The Lord of the Sea Part 33

The officer read it half through with flurried closeness; then, "Well, but what is all this?" he broke out: "is it a piece of comedy, or what, gentlemen?"

"It is serious; and the last clause comes into operation to-day: only such ships being held authorized to pa.s.s on the sea as pay to the first-reached sea-fort on any voyage a tax, or sea-rent, of 4s. per ton on their registered tonnage, with an additional stamp-tax of 33s. 4d.

for receipt, and a stamp-tax of 1 16s. 8d. for clearance. You will see at a glance the clauses of the law, if you cast your eyes over this schedule--"

"Law!" the other broke in: "you talk of _Law_! But doesn't the sea, then, belong by right to all men--?"

"Not more than the land. Ask yourself: why should it? But I do hope you won't argue: your time must be so precious".

Out shrilled the _Kaiser Wilhelm's_ whistle of recall.

"I must go!" said the officer with a worried hand-toss: "I must go. If you give me those doc.u.ments, I will show them to the Captain--but he is not the sort of man--this is mere piracy, after all! But, good G.o.d, gentlemen, if you only dare touch that ship, I shouldn't put myself in your place this day week for all--"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the papers, dashed, and his men, in a pa.s.sion of haste, lay to the oars, the _Kaiser_ only four hundred yards from the _Boodah_; and the officer, shaking aloft the doc.u.ments, pitched up the stair, the centre of five hundred pairs of scared eyes, while the captain bored his way to him.

Two minutes of intense low speech, crowded with gestures: and suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the bridge; and now he is bending down with howling throat: "Pa.s.sengers to their berths!"

Simultaneously, above the engine-room stair a bell jangled; round swung the pointer to "_Full Ahead_"; and ere the decks were cleared of their bustle the _Kaiser_, like a back-kicking hen, scratched up under her p.o.o.p a spreading pool of spume, which tossed spasmodic spray-showers and spoutings: and she stirred, stretched like a street, churned the sea, and, wheeling to reveal her receding stern, was away.

By which time Hogarth was standing at a cubical cabin of steel on the roof, with him Loveday and Quilter-Beckett, his brow puckered with wrinkles, the sun troubling his eyes.

"I suppose the _chef_ is warned?"--he threw away his cigar.

"Oh, yes, my Lord King", Quilter-Beckett answered.

And Loveday: "She sweats like a thoroughbred"--haggard, but a.s.suming calm: "few things could be more profusely expeditious".

"Ah, make phrases, John," murmured Hogarth...."Well, but hadn't you better be getting out the boats?"

Upon which Quilter-Beckett stepped into the little erection, touched a b.u.t.ton, and in a minute the water round the southern side was swarming with twenty-three boats whose blue-jackets began to row toward the _Kaiser_.

And presently, "It's no use waiting", said Hogarth, looking in upon Quilter-Beckett: "I should mine and sh.e.l.l her at the same moment, if I were you; tell them to get it in well amidships".

Now a few seconds, full of expectation, pa.s.sed, the _Kaiser Wilhelm_ already two miles away: till suddenly s.p.a.ce opened its throat in a gulf to bay gruff and hollow like h.e.l.l-gate dogs; and, almost at the same moment, close by the _Kaiser_ a column of water hopped with one humph of venom two hundred feet on high: when this dropped back broad-showering with it came showering a rain of wreckage; and instantly a shriek of lamentation floated over the sea, mixed with another shriek of steam.

For the moment the ship, enveloped in vapours, could not be seen; but in two minutes glimpses of her hull appeared, shewing the bluff bulge of her starboard bottom: for she leaned steeply to port with a forward crank, her two starboard screws, now free, spinning asleep like humming-tops. A six-inch sh.e.l.l, beautifully aimed, had shattered her engines, killing two stokers, and a torpedo-mine had knocked a hole nine feet across in her port beam.

But as the _Boodah's_ boats, meanwhile, had been racing toward her, and as her own port boats were quickly out, all were got off; in fact, she floated so long, that her ship's papers with 270,000 in specie, and a few hundred-weight of mailbags were saved, and even after the boats reached the _Boodah_ she still stretched there motionless, until, with a sudden flurry, she determined to plunge.

Soon afterwards Hogarth had the Captain in his suite, to tell him that he did not wish any intelligence of the event to reach the world for four days, during which pa.s.sengers and crew would be his guests, and then be sent on to America, his object, he said, being to impress the loss of the _Kaiser_ upon the consciousness of all, by making all anxious as to her fate.

So that night her pa.s.sengers danced till late, for there was no resisting the hospitality of Hogarth, or the witchery of those vistas and arcades, grand hall and lost grot, _salons_ and conservatories, there in the dark of the ocean, or such an enchantment of music, and fabulousness of table; the host, too, pleaded prettily for himself; and now they pardoned, and now they pouted, but always they banqueted, kissed, lost themselves in visions, were charmed, and danced.

x.x.xV

THE CUP OF TREMBLING

It was by the merest chance that Baruch Frankl and his daughter were not on the _Kaiser_: for Frankl was the half-nephew of Mrs. Charles P.

Stickney, a New York Jewess, and as the marriage of Miss Stickney with Lord Alfred Cowern was only fifteen days off, Frankl had made arrangements to accompany the bridegroom across, but had been detained by stress of business; happily for him--for Lord Alfred, the bridegroom, was a dancing prisoner in the _Boodah_.

Early, then, on the third morning thence, Charles P. Stickney, the bride's father, a natty little Yankee, hurried a-foot to the Maritime Exchange: for, to his infinite surprise, the _Kaiser's_ arrival had not been in the morning's paper: so the little arch-millionaire stepped toward Beaver Street, sure that the _Kaiser_ had come in too late for the press.

Early as it was, he found the place as thickly a-buzz as though it was that feverish hour between eleven and twelve.

He pushed his way to the bulletin-board, inscribed with the hours at which ships are sighted and entered into dock: the Kaiser was not there: and with p.r.o.ne outlook he went seeking an a.s.sistant superintendent; but, sighting a fellow-operator, come, as usual, to digest the world, from barometer-reports to coffee-quotations at Rio, Charles P. Stickney cried to him: "Funny about the _Kaiser_! Know anything?"

"It's the darndest thing..." mumbled the other, still star-gazing at a blackboard prices-current of American staples: "raise h.e.l.l this day, I guess"....

And on through the rooms Stickney shouldered: all in the air here an odour of the sea, and of them that go down to it in ships; pilot, captain, supercargo, purser; abstracts from logs, copies of manifests and clearances, marks and numbers of merchandise, with quant.i.ties, shippers, consignees; here peaked caps, and the jaw that chewed once, and paused long, and, lo, it moved anew; Black Books, ma.s.sive volumes enshrining ancient wrecks; vast newspaper-files in every tongue; records of changes in lightships, lights, buoys, and beacons, from Shanghai to Cape Horn; reports, charts, atlases, globes; the progress of the rebellion in Shantung, and the earthquake last night in Quito; directories, and high-curved reference-books, and storm-maps; every minute the arrival of cipher cablegrams, breathless with the day's Amsterdam exchange on London, or with the quant.i.ties of tea _in transitu_ via Suez or Pacific Railway; and the drift of ocean-currents, and the latest position of the _Jane Richardson_, derelict, and the arrival of the _Ladybird_ at Bahia; and the probabilities of wind-circulation, atmospheric moisture, aberrations of audibility in fog; and in the middle of it the pulse of the sun, the thundering engines and shooting shuttles of this Loom; a tiptop briskness and bustle of action; a scramble of wits; a _melee_ to the death; mixed with pea-jackets, and aromas of chewed pigtail, and a rolling in the gait.

Into this roar of life that word _Kaiser_ stole: and it grew to a chorus.

Charles P. Stickney, b.u.t.ting upon a tearing clerk who was holding aloft a bulletin of icebergs and derelicts, tried to stop him: upon which the clerk, who would not be stopped, cried with a back-looking face of pa.s.sionate haste: "London message just received--_no intelligence of Kaiser_--"

But he had hardly disappeared, when another man from an inner room rushed, waving something: the Navesink Highlands lookout had wired the _Kaiser_ in sight! And while the Exchange rang with cheers, Stickney, a colour now in his sere cheeks, went boring his way outward.

The lookout had said it--those blue eyes that never failed there on his watch-tower, he knowing the ships that sail the sea as the Cyclops his sheep, in his heart so knowing them all, that as that sea-gla.s.s detected a speck on the horizon, those sea-wise nostrils sniffed its name: for between the _Mary Jane_ and the _Mary Anne_, both off-sh.o.r.e schooners, is all the world of difference: if you would not see it, _he_ knows. And he had wired the _Kaiser!_--so expectant his outlook: and that day wept like a ruined man.

Swift upon his first wire a second flashed: and one of those c.r.a.ped days of the tragedies of commerce followed, the boding, the loss, flashed everywhere, pervading Europe and America.

The next morning the Exchange, all the exchanges, the Lloyds', the bourses, were crowded from an early hour, but subdued: no news, not a word; but still--there was certainty: for had the _Kaiser_ and her wireless been merely disabled, she would undoubtedly by now have been reported: she had foundered.

_Foundered!_--in the serenest weather in which ship ever crossed the water....

But at eleven the truth came: for the brig which had lain becalmed near the _Boodah_ at the moment of the tragedy, and now was nearer England, had flashed the news: "many of the Kaiser's pa.s.sengers mutilated, many drowned".

Death, then, was in the pottage of Life; the air tainted with specks of blood....

That day Man, as it were, rent his garments, sitting in ashes, and to Heaven sent up a howl of fear, of anguish, and of hissing hate.

Those who lacked the intelligence to feel the fear, felt the hate: every girl, the shirt-maker, the shopman, feeling himself robbed of his very own; the Duke in the centre of his oak-lands felt it; the burglar, the junk-dweller of the Yangtse, the pariah of the Hugli. Lamentation and a voice in Ramah, wail on wail. For G.o.d had given the sea to man, and it had been seized by a devil.

G.o.d had also given the sh.o.r.e; and it, too, had been seized: but, as that had been before their birth, they had not observed it--in such a numb somnambulism shambles humanity.

But the theft of the sea was new and flagrant, it, and the air, being all that had remained: and a roar for vengeance--sharp, and rolled in blood--rose from the throat of man.

Accordingly, when Mr. C. P. Stickney during the afternoon wired for information to the White House, he received the reply: "Encourage calm on 'Change. Government in touch with Europe. Great naval activity. Await good news, seven P.M."

It was about seven P.M. that what the White House would have considered specially good news occurred: for the _Boodah_ then telegraphed through to O'Hara's _Mahomet_ at the Straits:

"B. 7651. Begins. After to-morrow (Monday) you begin taxation, as per Order B., 7315, of 2nd inst. But if warships desire to pa.s.s out, (not in), permit, till further order. Richard. Ends".

Which meant that if any Power, or Powers, desired to concentrate force upon the attack of any island, the Lord of the Sea granted them facilities.

The _Kaiser_ pa.s.sengers had now been sent off to New York, the _Boodah's_ halls seemed the home of desolation; and, as the night advanced, Hogarth and Loveday walked on the roof: for they could find no rest, the sky without moon or star, the sea making of three sides of the _Boodah_ a roaring reef, the wind blowing cold, they two wrapped to the nose in oilskins with sou'-westers, lashed by rages of rain and spray.