Beggars on Horseback Part 18

"Yes. It could not be carried through without him."

"Ah, I see. . . . Only poor Lemaire was to be kept out. . . . And dis reef?"

"It's uncharted. I found it years ago. I had reasons for not wanting it known where I'd been and I never reported. It's a tricky place, the sea don't break true on it, sets in sideways. Beyond it's flat to the sh.o.r.e.

No risk of salvage; it's out of the course, and a wooden s.h.i.+p goes to pieces at once, anyway."

"Where is it, dis reef?"

Elderkin drew his pencil down the chart to an indented bit of coast not a couple of degrees below the fortieth parallel. Lemaire sweated to think how near he had been to risk.

"If this north-west gale holds, and we are to have an accident which made her unmanageable," went on Elderkin, "we should be driven ash.o.r.e, on to that reef. Or at least we could always say so afterwards."

"We might arrange so's Olsen was neber able to give us de lie . . ."

suggested Lemaire, glancing sidelong at the other.

"If needful."

But when the tussle over terms was ended and Lemaire had gone forth, Elderkin swore to himself that it was the mate who should never again see the Islands rise above the rim of the sea. He cursed, and for a few moments as he sat at the chart-room table, he allowed himself the luxury of hating the course on which he had embarked. A man cannot give his soul into the keeping of any one idea, whether that idea be embodied in another person or in a mode of life, without suffering a profound disturbance if he violently part from it; and for many years now Elderkin's soul had been one with his s.h.i.+p. She was ugly, cranky, she bore a name as a h.e.l.l-s.h.i.+p that he had earned for her, but together they had won through much; men had died on her, blood run upon her decks, misery and pride and drunkenness and strange doings permeated her very frame. She was as the flesh of his flesh, and only that dream-s.h.i.+p of his own which floated in a mirage before his mind could have made him unfaithful to her. He was in the position of a man who has lived with a despised but deeply felt mistress, and who at last thinks he holds the ideal woman, the bride, the untouched, within his grasp, at the price of the severance of the old ties. And, like a reproachful ghost, as though she were dead already, the appeal of the old reprobate of the seas kept p.r.i.c.king at him, day and night, throughout the ordered watches that drew her towards her end.

He had sold his soul to gain his soul, a not altogether uncommon bargain. "If I can only have this one thing I will Be Good ever after,"

is a cry that must have caused amus.e.m.e.nt above and below as many times as there are mortals upon the earth. In Elderkin's case the "one thing"

was a s.h.i.+p of his own, and now that she loomed at last over his horizon, he found that it was this old Hagar of the high seas, the mistress and not the wife, who, in spite of himself, absorbed his consciousness. All the ugliness of his betrayal of her was thrown sharply into notice by the compact with his mate; and, shot by a sharper distaste than ever before, he covered his eyes for a minute, in an attempt to focus his will undistracted. It was successful; Elderkin, little as he knew it, was an idealist, however perverted a one, and idealism was with him in this venture, beckoning to him in the dip and curtsy of a dream vessel, her bright canvas burning with perpetual sunlight. . . . He dropped his hands and straightened himself, and his eye fell on the Bible in which he had made his calculations, and where he had also noted down his covenant with Lemaire. It had fallen open, by the chance movement of his arms, at a different place, and he found he was reading a few lines before he knew what he was about.

Too imperceptibly for him to have noticed the progress of it, the light had strengthened in the chart-room, for a stormy sun had penetrated the gloom, and the heavy black letters stood out distinctly on the yellowed page. A sudden flash of memory leapt through Elderkin's mind--the memory of a day long ago in his childhood.

He had been brought up in New England by a rigid old grandmother until he ran away to sea, his Nova Scotian blood too strong for him. But his mother's Puritan strain was with him nevertheless, had held by him if in nothing else but a certain Biblical flavour in his oaths. Now there flashed across his mind a dreary Sunday when he was a little boy--one of many like it, but this particular one had stuck in his memory. And, probably because of the yellow light flooding the chart-room, the memory surged up at him, for on that Sunday he had escaped to the barn, although with no better spoils than a book of Old Testament stories, and lain there, heels in the air and elbows on the straw, reading the story of the Flood in just such a stormy yellow glow as this. A gale had followed, rain-laden, and his childish mind had half-feared, half-hoped, that a flood was coming, down which he could float triumphantly in some makes.h.i.+ft ark . . . as to his grandmother, he might rescue her and he might not, but if he did, of course, she would be so overcome with grat.i.tude and admiration that she would never again abase his dignity with a certain limber cane. Then, in a lull of the gale, the gleam had shone out once more, and by its light he read on; read how G.o.d had promised there should never come a flood over all the earth again, and had made a rainbow as a sign of it. Rather dull of G.o.d, he thought in his disappointment. The storm raged so that he dared not slip back to the house, not because of any fear of the elements, but because his grandmother would notice if his clothes got wet; so he had stayed on, his mind thronged with imaginary adventures, till the storm was over.

Then he had gone back to the house, feeling curiously flat after the excitement wind always produced in him. A faint yet, pictorially, a vivid memory of that strained hour of varying emotions swept across him now in a moment's s.p.a.ce, as he gazed at the page before him. The next moment he understood why--it was not only the light that reproduced that afternoon of long ago, but also the words at which he was looking--the two things together had fused a section of time from thirty years earlier into a section of the present. He read the verses through, but a few phrases knocked at his mind to the exclusion of the rest. The word "covenant," especially, so hard upon his pact with Lemaire, seemed to stare up at him. . . .

"And I will establish a covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. . . . And G.o.d said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you. . . . I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be the token of a covenant. . . . And it shall come to pa.s.s when I shall bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud, and I shall remember the covenant which is between me and you. . . ."

Elderkin sat at gaze like a man in a trance, unable for a few moments to disa.s.sociate that hour in the barn from the present--not sure which was the present, so vivid was the illusion and so sharp the knock on his dormant spiritual sense. His hands, which were trembling oddly, went out to grasp the edge of the table, not for the physical support, but more that a common sensation should rea.s.sure his mind. Then he rose, and backing away from the Book as though it would spring at him, he went out.

The wind had dropped, but the _Spirito Santo_ was rolling her bulwarks--those solid structures which were traps for all the water s.h.i.+pped--into the confused sea that the dead wind had left. She was travelling badly, her heavy load robbed her of the elasticity which would have enabled her to rise to the onslaught of each successive wave.

The _Spirito Santo_ boasted no bridge, the roof of the chart-room, which was situated on the p.o.o.p, just forward of the mizzen-mast, doing duty instead. The wheel, which was uncovered, was set at the break of the p.o.o.p, between the rail and the chart-house. Elderkin climbed the ladder to the top of the chart-house, and then stood there, struck to sudden stillness. He never glanced at the binnacle to see if the man were keeping the course, or noted the wiry figure of the mate as he tramped back and forth; his whole being was arrested by the portent which held the sky. And all the long-dormant but never wholly cast-off beliefs of his childhood awoke in his blood.

A curtain of luminous, ashen-pink cloud was drawn across the sky from horizon to zenith, absolutely smooth and unbroken, and against it arched a rainbow, spanning the horizon and coming down mistily into the sea. So close the opalescent feet of it looked that it seemed as though the s.h.i.+p's bows were heading through the phantom portals of some new world, but high in air the summit of the curve, clear and burnished as cut-gla.s.s, looked infinitely far away. As Elderkin stood at gaze, particles of sun-bright cloud floated slowly across the right of the arch, like little morsels of golden wool.

Elderkin, his fingers clutching a wet stanchion, was aware of a curious feeling coming over him. He felt he had seen just that effect before--that curtain of ashen pink, the rainbow against it, the flock of little golden-bright morsels, floating slowly across it . . . and had seen it in connexion with something of vital importance. Yet, try as he would, he could not capture the thought--memory--dream--whatever it was, of which he was so sure in the back of his mind that he felt it waiting for him to recognize it every moment. . . . All sorts of bewildering little half-memories flitted across his mind, and refused to be captured or placed. Queer, irrational little things they were, incongruous and wildly senseless; he felt dizzy chasing them, but he knew if he gave up concentrating even for an instant, the whole thing would be gone. Yet piece together these half-memories that p.r.i.c.ked at him he could not, they were elusive as moths and as unsubstantial. He knew that there was one key to them and that if he could only find it they would become sense, though not sense of this world--it was as though they were in a different focus and on a different plane, but they would become clear if only he could find the key. . . .

As he stared the little particles of cloud in front of the rainbow slowly dissolved and melted into the ashen pink of the cloud-curtain, from that, too, the glow was fading, and the arch itself began slowly to die into the air. Elderkin found himself in the chart-room again; he sat down and shut his eyes, striving to remember. He could not recollect having dreamt such a thing, and yet the feeling aroused in him was exactly that provoked when, on the day following a very vivid dream, it will keep on intruding in fragments, each time to be shaken off as the mind readjusts itself to the normal after the moment's blurring of edge.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he must have seen that effect only a few days before and he opened his diary, in which, his vice being pen and paper, he noted down matters not important enough for the "Remarks"

s.p.a.ce in the log. He hunted the pages back and forth, and in the midst of his futile search his mind seemed to give a click and he was switched back into the normal again. He sat looking at the book in his hands and realized that he had never seen that especial effect before, that he had most certainly never noted it down; the mere idea that he had now seemed as silly as a dream when the mind has struggled fully awake, though when he had first thought of it and taken the notebook up, it had seemed as possible as the same dream when the sleeper is in the midst of it. He still felt curiously dizzy, though his head was clearing slowly: things seemed commonplace around him once more; he could not even remember distinctly what his sensations had been. He only knew that in that trance-like state, of a moment--of aeons--earlier, he had known he had seen before that which he then saw, and seen it connected with something he could not catch. Whether he ever had seen it, perhaps on that incompletely remembered day of storm which had flashed back to him on this afternoon; or whether, already worked up by his conscience, by the interview with Lemaire, and, to his sensitized mind, by the words in the Bible, the sudden effect on him of seeing that bow set in the flaming cloud, had produced a brainstorm, he could never know. He would have thought it blasphemy to wonder whether nothing more spiritual than the driven blood in his skull was responsible for that queer switching off the track; but whatever it was, the effect of it, on his awakened moral sense, was prodigious. He did not doubt that he had received a divine visitation, that for him the heavens had been decked with pomp, that the workings of G.o.d, in particular and exquisite relation to himself, were manifest in the ordered sequence of that day. His own stirrings at the violation of his solitary code had gone deeper with him than he knew, preparing him for further troubling, then the pact with Lemaire, driving in all the distasteful side of the business more keenly still, the coincidence of that word "covenant" coming on the heels of his covenant with the mate, that word used in the Bible pa.s.sage to suggest the eternal pact between man's soul and its creator, the memory it evoked, and, to crown all, the finding of the seal of it set in the heavens themselves--all these things rushed together, fused, and struck into his being.

He fell on his knees in the chart-room and praised G.o.d; praised Him in the phraseology of his Puritan forebears, as he had heard Him praised when a little boy, whose heedless ears had not seemed to take in the words battering about them.

Joab Elderkin had got religion. He had been converted.

When he scrambled to his feet he came to, so to speak, on a different sphere from any he had ever known. He seized up the Bible again, his hands shaken by the strongest pa.s.sion known to civilized man, the only acquired attribute, besides the making of fire, and of intoxicating liquor, which marks him off fundamentally from the other mammals. He read again the pa.s.sage that had flamed into his ken earlier, he read the promises of the Almighty, he read of how men were called the Sons of G.o.d. He saw himself and all his fellow humans not merely calling G.o.d Father by a kindly sufferance towards adopted children, but as beings created of the same substance, their souls as much made of the essence of G.o.d as their bodies of the essence of their earthly fathers, and the thought mounted to his head like wine. The swift darkness of the tropics had fallen, but full of his new conception of his fellow-creatures--"every living creature that was with him"

of the verses--he, when he opened the chart-room door, flared forth into a night of G.o.ds.

All the next day the glory held, both in the air and in Elderkin's mind.

The Pacific was rainbow-haunted; phantom archways through which the bowsprits seemed about to soar; pillars of prismatic colour that melted into air; broken shafts of it that flashed out in every sunlit burst of spray upon the decks. Even in the two plumes of spray for ever winging from either side of her cut.w.a.ter, a curve of burnished colours hung, as though piercing down into the translucent green, through whose depths the drowning surf was driven in paler clouds. The wind still held on and the _Spirito Santo_ made what way she could under steam and canvas, through the confused seas that slopped aboard her and buffeted her from all sides at once. It was of supreme significance to Elderkin that the north-westerly wind on which he had counted for his purpose, should have died away in the self-same hour that, as he phrased it, the wind of the spirit blew into his soul. The barometer was falling rapidly, in spite of the stiller air, and he had had the royals and outer jib and gaff-topsail stowed. What with her reduced sail, the influence of her steam, and the lumpy seas, the _Spirito Santo_ was behaving her worst, riding slugglishly with a heavy reluctant motion as though she hardly considered it worth the effort of keeping her blunt nose above water at all. Elderkin felt her sulkiness, and it seemed to him as though, instead of helping to save her, she was possessed of an evil spirit bent on thwarting him. He watched her closely, and spent the day on the p.o.o.p, and though he said little, every one was aware of something new and strange about him. The crew commented among themselves on his abstraction and the poverty of his abuse; Lemaire thought he held the key to it, but Olsen, the freckled Dane, grew uneasy. He was having trouble with his engines, which should have been overhauled long ago, and would inevitably have been renovated this trip had it been undertaken with a normal objective. If the voyage were unduly prolonged he would be hard put to it for fuel; it would not take very much to send his boilers cras.h.i.+ng from the rusty stays that held them; added to which every degree further south, now they were in the forties, diminished their chances of safety. As there was no longer any wind to contend with, Olsen was all for steaming towards sh.o.r.e at once, for his sea-sense combined with the barometer to tell him of trouble ahead.

Olsen was a taciturn creature, who cared for no one in the world but his half-caste children--bright, large-stomached little creatures, whom he had left playing in the dust in front of his gaily painted wooden house in St. Thomas. For their sakes he put up with his fat, slovenly wife and her swarms of relations of various shades of brown. It was only for the children's sake that he had stuck to the _Spirito Santo_, for it suited him to be able to get home as often as he might, and even when the _Spirito Santo_ did not touch St. Thomas he could always pick up with a mail-packet or a sailing s.h.i.+p of some kind. It was his ambition to send both boy and girl to New York for their education, now that the Civil War had made it possible for anyone with a touch of colour to make good.

Therefore he nursed his crazy engines as though he loved them, but he decided that the sooner the accident occurred the better. In the second dog-watch, he, as Lemaire had done the day before, went to Elderkin in the chart-room.

He found the captain with an open book in front of him: he was not reading, but making calculations on the margin. He glanced up at Olsen and his tired eyes brightened for a moment. Then:

"Ask Mr. Lemaire to come here," he ordered, "and come back yourself."

Olsen made his way to the top of the chart-house, where Lemaire was pacing, full of anxiety, and delivered the order. Lemaire came with a mixture of civility and an a.s.sumption of confederacy in his manner, but Elderkin took no more notice of it than of Olsen's waiting stolidity. He closed the Bible and confronted the two men.

"Well, Olsen," he said, "you were wanting to see me about something?"

"It is about this affair," answered Olsen, "there is no good to be got by waiting, sir. I tell you plainly my engines will not stand so very much. And the way she is loaded, if we come up against anything in the way of a sea----"

"And you?" asked Elderkin of the mate.

"I am sure dat what Olsen say is right. It must be now or never."

"It is going to be never," replied Elderkin in his usual soft tones.

The two men stared at him, then the quicker Latin flashed into speech.

He demanded, with a lapse into Island patois now and again, what the blank blank blank the captain thought he was doing. Elderkin sat through it unmoved.

"I will not speak to you as you have just done to me," he began, "because hairy, forsaken Frenchy as you are, you are still a son of G.o.d, even as I am. Praise the Lord with me, for He has shown me into what an abyss of sin I had fallen. Do you hear what I say? I am captain aboard this s.h.i.+p, Mr. Lemaire, and I order you to praise G.o.d for having delivered us while there is yet time."

Lemaire stared at his superior officer in total silence for a moment instead of complying. Then he turned to Olsen. The freckled Dane grasped the situation the first. He saw that the skipper was not trying to do them down as Lemaire, when he found his tongue again, accused him: that this was not some deep-laid trick to keep them out of the profits. Olsen had seen many religious revivals in the Islands and he knew the signs.

"See here, Mr. Elderkin," he said, stepping forward; "I've my side of it to think of. I've not suddenly got holy. I'm thinking of my children, same as I was before. You've never thought for anyone but yourself. I only s.h.i.+pped this voyage because it meant being able to do what I want for them. I've only stuck to this h.e.l.l-s.h.i.+p for them. There's been things done aboard here that would have sunk the s.h.i.+p if sin could sink her. You can't clean your b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+p by talking of G.o.d now. We all made an agreement and let's stand by it like men. Sink the s.h.i.+p, sir, and the top of the sea'll be the sweeter for it."

"I've been a sinful man all my days," agreed Elderkin, "but my eyes have been opened, the Lord be thanked. . . . I have been saved and by the grace of G.o.d I mean to save the s.h.i.+p."

"It'll take more than the grace of G.o.d to keep my engines working,"

commented Olsen.

"And suppose we refuse?" asked Lemaire. "We are two to one, Mr.

Elderkin. Remember, sah--if the captain is sick it is de mate who take charge of de s.h.i.+p. . . ."

"Mutiny? You? Do you imagine, Mossoo, that I couldn't hold my own s.h.i.+p against any half-breed afloat?"

"d.a.m.n you!" screamed the mate, his skin darkening with his angry blood.

"If you not take care we will say you are mad, yes, mad. De men have only got to hear religion coming out of your face to believe it. De s.h.i.+p's not safe, and we must scuttle her now, d'you hear?"

"The men!" repeated Elderkin. "Let me tell you there never was a dago crew yet that I couldn't lick. I'll save this s.h.i.+p against the lot of you, I'll save her against herself--G.o.d helping me," he added.

"But we shall be ruined, all of us," urged Olsen. "What do you suppose they will say to us at Port of Spain, Mr. Elderkin? They won't be pleased to see the _Spirito Santo_ come crawling into the roadstead with a faked cargo and all that good insurance money wasted. . . . We shall all be ruined men, I tell you. . . . What will become of us?"