C. Fox Smith

“ All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted as the grave—nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain, once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock, and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his memories. ”

“ This was his ship—this dream, this queen, this perfect thing among ships! Why, her name was like a song—why hadn’t it struck him before?—and she was like a song ... the loveliest thing, Anderton thought, he had ever seen ... rising up there so proud and stately above them all ... her bare slender skysail poles soaring up, up until the little rosy dapple in the evening sky seemed almost like a flight of tropical birds resting on her spars. She dwarfed everything else in the dock. Anderton had thought his last ship, the ship in which he had served his time, lofty enough ”

“ The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea, under the grey light of the dreary dawn—a sight to daunt the stoutest heart.
It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. ”

“ It was all a wonder to him, just as Oporto, whither the “John and Jane” was bound, was a wonder to him after the cold stormy North Sea, the bleak streets of Newcastle and Wapping which so far had been his only idea of seaports. The schooner, as has already been said, was an easy ship, and in port the hands had plenty of time to themselves. He liked the sun, the light, the warmth, the colour. He liked the laughing, lazy, careless children of the South. ”

“ ORANGES THE clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm. ”

“ The voices of the men as they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.
Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. ”

“ There was some kind of a small disturbance—a street row of some sort—in progress just outside the dock gate, and, despite his impatience to see his new ship, Anderton stopped to see what was happening.
A queer little scarecrow of a man was standing in the roadway, shaking his clenched fists in denunciation towards the soaring spars of a lofty clipper, whose poles, rising above the roofs of the warehouses, seemed to stab the sunset sky. ”

“ The mate was a poor creature—weak, but with the self-assertiveness that generally goes with weakness. Broughton felt he would not like to rely upon him in an emergency.
But he had had very little sleep since the ship sailed—nor, indeed, during the weeks which had elapsed since Featherstone’s funeral. He shrank instinctively from being alone. It was then that his anxieties began to crowd upon him afresh, and that the threat of the future seemed to touch him like the shadow of some boding wing. ”

“ Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.{76}
It was queer. He couldn’t explain it—couldn’t understand it! But there was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he must save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel making signals from a turret top. ”

“ His cat was missing—a ginger-and-white specimen, gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost, making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The steward had only to murmur “P’sss—p’sss—p’sss!” under his breath, and out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying roar of “Damn you—shishing that infernal cat again! ”

“ An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him—just such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay down on the cabin settee.
A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out ... if he could only think of it ... somewhere.... ”

“ The ship lay jammed hard and fast on a sunken reef, and was making water rapidly.
They left the ship at sunset. The skipper took his seat in the boat without a word or a backward glance; the mate—sobered for once—hung his head like a beaten dog. The melancholy steward carried the faithful Ginger in a basket.
“Ain’t been such a bad ol’ gal, ’as she?” That was the gist of the crew’s valedictions. They set off in single file up the narrow path that led to the top of the cliff—an oddly incongruous little procession in that rural setting.
Anderton came last of all. ”

“ The opaque green waters of the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the early morning sky.
The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main, and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in the sun{73}light that caressed their swelling surfaces. ”

“ There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing more than he could help. But he—what had he given to her? Money—well, he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of, sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin. ”

“ There were haloes round the flares that roared above the street stalls, and the lighted shop windows were mere luminous blurs in the surrounding murk.
“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no mistake—thick as ever I see it!”
Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel—a solid mass of clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand, getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. ”

“ Anderton’s eye dwelt longingly on the tall clipper whose spars he had already seen soaring above the sheds. There, now, was the very ship of his dreams! He thought life could hold no higher bliss for a{142} sailorman than to stand upon her poop—to control her, to guide her, to see the whole of her lovely height and grace moving in obedience to his commands. ”

“ He sniffed the coming wind as a dog sniffs the scent of its accustomed quarry; then he walked briskly across to the break of the poop and, leaning his hands on the rail, called to the mate.
“Mister!”
“Sir?”
“Stand by to square away your main yard! I think we’ll get a breeze afore two bells.”
He walked the poop fore and aft, rubbing his hands and whistling a little tune.
There was a scamper of bare feet on the planking. Men sang out as they hauled on the braces, “Yo-heu-yoi-hee!” Blocks sang shrill as fifes, reef points beat a tattoo on the tautened canvas. The sails filled with loud clappings. ”

“ They were the first ships Old Featherstone bought, in the distant days when he was still young Featherstone, a smart young clerk in Daly’s office, whose astonishing rise to fortune was yet on the knees of the gods.
They were old frigate-built East Indiamen, both of them, the “General Bunbury” and “Earl Clapham,” from some Bombay or Moulmein dockyard: teak through and through, but as leaky as sieves with sheer age and years of labouring in seaways. ”

“ He awoke to a flood of bright sunshine streaming in through the skylight. The wind had driven fog and rain before it, leaving a virginal and new-washed world under a sky of pale, remote blue.{37}
Broughton heaved himself off the settee, catching a glimpse of himself—haggard, rumpled, and unkempt—in the mirror over the sideboard, as he did so.
“By George!” he said to himself, viewing his reflection, “Marianne would have looked down her nose at me if I’d turned up at Sibella Road like this. She’d have thought I’d been having a thick night, and small blame to her!” ”

“ It was a large and imposing stateroom with a big teak bed—evidently the captain’s, a relic of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner of the voice—a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever heard. ”

“ During the long hours while the ship fought for her life—during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept going incessantly to free her from the volume of water{152} that had flooded her hold—when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient sail to keep her going before the wind—he it was who continually urged, encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. ”

“ Broughton sipped his glass of wine and ate a sandwich, surveying the familiar room with that curious illogical sense of surprised resentment which humanity always feels in the presence of the calm indifference of inanimate things to its own transiency and mortality. ”

“ Moreover, the legend grew apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in her!{153}”
And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She lost spars—she lost sails—she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows what! ”

“ Three years is a long while, especially to the young; but it was not in point of actual time, but in experience, that so wide and deep a gulf yawned between himself and the boy who three years since had left these shores he was now approaching. She had taught him many things, that old ship—more, perhaps, than he himself knew....
Rumbold wandered up on to the poop and began to tell smutty tales. The restlessness which always consumed him when the ship was nearing land was strong on him. ”

“ Perhaps it was one of the secrets of his success: for imagination, nine times out of ten, is a dangerous sort of commodity, commercially considered; and if Old Featherstone had gone a-gallivanting off to Tuticorin or Amoy or Punta Arenas or Penang or Port au Prince or any other alluringly-named place with which his ships trafficked, instead of sitting in Billiter Square and looking after his business—why, no doubt his business would have been vastly the sufferer! ”

“ The helmsman, a big heavy Swede, was still clinging to the wheel like a limpet; partly because it appeared to him good to have something to hold on to, partly because his wits worked so slowly that it hadn’t yet occurred to him to let go. Broughton grasped the spokes and the two men threw every ounce of their strength into the task of putting the helm over.
Gusts of cheery obscenity came out of the darkness forward as the crew fought to get the spars round. “Good men!” ”

“ Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days, Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.
Time—there was no time! There was just a never-ending succession of low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of white-{85}crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been days—there must have been nights. ”

“ Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps, that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth living, if she didn’t, it was not. ”