The Mutiny of the Elsinore Part 32

"There's me Byron. An' there goes Zola an' Browning with a piece of Shakespeare runnin' neck an' neck, an' what's left of _Anti-Christ_ makin' a bad last. An' there's Carlyle and Zola that cheek by jowl you can't tell 'em apart."

Here the _Elsinore_ lay down to starboard, and the water in the forecastle poured out against my legs and hips. My wet mittens slipped on the iron work, and I swept down the runway into the scuppers, where I was turned over and over by another flood that had just boarded from windward.

I know I was rather confused, and that I had swallowed quite a deal of salt water, ere I got my hands on the rungs of the ladder and climbed to the top of the house. On my way aft along the bridge I encountered the crew coming for'ard. Mr. Mellaire and Mr. Pike were talking in the lee of the chart-house, and inside, as I pa.s.sed below, Captain West was smoking a cigar.

After a good rub down, in dry pyjamas, I was scarcely back in my bunk with the _Mind of Primitive Man_ before me, when the stampede over my head was repeated. I waited for the second rush. It came, and I proceeded to dress.

The scene on the p.o.o.p duplicated the previous one, save that the men were more excited, more frightened. They were babbling and chattering all together.

"Shut up!" Mr. Pike was snarling when I came upon them. "One at a time, and answer the captain's question."

"It ain't no barrel this time, sir," Tom Spink said. "It's alive. An'

if it ain't the devil it's the ghost of a drownded man. I see 'm plain an' clear. He's a man, or was a man once--"

"They was two of 'em, sir," Richard Giller, one of the "bricklayers,"

broke in.

"I think he looked like Petro Marinkovich, sir," Tom Spink went on.

"An' the other was Jespersen--I seen 'm," Giller added.

"They was three of 'em, sir," said Nosey Murphy. "O'Sullivan, sir, was the other one. They ain't devils, sir. They're drownded men. They come aboard right over the bows, an' they moved slow like drownded men.

Sorensen seen the first one first. He caught my arm an' pointed, an'

then I seen 'm. He was on top the for'ard-house. And Olansen seen 'm, an' Deacon, sir, an' Hackey. We all seen 'm, sir . . . an' the second one; an' when the rest run away I stayed long enough to see the third one. Mebbe there's more. I didn't wait to see."

Captain West stopped the man.

"Mr. Pike," he said wearily, "will you straighten this nonsense out."

"Yes, sir," Mr. Pike responded, then turned on the man. "Come on, all of you! There's three devils to tie down this time."

But the men shrank away from the order and from him.

"For two cents . . . " I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke off utterance.

He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge. In the same order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up the rear, we followed. It was a similar journey, save that we caught a ducking midway on the first span of bridge as well as a ducking on the 'mids.h.i.+p- house.

We halted on top the for'ard-house. In vain Mr. Pike flashed his light- stick. Nothing was to be seen nor heard save the white-flecked dark water on our deck, the roar of the gale in our rigging, and the crash and thunder of seas falling aboard. We advanced half-way across the last span of bridge to the fore-castle head, and were driven to pause and hang on at the foremast by a bursting sea.

Between the drives of spray Mr. Pike flashed his stick. I heard him exclaim something. Then he went on to the forecastle-head, followed by Mr. Mellaire, while I waited by the foremast, clinging tight, and endured another ducking. Through the emergencies I could see the pencil of light, appearing and disappearing, darting here and there. Several minutes later the mates were back with me.

"Half our head-gear's carried away," Mr. Pike told me. "We must have run into something."

"I felt a jar, right after you' went below, sir, last time," said Mr.

Mellaire. "Only I thought it was a thump of sea."

"So did I feel it," the mate agreed. "I was just taking off my boots. I thought it was a sea. But where are the three devils?"

"Broaching the cask," the second mate suggested.

We made the forecastle-head, descended the iron ladder, and went for'ard, inside, underneath, out of the wind and sea. There lay the cask, securely lashed. The size of the barnacles on it was astonis.h.i.+ng. They were as large as apples and inches deep. A down-fling of bow brought a foot of water about our boots; and as the bow lifted and the water drained away, it drew out from the sh.e.l.l-crusted cask streamers of seaweed a foot or so in length.

Led by Mr. Pike and watching our chance between seas, we searched the deck and rails between the forecastle-head and the for'ard-house and found no devils. The mate stepped into the forecastle doorway, and his light-stick cut like a dagger through the dim illumination of the murky sea-lamp. And we saw the devils. Nosey Murphy had been right. There were three of them.

Let me give the picture: A drenched and freezing room of rusty, paint- scabbed iron, low-roofed, double-tiered with bunks, reeking with the filth of thirty men, despite the was.h.i.+ng of the sea. In a top bunk, on his side, in sea-boots and oilskins, staring steadily with blue, bitter eyes, Andy Fay; on the table, pulling at a pipe, with hanging legs dragged this way and that by the churn of water, Mulligan Jacobs, solemnly regarding three men, sea-booted and b.l.o.o.d.y, who stand side by side, of a height and not duly tall, swaying in unison to the _Elsinore's_ down-flinging and up-lifting.

But such men! I know my East Side and my East End, and I am accustomed to the faces of all the ruck of races, yet with these three men I was at fault. The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow. Their skin was white under a bronze of weather. Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair. Yet their eyes were dark--and yet not dark. They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel. Nor were they black. They were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of great cats. They regarded us like walkers in a dream, these pale-haired storm-waifs with pale, topaz eyes. They did not bow, they did not smile, in no way did they recognize our presence save that they looked at us and dreamed.

But Andy Fay greeted us.

"It's a h.e.l.l of a night an' not a wink of sleep with these goings-on," he said.

"Now where did they blow in from a night like this?" Mulligan Jacobs complained.

"You've got a tongue in your mouth," Mr. Pike snarled. "Why ain't you asked 'em?"

"As though you didn't know I could use the tongue in me mouth, you old stiff," Jacobs snarled back.

But it was no time for their private feud. Mr. Pike turned on the dreaming new-comers and addressed them in the mangled and aborted phrases of a dozen languages such as the world-wandering Anglo-Saxon has had every opportunity to learn but is too stubborn-brained and wilful-mouthed to wrap his tongue about.

The visitors made no reply. They did not even shake their heads. Their faces remained peculiarly relaxed and placid, incurious and pleasant, while in their eyes floated profounder dreams. Yet they were human. The blood of their injuries stained them and clotted on their clothes.

"Dutchmen," snorted Mr. Pike, with all due contempt for other breeds, as he waved them to make themselves at home in any of the bunks.

Mr. Pike's ethnology is narrow. Outside his own race he is aware of only three races: n.i.g.g.e.rs, Dutchmen, and Dagoes.

Again our visitors proved themselves human. They understood the mate's invitation, and, glancing first at one another, they climbed into three top-bunks and closed their eyes. I could swear the first of them was asleep in half a minute.

"We'll have to clean up for'ard, or we'll be having the sticks about our ears," the mate said, already starting to depart. "Get the men along, Mr. Mellaire, and call out the carpenter."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

And no westing! We have been swept back three degrees of casting since the night our visitors came on board. They are the great mystery, these three men of the sea. "Horn Gypsies," Margaret calls them; and Mr. Pike dubs them "Dutchmen." One thing is certain, they have a language of their own which they talk with one another. But of our hotch-potch of nationalities fore and aft there is no person who catches an inkling of their language or nationality.

Mr. Mellaire raised the theory that they were Finns of some sort, but this was indignantly denied by our big-footed youth of a carpenter, who swears he is a Finn himself. Louis, the cook, avers that somewhere over the world, on some forgotten voyage, he has encountered men of their type; but he can neither remember the voyage nor their race. He and the rest of the Asiatics accept their presence as a matter of course; but the crew, with the exception of Andy Fay and Mulligan Jacobs, is very superst.i.tious about the new-comers, and will have nothing to do with them.

"No good will come of them, sir," Tom Spink, at the wheel, told us, shaking his head forebodingly.

Margaret's mittened hand rested on my arm as we balanced to the easy roll of the s.h.i.+p. We had paused from our promenade, which we now take each day, religiously, as a const.i.tutional, between eleven and twelve.

"Why, what is the matter with them?" she queried, nudging me privily in warning of what was coming.

"Because they ain't men, Miss, as we can rightly call men. They ain't regular men."

"It was a bit irregular, their manner of coming on board," she gurgled.