The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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No one was on the poop. It was Mr. Pike's watch, and I strolled
for'ard along the bridge to find him. He was on Number One hatch
giving some instructions to the sail-makers. I awaited my chance,
until he glanced up and greeted me.

"Good morning," I answered. "And what man is at the wheel now?"

"That crazy Greek, Tony," he replied.

"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco he isn't," I offered.

Mr. Pike looked at me with quick sharpness.

"Who is at the wheel?"

"Nobody," I replied.

And then he exploded into action. The age-lag left his massive
frame, and he bounded aft along the deck at a speed no man on board
could have exceeded; and I doubt if very many could have equalled it.
He went up the poop-ladder three steps at a time and disappeared in
the direction of the wheel behind the chart-house.

Next came a promptitude of bellowed orders, and all the watch was
slacking away after braces to starboard and pulling on after braces
to port. I had already learned the manoeuvre. Mr. Pike was wearing
ship.

As I returned aft along the bridge Mr. Mellaire and the carpenter
emerged from the cabin door. They had been interrupted at breakfast,
for they were wiping their mouths. Mr. Pike came to the break of the
poop, called down instructions to the second mate, who proceeded
for'ard, and ordered the carpenter to take the wheel.

As the Elsinore swung around on her heel Mr. Pike put her on the back
track so as to cover the water she had just crossed over. He lowered
the glasses through which he was scanning the sea and pointed down
the hatchway that opened into the big after-room beneath. The ladder
was gone.

"Must have taken the lazarette ladder with him," said Mr. Pike.

Captain West strolled out of the chart-room. He said good morning in
his customary way, courteously to me and formally to the mate, and
strolled on along the poop to the wheel, where he paused to glance
into the binnacle. Turning, he went on leisurely to the break of the
poop. Again he came back to us. Fully two minutes must have elapsed
ere he spoke.

"What is the matter, Mr. Pike? Man overboard?"

"Yes, sir," was the answer.

"And took the lazarette ladder along with him?" Captain West queried.

"Yes, sir. It's the Greek that jumped over at Baltimore."

Evidently the affair was not serious enough for Captain West to be
the Samurai. He lighted a cigar and resumed his stroll. And yet he
had missed nothing, not even the absence of the ladder.

Mr. Pike sent look-outs aloft to every skysail-yard, and the Elsinore
slipped along through the smooth sea. Miss West came up and stood
beside me, searching the ocean with her eyes while I told her the
little I knew. She evidenced no excitement, and reassured me by
telling me how difficult it was to lose a man of Tony's suicidal
type.

"Their madness always seems to come upon them in fine weather or
under safe circumstances," she smiled, "when a boat can be lowered or
a tug is alongside. And sometimes they take life--preservers with
them, as in this case."

At the end of an hour Mr. Pike wore the Elsinore around, and again
retraced the course she must have been sailing when the Greek went
over. Captain West still strolled and smoked, and Miss West made a
brief trip below to give Wada forgotten instructions about Possum.
Andy Pay was called to the wheel, and the carpenter went below to
finish his breakfast.

It all seemed rather callous to me. Nobody was much concerned for
the man who was overboard somewhere on that lonely ocean. And yet I
had to admit that everything possible was being done to find him. I
talked a little with Mr. Pike, and he seemed more vexed than anything
else. He disliked to have the ship's work interrupted in such
fashion.

Mr. Mellaire's attitude was different.

"We are short-handed enough as it is," he told me, when he joined us
on the poop. "We can't afford to lose him even if he is crazy. We
need him. He's a good sailor most of the time."

The hail came from the mizzen-skysail-yard. The Maltese Cockney it
was who first sighted the man and called down the information. The
mate, looking to windwards, suddenly lowered his glasses, rubbed his
eyes in a puzzled way, and looked again. Then Miss West, using
another pair of glasses, cried out in surprise and began to laugh.

"What do you make of it, Miss West?" the mate asked.

"He doesn't seem to be in the water. He's standing up."

Mr. Pike nodded.

"He's on the ladder," he said. "I'd forgotten that. It fooled me at
first. I couldn't understand it." He turned to the second mate.
"Mr. Mellaire, will you launch the long boat and get some kind of a
crew into it while I back the main-yard? I'll go in the boat. Pick
men that can pull an oar."

"You go, too," Miss West said to me. "It will be an opportunity to
get outside the Elsinore and see her under full sail."

Mr. Pike nodded consent, so I went along, sitting near him in the
stern-sheets where he steered, while half a dozen hands rowed us
toward the suicide, who stood so weirdly upon the surface of the sea.
The Maltese Cockney pulled the stroke oar, and among the other five
men was one whose name I had but recently learned--Ditman Olansen, a
Norwegian. A good seaman, Mr. Mellaire had told me, in whose watch
he was; a good seaman, but "crank-eyed." When pressed for an
explanation Mr. Mellaire had said that he was the sort of man who
flew into blind rages, and that one never could tell what little
thing would produce such a rage. As near as I could grasp it, Ditman
Olansen was a Berserker type. Yet, as I watched him pulling in good
time at the oar, his large, pale-blue eyes seemed almost bovine--the
last man in the world, in my judgment, to have a Berserker fit.

As we drew close to the Greek he began to scream menacingly at us and
to brandish a sheath-knife. His weight sank the ladder until the
water washed his knees, and on this submerged support he balanced
himself with wild writhing and outflinging of arms. His face,
grimacing like a monkey's, was not a pretty thing to look upon. And
as he continued to threaten us with the knife I wondered how the
problem of rescuing him would be solved.

But I should have trusted Mr. Pike for that. He removed the boat-
stretcher from under the Maltese Cockney's feet and laid it close to
hand in the stern-sheets. Then he had the men reverse the boat and
back it upon the Greek. Dodging a sweep of the knife, Mr. Pike
awaited his chance, until a passing wave lifted the boat's stern
high, while Tony was sinking toward the trough. This was the moment.
Again I was favoured with a sample of the lightning speed with which
that aged man of sixty-nine could handle his body. Timed precisely,
and delivered in a flash and with weight, the boat-stretcher came
down on the Greek's head. The knife fell into the sea, and the
demented creature collapsed and followed it, knocked unconscious.
Mr. Pike scooped him out, quite effortlessly it seemed to me, and
flung him into the boat's bottom at my feet.

The next moment the men were bending to their oars and the mate was
steering back to the Elsinore. It was a stout rap Mr. Pike had
administered with the boat-stretcher. Thin streaks of blood oozed on
the damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp. I could but stare at
the lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet. A
man, all life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced
the next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of
death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of
the philosopher. And in this case it had been accomplished so
simply, by means of a stick of wood brought sharply in contact with
his skull.

If Tony the Greek be accounted an APPEARANCE, what was he now?--a
DISAPPEARANCE? And if so, whither had he disappeared? And whence
would he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call
consciousness returned to him? The first word, much less the last,
of the phenomena of personality and consciousness yet remains to be
uttered by the psychologists.

Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle
of the Elsinore burst upon me. I had been so long on board, and in
board of her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship. So
low to the water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the
tall, sky-reaching spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of
canvas seemed preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of
the law of gravitation. It required effort to realize that that slim
curve of hull inclosed and bore up from the sea's bottom five
thousand tons of coal. And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites
of men had conceived and constructed so stately and magnificent an
element-defying fabric--mites of men, most woefully like the Greek at
my feet, prone to precipitation into the blackness by means of a rap
on the head with a piece of wood.

Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned.
From somewhere he was reappearing. I noticed Mr. Pike look at him
quickly, as if apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would
require more boat-stretcher. But Tony merely fluttered his big black
eyes open and stared at me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere
he closed them again.

"What are you going to do with him?" I asked the mate.

"Put 'm back to work," was the reply. "It's all he's good for, and
he ain't hurt. Somebody's got to work this ship around the Horn."

When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below.
In the chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers. Mr.
Mellaire had turned in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch
on deck at noon. Mr. Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to
state, does not sleep aft. He shares a room in the 'midship-house
with Mr. Pike's Nancy.

Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek. He was bundled out
upon Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended,
to recover consciousness as he might elect. Yes, and so inured have
I become that I make free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself.
My eyes were still filled with the beauty of the Elsinore. One does
grow hard at sea.

CHAPTER XIX

One does not mind the trades. We have held the north-east trade for
days now, and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls
and tinkles on the taffrail. Yesterday, log and observation
approximated a run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before
we ran two hundred and forty, and the day before that two hundred and
sixty-one. But one does not appreciate the force of the wind. So
balmy and exhilarating is it that it is so much atmospheric wine. I
delight to open my lungs and my pores to it. Nor does it chill. At
any hour of the night, while the cabin lies asleep, I break off from
my reading and go up on the poop in the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.

I never knew before what the trade wind was. And now I am infatuated
with it. I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever
mate has the watch. Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr.
Pike, on these delicious nights, stands his first watch after
midnight in his pyjamas. He is a fearfully muscular man. Sixty-nine
years seem impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed
like fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge
muscle. A splendid figure of a man! What he must have been in the
hey-day of youth two score years and more ago passes comprehension.

The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream. Here,
where time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the
watches, where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to
one's notice by the striking of the ship's bells fore and aft, time
ceases. Days merge into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for
one, can never remember the day of the week or month.

The Elsinore is never totally asleep. Day and night, always, there
are the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at
the wheel, and the officer of the deck. I lie reading in my bunk,
which is on the weather side, and continually over my head during the
long night hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other,
pacing up and down, and, as I well know, the man himself is for ever
peering for'ard from the break of the poop, or glancing into the
binnacle, or feeling and gauging the weight and direction of wind on
his cheek, or watching the cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud
across the stars and the moon. Always, always, there are wakeful
eyes on the Elsinore.

Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o'clock, as I lay with
the printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an
abrupt outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike. I located him as at the
break of the poop; and the man at whom he snarled was Larry,
evidently on the main deck beneath him. Not until Wada brought me
breakfast did I learn what had occurred.

Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face,
and his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some
unlucky whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of
darkness on the main deck. But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of
the poop, had picked the offender unerringly. This was when the
explosion occurred. Then the unfortunate Larry, truly half-devil and
all child, had waxed sullen and retorted still more insolently; and
the next he knew, the mate, descending upon him like a hurricane, had
handcuffed him to the mizzen fife-rail.

Imagine, on Mr. Pike's part, that this was one for Larry and at least
ten for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. I'll not be so
absurd as to say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters. I doubt
if he has ever experienced fear. It is not in him. On the other
hand, I am confident that he apprehends trouble from these men, and
that it was for their benefit he made this example of Larry.

Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his
stupid brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because
he bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair
fight. Promptly Mr. Pike was there with the key to the handcuffs.
As if Larry had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged
man! Wada reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a
couple of front teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day. When
I met Mr. Pike on deck after eight o'clock I glanced at his knuckles.
They verified Wada's tale.

I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little
events like the foregoing. Not only has time ceased, but the world
has ceased. Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these
weeks I have received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no
visitor. I have not been to the play. I have not read a newspaper.
So far as I am concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers. All
such things have vanished with the vanished world. All that exists
is the Elsinore, with her queer human freightage and her cargo of
coal, cleaving a rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen
miles away.

I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture,
who for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be
alive. Not until the world learned of his death was he anything but
alive to the world. By the same token, was he not alive? And by the
same token, here on the Elsinore, has not the land-world ceased? May
not the pupil of one's eye be, not merely the centre of the world,
but the world itself? Truly, it is tenable that the world exists
only in consciousness. "The world is my idea," said Schopenhauer.
Said Jules de Gaultier, "The world is my invention." His dogma was
that imagination created the Real. Ah, me, I know that the practical
Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful
exercise of my wits.

To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read The Daughters of
Herodias to Miss West. It was superb in its effect--just what I had
expected of her. She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for
her father while I read. (She is never idle, being so essentially a
nest-maker and comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a
whole pile of these handkerchiefs for her father.)

She smiled, how shall I say?--oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh,
with all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm,
long gray eyes, when I read:

"But they smile innocently and dance on,
Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:
'Am I not beautiful? Shall I not be loved?'
Be patient, for they will not understand,
Not till the end of time will they put by
The weaving of slow steps about men's hearts."

"But it is well for the world that it is so," was her comment.

Ah, Symons knew women! His perfect knowledge she attested when I
read that magnificent passage:

"They do not understand that in the world
There grows between the sunlight and the grass
Anything save themselves desirable.
It seems to them that the swift eyes of men
Are made but to be mirrors, not to see
Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.
'For are not we,' they say, 'the end of all?
Why should you look beyond us? If you look
Into the night, you will find nothing there:
We also have gazed often at the stars.'"

"It is true," said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to
see how she had received the thought. "We also have gazed often at
the stars."

It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.

"But wait," I cried. "Let me read on." And I read:

"'We, we alone among all beautiful things,
We only are real: for the rest are dreams.
Why will you follow after wandering dreams
When we await you? And you can but dream
Of us, and in our image fashion them.'"

"True, most true," she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and
power mounted in her eyes.

"A wonderful poem," she conceded--nay, proclaimed--when I had done.

"But do you not see . . ." I began impulsively, then abandoned the
attempt. For how could she see, being woman, the "far-off,
disastrous, unattainable things," when she, as she so stoutly
averred, had gazed often on the stars?

She? What could she see, save what all women see--that they only are
real, and that all the rest are dreams.

"I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias," said Miss West.

"Well," I admitted lamely, "we agree. You remember it is what I told
you you were."

"I am grateful for the compliment," she said; and in those long gray
eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and self-
certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so large
a part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by
woman.

CHAPTER XX

Heavens!--how I read in this fine weather. I take so little exercise
that my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions,
such as life teems with on the land, that I read myself almost
stupid. Recommend me a sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind
in his reading. I am making up years of it. It is an orgy, a
debauch; and I am sure the addled sailors adjudge me the queerest
creature on board.

At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for
any diversion. When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the
north-east and the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my
little twenty-two automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot. I
used to shoot, when I was a wee lad. I can remember dragging a shot-
gun around with me over the hills. Also, I possessed an air-rifle,
with which, on great occasion, I was even able to slaughter a robin.

While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space
for deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from
either side of the chart-house and that are of the width of the
chart-house. This space again is restricted to one side or the other
according to the slant of the morning and afternoon sun and the
freshness of the breeze. Wherefore, Miss West's chair and mine are
most frequently side by side. Captain West has a chair, which he
infrequently occupies. He has so little to do in the working of the
ship, taking his regular observations and working them up with such
celerity, that he is rarely in the chart-room for any length of time.
He elects to spend his hours in the main cabin, not reading, not
doing anything save dream with eyes wide open in the draught of wind
that pours through the open ports and door from out the huge crojack
and the jigger staysails.

Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her
own laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine
linen. In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All
hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the
deck-chair beside me. She avers that she loves the sea and the
atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things
and land-things along with her--even to her pretty china for
afternoon tea.

Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker. She is a born
cook. The steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and de luxe
for the cabin table; yet Miss West is able at a moment's notice to
improve on these dishes. She never lets any of their dishes come on
the table without first planning them or passing on them. She has
quick judgment, an unerring taste, and is possessed of the needful
steel of decision. It seems she has only to look at a dish, no
matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or its
surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into
something indescribably different and delicious--My, how I do eat! I
am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite.
Already am I quite convinced that I am glad Miss West is making the
voyage.

She has sailed "out East," as she quaintly calls it, and has an
enormous repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes. In the cooking
of rice Louis is a master; but in the making of the accompanying
curry he fades into a blundering amateur compared with Miss West. In
the matter of curry she is a sheer genius. How often one's thoughts
dwell upon food when at sea!

So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West. I
read all the time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to
her passages, and even books, with which I am interested in trying
her out. Then, too, such reading gives rise to discussions, and she
has not yet uttered anything that would lead me to change my first
judgment of her. She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.

And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl. She isn't a
girl, she is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl. She
has the carriage, the attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and
yet she cannot be described as being in the slightest degree stately.
She is generous, dependable, sensible--yes, and sensitive; and her
superabundant vitality, the vitality that makes her walk so
gloriously, discounts the maturity of her. Sometimes she seems all
of thirty to me; at other times, when her spirits and risibilities
are aroused, she scarcely seems thirteen. I shall make a point of
asking Captain West the date of the Dixie's collision with that river
steamer in San Francisco Bay. In a word, she is the most normal, the
most healthy, natural woman I have ever known.

Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair,
that it is as invariably smooth and well-groomed as all the rest of
her. On the other hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved
by the latitude of dress she allows herself. She never fails of
being a woman. Her sex, and the lure of it, is ever present.
Possibly she may possess high collars, but I have never seen her in
one on board. Her blouses are always open at the throat, disclosing
one of her choicest assets, the muscular, adequate neck, with its
fine-textured garmenture of skin. I embarrass myself by stealing
long glances at that bare throat of hers and at the hint of fine,
firm-surfaced shoulder.

Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function. At
least once each day we make the journey for'ard along the bridge to
the top of the 'midship-house. Possum, who is now convalescent,
accompanies us. The steward makes a point of being there so as to
receive instructions and report the egg-output and laying conduct of
the many hens. At the present time our four dozen hens are laying
two dozen eggs a day, with which record Miss West is greatly elated.

Already she has given names to most of them. The cock is Peter, of
course. A much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden. A slim, trim thing
that dogs Peter's heels she calls Cleopatra. Another hen--the
mellowest-voiced one of all--she addresses as Bernhardt. One thing I
have noted: whenever she and the steward have passed death sentence
on a non-laying hen (which occurs regularly once a week), she takes
no part in the eating of the meat, not even when it is metamorphosed
into one of her delectable curries. At such times she has a special
curry made for herself of tinned lobster, or shrimp, or tinned
chicken.

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