A Master of Fortune Part 13

But Captain Kettle, it must be confessed, felt none of the artist's pride in finding his art appreciated. He had always the South Shields chapel at the back of his mind, with its austere code and creed, and he felt keenly the degradation of lowering himself to the level of the play-actor; even though he was earning his bare existence--and had been doing all through the heart of barbarous Africa--by mumming and carolling to tribes whose trade was murder and cannibalism.

He felt an infinite pity for himself when he reflected that many a time nothing but a breakdown, or a loudly bawled hymn, or a series of twisted faces, had been the only thing which stood between him and the cooking fires. But there was no help for it. He was a fighting man, but he could not do battle with a continent; and so he had either to take the only course which remained, and lower himself (as he considered it) to the level of the music-hall pariah, and mouth and mow to amuse the mob, or else accept the alternative which even the bravest of men might well shrink from in dismay.

His travel through the black heart of this black continent may have been paralleled by that of other obscure heroes who voyaged from grim necessity and not for advertis.e.m.e.nt, but the history of it, as it was told me in his simple log-book style, far surpa.s.ses the wonder of any of those travels which find a place in published volumes. He had started, a completely dest.i.tute man, from a spot far up on the Haut Congo, amidst treacherous hostile population. He had not a friend in Africa, black or white. He had no resources save his tongue, his thews, an empty revolver, and his mother wit, and yet he had won a slow way down to the western seaboard through a hundred hostile tribes, where an army would have been eaten up, and a Marco Polo might well have failed.

It would suit my pleasure finely to write of this terrific journey, with its dangers, its finesses, and its infinite escapes; it would gratify me to the quick if I might belaud to the full of my appreciation the endurance, and the grand resourcefulness, of this little sailor cast so desperately out of his more native element; but the account of the travel is reserved for the pen of Captain Kettle himself, and so the more professional scribe may not poach upon his territory.

I had it from his own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the _chef d'oeuvre_ of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct against the sombre background of prosaic travel books.

His arrival at the coast was an achievement that made him almost faint with joy. Xenophon and his ten thousand Greeks hailed the sea, we are told, with a mighty shout. But to them Thala.s.sa was merely a way-mark, a sign that they were nearing home. To Kettle it was more, far more, although he could not define the relationship. He had dwelt upon the sea the greater part of his days; he had got his meagre living from her; and although at all times she had been infinitely hard and cruel to him, and he had cursed her day in and day out with all a seaman's point and fluency, she had wrapped herself into his being in a way he little guessed, till separation showed him the truth.

He had seen the glint of her through the trees as he entered this last village of his march, but the air was too dull with heat for him to catch so much as a whiff of her refreshing saltness, and for the present he could not go down to greet her. He was still the lonely troubadour, dressed in a native cloth around the loins, with a turban of rags upon his head, and a battered accordion slung from his back, come in from afar to sing and pull faces for a dinner.

The meal, for reasons which have been stated, was not a success, but payment had to be rendered all the same. He sang with noise, and made antics such as experience had taught him would be acceptable; and the audience, to whom a concert of this kind was a rarity, howled to him to go on. There was no escape. He had to sing till he could sing no more.

It was far on into the night when a couple of native _tom-tom_ players rescued him. The musical appet.i.tes of the village had been whetted rather than appeased, and as no more could be got out of this wandering minstrel, why then they were quite ready to listen to local instruments and melody.

Dancing commenced, and the heat and the noise grew, and presently Kettle managed to slip away and walk out through the yam and manioc gardens, and the banana groves, to the uproarious beach beyond. He threw himself wearily down on the warm white sand, and when the great rollers swept in and crashed into noisy bellowing surf, the spindrift from it drove on him, and refreshed him luxuriously. It was almost worth going through all he had suffered to enjoy the pleasures of that greeting.

For long-enough he filled his eye on the creaming fringes of the surf, and then he glanced over it at the purple plain of ocean which lay level and unruffled beyond. A great African moon glowed above it in the night, and the lonely vastness of it all gratified him like the presence of a friend. "You are a decent old puddle," he murmured to himself, "though I say it that's got precious little from you beyond mud and slashing.

It's good to be back in reach of the stink of you again."

He lay on where he was deep into the night, revelling in the companionship of the sea, till the many-colored land-crabs began to regard him as mere jetsam. He was not consciously thinking. He was letting his mind rest in an easy torpor; but from time to time he let his eyes range through the purple dark with a seaman's mechanical watchfulness. The noise of the _tom-toms_ and the dancing from the village behind him had died away, and nothing but the sounds from the bush, and the din of the surf, remained to show that the world was alive. The moon, too, had been smothered by a cloud bank, and night lay huddled close round him, with a texture like black velvet.

Then, with a jump he was on his feet, and trembling violently. Another old friend was in his neighborhood--a steamer. Her masthead light had just twinkled into view. He got up and began walking nervously toward her along the hard, white sands. He saw her first in the northwest, coming from some port in the Bight of Biafra probably, and the odds were she was heading south along the Coast.

Presently he picked up her red port light. Yes, he admitted to himself with a sigh, she was making for one of the ports to southward, for Sette Camma perhaps, or Loango, or Landana, or Kabenda, and he calmed himself down with the discovery. Had she been heading north, he had it in him to have swum out to her through the surf and the sharks, and chanced being picked up. He was sick of this savage Africa which lay behind him. The sight of those two lights, the bright white, and the duller red, let him know how ravenous was his hunger to see once more a white man and a white man's ship, and to feel the sway of a deck, and to smell the smells of oil, and paint, and Christian cookery, from which he had been for such a weary tale of days divorced.

The steamer drew on till she came a-beam, and the red port light was eclipsed, and "carrying no stern light," was Captain Kettle's comment.

There was a small glow from her deck and two or three of her ports were lit, but for the most part she crept along as a mysterious black ship voyaging into a region of blackness. It was too dark to make out more than her bare existence, but Kettle took a squint at the Southern Cross, which hung low in the sky like an ill-made kite, to get her bearings, and so made note of her course, and from that tried to deduce her nationality.

From the way she was steering he reckoned she came from Batanga or Cameroons, which are in German territory, and so set her down as sailing originally from Ma.r.s.eilles or Hamburg, and anyway decided that she was not one of the Liverpool boats which carry all the West Coast trade to England. But as he watched, she seemed to slew out of her course. She lengthened out before him across the night, as her bows sheered in toward the land, till he saw her broadside on, and then she hung motionless as a black blot against the greater blackness beyond.

Captain Kettle summed the situation: "Rounded up and come to an anchor.

There'll be a factory somewhere on the beach there. But I don't know, though. That one-eyed head-man said nothing about a factory, and if there was one, why doesn't she whistle to raise 'em up so's they'd be ready to bring off their bit o' trade in the surf-boats when day breaks?"

A cloud slid away in the sky, and the moon shone out like the suddenly opened bulb of a dark lantern. The oily surface of the sea flashed up into sight, and on it sat the steamer--a picture in black and silver.

She lay there motionless as the trees on the beach, and the reason for her state was clear. Her forefoot soared stiffly aloft till it was almost clear of the water; her stern was depressed; her decks listed to port till it was an acrobatic feat to make pa.s.sageway along them.

Captain Kettle whistled to himself long and dismally. "Piled her up," he muttered, "that's what her old man has done. Hit a half-ebb reef, and fairly taken root there. He's not shoved on his engines astern either, and that means she's ripped away half her bottom, and he thinks she'll founder in deep water if he backs her off the ground." A tiny spit of flame, pale against the moonlight, jerked out from under the awnings of the steamer's upper bridge. The noise of the shot came some time afterward, no louder than the cracking of a knuckle. "By James!

somebody's getting his gun into use pretty quick. Well, it's some one else's trouble, and not mine, and I guess I'm going to stay on the beach, and watch, and not meddle." He frowned angrily as though some one had made a suggestion to him. "No, by James! I'm not one of those that seeks trouble unnecessarily."

But all the same he walked off briskly along the sand, keeping his eyes fixed on the stranded steamer. That some sort of a scuffle was going on aboard of her was clear from the shouts and the occasional pistol shots, which became louder as he drew more near; and Captain Kettle, connoisseur as he was of differences of this sort on the high seas, became instinctively more and more interested. And at last when he came to a small canoe drawn up on the beach above high-water mark, he paused beside it with a mind loaded with temptation as deep as it would carry.

The canoe was a dug-out, a thing of light cotton-wood, with washboards forward to carry it through a surf. A couple of paddles and a calabash formed its furniture, and its owner probably lived in the village where he had sung for his dinner over-night. Of course, to borrow her--merely to borrow her, of course--without permission was--

Another splatter of pistol shots came from the steamer, and a yelping of negro voices. Captain Kettle hesitated no longer. He laid hands on the canoe's gunwale, and ran her down into the edge of the surf. He had barely patience to wait for a smooth, but, after three rollers had roared themselves into yeast and quietude, he ran his little craft out till the water was arm-pit deep, and then scrambled on board and paddled furiously.

But it is not given to the European to equal the skill of the black on African surf beaches, and, as might be expected, the next roller that swooped in overended the canoe, and sent it spinning like a toy through the broken water. But Captain Kettle had gained some way; and if he could not paddle the little craft to sea, he could at least swim her out; and this he proceeded to do. He was as handy as an otter in the water, and besides, there was something here which was dragging him to seaward very strongly. His soul l.u.s.ted for touch with a steamer again with a fierceness which he did not own even to himself. Even a wrecked steamer was a thing of kinship to him then.

He swam the dug-out through the last drench and backtow of the surf, rocked her clear from part of her watery load, and then, with a feeling of relief, clambered gingerly on board and baled the rest over the gunwale with his hands. It is not good to stay over-long in these seas which fringe the West African beaches, by reason of the ground shark which makes them his hunting-ground. And then he manned the paddle, knelt in the stern, and went the shortest way to the steamer which perched on the rock.

The moon was still riding in the sky, but burnt with a pale light now, as dawn had jumped up from behind the sh.o.r.e forests. All things were shown clearly. Among other matters, Kettle noted from trifles in her garnishing, which read clear as print to a seaman's eye, that the steamer was not French or German as he had guessed before, but hailed from his own native islands. Moreover, her funnel told him that she was not one of the two regular lines from Liverpool, which do all the commerce of the coast. But he had no time for fresh speculations just then as to her business. The scuffling on board had been growing more and more serious, and it was clear that the blacks of her complement were giving the whites more than they cared about.

Kettle knew enough of the custom of the Coast to be able to sum the situation. "Her Krooboys have broken out of hand," he commented. "That's what's the trouble. You come down here from England with just enough white men to handle your vessel to Sierra Leone, and then you ship Krooboys to work cargo and surf-boats, and do everything except steer, and as long as nothing happens, your Krooboy is a first-cla.s.s hand. Two cupfuls of rice and a bit offish is all the grub he wants; he'll work sixteen hours a day without a grunt; and he'll handle a winch or a steam crane with any Geordie donkey-man that has been grounded in the shops.

But just put your steamboat on the ground where he thinks she can't get off, and there's a different tune to play. He's got a notion that the ship's his, and the cargo's his, to loot as he likes, and if he doesn't get 'em both, he's equal to making trouble. Seems to me he's making bad trouble now."

By this time it was plain that the black men had got entire possession of the lower parts of the ship. The small handful of whites were on the top of the fiddley, and while most were fighting to keep the Africans back, a couple were frenziedly working to get a pair of davits swung outboard, and a lifeboat which hung from them lowered into the water. It was clear they had given up all hope of standing by the ship; and presently they got the boat afloat, and slid down to her in hurried cl.u.s.ters by the davit falls, and then unhooked and rowed away from the steamer's side in a skelter of haste. Coals and any other missile that came handy were showered upon them by the Krooboys who manned the rail, to which they replied with a few vicious revolver shots; and then the boat drew out of range.

Captain Kettle, in his clumsy canoe, paddled up close to her and nodded, and gave the boat's people a "good-morning." The greeting was quaintly enough out of place, but n.o.body seemed to notice that. Each party was too occupied in staring at the other. Those in the lifeboat saw a little lean European, naked to the waist, clad only in a turban and native cloth, and evidently (from the color of his skin) long inured to that state. Kettle saw a huddle of fugitives, all of them scared, and many of them b.l.o.o.d.y with wounds.

The man who was steering the white boat, the steamer's mate he was, according to the gold lace on his cuff, spoke first.

"Well," he said, "you're a funny enough looking beachcomber. What do you want, anyway?"

Captain Kettle felt himself to redden all over under the tan of his skin. Neatness in clothes was always a strong point with him, and he resented the barbarism of his present get-up acutely. "If I wanted a job at teaching manners, I could find one in your boat, that's certain," was his prompt retort. "And when I'd finished with that, I could give some of you a lesson in pluck without much harm being done. I wonder if you call yourselves white men to let a crowd of n.i.g.g.e.rs clear you out of your ship like that?"

"Now, look here, Robinson Crusoe," said the man at the steering oar, "our tempers are all filed up on the raw edge just now, and if you give much lip, this boat will be rowed over the top of your Noah's ark before you know what's. .h.i.t it. You paddle back to your squaw and piccaninnies on the beach, Robinson, and don't you come out here to mock your betters when they're down on their luck. We've nothing to give you except ugly words, and you'll get them cheap."

"Well, Mr. Mate," said Kettle, "I haven't heard white man's English for a year, but if you can teach me anything new, I'm here to learn. I've come across most kinds of failure in my time, but a white man who lets himself be kicked off his ship by a parcel of Krooboys, and who disgraces Great Britain by being a blooming Englishman, is a specimen that's new to me. But perhaps I'm making a mistake? Perhaps you're a Dutchman or a Dago that's learnt the language? Or perhaps, to judge from that cauliflower nose of yours, you're something that's escaped out of a freak museum? You haven't a photo about you by any chance? I'd like to send one home to South Shields. My Missis is a great hand at collecting curiosities which you only see in foreign parts."

The mate bent on the steering gear with sudden violence, turned the lifeboat's head with a swirl, and began sculling her toward the canoe.

But a tall, thin man sitting beside him in the stern-sheets said something to him in an undertone, and the Mate reluctantly let the oar drag limp in the water, and sat himself down, and ostentatiously made ready to roll a cigarette.

"Now, look here," said the tall man, "I don't suppose you want to quarrel."

"I've been in quarrels before for the sheer fun of the thing," said Kettle, who was determined that at any rate no apology should come from his side.

"So have I," said the tall man, "but I've no time for empty amus.e.m.e.nt just now. I'm down here on business. I'm trying to start a new steamer line to work this Coast and get away the monopoly from the other companies. That boat stuck yonder--the _Indian Sheriff_ she's called--is my venture, and she represents about all I've got, and she isn't underwritten for a sixpence. I've been going nap or nothing on this scheme, and at present it looks uncommon like nothing. What I'm anxious about now, is to see if I can't make some arrangement for salvage."

"I can understand it would be useful to you."

"It might be useful to others besides me. Now, there's you, for instance. I dare say you've got a nice little establishment ash.o.r.e, and some simple comforts, and a bit of influence in your village. But you spoke about your wife at home in South Shields just now, and I make no doubt that if you'd got a tidy sum of money in your pocket you'd be as pleased as not to get home to her again?"

Captain Kettle was on the point of breaking out into explanations and disavowals, but a thought came to him, and he refrained.

"Well," he said, "I'm waiting to hear your offer."

"Here it is, then. You go ash.o.r.e now, raise your village, bring off every n.i.g.g.e.r you can scare up, swamp the Krooboys on that steamboat and keep her from being looted, and I solemnly promise you 25 per cent. of her value and the value of what she has in her."

"Yes," said Kettle thoughtfully. "That's a square enough offer, and it's made before witnesses, and I believe the courts would make you stick to it."

"Ho!" grunted the Mate, "Robinson's a sea lawyer, is he? Courts, he talks about."

Kettle ignored the suggestion. "Should I know your name, sir?" he asked of the tall man.

"I'm Nicholson Sheriff. If you know Liverpool, you'll have heard of me."

"You were with Kevendales?"