The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea. How he
happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did
not explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
Elsinore. But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
the sea. He is a small man, but most powerfully built. His
shoulders are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and
yet he is slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked. This
last, however, is not due to sickness or ill-health. Tyro as he is
on the sea, Steve Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and
crooked. He has a way of looking straight at one with utmost
frankness while he talks, and yet it is at such moments I get most
strongly the impression of crookedness. But he is a man, if trouble
should arise, to be reckoned with. In ways he suggests a kinship
with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a prejudice against--Kid
Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. And I have already noticed, in
the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve Roberts chums.

The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him
work for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with
curvature of the spine. But before she sent him packing other things
occurred in which I was concerned. I was in the room when Mulligan
Jacobs first came in to go to work, and I could not help observing
the startled, avid glance he threw at my big shelves of books. He
advanced on them in the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard
of gold, and as a miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled
these book-titles with his eyes.

And such eyes! All time bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me
the man possessed was there in his eyes. They were small, pale-blue,
and gimlet-pointed with fire. His eyelids were inflamed, and but
served to ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the
pupils. The man was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in
learning that he hated all things except books.

"Would you care to read some of them?" I said hospitably.

All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his
head to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.

"It's hell, ain't it?--you with a strong body and servants to carry
for you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that
puts the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?"

How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he
uttered these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down
the hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of
safety. Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same
as if I were locked in a cage with a tiger-cat. The devilishness,
the wickedness, and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with
which the man eyed me and addressed me, were most unpleasant. I
swear I knew fear--not calculated caution, not timid apprehension,
but blind, panic, unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the creature
was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it poured
from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered,
twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of
hands. And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take
the throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
malformed life out of it.

But there was little encouragement in such thought--no more than a
man might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for,
crush them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink
their poison into him. And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of
him was the fear of being infected with his venom. I could not help
it; for I caught a quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had
seen in his mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with
their acid, destroying me.

One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely,
he did not know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one
treads underfoot in nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing
was, a nightmare.

"You suffer pain often?" I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by
the calculated use of sympathy.

"The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an'
burn," was his reply. "But by what damnable right do you have all
these books, and time to read 'em, an' all night in to read 'em, an'
soak in them, when me brain's on fire, and I'm watch and watch, an'
me broken spine won't let me carry half a hundredweight of books
about with me?"

Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him
what were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what
were the writers he preferred. His library, he told me, among other
things included, first and f ore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a
complete Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full
hall-dozen he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of
Lecky, Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, several of Carlyle, and
eight or ten of Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a
prime favourite.

He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently
mad from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him
about books and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He
liked O. Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four--flusher. Edgar
Saltus' Anatomy of Negation was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck
was a mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen's Ghosts was the
stuff, though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real
goods. He preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to
Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. John
Masefield knew what he was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was
living too fat to turn out the stuff he first turned out.

And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I
had ever heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on
sociology. Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no
anarchist. On the other hand, political action was a blind-alley
leading to reformism and quietism. Political socialism had gone to
pot, while industrial unionism was the logical culmination of
Marxism. He was a direct actionist. The mass strike was the thing.
Sabotage, not merely as a withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen
destruction-of-profits policy, was the weapon. Of course he believed
in the propaganda of the deed, but a man was a fool to talk about it.
His job was to do it and keep his mouth shut, and the way to do it
was to shoot the evidence. Of course, HE talked; but what of it?
Didn't he have curvature of the spine? He didn't care when he got
his, and woe to the man who tried to give it to him.

And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he
talked about and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and
it was patent that he was self-educated. When I asked him how it was
he had come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as
hot one place as another. He unbent enough to tell me that he had
been an athlete, when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer
in Eastern Canada. And then his disease had come upon him, and for a
quarter of a century he had been a common tramp and vagabond, and he
bragged of a personal acquaintance with more city prisons and county
jails than any man that ever existed.

It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into
the doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most
sour look of disapprobation. Mr. Pike's countenance is almost
petrified. Any expression seems to crack it--with the exception of
sourness. But when Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty
at all. His hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness.
Evidently he condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs's time. To
Mulligan Jacobs he said in his customary snarl:

"Go on an' get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch below."

And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I
had already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now
was manifested. I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold
weather, did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.

"Aw, go to hell, you old stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.

If ever I had seen murder in a man s eyes, I saw it then in the
mate's. He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand
not open but clenched. One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan
Jacobs and all the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in
the everlasting darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat,
like a rattlesnake on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he
faced the irate giant. More than that. He even thrust his face
forward on its twisted neck to meet the blow.

It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that
frail, crippled, repulsive thing.

"It's me that can call you the stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs. "I
ain't no Larry. G'wan an' hit me. Why don't you hit me?"

And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose
whole career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a
shambles, could not strike this fractured splinter of a man. I swear
that Mr. Pike actually struggled with himself to strike. I saw it.
But he could not.

"Go on to your work," he ordered. "The voyage is young yet,
Mulligan. I'll have you eatin' outa my hand before it's over."

And Mulligan Jacobs's face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
into incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness
that consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it. All he
could do was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should
not have been surprised had he spat poison in the mate's face.

And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
beaten.

I can't get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the
cripple facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is
different from the books and from what I know of existence. It is
revelation. Life is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter
flame that informs Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he--with no hope of any
profit, not a hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to
God, but a mere filthy, malignant rat--how dare he, I ask myself, be
so defiant, so death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt
all the schools of the metaphysicians and the realists. No
philosophy has a leg to stand on that does not account for Mulligan
Jacobs. And all the midnight oil of philosophy I have burned does
not enable me to account for Mulligan Jacobs . . . unless he be
insane. And then I don't know.

Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these
humans with whom I am herded on the Elsinore?

And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is
another one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon.
He is the pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when
the men were routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass--the
man I so instantly adjudged a drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.

I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.

"White slaver," was his answer. "Had to skin outa New York to save
his skin. He'll be consorting with those other three larrakins I
gave a piece of my mind to."

"And what do you make of them?" I asked.

"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin'
for 'em right now. I'd like to have the cash somebody's put up in
New York to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed."

"Gangsters?" I queried.

"That's what. But I'll trim their dirty hides. I'll trim 'em. Mr.
Pathurst, this voyage ain't started yet, and this old stiff's a long
way from his last legs. I'll give them a run for their money. Why,
I've buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And
I'll bury some of them that think me an old stiff."

He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.

"Mr. Pathurst, I've heard you're a writing man. And when they told
me at the agents' you were going along passenger, I made a point of
going to see your play. Now I'm not saying anything about that play,
one way or the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing
man you'll get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell's
going to pop, believe me, and right here before you is the stiff
that'll do a lot of the poppin'. Some several and plenty's going to
learn who's an old stiff."

CHAPTER XV

How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is
delicious--thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then
there was Wada. But no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate
the problem of woman. It is just such an incident among a million
others that keeps the thinker's gaze fixed on woman. They truly are
the mothers and the conservers of the race.

Rail as I will at Miss West's red-blood complacency of life, yet I
must bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible,
hard-headed, a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the
distressing attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother,
nevertheless I must confess I am most grateful that she is along.
Had she not been on the Elsinore, by this time I should have been so
overwrought from lack of sleep that I would be biting my veins and
howling--as mad a hatter as any of our cargo of mad hatters. And so
we come to it--the everlasting mystery of woman. One may not be able
to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one
cannot get along without her. But, regarding Miss West, I do
entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she is not a suffragette.
That would be too much.

Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a
bit fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he
regretted the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms. It
seems he has a keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on
the Elsinore, and that, although he is oblivious of the existence of
the crew, he is not oblivious of my comfort. By his few expressions
of regret it appears that he cannot forgive himself for his careless
acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my affliction. Yes; Captain
West is a real human man. Is he not the father of the slender-faced,
strapping-bodied Miss West?

"Thank goodness that's settled," was Miss West's exclamation this
morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how
gloriously I had slept.

And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all
practical purposes--it was settled, she next said:

"Come on and see the chickens."

And I accompanied her along the spidery bridge to the top of the
'midship-house, to look at the one rooster and the four dozen fat
hens in the ship's chicken-coop.

As I accompanied her, my eyes dwelling pleasurably on that vital gait
of hers as she preceded me, I could not help reflecting that, coming
down on the tug from Baltimore, she had promised not to bother me nor
require to be entertained.

COME AND SEE THE CHICKENS!--Oh, the sheer female possessiveness of
that simple invitation! For effrontery of possessiveness is there
anything that can exceed the nest-making, planet-populating, female,
human woman?--COME AND SEE THE CHICKENS! Oh, well, the sailors
for'ard may be hard-bitten, but I can promise Miss West that here,
aft, is one male passenger, unmarried and never married, who is an
equally hard-bitten adventurer on the sea of matrimony. When I go
over the census I remember at least several women, superior to Miss
West, who trilled their song of sex and failed to shipwreck me.

As I read over what I have written I notice how the terminology of
the sea has stolen into my mental processes. Involuntarily I think
in terms of the sea. Another thing I notice is my excessive use of
superlatives. But then, everything on board the Elsinore is
superlative. I find myself continually combing my vocabulary in
quest of just and adequate words. Yet am I aware of failure. For
example, all the words of all the dictionaries would fail to
approximate the exceeding terribleness of Mulligan Jacobs.

But to return to the chickens. Despite every precaution, it was
evident that they had had a hard time during the past days of storm.
It was equally evident that Miss West, even during her sea-sickness,
had not neglected them. Under her directions the steward had
actually installed a small oil-stove in the big coop, and she now
beckoned him up to the top of the house as he was passing for'ard to
the galley. It was for the purpose of instructing him further in the
matter of feeding them.

Where were the grits? They needed grits. He didn't know. The sack
had been lost among the miscellaneous stores, but Mr. Pike had
promised a couple of sailors that afternoon to overhaul the
lazarette.

"Plenty of ashes," she told the steward. "Remember. And if a sailor
doesn't clean the coop each day, you report to me. And give them
only clean food--no spoiled scraps, mind. How many eggs yesterday?"

The steward's eyes glistened with enthusiasm as he said he had got
nine the day before and expected fully a dozen to-day.

"The poor things," said Miss West--to me. "You've no idea how bad
weather reduces their laying." She turned back upon the steward.
"Mind now, you watch and find out which hens don't lay, and kill them
first. And you ask me each time before you kill one."

I found myself neglected, out there on top the draughty house, while
Miss West talked chickens with the Chinese ex-smuggler. But it gave
me opportunity to observe her. It is the length of her eyes that
accentuates their steadiness of gaze--helped, of course, by the dark
brows and lashes. I noted again the warm gray of her eyes. And I
began to identify her, to locate her. She is a physical type of the
best of the womanhood of old New England. Nothing spare nor meagre,
nor bred out, but generously strong, and yet not quite what one would
call robust. When I said she was strapping-bodied I erred. I must
fall back on my other word, which will have to be the last: Miss
West is vital-bodied. That is the key-word.

When we had regained the poop, and Miss West had gone below, I
ventured my customary pleasantry with Mr. Mellaire of:

"And has O'Sullivan bought Andy Fay's sea-boots yet?"

"Not yet, Mr. Pathurst," was the reply, "though he nearly got them
early this morning. Come on along, sir, and I'll show you."

Vouchsafing no further information, the second mate led the way along
the bridge, across the 'midship-house and the for'ard-house. From
the edge of the latter, looking down on Number One hatch, I saw two
Japanese, with sail-needles and twine, sewing up a canvas-swathed
bundle that unmistakably contained a human body.

"O'Sullivan used a razor," said Mr. Mellaire.

"And that is Andy Fay?" I cried.

"No, sir, not Andy. That's a Dutchman. Christian Jespersen was his
name on the articles. He got in O'Sullivan's way when O'Sullivan
went after the boots. That's what saved Andy. Andy was more active.
Jespersen couldn't get out of his own way, much less out of
O'Sullivan's. There's Andy sitting over there."

I followed Mr. Mellaire's gaze, and saw the burnt-out, aged little
Scotchman squatted on a spare spar and sucking a pipe. One arm was
in a sling and his head was bandaged. Beside him squatted Mulligan
Jacobs. They were a pair. Both were blue-eyed, and both were
malevolent-eyed. And they were equally emaciated. It was easy to
see that they had discovered early in the voyage their kinship of
bitterness. Andy Fay, I knew, was sixty-three years old, although he
looked a hundred; and Mulligan Jacobs, who was only about fifty, made
up for the difference by the furnace-heat of hatred that burned in
his face and eyes. I wondered if he sat beside the injured bitter
one in some sense of sympathy, or if he were there in order to gloat.

Around the corner of the house strolled Shorty, flinging up to me his
inevitable clown-grin. One hand was swathed in bandages.

"Must have kept Mr. Pike busy," was my comment to Mr. Mellaire.

"He was sewing up cripples about all his watch from four till eight."

"What?" I asked. "Are there any more?"

"One more, sir, a sheeny. I didn't know his name before, but Mr.
Pike got it--Isaac B. Chantz. I never saw in all my life at sea as
many sheenies as are on board the Elsinore right now. Sheenies don't
take to the sea as a rule. We've certainly got more than our share
of them. Chantz isn't badly hurt, but you ought to hear him
whimper."

"Where's O'Sullivan?" I inquired.

"In the 'midship-house with Davis, and without a mark. Mr. Pike got
into the rumpus and put him to sleep with one on the jaw. And now
he's lashed down and talking in a trance. He's thrown the fear of
God into Davis. Davis is sitting up in his bunk with a marlin-spike,
threatening to brain O'Sullivan if he starts to break loose, and
complaining that it's no way to run a hospital. He'd have padded
cells, straitjackets, night and day nurses, and violent wards, I
suppose--and a convalescents' home in a Queen Anne cottage on the
poop.

"Oh dear, oh dear," Mr. Mellaire sighed. "This is the funniest
voyage and the funniest crew I've ever tackled. It's not going to
come to a good end. Anybody can see that with half an eye. It'll be
dead of winter off the Horn, and a fo'c's'le full of lunatics and
cripples to do the work.--Just take a look at that one. Crazy as a
bedbug. He's likely to go overboard any time.''

I followed his glance and saw Tony the Greek, the one who had sprung
overboard the first day. He had just come around the corner of the
house, and, beyond one arm in a sling, seemed in good condition. He
walked easily and with strength, a testimonial to the virtues of Mr.
Pike's rough surgery.

My eyes kept returning to the canvas-covered body of Christian
Jespersen, and to the Japanese who sewed with sail-twine his sailor's
shroud. One of them had his right hand in a huge wrapping of cotton
and bandage.

"Did he get hurt, too?" I asked.

"No, sir. He's the sail-maker. They're both sail-makers. He's a
good one, too. Yatsuda is his name. But he's just had blood-
poisoning and lain in hospital in New York for eighteen months. He
flatly refused to let them amputate. He's all right now, but the
hand is dead, all except the thumb and fore-finger, and he's teaching
himself to sew with his left hand. He's as clever a sail-maker as
you'll find at sea."

"A lunatic and a razor make a cruel combination," I remarked.

"It's put five men out of commission," Mr. Mellaire sighed. "There's
O'Sullivan himself, and Christian Jespersen gone, and Andy Fay, and
Shorty, and the sheeny. And the voyage not started yet. And there's
Lars with the broken leg, and Davis laid off for keeps--why, sir,
we'll soon be that weak it'll take both watches to set a staysail."

Nevertheless, while I talked in a matter-of-fact way with Mr.
Mellaire, I was shocked--no; not because death was aboard with us. I
have stood by my philosophic guns too long to be shocked by death, or
by murder. What affected me was the utter, stupid bestiality of the
affair. Even murder--murder for cause--I can understand. It is
comprehensible that men should kill one another in the passion of
love, of hatred, of patriotism, of religion. But this was different.
Here was killing without cause, an orgy of blind-brutishness, a thing
monstrously irrational.

Later on, strolling with Possum on the main deck, as I passed the
open door of the hospital I heard the muttering chant of O'Sullivan,
and peeped in. There he lay, lashed fast on his back in the lower
bunk, rolling his eyes and raving. In the top bunk, directly above,
lay Charles Davis, calmly smoking a pipe. I looked for the marlin-
spike. There it was, ready to hand, on the bedding beside him.

"It's hell, ain't it, sir?" was his greeting. "And how am I goin' to
get any sleep with that baboon chattering away there. He never lets
up--keeps his chin-music goin' right along when he's asleep, only
worse. The way he grits his teeth is something awful. Now I leave
it to you, sir, is it right to put a crazy like that in with a sick
man? And I am a sick man.''

While he talked the massive form of Mr. Pike loomed beside me and
halted just out of sight of the man in the bunk. And the man talked
on.

"By rights, I oughta have that lower bunk. It hurts me to crawl up
here. It's inhumanity, that's what it is, and sailors at sea are
better protected by the law than they used to be. And I'll have you
for a witness to this before the court when we get to Seattle."

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