The Pilot and his Wife Part 8

The only one who neither expected news, nor cared apparently whether he received a letter or not, was Salve Kristiansen. While the parcel was being distributed, he remained standing by the wheel, intent apparently upon watching the movements of the two men who were hoisting up and making fast the jolly-boat. His lips were compressed; and when he gave the men a hand now and then, it was not a very willing one, and was generally accompanied by some bitter or sarcastic remark. His nature since they last sailed from Arendal seemed to have turned to gall; and when the captain had casually mentioned in his letter home that he was not so well satisfied with him, he had had good reason for saying so.

There had been all sorts of unpleasantness between them; and if any discontent or difference between himself and the crew prevailed, Salve was sure to be at the bottom of it. He had found a rancid salt-herring, set up on four legs with a tail, as he was walking on the p.o.o.p one evening in the moonlight; and as complaints had been recently made about the food, a good deal of which had become worse than bad from the effects of the hot climate, he had at once attributed to Salve this pointed method of drawing his attention to the subject again. It seemed almost as if he had some cause for bitterness against himself personally; and as he had always treated him with marked favour, he was at a loss to comprehend the reason for it.

With the exception of the captain, who had retained his seat at the after-end of the p.o.o.p, Salve was soon the only human being to be seen on deck. The whole crew had disappeared, and might have been found poring over their letters two and two, or singly, in the most out-of-the-way places, from the main and fore top even to the bowsprit end, where one had erected a pavilion for himself out of a fold of the hauled-down jib.

Captain Beck's letter, to judge from his gestures and half-audible exclamations, was not giving him the pleasure which he had antic.i.p.ated.

His whole face, up to the top of his head, had become red as a lobster, and he sat now drumming with one hand on his knee, and casting an occasional fierce look over at Salve, in the att.i.tude of a man beside himself with anger. At last he brought the hand in which he held the letter down upon the table with a force that sent the decanter and gla.s.s flying, and thrusting the fragments aside with his foot, he strode up and down the deck for a couple of minutes and then came towards Salve as if he meant to say something; and as the latter could very well perceive that it was not going to be anything pleasant, his countenance a.s.sumed an expression of defiance accordingly. He changed his mind, though, before he reached him, and turning short round shouted instead--

"Where is the second mate? Where is the whole watch?" and he looked furiously about him, as if surprised, although he knew very well how they were occupied, and that it had been decided not to weigh anchor until later in the day, when they would have the evening breeze.

"Ay, ay, sir!" was heard from the mate in the long-boat; and he raised himself and came forward with the letter he had been reading in his hand.

"Stand by to man the windla.s.s! Pipe all hands!" ordered the captain, and roared the command again gratuitously through the trumpet.

The crew turned out from their several retreats with sour looks. They had expected to be left alone until after tea-time, when there would have been a general interchange of news on the forecastle; and now there came instead a hail of orders from the speaking-trumpet, as if the captain had all of a sudden become possessed.

There was already a good deal of discontent prevailing among the crew, both on account of the bad food which they had to put up with, and on account of their leave ash.o.r.e at Monte Video having been, as they thought, capriciously refused; and it was therefore something more nearly approaching to a howl than a song that was now heard from the capstan and from the party who were hoisting the heavy mainsail. The customary English chorus--

"Haul the bowline, The captain he is growling; Haul the bowline, The bowline haul"--

was sung with offensive significance; and though, at the last heavy heave with which the enormous anchor was catted up to the bows, the mate tried to create a diversion in the feeling by a cheery "Saat 'kjelimen--hal' paa," the concluding words of the song--

"Aa hal i--aa--iaa-- Cheerily, men!"--

were delivered in a scornful shout.

"You'll have a chance of cooling yourselves presently, my lads," said Salve, coming up at the moment from his own heavy work with the cross-jack; "when we weather the point, all the lee-sails have to be set"--and the remark had the effect which he desired of intensifying the prevailing irritation.

In spite of the vertical heat, the hail of orders from the captain's trumpet continued, accompanied by reprimands and fault-finding all round, until the crew were nearly in a state of mutiny, and it was not until late in the evening that he showed any signs of exhaustion.

His temper had not improved next day. He looked as if he had a determination of blood to the head; and every time he came near Salve, he glared at him as if it was all he could do to control himself from an outburst of some kind or another. He knew that Salve had made love to Elizabeth, and had wished to make her presents since she had come into his house; and that the same girl was now to be his son's wife--the idea was absolutely intolerable!

At last he could contain himself no longer. Salve had just deposited a coil of rope aft, and the captain, after watching his movements with evidently suppressed irritation, broke out suddenly, without preface of any kind--

"You, I believe, had some acquaintance with that--that Elizabeth Raklev I took into my house."

Salve felt the blood rush to his heart. He seemed to know what was coming.

"The post," the captain continued, in a bitterly contemptuous tone, "has brought me the delightful intelligence that my son has engaged himself to her."

"Congratulate you, captain," said Salve. His voice almost failed him, and he was deadly pale, but his eyes flashed with a wild defiance.

He went forward, and the captain growled after him to himself, "He can have that to fret over now instead of the food;" and as the mate was coming up the cabin stairs at the moment polishing the s.e.xtant, he turned away with a look of grim satisfaction to take the alt.i.tude.

When the Juno last sailed from Arendal she had changed two of her crew.

One of the new hands was a square-built, coa.r.s.e-featured, uncouth-looking creature, from the fjord region north of Stavanger, who called himself Nils Buvaagen, but whose name had been changed by the others to Uvaagen (not-awake), on account of his evident predisposition to sleep. He was incredibly _nave_ and communicative, especially on the subject of his wife and children (of which latter he apparently had his nest full), and had soon become the b.u.t.t of the ship. Salve was the only one who ever took his part, and that only because he saw all the others against him; and having also been the means of saving his life when he had been washed overboard one dark night in the English Channel, he had inspired the simple fellow with a perfectly devoted attachment to him.

They were up on the mainyard together that evening, where they had been helping to carry out an order with the mainsail. The rest had gone down again, but Salve, who felt a longing to be alone, had remained aloft, and was standing on the foot-rope, with his elbows resting on the yard.

Nils's sympathetic eyes had perceived from his behaviour and whole appearance that day that there was something unusual the matter with him; and when he saw that Salve remained behind, he remained too, observing that it would be pleasant to cool for a while before going to their hammocks in the close air between decks.

The sky above them blazed like a cupola "inlaid with patines of bright gold;" obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen, with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of phosph.o.r.escence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish glittering light.

From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor's song, the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding lines:--

"But never more her name I'll utter till I die, For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie."

It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved. When it came to an end, Salve turned suddenly to him.

"You are distressing yourself for another's sweetheart now, Nils. What would you have done if it had been your own?"

"My wife!" He had evidently not for the moment taken in the idea, and looked with all his heavy countenance at Salve.

"Yes. Wouldn't you have liked to see her sunk to the bottom of the sea?"

"My Karen to the bottom of the sea! I'd go there myself first."

"Yes; but if she had been unfaithful to you?" persisted Salve, seeming to take a fiendish delight in bringing home the idea to the poor fellow.

"But she is not," was the rejoinder.

Nils had no genius for the abstract, and no more satisfaction was to be got out of him. But at the same time he had been shocked, and went down shortly after without saying a word.

Salve still remained aloft, the dull consciousness of Elizabeth's engagement with the captain's son alternating with a more active desire for revenge upon the captain himself for the manner in which he had conveyed the information; and the result of his brooding up there upon the yard was a determination to desert as soon as the Juno arrived at Rio. He would never go back to Arendal; and he would no longer tread the same deck with the father of Carl Beck.

Later on in the night, when the moon had risen, Nils, who had not been able to sleep in his hammock, came up to Salve again, and drew him aside behind the round-house, as if for a private conversation.

"What would I have done? you asked. I'll tell you," he said, after a short pause, and his honest face seemed to express a vivid realisation of the whole misery of the situation. "I would have died upon the doorstep!"

Salve stood and looked at him for a moment. There came a strange pallor over his face in the moonlight.

"Look you," he said, ironically, laying his hand upon the other's shoulder, "I have never a wife; but all the same, I am dead upon the doorstep--" Then, in the next breath, and with a sudden change of tone, he said, "Of course I am only joking, you know," and left him, with a hard, forced laugh.

Nils remained where he was, and pondered, not knowing exactly how to take it. It was possible Salve had only been making fun of him. But another feeling eventually predominated. It told him that he had had a glimpse into a despairing soul; and he was profoundly moved.

CHAPTER XIII.

They stood slowly away to the north-east along the coast of Brazil.

Every morning, towards the end of the dog-watch, when the sun rose in its gorgeous majesty from the sea, there came a refreshing breeze off the land, bringing with it the perfume of a thousand aromatic herbs; albatrosses and sea-gulls circled round the ship; flying-fish were to be seen in shoals; and all nature, animate and inanimate, seemed to be freshened for the time into activity and life. But gradually the breeze would become warmer and lighter, and then die away altogether, so that before noon the sails would hang flapping against the mast. They scarcely made five knots in the watch, and the heat during the greater part of the day was unbearable--as unbearable almost as the captain's temper, which showed no signs of improvement, and which vented itself in a systematic grinding of the crew, who, Captain Beck declared, were getting into intolerable habits of idleness.

Strange things occurred on board just at this time, which, taken in connection with the captain's mood, produced an uncomfortable feeling that there was some evil influence at work by which both the ship and the captain were possessed. Groans had been distinctly heard down in the hold among the coals; and the sailmaker affirmed that on several nights in succession he had seen a man go from amidships aft along the bulwark railings, stand still and point with his hand to the compa.s.s, and then disappear in the wake of the ship. Another declared that he had seen the ship's genius proceed in the same direction and jump overboard--cap and all he was no higher than a half sea-boot; and when the genius deserts a ship, it betokens in the sailors' superst.i.tious creed that she is about to founder.

The unaccountable sounds in the hold continued, and changed one day when the hatch was battened down to a kind of wail, which ceased, however, when, for fear of an explosion of coal-gas, it was taken off again. On the following day the cook, who had gone down for water, came hurrying back with a scared face, and declared that he had seen a man sitting there in a red jacket.

"It is the ship's genius lamenting the ship," was hesitatingly suggested by some. But when the cook objected that the creature was at least as large as Big Anders the boatswain, and proceeded besides to endow him with sable colouring and claws, the terror reached its height.