Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories Part 20

"Couldn't have been a bell-buoy, I suppose?" he suggested, with a tentative laugh as he pushed his cap upwards away from his ears.

"No bell-buoys out here," replied the captain, rather sharply, with his usual self-confidence.

They stood side by side in silence for five minutes or more. The mist was a little thinner now, and Captain Dixon looked upwards to the sky, hoping to see the stars. He was looking up when the steamer struck, and the shock threw him against the after rail of the bridge. The second officer was thrown to the ground and struggled there for an instant before getting to his feet again.

"G.o.d Almighty!" he said, and that was all.

Captain Dixon was already at the engine-room telegraph wrenching the pointer round to full speed ahead. The quartermaster on watch was at his side in a moment, and several men in shining oilskins swarmed up the ladder to the bridge for their orders.

The Grandhaven was quite still now, but trembling like a horse that had stumbled badly and recovered itself with dripping knees. Already the seas were beating the bluff sides of the great vessel, throwing pyramids of spray high above the funnels.

Captain Dixon grabbed the nearest man by the arm.

"The boats," he shouted in his ear. "Tell Mr. Stoke to take charge. Tell him it's the Manacles."

There seemed to be no danger, for the ship was quite steady, with level decks. Turning to another quartermaster, Dixon gave further orders clearly and concisely.

"Keep her at that," he said to the second officer, indicating the dial of the engine-room.

"Stay where you are!" he shouted to the two steersmen who were preparing to quit the wheelhouse.

If Captain Dixon had never made a mistake in seamanship he must have thought out the possibilities of this mistake in all their bearings.

For the situation was quite clear and compact in his mind. The orders he gave came in their proper sequence and were given to the right men.

From the decks beneath arose a confused murmur like the stirring of bees in an overturned hive. Then a sharp order in one voice, clear and strong, followed by a dead silence.

"Good!" said the captain. "Stoke has got 'em in hand."

He broke off and looked sharply fore and aft and up above him at the towering funnel.

"She is heeling," he said. "Martin, she's heeling."

The ship was slowly turning on her side, like some huge and stricken dumb animal laying itself down to die.

"Yes," said the captain with a bitter laugh, to the two steersmen who had come a second time to the threshold of the wheel-house, "yes, you can go."

He turned to the engine-room telegraph and rang the "Stand by." But there was no answer. The engineers had come on deck.

"She's got to go," said Martin, the second officer, deliberately.

"You had better follow them," replied the captain, with a jerk of his head towards the ladder down which the two steersmen had disappeared.

"Go, be d--d," said Martin. "My place is here." There was no nervousness about the man now.

The murmur on the decks had suddenly risen to shrieks and angry shouts.

Some were getting ready to die in a most unseemly manner. They were fighting for the boats. The clear, strong voice had ceased giving orders. It afterwards transpired that the chief officer, Stoke, was engaged at this time on the sloping decks in tying lifebelts round the women and throwing them overboard, despite their shrieks and struggles.

The coastguards found these women strewn along the beach like wreckage below St. Keverne--some that night, some at dawn--and only two were dead.

The captain snapped his finger and thumb, a gesture of annoyance which was habitual to him. Martin knew the meaning of the sound, which he heard through the shouting and the roar of the wind and the hissing of a cloud of steam. He placed his hand on the deck of the bridge as if to feel it. He had only to stretch out his arm to touch the timbers, for the vessel was lying over farther now. There was no vibration beneath his hand; the engines had ceased to work.

"Yes," said Dixon, who was holding to the rail in front of him with both hands. "Yes, she has got to go."

And as he spoke the Grandhaven slid slowly backwards and sideways into the deep water. The shrieks were suddenly increased, and then died away in a confused gurgle. Martin slid down on to the captain, and together they shot into the sea. They sank through a stratum of struggling limbs.

The village of St. Keverne lies nearly two miles from the sea, high above it on the bare tableland that juts out ten miles to the Lizard lights. It is a rural village far from railway or harbour. Its men are agriculturists, following the plough and knowing but little of the sea, which is so far below them that they rarely descend to the beach, and they do no business in the great waters. But their churchyard is full of drowned folk. There are one hundred and four in one grave, one hundred and twenty in another, one hundred and six in a third. An old St.

Keverne man will slowly name thirty ships and steamers wrecked in sight of the church steeple in the range of his memory.

A quick-eared coastguard heard the sound of the escape of steam, which was almost instantly silenced. Then he heard nothing more. He went back to the station and made his report. He was so sure of his own ears that he took a lantern and went down to the beach. There he found nothing.

He stumbled on towards Cadgwith along the unbroken beach. At times he covered his lantern and peered out to sea, but he saw nothing. At last something white caught his eye. It was half afloat amid the breakers. He went knee-deep and dragged a woman to the sh.o.r.e; she was quite dead. He held his lantern above his head and stared out to sea. The face of the water was flecked with dark shadows and white patches. He was alone, two miles from help up a steep combe and through muddy lanes, and as he turned to trudge towards the cliffs his heart suddenly leapt to his throat. There was some one approaching him across the shingle.

A strong deep voice called to him, with command and a certain resolution in its tones.

"You, a coastguard?" it asked.

"Yes."

The man came up to him and gave him orders to go to the nearest village for help, for lanterns and carts.

"What ship?" asked the coastguard.

"Grandhaven, London, New Orleans," was the answer. "Hurry, and bring as many men as you can. Got a boat about here?"

"There is one on the beach half a mile along to the south'ard. But you cannot launch her through this."

"Oh yes, we can."

The coastguard glanced at the man with a sudden interest.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Stoke--first mate," was the reply.

The rest of the story of the wreck has been told by abler pens in the daily newspapers. How forty-seven people were saved; how the lifeboat from Cadgwith picked up some, floating insensible on the ebbing tide with lifebuoys tied securely round them; how some men proved themselves great, and some women greater; how a few proved themselves very contemptible indeed; how the quiet chief officer, Stoke, obeyed his captain's orders to take charge of the pa.s.sengers;--are not these things told by the newspapers? Some of them, especially the halfpenny ones, went further, and explained to a waiting world how it had all come about, and how easily it might have been avoided. They, moreover, dealt out blame and praise with a liberal hand, and condemned the owners or exonerated the captain with the sublime wisdom which illumines Fleet Street. One and all agreed that because the captain was drowned he was not to blame, a very common and washy sentiment which appealed powerfully to the majority of their readers. Some of the newspapers, while agreeing that the first officer, having saved many lives by his great exertions during the night, and perfect organization for relief and help the next day, had made for himself an immortal name, hinted darkly that the captain's was the better part, and that they preferred to hear in such cases that all the officers had perished.

Stoke despatched the surviving pa.s.sengers by train from Helston back to London. They were not enthusiastic about him, neither did they subscribe to present him with a service of plate. They thought him stern and unsympathetic. But before they had realized quite what had happened they were back at their homes or with their friends. Many of the dead were recovered, and went to swell the heavy crop of G.o.d's seed sown in St.

Keverne churchyard. It was Stoke who organized these quiet burials, and took a careful note of each name. It was he to whom the friends of the dead made their complaint or took their tearful reminiscences, to both of which alike he gave an attentive hearing emphasized by the steady gaze of a pair of grey-blue eyes which many remembered afterwards without knowing why.

"It is all right," said the director of the great steamship company in London. "Stoke is there."

And they sent him money, and left him in charge at St. Keverne. The newspaper correspondents hurried thither, and several of them described the wrong man as Stoke, while others, having identified him, weighed him, and found him wanting in a proper sense of their importance. There was no "copy" in him, they said. He had no conception of the majesty of the Press.

At length the survivors were all sent home and the dead thrown up by the sea were buried. Martin, the second officer, was among these. They found the captain's pilot-jacket on the beach. He must have made a fight for his life, and thrown aside his jacket for greater ease in swimming.

Twenty-nine of the crew, eleven pa.s.sengers, and a stewardess were never found. The sea would never give them up now until that day when she shall relinquish her hostages--mostly Spaniards and English--to come from the deep at the trumpet call.

Stoke finished his business in St. Keverne and took the train to London.

Never an expansive man, he was shut up now as the strong are shut up by a sorrow. The loss of the Grandhaven left a scar on his heart which time could not heal. She had come to his care from the builder's yard. She had never known another husband.

He was free now--free to turn to the hardest portion of his task. He had always sailed with Dixon, his life-long friend. They had been boys together, had forced their way up the ladder together, had understood each other all through. His friend's wife, by virtue of her office perhaps, had come nearer to this man's grim and lonely heart than any other woman. He had never defined this feeling; he had not even gone back to its source as a woman would have done, or he might have discovered that the gentle air of question or of waiting in her eyes which was not always there, but only when he looked for it, had been there long ago on a summer voyage before she was Captain Dixon's wife at all.