Admiral’s aversion, and it turns her into angry ice. ”

“ It gives the tender Aimee a dull ache of the heart. A lone feeling of helplessness overwhelms her, as fears rise up for her poor love that, in so short a space, has become the one sweet thing in life. True, she herself is a Bourbon! But with the bar sinister. How then shall she, obscure and poor and by the left hand, hope to sustain herself in the heart of her lover against the wiles and siren wooings of one who is at once the most legitimate, the most beautiful, and the most wealthy woman in France! ”

“ Back to the deck springs Commodore Paul Jones, while the face of Captain Pearson is stricken old and white. For the earliest time he realizes the desperate heart of that unconquerable one who has him in a death-grapple, and a premonition of his own defeat pierces his heart like a dagger of ice. As Commodore Paul Jones regains the deck, he observes Boatswain Jack Robinson who has waddled aft. The cloud of anger fades from his brow, and he breaks into a loud laugh that is tenfold worse than the cloud. ”

“ For the wise old world loves lovers; and because Aimee always officially resides with the good Marsan when her “Paul” is in Paris, and actually resides with that amiable gentlewoman when her “Paul” is in London, or Copenhagen, or elsewhere on the complex business of those prize moneys, no one finds fault. And so four years of love and truth and sweetness, four beautiful years, throughout which the birds sing and the sun shines always, come and go for Commodore Paul Jones and his Aimee; and every noble door in France swings open at their approach. ”

“ The Richard, the little Pallas close to its heels, cracks on canvas throughout the night. The winds are mere puffs and catspaws; still, slow as is their speed, daylight finds them within throwing distance of their destination. They are the wrong-side of the weather, however, and the whole day is wasted in beating inshore against the wind. Our young commodore must do all the work; for the English merchantmen, as though faint with fear at the sight of him, refuse to come out; while the Serapis and its consort stick close to them in their role of guardships. ”

“ Commodore Paul Jones snatches a firelock from one of the agitated French marines. Steadying himself against a backstay, he raises the weapon to his shoulder and fires. The ball goes crashing through the seaman’s head as he raises his hatchet to cut free the anchor. Another leaps forward and grasps the hatchet. Seizing a second firelock, Commodore Paul Jones stretches him across the anchor’s shank, where he lies clutching and groaning and bleeding his life away. As the second man goes down, those nearest fall back. That fatal starboard anchor is a death-trap; they want none of it! ”

“ Off shore, a cable’s length, an English sloop of war, eighteen guns, lies tugging at her anchors. In shore from the sloop of war rides the peaceful twenty-ton sloop of Planter Paul Jones. The sailor-planter, loitering homeward from a cruise to Charleston and the coast towns of the Carolinas, is calling on friends in Norfolk. Both the war sloop and the peace sloop seem almost deserted in the falling snow. Aside from the harbor light burning high in the rigging, and an anchor watch of two sailors muffled to the ears, the decks of neither craft show signs of life. ”

“ I pity the man—beset as he is by situations to which he is unequal. Lafayette cannot long restrain the sinister forces that confront him. He has neither the head nor the heart nor the hand for it. This is a time for grapeshot. I only wish that I might be in command of those thirty cannon parked about the palace, and have with me, even for a day, my old war-dogs of the Ranger and the Richard. Believe me, I should offer the mob convincing reasons in support of conservatism and justice; I should teach it forbearance at the muzzles of my guns. ”

“ The Serapis is a new ship, fresh from the yards, and her spars and cordage stand the strain. Captain Pearson backs himself slowly out of the trap. He grazes fate so closely that the Richard, answering some sudden occult movement of the helm, runs its bowsprit over the larboard quarter of the Serapis, into its mizzen rigging.
“Stand by with those grappling irons!” shouts Commodore Paul Jones.
Lieutenant Mayrant throws the grapples with a seaman’s accuracy; they catch, as he means they shall, in the mizzen backstays of the Englishman. But the ships have too much way on. ”

“ The great chapel is dark and vacant; the feeble light does not reach the vaulted roof, and the groined arches disappear upward in a thick blackness.
At the altar stands a priest. Near the rail is gathered a group of four, the Duchess de Chartres, the good Marchioness de Marsan, Aimee—heart a-flutter, her pink cheeks hidden in a veil—and Commodore Paul Jones. The priest draws the Duchess aside. ”

“ There are four squatting ranks of them; each rank sits face to face with its fellow rank across the detaining cable. Thus will they sit and suffer, cramped and choked and half-starved in that tropical hell between decks, through those two-score days and nights which lie between the John O’ Gaunt and Kingston.
Captain Denbigh keeps the deck until the anchors are up. The wind is forward of the beam, and now, when its canvas is shaken out, the John O’ Gaunt begins to move through the water on the starboard tack. ”

“ Madame Houdetot, Mrs. Adams and the rest adopt her example. And still the girl-Duchess holds Captain Paul Jones to herself:
“I am to have one evening—one before you go?” she pleads; and her tones are a woman’s tones and deeply wistful; and are not in any respect the tones of a Bourbon.
“One evening? You shall have every evening—ay! and every day.”
“Remember!” and as she makes ready to go the girl-Duchess takes firmer command of her manner and her voice; “remember! You have promised to lay an English frigate at my feet.” ”

“ The sun goes down, night descends, and as yet our young commodore has not been able to get within reach of the foe; for at beating to windward the Richard is as dull as a Dutchman.
When darkness comes, it unlooses a land breeze. With that the merchantmen take heart of grace, and resolve to dare all and run for it. They rush out of Bridlington Bay, wind free, like a flock of seagulls. What is a fair wind for them is a headwind for the Richard and Pallas; with no one to molest them, the fifty timber ships show a clean pair of heels. Commodore Paul Jones makes no effort to chase ”

“ If he holds on, the Richard will run him down; he can already see the great, black cutwater rearing itself on high, as though to crush him and cut him in two. If he pays off the head of the Serapis, and avoids being run down, the Richard will still foul and grapple with him. Lieutenant Mayrant’s bandaged head shows above the Richard’s hammock nettings, as, with grappling irons ready for throwing, he musters a party of boarders—cutlass and pistol and pike—to have them in hand the moment the ships crash together. ”

“ To his men your captain must he prophet, priest and king. His authority when off-shore is necessarily absolute, and therefore the crew should be as one man impressed that the captain, like the sovereign, can do no wrong. If a captain fail in this, he cannot make up for it by severity, austerity or cruelty. Use force, apply restraint, punish as he may, he will always have a sullen crew and an unhappy ship.”
The nose of the gig grates on the river’s bank, and Captain Jack Paul leaps ashore. He is greeted by a tall, weather-beaten old man—grizzled and gray. ”

“ Shutting up his glass, Captain Paul Jones leaps from the after flush-deck down among his sailors. Drunk with blood, grimed of powder, naked to the waist, the black glory of battle in their hearts, they merrily work their guns. It is as he beheld from the after-deck. The Ranger rolls to port as the Drake, all dripping, is fetching up her starboard side. ”

“ Paul Jones, planter for two years, has made himself a foremost figure in Virginia. Twenty-eight, cultured, travelled, gallant, brilliant, and a bachelor, he is welcome in every drawing-room. Besides, is there not the Jones plantation, with its mile of river front, its noble mansion house, its tobacco teeming acres, its well-trained slaves, and all turning in those yearly one thousand yellow guineas under the heedful managing thumb of canny Duncan Macbean? Planter Paul Jones is a prince for hospitality, too ”

“ He must board the Englishman, or he is lost. As showing what Captain Pearson’s eighteen-pounders can do, the Richard’s starboard battery—being the one in action—shows nine of its twelve-pounders dismounted from their carriages; while, of the one hundred and forty-three officers and men who belong with the main gun-deck battery under Lieutenant Dale, eighty-seven lie dead and wounded. The gun-deck itself, a-litter with dismounted guns and shot-smashed carriages and tackle, is slippery with blood, and choked by a red clutter of dead and wounded sailors. ”

“ The long nines respond with flame and bellow!
Then they race crashingly inboard with the recoil, and are caught by the breeching tackle. With that the smoky work is all to do over again. The brawny sailor men—from Nantucket, from Martha’s Vineyard, from Sag Harbor, from New London and Barnstable and Salem and Boston and Portsmouth they are—shirtless and shoeless, barefoot and stripped to the belts, ply sponge and rammer. Again each black-throated gun is ready with a stomachful of solid shot. ”

“ Doctor Franklin glances across where the austere Mr. Adams is stiffly posing, with a final thought of impressing the sparkling Duchess de Chartres.
“Rather he is a big man,” replies the philosopher. “Like some houses, his foundations cover a deal of ground; but then he is only one story high. If you could raise Mr. Adams another story, he would be a great man.”
The good doctor goes over, and becomes polite to Mrs. Adams; for the enlightenment of that lady of reserve and dignity, he expands on France and the French character. ”

“ Off Spurn Head our industrious young commodore sinks one collier and chases another ashore. Being full of curiosity, he takes a peep into the mouth of the Humber, and discovers a frightened fleet of British merchant vessels. The merchantmen are in a flutter at the sight of the Richard’s dread topsails; the frigate that it conveying them has its work cut out, to nurse them into anything like calmness.
Following the look into the Humber, that sets so many timid merchantmen to shivering, Commodore Paul Jones puts out to sea under doublereefs. ”

“ And he can charm, too—as witness a letter which two years farther on the unimpressionable Doctor Franklin will write to Madam d’Haudetot:
“No matter, my dear madam,” the cool philosopher will say, “what the faults of Paul Jones may be, I must warn your ladyship that when face to face with him neither man nor, so far as I learn, woman, can for a moment resist the strange magnetism of his presence, the indescribable charm of his manner; a commingling of the most compliant deference with the most perfect self-esteem that I have ever seen in a man ”