The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope
that hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with
painfully slow movements. "Walk away with it!" Mr. Pike would yell.
And perhaps for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the
rope ere they came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill. And yet,
did either of the mates spring in and add his strength, they were
able to move right along the deck without stopping. Either of the
mates, old men that they were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of
the wretched creatures.

"This is what sailin's come to," Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear.
"This ain't the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling.
But what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?"

"I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled," I said.

"Sure they do. Want to hear 'em?"

I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered
that I'd like to very much.

"Here, you bosun!" Mr. Pike snarled. "Wake up! Start a song!
Topsail halyards!"

In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was
pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite
bleakness freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin.

Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could
have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful,
unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it
should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness,
for the words poor Nancy sang were:

"Away, way, way, yar,
We'll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots."

"Quit it! Quit it!" Mr. Pike roared. "This ain't a funeral! Ain't
there one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It's a topsail-yard--
"

He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out
of the men's hands to put into them the right rope.

"Come on, bosun! Break her out!"

Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers' voice, cracked and crazy
and even more lugubrious than Nancy's:

"Then up aloft that yard must go,
Whiskey for my Johnny."

The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two
men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line:

"Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue."

Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin
and lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness:

"And whiskey killed the old man, too,
Whiskey for my Johnny."

He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the
work and to the chorused emphasis of "Whiskey for my Johnny."

And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive,
until he interrupted the song to cry "Belay!"

And then all the life and lilt went out of them, and they were again
maundering and futile things, getting in one another's way, stumbling
and shuffling through the darkness, hesitating to grasp ropes, and,
when they did take hold, invariably taking hold of the wrong rope
first. Skulkers there were among them, too; and once, from for'ard
of the 'midship house, I heard smacks, and curses, and groans, and
out of the darkness hurriedly emerged two men, on their heels Mr.
Pike, who chanted a recital of the distressing things that would
befall them if he caught them at such tricks again.

The whole thing was too depressing for me to care to watch further,
so I strolled aft and climbed the poop. In the lee of the chart-
house Captain West and the pilot were pacing slowly up and down.
Passing on aft, I saw steering at the wheel the weazened little old
man I had noted earlier in the day. In the light of the binnacle his
small blue eyes looked more malevolent than ever. So weazened and
tiny was he, and so large was the brass-studded wheel, that they
seemed of a height. His face was withered, scorched, and wrinkled,
and in all seeming he was fifty years older than Mr. Pike. He was
the most remarkable figure of a burnt-out, aged man one would expect
to find able seaman on one of the proudest sailing-ships afloat.
Later, through Wada, I was to learn that his name was Andy Fay and
that he claimed no more years than sixty-three.

I leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared
up at the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there.
No, I decided I was not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of
it was wrong. There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-
ends. There was Miss West coming along. There was the crew of
broken men and lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek in the
'midship house still gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up;
and I was quite sure I would not care to witness such a transaction
in surgery.

Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of
the voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in
sailing-ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not
exist. And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she
could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had
always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always
live and that nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious
personality.

Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition
that the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to
me--for I knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be.
And for five months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a
pound of tobacco or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent
on the same ship with her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap,
just that sure was I that ere the voyage was over I should be
pestered by her making love to me. Please do not mistake me. My
certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own
desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of
women as instinctive huntresses of men. In my experience women
hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit
of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by
the tendrils of the grapevine.

Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-
weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a
young man of thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these
things--weary and in doubt. It was because of this state that I was
undertaking the voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away
from all these things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter
over.

It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness
had been brought about by the success of my play--my first play, as
every one knows. But it had been such a success that it raised the
doubt in my own mind, just as the success of my several volumes of
verse had raised doubts. Was the public right? Were the critics
right? Surely the function of the artist was to voice life, yet what
did I know of life?

So you begin to glimpse what I mean by the world-sickness that
afflicted me. Really, I had been, and was, very sick. Mad thoughts
of isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me. I had
even canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of
my years to the lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and
strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I
knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the
lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that
mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.

Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head. Very
well. Granted. But the turned head remains a fact, an
incontrovertible fact--my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness,
and a fact. This I knew: I had reached an intellectual and artistic
climacteric, a life-climacteric of some sort. And I had diagnosed my
own case and prescribed this voyage. And here was the atrociously
healthy and profoundly feminine Miss West along--the very last
ingredient I would have considered introducing into my prescription.

A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by
their persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of
age, not entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in
the world, and an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue
me? They would have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake
of my artistic place alone, for the sake of my income alone.

Yes; and love! Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic
love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and
sung and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead.
But it was so long ago. How young I was--turned twenty-four! And
after that I had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief
may die; and I had laughed again and done my share of philandering
with the pretty, ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of
my fortune and artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired
disgusted from the lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking
adventures in the realm of mind. And here I was, on board the
Elsinore, unhorsed by my encounters with the problems of the
ultimate, carried off the field with a broken pate.

As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I
could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as
she made her little nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the
everlasting mystery of woman. Yes, I, with all the futuristic
contempt for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman.

Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and
possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than
Lucifer and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid,
attraction for the thinker. What is this flame of her, blazing
through all her contradictions and ignobilities?--this ruthless
passion for life, always for life, more life on the planet? At times
it seems to me brazen, and awful, and soulless. At times I am made
petulant by it. And at other times I am swayed by the sublimity of
it. No; there is no escape from woman. Always, as a savage returns
to a dark glen where goblins are and gods may be, so do I return to
the contemplation of woman.

Mr. Pike's voice interrupted my musings. From for'ard, on the main
deck, I heard him snarl:

"On the main-topsail-yard, there!--if you cut that gasket I'll split
your damned skull!"

Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he
called to I concluded was the training-ship boy.

"You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!" he cried. "Don't make those
gaskets up! Fetch 'em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!"

Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my
hand went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate's
voice rang out:

"Come on, you gentlemen's sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively now!"

CHAPTER IX

I did not sleep well. To begin with, I read late. Not till two in
the morning did I reach up and turn out the kerosene reading-lamp
which Wada had purchased and installed for me. I was asleep
immediately--perfect sleep being perhaps my greatest gift; but almost
immediately I was awake again. And thereafter, with dozings and cat-
naps and restless tossings, I struggled to win to sleep, then gave it
up. For of all things, in my state of jangled nerves, to be
afflicted with hives! And still again, to be afflicted with hives in
cold winter weather!

At four I lighted up and went to reading, forgetting my irritated
skin in Vernon Lee's delightful screed against William James, and his
"will to believe." I was on the weather side of the ship, and from
overhead, through the deck, came the steady footfalls of some officer
on watch. I knew that they were not the steps of Mr. Pike, and
wondered whether they were Mr. Mellaire's or the pilot's. Somebody
above there was awake. The work was going on, the vigilant seeing
and overseeing, that, I could plainly conclude, would go on through
every hour of all the hours on the voyage.

At half-past four I heard the steward's alarm go off, instantly
suppressed, and five minutes later I lifted my hand to motion him in
through my open door. What I desired was a cup of coffee, and Wada
had been with me through too many years for me to doubt that he had
given the steward precise instructions and turned over to him my
coffee and my coffee-making apparatus.

The steward was a jewel. In ten minutes he served me with a perfect
cup of coffee. I read on until daylight, and half-past eight found
me, breakfast in bed finished, dressed and shaved, and on deck. We
were still towing, but all sails were set to a light favouring breeze
from the north. In the chart-room Captain West and the pilot were
smoking cigars. At the wheel I noted what I decided at once was an
efficient. He was not a large man; if anything he was undersized.
But his countenance was broad-browed and intelligently formed. Tom,
I later learned, was his name--Tom Spink, an Englishman. He was
blue-eyed, fair-skinned, well-grizzled, and, to the eye, a hale fifty
years of age. His reply of "Good morning, sir" was cheery, and he
smiled as he uttered the simple phrase. He did not look sailor-like,
as did Henry, the training-ship boy; and yet I felt at once that he
was a sailor, and an able one.

It was Mr. Pike's watch, and on asking him about Tom he grudgingly
admitted that the man was the "best of the boiling."

Miss West emerged from the chart-house, with a rosy morning face and
her vital, springy limb-movement, and immediately began establishing
her contacts. On asking how I had slept, and when I said wretchedly,
she demanded an explanation. I told her of my affliction of hives
and showed her the lumps on my wrists.

"Your blood needs thinning and cooling," she adjudged promptly.
"Wait a minute. I'll see what can be done for you."

And with that she was away and below and back in a trice, in her hand
a part glass of water into which she stirred a teaspoonful of cream
of tartar.

"Drink it," she ordered, as a matter of course.

I drank it. And at eleven in the morning she came up to my deck-
chair with a second dose of the stuff. Also she reproached me
soundly for permitting Wada to feed meat to Possum. It was from her
that Wada and I learned how mortal a sin it was to give meat to a
young puppy. Furthermore, she laid down the law and the diet for
Possum, not alone to me and Wada, but to the steward, the carpenter,
and Mr. Mellaire. Of the latter two, because they ate by themselves
in the big after-room and because Possum played there, she was
especially suspicious; and she was outspoken in voicing her
suspicions to their faces. The carpenter mumbled embarrassed
asseverations in broken English of past, present, and future
innocence, the while he humbly scraped and shuffled before her on his
huge feet. Mr. Mellaire's protestations were of the same nature,
save that they were made with the grace and suavity of a
Chesterfield.

In short, Possum's diet raised quite a tempest in the Elsinore
teapot, and by the time it was over Miss West had established this
particular contact with me and given me a feeling that we were the
mutual owners of the puppy. I noticed, later in the day, that it was
to Miss West that Wada went for instructions as to the quantity of
warm water he must use to dilute Possum's condensed milk.

Lunch won my continued approbation of the cook. In the afternoon I
made a trip for'ard to the galley to make his acquaintance. To all
intents he was a Chinese, until he spoke, whereupon, measured by
speech alone, he was an Englishman. In fact, so cultured was his
speech that I can fairly say it was vested with an Oxford accent.
He, too, was old, fully sixty--he acknowledged fifty-nine. Three
things about him were markedly conspicuous: his smile, that embraced
all of his clean-shaven Asiatic face and Asiatic eyes; his even-
rowed, white, and perfect teeth, which I deemed false until Wada
ascertained otherwise for me; and his hands and feet. It was his
hands, ridiculously small and beautifully modelled, that led my
scrutiny to his feet. They, too, were ridiculously small and very
neatly, almost dandifiedly, shod.

We had put the pilot off at midday, but the Britannia towed us well
into the afternoon and did not cast us off until the ocean was wide
about us and the land a faint blur on the western horizon. Here, at
the moment of leaving the tug, we made our "departure"--that is to
say, technically began the voyage, despite the fact that we had
already travelled a full twenty-four hours away from Baltimore.

It was about the time of casting off, when I was leaning on the poop-
rail gazing for'ard, when Miss West joined me. She had been busy
below all day, and had just come up, as she put it, for a breath of
air. She surveyed the sky in weather-wise fashion for a full five
minutes, then remarked:

"The barometer's very high--30 degrees 60. This light north wind
won't last. It will either go into a calm or work around into a
north-east gale."

"Which would you prefer?" I asked.

"The gale, by all means. It will help us off the land, and it will
put me through my torment of sea-sickness more quickly. Oh, yes,"
she added, "I'm a good sailor, but I do suffer dreadfully at the
beginning of every voyage. You probably won't see me for a couple of
days now. That's why I've been so busy getting settled first."

"Lord Nelson, I have read, never got over his squeamishness at sea,"
I said.

"And I've seen father sea-sick on occasion," she answered. "Yes, and
some of the strongest, hardest sailors I have ever known."

Mr. Pike here joined us for a moment, ceasing from his everlasting
pacing up and down to lean with us on the poop-rail.

Many of the crew were in evidence, pulling on ropes on the main deck
below us. To my inexperienced eye they appeared more unprepossessing
than ever.

"A pretty scraggly crew, Mr. Pike," Miss West remarked.

"The worst ever," he growled, "and I've seen some pretty bad ones.
We're teachin' them the ropes just now--most of 'em."

"They look starved," I commented.

"They are, they almost always are," Miss West answered, and her eyes
roved over them in the same appraising, cattle-buyer's fashion I had
marked in Mr. Pike. "But they'll fatten up with regular hours, no
whiskey, and solid food--won't they, Mr. Pike?"

"Oh, sure. They always do. And you'll see them liven up when we get
'em in hand . . . maybe. They're a measly lot, though."

I looked aloft at the vast towers of canvas. Our four masts seemed
to have flowered into all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath
us, under Mr. Mellaire's direction, were setting triangular sails,
like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they
overlapped one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the
men handled these small sails led me to ask:

"But what would you do, Mr. Pike, with a green crew like this, if you
were caught right now in a storm with all this canvas spread?"

He shrugged his shoulders, as if I had asked what he would do in an
earthquake with two rows of New York skyscrapers falling on his head
from both sides of a street.

"Do?" Miss West answered for him. "We'd get the sail off. Oh, it
can be done, Mr. Pathurst, with any kind of a crew. If it couldn't,
I should have been drowned long ago."

"Sure," Mr. Pike upheld her. "So would I."

"The officers can perform miracles with the most worthless sailors,
in a pinch," Miss West went on.

Again Mr. Pike nodded his head and agreed, and I noted his two big
paws, relaxed the moment before and drooping over the rail, quite
unconsciously tensed and folded themselves into fists. Also, I noted
fresh abrasions on the knuckles. Miss West laughed heartily, as from
some recollection.

"I remember one time when we sailed from San Francisco with a most
hopeless crew. It was in the Lallah Rookh--YOU remember her, Mr.
Pike?"

"Your father's fifth command," he nodded. "Lost on the West Coast
afterwards--went ashore in that big earthquake and tidal wave.
Parted her anchors, and when she hit under the cliff, the cliff fell
on her."

"That's the ship. Well, our crew seemed mostly cow-boys, and
bricklayers, and tramps, and more tramps than anything else. Where
the boarding-house masters got them was beyond imagining. A number
of them were shanghaied, that was certain. You should have seen them
when they were first sent aloft." Again she laughed. "It was better
than circus clowns. And scarcely had the tug cast us off, outside
the Heads, when it began to blow up and we began to shorten down.
And then our mates performed miracles. You remember Mr. Harding--
Silas Harding?"

"Don't I though!" Mr. Pike proclaimed enthusiastically. "He was some
man, and he must have been an old man even then."

"He was, and a terrible man," she concurred, and added, almost
reverently: "And a wonderful man." She turned her face to me. "He
was our mate. The men were sea-sick and miserable and green. But
Mr. Harding got the sail off the Lallah Rookh just the same. What I
wanted to tell you was this:

"I was on the poop, just like I am now, and Mr. Harding had a lot of
those miserable sick men putting gaskets on the main-lower-topsail.
How far would that be above the deck, Mr. Pike?"

"Let me see . . . the Lallah Rookh." Mr. Pike paused to consider.
"Oh, say around a hundred feet."

"I saw it myself. One of the green hands, a tramp--and he must
already have got a taste of Mr. Harding--fell off the lower-topsail-
yard. I was only a little girl, but it looked like certain death,
for he was falling from the weather side of the yard straight down on
deck. But he fell into the belly of the mainsail, breaking his fall,
turned a somersault, and landed on his feet on deck and unhurt. And
he landed right alongside of Mr. Harding, facing him. I don't know
which was the more astonished, but I think Mr. Harding was, for he
stood there petrified. He had expected the man to be killed. Not so
the man. He took one look at Mr. Harding, then made a wild jump for
the rigging and climbed right back up to that topsail-yard.

Miss West and the mate laughed so heartily that they scarcely heard
me say:

"Astonishing! Think of the jar to the man's nerves, falling to
apparent death that way."

"He'd been jarred harder by Silas Harding, I guess," was Mr. Pike's
remark, with another burst of laughter, in which Miss West joined.

Which was all very well in a way. Ships were ships, and judging by
what I had seen of our present crew harsh treatment was necessary.
But that a young woman of the niceness of Miss West should know of
such things and be so saturated in this side of ship life was not
nice. It was not nice for me, though it interested me, I confess,--
and strengthened my grip on reality. Yet it meant a hardening of
one's fibres, and I did not like to think of Miss West being so
hardened.

I looked at her and could not help marking again the fineness and
firmness of her skin. Her hair was dark, as were her eyebrows, which
were almost straight and rather low over her long eyes. Gray her
eyes were, a warm gray, and very steady and direct in expression,
intelligent and alive. Perhaps, taking her face as a whole, the most
noteworthy expression of it was a great calm. She seemed always in
repose, at peace with herself and with the external world. The most
beautiful feature was her eyes, framed in lashes as dark as her brows
and hair. The most admirable feature was her nose, quite straight,
very straight, and just the slightest trifle too long. In this it
was reminiscent of her father's nose. But the perfect modelling of
the bridge and nostrils conveyed an indescribable advertisement of
race and blood.

Hers was a slender-lipped, sensitive, sensible, and generous mouth--
generous, not so much in size, which was quite average, but generous
rather in tolerance, in power, and in laughter. All the health and
buoyancy of her was in her mouth, as well as in her eyes. She rarely
exposed her teeth in smiling, for which purpose she seemed chiefly to
employ her eyes; but when she laughed she showed strong white teeth,
even, not babyish in their smallness, but just the firm, sensible,
normal size one would expect in a woman as healthy and normal as she.

I would never have called her beautiful, and yet she possessed many
of the factors that go to compose feminine beauty. She had all the
beauty of colouring, a white skin that was healthy white and that was
emphasized by the darkness of her lashes, brows, and hair. And, in
the same way, the darkness of lashes and brows and the whiteness of
skin set off the warm gray of her eyes. The forehead was, well,
medium-broad and medium high, and quite smooth. No lines nor hints
of lines were there, suggestive of nervousness, of blue days of
depression and white nights of insomnia. Oh, she bore all the marks
of the healthy, human female, who never worried nor was vexed in the
spirit of her, and in whose body every process and function was
frictionless and automatic.

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