Beggars on Horseback Part 19

"We shall never get into Port of Spain," spoke Lemaire, "we shall never round the Horn. It's coming on to blow now. She can't live through it, I tell you. It's sinking her now and saving ourselves and making a d.a.m.n-big pile out of it, or it's all going down togeder."

"Then we will all go down together," said Elderkin; "if my repentance is too late the Lord will not let me save the ship nor yet my soul."

"I don't give a curse in h.e.l.l for your soul, or anyone else's," cried the mate. "I tell you it's madness. Only a miracle could keep de ship afloat."

"There has already been one miracle aboard her," said Elderkin. "Who are we to set limits to the power of the Almighty? It is a small thing to keep a senseless structure of wood and iron afloat in comparison with making the blackest of sinners see the true light, which the Lord has done between two dog-watches. Yesterday I was profaning the Book with my calculations of sinful gain made out upon its pages, to-day I have been calculating how many years I have spent in following my l.u.s.ts, and were the years as many as the waves of the sea, I have prayed the Lord that the weeks of striving in front of us may wipe out the years."

"He is mad," remarked Olsen, philosophically.

Lemaire turned swiftly on the engineer. "We must take charge," he urged in a low voice, his back to the captain, "and then you must do what I say. We will run her close insh.o.r.e, and . . ."

Whether Elderkin heard above the growing clamour of the ship or not--for the woodwork had begun to crackle like a wheezy concertina and the slap of green water breaking sounded in a scurrying frequency--he knew what the mate was planning. A rim of something cold on the back of Lemaire's neck made his speech fade on his lips, and he and Olsen stood motionless while Elderkin spoke, Olsen's light eyes looking at the fanatical dark ones above the gun.

"I am master of this ship, and what I say goes, or I'll put daylight through your dirty body," said Elderkin, pressing the muzzle in till the dark seamed skin on the mate's neck turned greenish in a circle around the iron. "As for you, Olsen, you're white, though you're a Dutchman, and I look to you to stick. What about the engines?"

"I am sorry about this," replied Olsen, with seeming inconsequence, "but what must be will be. I will do the best with my engines. But if ever we see port again, I have done with you and your ship and your religion. I have my children to think of. I will go below."

And he pulled the chart-room door open. As though his doing so were the signal to some malignancy without, a sudden blow of wind struck the ship; a crash sounded along her decks and on the moment a surge of water flooded into the chart-room. A sudden squall from the south-west, such as sometimes arises like a thunderclap in those lat.i.tudes at that time of year, had caught the _Spirito Santo_ in the confusion of the heavy cross seas. That first blow heeled her over, over, over . . . it seemed as though she were dipping swiftly far beyond the angle of safety; further and further. There was nothing to be done for the moment but clutch on to whatever was nearest; cries of terror from the dagos sounded thinly even through the clamour of wind and sea and crashing of gear. Then came that agonizing moment when a vessel, heeled over as far as possible, seems to hesitate, remains poised for the fraction of a second that partakes of the quality of eternity, between recovery and the hair's-breadth more that means foundering.

Then, with a groaning of timbers like some mammoth animal in pain, a thick jarring of machinery, and a clattering of everything movable aboard her, the _Spirito Santo_ came slowly up again. If that gust of wind had held a minute longer she would have rolled herself, her faked cargo, and her huddled lives, down towards the bed of the Pacific; sins and religions, material hopes and spiritual aspirations, alike marked by one fading trail of air bubbles.

Elderkin found he was holding Lemaire round the waist, while Olsen was on his hands and knees in the lather of water streaming off the floor.

"The Lord has decided," said Elderkin, "we have now no choice. Get below, Olsen." He was heaving himself into his oilskins as he spoke, ordered in his movements but speedy, considering the terrible lurching of the vessel. His fight to save the _Spirito Santo_, to save her against herself, had begun.

He found her topgallant sails thrashing out like blinds from a window, for the topgallant sheets had carried away, while the foresail and fore-topmast-staysail were like to flap themselves to rags. He bellowed his orders above the clamour of the ropes and guys, that were all shrieking and wailing on different notes as though the ship were suddenly endowed with the gift of tongues. The men fought their way up the rigging, and, lying along the slippery yard-arms, wrestled with clew-lines that whipped about as if possessed, while the wet and iron-hard canvas beat back and forth with reports like gunshots. But the men succeeded at length and Elderkin felt that the first tiny stage in his great battle was won.

Already the sea was running in great slopes of blackish green, streaked and scarred with livid whiteness; from the p.o.o.p the whole of the ship was filled with a swirling mist of spray that wreathed about the masts, only parting here and there to show one boiling flood of broken water that poured across the waist from upreared starboard rail to submerged port scuppers. The forecastle was flooded; from the forecastle head, as the ship pitched, a torrent poured on to the hatches, and when the next moment she dived forward, rushing down a long valley that seemed to slope to the heart of the ocean, two rivers poured out of her hawse-holes. Elderkin, as she dived, called down the tube--the only means of communicating with the engine-room except the still more primitive one of messengers--to stop her. And when it looked as though she could never recover to meet that oncoming mountain, but must dive into it and be smothered, her bows rose once more, up and up, till they raked the swollen clouds, while a wall of whiteness thundered past on either side. As Elderkin called for "full" again, his face was as calm as that of a little child. All that night the storm increased, and wove air and water into one great engine of destruction, and all night Elderkin stayed lashed to the rail of the chart-house, which was momentarily in danger of being washed away like a rabbit-hutch. It was impossible to keep the binnacle alight, and no stars were visible; steering was a mere groping by the feel of the wind. Dawn seemed hardly a lightening, so dark hung the ma.s.sed clouds, of a curious rusty-brown colour, packed one above the other, overlapping so as to form a solid roof. Only between their lower rim and the slate-grey sea, an occasional glimpse of horizon showed where a thin line of molten pallor ran. Brown, white and steel-grey, with the masts and rigging sharp and black against it all, and the decks, dark and wet, now refracting what light there was as the ship rolled one way, now falling on deadness again as she rolled the other.

With the dawning, Elderkin was unlashed and took the wheel himself, aided by a seaman, for it took two men to stand its kicking. To him came Olsen, still phlegmatic, almost as black as one of his dago squad.

Gripping the p.o.o.p-rail with one hand, with the other he laid hold of the captain's oilskin, and leant as near as possible to shout his news, but even so Elderkin could only catch a word here and there.

"Won't stand . . . stays parting . . ." came to him.

"Keep her at it," he yelled back.

But a sudden shout came from Olsen, while the man at the wheel literally turned colour and closed his eyes. Only Elderkin, with a look that seemed queerly of exultation on his face, stared ahead to where a vast wall of water, so high it glimmered greenly, was rolling towards them over the broken, tossing sea. That was exactly what it looked like, as though it were a body distinct and separate from the rest of the raging water, some great fold pushed up from the Antarctic region and urged across the ocean, on and on. . . . It bore down on the infinitesimal ship and her clinging ants of crew, bore down, blotting out the sky, till suddenly it was so near it became one with the rest of the sea, as though the whole surface were curving over into a hollow sphere. It thundered upon them; then, its gla.s.sy concavity reared to an incredible height, it toppled over and broke in one roaring cataract of foam.

What happened next no one remaining in the _Spirito Santo_ could ever have told. Three men were washed overboard; one had his legs so broken that the splintered bones drove into the deck where he was hurled down.

There were a few long-drawn seconds when all thought she had gone under, for the rushing sea had climbed level with the chart-house roof, while the air was so thick with spume and spray it would have been difficult to say where the sea left off being solid and became fused with the wind. Then, with a roaring and a sucking like that when a wave, shattered, streams off a cliff, the water poured off decks and hatches in long lacings of dazzling white. The _Spirito Santo_ still lived.

But it seemed she was mortally wounded, for she was jarring all her length, even the twisted stanchions vibrated as though some malignant force within her had broken loose; and when Elderkin tried to bring her head up to the wind, the wheel spun in his hands as easily and uselessly as a child's toy.

"The rudder . . ." cried Olsen, "she is gone. . . ."

Elderkin retained his clarity of aspect and gave his orders collectedly; only when the dago crew clung miserably to any support and refused to obey, he pulled out his gun and drove them to their stations. Hove-to, with only her spanker, close-reefed main-topsail and fore-staysail set, there was a chance of keeping her off the coast till the sea should quiet down enough to allow of a jury rudder being rigged. Meanwhile, as the men were setting the sails she rolled horribly in the trough of the sea; rolled fit to break her heart. Elderkin, on the p.o.o.p, shouting at the men reefing the topsail, saw something that for the first moment of horror seemed fraught with the supernatural. Years of neglect, of rust, of corrosion from salt, had in reality gone to bring about what he then saw, with dishonesty and money-grubbing meanness behind the rust and corrosion. For, with a scream of ripping iron and the sharp snapping of guys, the _Spirito Santo_ rolled her funnel clean off at the root, the casing along with it. It crashed upon the deck, and the next moment was swept overboard, carrying away the port bulwarks. A gust of heat and a murky torrent of foul smoke blew flatly from the cavity that gaped in the ship's vitals; then a flood of water, luminously pale in the growing daylight, filmed across the deck amidships and poured over the ragged rim of the wound. The _Spirito Santo_ rolled upon the water, little more than a helpless wreck.

Lemaire, who was lying on the top of the chart-house, gripping the rail, screamed out that they were done for; even Olsen, turning his blackened face to the captain, shouted that the game was up; as to the dagos, each yelled where he lay. This time Elderkin had to use his gun before he could get the ship hove-to. At sight of one of their number lying limp in the scuppers, the crew obeyed once more, while Olsen, sticking by his caste, and Lemaire, seeing still a faint chance for life, worked with them to cover the jagged hole with the stoutest timbers they could find.

What was left of the fires was drawn, the planks over the hole sh.o.r.ed up from below with timbers, tarpaulins stretched a-top of all and fastened down by a great batten bolted through the sodden deck; and, during all the hours of work amid wind and water, Elderkin watched the ship, saw that she did not come too much up into the wind nor fall off into the trough of the sea; kept the men at it when, time and again, they would have given up. Gun in one hand and Bible in the other, he read out threats of the Almighty's, intermingled with his own. And, at last, the jury-hatch was finished, and a further stage of the battle won.

Now came the most trying hours of all, when there no longer remained anything possible to do, when hands fell on inaction and bodies were free to feel sore and cold, and minds were vacant of everything but an animal despondency. Olsen lit a fire on the iron floor by the boilers, and here, for the most part, the miserable men crouched during the rest of the day and the following night. Elderkin, after he had slept the sudden and over-powering sleep of the worn-out man, awoke to his first doubts. As long as there had been continuous need for action, that and the stern joy of a fight had shut out everything else for him; now that there was nothing to be done but hoist the inner jib when she came up too much into the wind and lower it when she paid off again, a need so recurring it was almost mechanical, he became as much a prey to inner questionings as his ship was to the winds. What tormented him was the thought that if the _Spirito Santo_ had foundered in this south-west gale all hands would have inevitably been lost, whereas had he kept by his agreement to scuttle her earlier all could probably have been saved.

Was he then become a murderer by having decided as he had, and would it have been more righteous to keep on his evil course? Elderkin, to whom for the first time the lives of his men had become of a value other than commercial, was tormented by the thought of the three washed overboard by the great wave; and the curses of the man who had died a few hours after his legs were shattered re-echoed through his mind. It was not so much that these men had met death--Elderkin had too often stared it in the face to think overmuch of that--but that they were cut off in the midst of their sins, with blasphemies on lip and soul. Elderkin's creed allowed of no gracious after-chances, he saw the ent.i.ties he had known and bullied in the flesh, as having become blind particles of consciousness burning in undying fires. . . .

With dawn and a further dropping of the wind, which had been lessening all night, he searched again the pages of his Bible, and he followed the instinctive trail of human nature when he thrust the niceties of values from him and determined to hold by what was right and wrong at the springs of his action. When he went out on to the p.o.o.p and met the crisp but now friendly wind, saw the glitter of sunshine on peac.o.c.k waves, that still broke into white crests, but without malignance, he knew that the Lord was on his side. How was it possible he had ever thought otherwise? He must indeed be weak in the ways of grace that his first testing should awake such questionings within him. As the weight of despondency and sick dread fell off him in the cold sunlight, Elderkin flung up his arms and shouted for joy. Lemaire, crawling up, found him on his knees upon the top of the battered chart-house, improvising a paen of thanksgiving.

All that day the men worked at rigging a jury rudder and patching up the port bulwarks. Then Olsen, who kept them as doggedly at it as the skipper himself, conceived a plan whereby his engines could once again play a part. He collected sheet-iron and stout pieces of wood, and with these he contrived a jury-funnel, fitting steam-jets at the base to maintain the draught to the furnaces. The freakish erection held together well, though it looked oddly stumpy in place of the thin, raking smoke-stack; Olsen secured it by guys of iron chain. At last all was complete, and once again a plume of dirty smoke trailed from between the sticks of the _Spirito Santo_. The men slept as they fell, but by then the rudder and smoke-stack had converted her from a blind cripple into an intelligent whole which could work independently of the direction of wind and current. A further stage of the battle was won, and with every victory Elderkin felt greater confidence in the Lord and in himself.

By the next day it had grown very cold, and the men began to prepare shapeless and weather-worn garments against the bitterness of the Horn.

Even Lemaire, who kept on repeating sullenly that they could never round it, knew that the only chance now was to carry on, and, his face seeming to pale with the first breath of the cold, hugged himself in a great padded coat. Food was already beginning to run short, and only by serving out double quant.i.ties of the raw West Indian rum were the men kept going at all. The ship herself could be heartened with no such encouragement, and although she was now snoring at a fair pace through the smother of foam that kept the lee-scuppers covered with a running river, yet her foul sides and wicked loading absorbed half her speed.

She was a wet ship at the best of times, now she was sodden to her trucks, and the showers of icy rain that blew down on the westerly gale every now and then, wetted in a worse fashion, for rain-water chills to the bone right through oilskins. One day an exhausted Cape pigeon fell on board, and the little bird was eaten raw by the first man who got to it; sometimes a great albatross sailed on level unmoving wings around the labouring ship, and mollymawks screamed and circled, but none fell a victim to the hungry crew. There was a certain amount of salt junk left aboard, but the chief diet was nothing but hard-tack, and that was mouldy. Elderkin remained unmoved by any consideration save how to get her round the Horn, and he made Olsen save the dwindling fuel as much as possible for the attempt, lest they should be kept beating back and forth for weeks till exhaustion of ship and men sent them under. So the days went on, and the great Cape Horn greybeards rolled up with glistening flanks and white crests that broke and poured down them in thunder. Cold rains, wind squalls, her own condition and that of the men aboard her, all fought against the _Spirito Santo_, till it seemed as though the strongly set will of her captain were the only thing that kept her alive--alive and obedient however sulky, to the intelligence that drove her.

Still she kept going, steaming and sailing into the stormy sunsets till at last she was off Cape Stiff itself, showing unspeakably bleak and gaunt through the driving mist; only now and then were the black cliffs visible, going down into a smoking line of foam.

If a bad storm had hit her off the promontory nothing could have saved her, but the wind, though the strong westerly gale of the "roaring forties," held less of violence than ordinary, and although she rolled till it seemed she would dip her yards, and the water could hardly be pumped out of her as fast as it poured in, yet she pulled through, as she had pulled through the south-westerly gale and the disasters that followed. Elderkin, who had somehow expected his great tussle off the Horn, felt an odd sensation that was almost disappointment.

On looking back afterwards, Elderkin saw that the voyage was, as it were, divided clearly into two by the pa.s.sing of the Horn--on the Pacific side the actual physical blows of material damage and storm, on the Atlantic the more wearing struggle against spiritual opposition. The men, headed by Lemaire, began to murmur.

For one thing, the last possible sc.r.a.p of fuel had been burned by the time they were pa.s.sing the Falklands, and they were left with nothing but their canvas to carry them home. As far as keeping her steady went, she was better under sail than steam, and also, like every true sailor, Elderkin felt more in harmony with the weather when using only canvas.

For a steamer goes independently of the wind, ignores it, shoves her nose in its face, and the wind pays her back by becoming an enemy, but a sailing-ship lives by wind, humours it, coaxes the last hair's-breadth of it, and the wind, flattered, ignores that all the time it is being managed and made of use.

But the sails of the _Spirito Santo_ were old and mildewed, she carried little spare canvas, and, worst of all, if they should come into a calm, those on board her might starve to death before they sighted help. All these things the men knew, and knowing, began to rebel. Lemaire, too, no longer seconded Elderkin, and he and Olsen bore the burden of n.i.g.g.e.r-driving alone--and Olsen, although he was loyal, made his discontent apparent. A terrible loneliness of mind fell upon Elderkin.

He felt himself accursed of all men, but he still held on; each successive incident of his fight, instead of wearing his resistance down, went to strengthen it. The crisis came when after weeks of crawling and standing still, hurrying on with any advantage of breeze that presented itself, yet afraid to carry too much canvas, the _Spirito Santo_ was nearing the fortieth parallel once more.

It was a grey, squally day, with the south-westerly wind keeping the sails bellied forward, and the gusts of rain driving so hard that the water in the br.i.m.m.i.n.g scuppers was lashed to paleness; the pumps were in pretty constant use now, and the fetid bilge-water washed over the decks in floods of a dark reddish colour, as though the _Spirito Santo_ were bleeding internally. A sullen moodiness held air and sea and mind of those who looked; that grinding reluctance of the _Spirito Santo_ had pa.s.sed into the men's bones, they moved slowly if ordered to do anything, their shrunken flesh was a ma.s.s of sea-boils and, since the lime-juice and potatoes were exhausted, scurvy had broken out. Elderkin himself looked like some mediaeval picture of the Baptist: he had grown a beard that came to a spa.r.s.e point, and his sombre eyes glowed from behind the disordered streaks of hair that fell over them, while his skin, so tightly stretched over the bones, had taken on a waxen texture.

To the men who came crowding on to the after-deck to voice their resentment, he had the air of a madman, as he stood erect at the break of the p.o.o.p, his figure dark against the grey pallor of the sky. For a few minutes he stood scanning them quietly, and they stared back at him.

In marshalling them where he had, Lemaire had made an error in psychology; for the mere fact that they had to look up to Elderkin on the p.o.o.p affected both him and them unconsciously.

"What do you want?" asked the skipper quietly. Lemaire stepped forward as spokesman.

"We want to get out of dis shop and make for the sh.o.r.e, dat's what we want, and dat's what we'll do."

"Ah . . . how?"

"We'll take de law into our own hands. If we sink her now we can make for the mout' of de Plate, or we might be picked up sooner. I've told de men; I've told how we was all goin' to be rich an' safe and would have been trowin' our money around ash.o.r.e by now if you hadn't got de praise-de-Lord bug in your head."

"What Ma.s.sa Lemaire say quite true, sah," called out a burly negro, whose black face was greyed over in patches from disease, "an' we aren't goin' to stand dis any longer. If you won't sink her we're goin' to, or we'll all be dead men."

"We're dead now, dead and rotting," shrieked the bo'sun, on a sudden note of frenzy that pierced the air like a thrown blade, "who ever saw live men rot?" And he held up a hand which scurvy, on an open wound, had literally rotted so that the tendons hung down like weed. He shook the maimed thing at Elderkin. "Look at this"--"And this . . ."--"And this . . ." came up to Elderkin in angry shouts. The men, intoxicated by the sudden venting of their wrongs, began to swarm up the ladders to the p.o.o.p deck.

Elderkin felt new life urge through his veins, the pressure of the dead weeks behind sloughed off him, as the thinning veils of sleep drop away from the waking consciousness in the morning. He did not pull out his gun, but kept his hands in his pockets and faced the snarling, tentative, ugly pack of them.

Then he talked, not raising his voice more than was needful for the grinding and creaking of the ship's labour and the weary complaining of the wind-tortured rigging.

"So you'd mutiny, would you?" he began in his soft voice, "well, first you'll listen to me. Down off that gang-way, you there . . . that's better. Well, I guess I know what you men are saying to yourselves--that I'm one man against the lot of you, and now we're no longer fighting to keep the ship afloat for our lives, you can easy get the better of me.

That's what you're thinking, isn't it?"

A murmur of a.s.sent, half-threatening, half-shame-faced, came from below.

To Elderkin, looking down, the men appeared as blots of deeper colour against the pale glimmer of the wet deck; their upturned faces had the abrupt fore-shortening that imparts a touch of the ludicrous, but those faces were set in folds which told of hardened determination, behind the swellings and boils which glistened in the watery light, so that Elderkin could see each disfigurement as clearly as pebbles in a pool unshaded from the sky.