The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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"Miss West has posed to me as quite a weather prophet," I said to the
mate. "Now what is your forecast of our coming weather?"

"She ought to be," was Mr. Pike's reply as he lifted his glance
across the smooth swell of sea to the sky. "This ain't the first
time she's been on the North Atlantic in winter." He debated a
moment, as he studied the sea and sky. "I should say, considering
the high barometer, we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east
or a calm, with the chances in favour of the calm."

She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the
rail as the Elsinore lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into
the trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in
hollow thunder.

"The calm has it," Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness.
"And if this keeps up I'll be in my bunk in about five minutes."

She waved aside all sympathy. "Oh, don't bother about me, Mr.
Pathurst. Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet,
and muddy weather, and poison ivy; besides, I'd rather be sea-sick
than have the hives."

Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some
stupidity or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire's
raised voice. Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors
that was distinctly unpleasant to the ear.

On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence.
One, in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.

"Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark," I observed.

Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss
West's eyes to Mr. Pike's big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles,
resting on the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. SHE KNEW.

CHAPTER X

That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
table, while the Elsinore rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West
to her room.

"You won't see her for a couple of days," Captain West told me. "Her
mother was the same way--a born sailor, but always sick at the outset
of a voyage.''

"It's the shaking down." Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
observation I had yet heard him utter at table. "Everybody has to
shake down when they leave the land. We've got to forget the good
times on shore, and the good things money'll buy, and start watch and
watch, four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all
our tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen
that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr.
Pathurst?"

I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.

"Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to
give it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch."

"You don't like the sea?" I queried.

He sighed.

"I don't know. But of course the sea is all I know--"

"Except music," I threw in.

"Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of
most of the music I oughta have had coming to me."

"I suppose you've heard Schumann Heink?"

"Wonderful, wonderful!" he murmured fervently, then regarded me with
an eager wistfulness. "I've half-a-dozen of her records, and I've
got the second dog-watch below. If Captain West don't mind . . . "
(Captain West nodded that he didn't mind). "And if you'd want to
hear them? The machine is a good one."

And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table,
this hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered
waif of the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid
collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed
on the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and
the main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain
West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the
phonograph. His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging
lamps, and every shade of expression was visible to me.

In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records
were only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation.
He handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and
unwrapping it and brushing it with a fine camel's hair brush while it
revolved and ere he placed the needle on it. For a time all I could
see was the huge brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the
knuckles, that expressed love in their every movement. Each touch on
the discs was a caress, and while the record played he hovered over
it and dreamed in some heaven of music all his own.

During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar. His face
was expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the
music. I almost doubted that he heard it. He made no remarks
between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure. He
seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote. And while I
watched him I wondered what his duties were. I had not seen him
perform any. Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship. Not
until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board. I had
not seen him give an order. It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr.
Mellaire did the work. All Captain West did was to smoke cigars and
keep blissfully oblivious of the Elsinore's crew.

When Mr. Pike had played the "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah,
and "He Shall Feed His Flock," he mentioned to me, almost
apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason,
perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he
had been a choir boy.

"And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and
sneaked off to sea again," he concluded with a harsh laugh.

And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer's "King of
Heaven," and Mendelssohn's "O Rest in the Lord."

When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all
carefully wrapped, back into his room. I lingered with him while he
rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.

"I've got a lot more good things," he said confidentially: "Coenen's
'Come Unto Me,' and Faure's 'Crucifix'; and there's 'O Salutaris,'
and 'Lead, Kindly Light' by the Trinity Choir; and 'Jesu, Lover of My
Soul' would just melt your heart. I'll play 'em for you some night."

"Do you believe in them?" I was led to ask by his rapt expression and
by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake
from my consciousness.

He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:

"I do . . . when I'm listening to them."

My sleep that night was wretched. Short of sleep from the previous
night, I closed my book and turned my light off early. But scarcely
had I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of
my hives. All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put
out the light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up.
Wada had not yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of
tartar. It was useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the
watch changing, I partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown,
and went up on to the poop.

I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours' watch, pacing up and
down the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man
at the wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of
the wheel-house.

Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging
and lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew,
and experienced premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be
possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore, a cargo-carrier
that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five
thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate. The voyage
had gone wrong from the first. In the wretched unbalance that loss
of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the
voyage was doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a
madman could have dreamed.

I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had
no doubts but what she would always live. I thought of the killing
and driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he
had gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not
count. He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured
passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in
some Nirvana of his own creating.

Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and
lying gibbering between the steel walls of the 'midship-house. This
picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified
the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew. Certainly I could go back to
Baltimore. Thank God I had the money to humour my whims. Had not
Mr. Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the
running expenses of the Elsinore at two hundred dollars a day? I
could afford to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the
several days that might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a
pilot tug, or any inbound craft to Baltimore.

I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to
tell him my decision, when another presented itself: THEN ARE YOU,
THE THINKER AND PHILOSOPHER, THE WORLD-SICK ONE, AFRAID TO GO DOWN,
TO CEASE IN THE DARKNESS? Bah! My own pride in my life-
pridelessness saved Captain West's sleep from interruption. Of
course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be
called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and
lunatics--and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and
Semitic ones who had aroused Mr. Pike's ire and who had laughed so
terribly and silently.

Night thoughts! Sleepless thoughts! I dismissed them all and
started below, chilled through by the cold. But at the chart-room
door I encountered Mr. Mellaire.

"A pleasant evening, sir," he greeted me. "A pity there's not a
little wind to help us off the land."

"What do you think of the crew?" I asked, after a moment or so.

Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.

"I've seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst. But I never
saw one as queer as this--boys, old men, cripples and--you saw Tony
the Greek go overboard yesterday? Well, that's only the beginning.
He's a sample. I've got a big Irishman in my watch who's going bad.
Did you notice a little, dried-up Scotchman?"

"Who looks mean and angry all the time, and who was steering the
evening before last?"

"The very one--Andy Fay. Well, Andy Fay's just been complaining to
me about O'Sullivan. Says O'Sullivan's threatened his life. When
Andy Fay went off watch at eight he found O'Sullivan stropping a
razor. I'll give you the conversation as Andy gave it to me:

"'Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?"
"Certainly," says I; "what can I do for you?" "Sell me your sea-
boots, Mr. Fay," says O'Sullivan, polite as can be. "But what will
you be wantin' of them?" says I. "'Twill be a great favour," says
O'Sullivan. "But it's my only pair," says I; "and you have a pair of
your own," says I. "Mr. Fay, I'll be needin' me own in bad weather,"
says O'Sullivan. "Besides," says I, "you have no money." "I'll pay
for them when we pay off in Seattle," says O'Sullivan. "I'll not do
it," says I; "besides, you're not tellin' me what you'll be doin'
with them." "But I will tell yeh," says O'Sullivan; "I'm wantin' to
throw 'em over the side." And with that I turns to walk away, but
O'Sullivan says, very polite and seducin'-like, still a-stroppin' the
razor, "Mr. Fay," says he, "will you kindly step this way an' have
your throat cut?" And with that I knew my life was in danger, and I
have come to make report to you, sir, that the man is a violent
lunatic.'

"Or soon will be," I remarked. "I noticed him yesterday, a big man
muttering continually to himself?"

"That's the man," Mr. Mellaire said.

"Do you have many such at sea?" I asked.

"More than my share, I do believe, sir."

He was lighting a cigarette at the moment, and with a quick movement
he pulled off his cap, bent his head forward, and held up the blazing
match that I might see.

I saw a grizzled head, the full crown of which was not entirely bald,
but partially covered with a few sparse long hairs. And full across
this crown, disappearing in the thicker fringe above the ears, ran
the most prodigious scar I had ever seen. Because the vision of it
was so fleeting, ere the match blew out, and because of the scar's
very prodigiousness, I may possibly exaggerate, but I could have
sworn that I could lay two fingers deep into the horrid cleft and
that it was fully two fingers broad. There seemed no bone at all,
just a great fissure, a deep valley covered with skin; and I was
confident that the brain pulsed immediately under that skin.

He pulled his cap on and laughed in an amused, reassuring way.

"A crazy sea cook did that, Mr. Pathurst, with a meat-axe. We were
thousands of miles from anywhere, in the South Indian Ocean at the
time, running our Easting down, but the cook got the idea into his
addled head that we were lying in Boston Harbour, and that I wouldn't
let him go ashore. I had my back to him at the time, and I never
knew what struck me."

"But how could you recover from so fearful an injury?" I questioned.
"There must have been a splendid surgeon on board, and you must have
had wonderful vitality."

He shook his head.

"It must have been the vitality . . . and the molasses."

"Molasses!"

"Yes; the captain had old-fashioned prejudices against antiseptics.
He always used molasses for fresh wound-dressings. I lay in my bunk
many weary weeks--we had a long passage--and by the time we reached
Hong Kong the thing was healed, there was no need for a shore
surgeon, and I was standing my third mate's watch--we carried third
mates in those days."

Not for many a long day was I to realize the dire part that scar in
Mr. Mellaire's head was to play in his destiny and in the destiny of
the Elsinore. Had I known at the time, Captain West would have
received the most unusual awakening from sleep that he ever
experienced; for he would have been routed out by a very determined,
partially-dressed passenger with a proposition capable of going to
the extent of buying the Elsinore outright with all her cargo, so
that she might be sailed straight back to Baltimore.

As it was, I merely thought it a very marvellous thing that Mr.
Mellaire should have lived so many years with such a hole in his
head.

We talked on, and he gave me many details of that particular
happening, and of other happenings at sea on the part of the lunatics
that seem to infest the sea.

And yet I could not like the man. In nothing he said, nor in the
manner of saying things, could I find fault. He seemed generous,
broad-minded, and, for a sailor, very much of a man of the world. It
was easy for me to overlook his excessive suavity of speech and
super-courtesy of social mannerism. It was not that. But all the
time I was distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though
in the darkness I couldn't even see his eyes, that there, behind
those eyes, inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality
that spied upon me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing
while it thought another thing.

When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I
had been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature.
The other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and
quick, behind the mask of words and flesh.

CHAPTER XI

But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the
heat of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet,
whenever I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and
read, my skin irritation decreased. But as soon as I turned out the
lamp and closed my eyes I was troubled again. So hour after hour
passed, through which, between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to
wade through many pages of Rosny's Le Termite--a not very cheerful
proceeding, I must say, concerned as it is with the microscopic and
over-elaborate recital of Noel Servaise's tortured nerves, bodily
pains, and intellectual phantasma. At last I tossed the novel aside,
damned all analytical Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in
the more genial and cynical Stendhal.

Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down. At
four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike's
promenade. Half an hour later, just as the steward's alarm went off,
instantly checked by that light-sleeping Asiatic, the Elsinore began
to heel over on my side. I could hear Mr. Pike barking and snarling
orders, and at times a trample and shuffle of many feet passed over
my head as the weird crew pulled and hauled. The Elsinore continued
to heel over until I could see the water against my port, and then
she gathered way and dashed ahead at such a rate that I could hear
the stinging and singing of the foam through the circle of thick
glass beside me.

The steward brought me coffee, and I read till daylight and after,
when Wada served me breakfast and helped me dress. He, too,
complained of inability to sleep. He had been bunked with Nancy in
one of the rooms in the 'midship-house. Wada described the
situation. The tiny room, made of steel, was air-tight when the
steel door was closed. And Nancy insisted on keeping the door
closed. As a result Wada, in the upper bunk, had stifled. He told
me that the air had got so bad that the flame of the lamp, no matter
how high it was turned, guttered down and all but refused to burn.
Nancy snored beautifully through it all, while he had been unable to
close his eyes.

"He is not clean," quoth Wada. "He is a pig. No more will I sleep
in that place."

On the poop I found the Elsinore, with many of her sails furled,
slashing along through a troubled sea under an overcast sky. Also I
found Mr. Mellaire marching up and down, just as I had left him hours
before, and it took quite a distinct effort for me to realize that he
had had the watch off between four and eight. Even then, he told me,
he had slept from four until half-past seven.

"That is one thing, Mr. Pathurst, I always sleep like a baby . . .
which means a good conscience, sir, yes, a good conscience."

And while he enunciated the platitude I was uncomfortably aware that
that alien thing inside his skull was watching me, studying me.

In the cabin Captain West smoked a cigar and read the Bible. Miss
West did not appear, and I was grateful that to my sleeplessness the
curse of sea-sickness had not been added.

Without asking permission of anybody, Wada arranged a sleeping place
for himself in a far corner of the big after-room, screening the
corner with a solidly lashed wall of my trunks and empty book boxes.

It was a dreary enough day, no sun, with occasional splatters of rain
and a persistent crash of seas over the weather rail and swash of
water across the deck. With my eyes glued to the cabin ports, which
gave for'ard along the main deck, I could see the wretched sailors,
whenever they were given some task of pull and haul, wet through and
through by the boarding seas. Several times I saw some of them taken
off their feet and rolled about in the creaming foam. And yet,
erect, unstaggering, with certitude of weight and strength, among
these rolled men, these clutching, cowering ones, moved either Mr.
Pike or Mr. Mellaire. They were never taken off their feet. They
never shrank away from a splash of spray or heavier bulk of down-
falling water. They had fed on different food, were informed with a
different spirit, were of iron in contrast with the poor miserables
they drove to their bidding.

In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in
the cabin. Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I
could have slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble.
Captain West, stretched out on the cabin sofa, his feet in carpet
slippers, slept enviably. By some instinct, I might say, in the deep
of sleep, he kept his place and was not rolled off upon the floor.
Also, he lightly held a half-smoked cigar in one hand. I watched him
for an hour, and knew him to be asleep, and marvelled that he
maintained his easy posture and did not drop the cigar.

After dinner there was no phonograph. The second dog-watch was Mr.
Pike's on deck. Besides, as he explained, the rolling was too
severe. It would make the needle jump and scratch his beloved
records.

And no sleep! Another weary night of torment, and another dreary,
overcast day and leaden, troubled sea. And no Miss West. Wada, too,
is sea-sick, although heroically he kept his feet and tried to tend
on me with glassy, unseeing eyes. I sent him to his bunk, and read
through the endless hours until my eyes were tired, and my brain,
between lack of sleep and over-use, was fuzzy.

Captain West is no conversationalist. The more I see of him the more
I am baffled. I have not yet found a reason for that first
impression I received of him. He has all the poise and air of a
remote and superior being, and yet I wonder if it be not poise and
air and nothing else. Just as I had expected, that first meeting,
ere he spoke a word, to hear fall from his lips words of untold
beneficence and wisdom, and then heard him utter mere social
commonplaces, so I now find myself almost forced to conclude that his
touch of race, and beak of power, and all the tall, aristocratic
slenderness of him have nothing behind them.

And yet, on the other hand, I can find no reason for rejecting that
first impression. He has not shown any strength, but by the same
token he has not shown any weakness. Sometimes I wonder what resides
behind those clear blue eyes. Certainly I have failed to find any
intellectual backing. I tried him out with William James' Varieties
of Religious Experience. He glanced at a few pages, then returned it
to me with the frank statement that it did not interest him. He has
no books of his own. Evidently he is not a reader. Then what is he?
I dared to feel him out on politics. He listened courteously, said
sometimes yes and sometimes no, and, when I ceased from very
discouragement, said nothing.

Aloof as the two officers are from the men, Captain West is still
more aloof from his officers. I have not seen him address a further
word to Mr. Mellaire than "Good morning" on the poop. As for Mr.
Pike, who eats three times a day with him, scarcely any more
conversation obtains between them. And I am surprised by what seems
the very conspicuous awe with which Mr. Pike seems to regard his
commander.

Another thing. What are Captain West's duties? So far he has done
nothing, save eat three times a day, smoke many cigars, and each day
stroll a total of one mile around the poop. The mates do all the
work, and hard work it is, four hours on deck and four below, day and
night with never a variation. I watch Captain West and am amazed.
He will loll back in the cabin and stare straight before him for
hours at a time, until I am almost frantic to demand of him what are
his thoughts. Sometimes I doubt that he is thinking at all. I give
him up. I cannot fathom him.

Altogether a depressing day of rain-splatter and wash of water across
the deck. I can see, now, that the problem of sailing a ship with
five thousand tons of coal around the Horn is more serious than I had
thought. So deep is the Elsinore in the water that she is like a log
awash. Her tall, six-foot bulwarks of steel cannot keep the seas
from boarding her. She has not the buoyancy one is accustomed to
ascribe to ships. On the contrary, she is weighted down until she is
dead, so that, for this one day alone, I am appalled at the thought
of how many thousands of tons of the North Atlantic have boarded her
and poured out through her spouting scuppers and clanging ports.

Yes, a depressing day. The two mates have alternated on deck and in
their bunks. Captain West has dozed on the cabin sofa or read the
Bible. Miss West is still sea-sick. I have tired myself out with
reading, and the fuzziness of my unsleeping brain makes for
melancholy. Even Wada is anything but a cheering spectacle, crawling
out of his bunk, as he does at stated intervals, and with sick,
glassy eyes trying to discern what my needs may be. I almost wish I
could get sea-sick myself. I had never dreamed that a sea voyage
could be so unenlivening as this one is proving.

CHAPTER XII

Another morning of overcast sky and leaden sea, and of the Elsinore,
under half her canvas, clanging her deck ports, spouting water from
her scuppers, and dashing eastward into the heart of the Atlantic.
And I have failed to sleep half-an-hour all told. At this rate, in a
very short time I shall have consumed all the cream of tartar on the
ship. I never have had hives like these before. I can't understand
it. So long as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled. The
instant I put out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and
the lumps on my skin begin to form.

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