A GOOD solid point of difference is, on the whole, almost as satisfactory as an interest in common—which, in the case of Kavanagh, the mate, and Ferguson, the chief engineer, of the tramp steamer “Gairloch,” was fortunate, since of the latter commodity they possessed none at all.
Kavanagh was by way of being particular about his appearance, and shaved before the six inches of mirror in his cramped little cabin as religiously as any brassbound officer of a crack liner.
Ferguson was hairy and unbrushed both by inclination and principle.
Kavanagh was neat in his attire.
Ferguson was at his happiest in a filthy boiler suit, and he had a trick of using a handful of engineroom waste where other men use a pocket handkerchief, which annoyed Kavanagh almost to the point of tears.
Kavanagh’s whole soul revolted against the smelly, smutty little tub which was for the time being his floating home. It was ungrateful of him, certainly, for she had done him a good turn after a fashion. But he couldn’t help it. He was a sail-trained man; and he had remained in sail, out of a sheer sense of beauty which was no less real for being entirely inarticulate, long after his own interests indicated that he should leave it. Then the company with which he had grown up sold the last of its fleet, and he had perforce to seek employment elsewhere. He found it at last, though only after many long and weary weeks of hanging about docks and shipping offices—found it as mate of the “Gairloch.”
He sang the praises of sail without ceasing. And even so did Ferguson wax lyrical on the theme of the engines of the “Gairloch.”
She might not, he admitted, be beautiful externally; but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her! He would then soar into ecstatic and highly technical rhapsodies concerning those same internal essentials, the technicalities being further complicated by a copious use of his native Doric, and decorated freely with a certain adjective of a sanguinary nature of which he was inordinately fond.
The argument began something after this fashion:
The “Gairloch” had not long cleared Victoria Harbour, and was belching forth an Acheronian smudge from her shabby funnel, as she butted her ugly hull into the south-westerly swell, when she met a big four-masted barque coming in to Hastings Mill for a cargo of Pacific Coast lumber. It was a glorious morning—one of those bright, calm, virginal mornings that are an especial climatic product of that coast. Everything was bathed in a flood of clear, pale sunlight. The opaque green waters of the Strait gleamed and flashed in the sun, and, clear-cut as if they were no more than a dozen miles away, the snowy summits of the Oregon ranges stood out dazzling in their whiteness against the blue of the early morning sky.
The barque was a tall ship for those days, with royals at fore, main, and mizen, and her piled-up sails shone white as the distant ranges in the sunlight that caressed their swelling surfaces. The hands were just laying aloft to get the canvas off her, and as she surged by with a bone in her mouth, her wet bows and white figurehead flashing as she lifted on the swell, Kavanagh’s heart ached anew with an unquenchable longing for sail. In his mind he followed the noble ship to her moorings, in fancy heard the familiar nasal chant as sail after sail was furled:
“We’ll roll up the bunt with a fling—o—oh …
An’ pa—ay Paddy Doyle for his bo—o—ots....”
“There’s a ship for you!” he exclaimed to the wide world.
“Ah see nae beauty in yon,” came a dour voice at his elbow—the voice of Ferguson. “Ah see nae beauty in thae bluidy windbags, nae mair than in ma wife’s cla’es hingin’ oot on the cla’es-line o’ a Monday morning.”
Kavanagh was annoyed. He had not meant his involuntary outburst of feeling to be overheard—least of all to be overheard by Ferguson. Sneaking about in carpet slippers....
“I dare say this floating abomination is more to your taste,” he snapped.
“She’s guid guts in her,” said Ferguson.
The argument was still going on as merrily as ever while the “Gairloch” rolled heavily up from the Line through days which grew ever colder and winds which grew ever more stormy.
The little ship had struck the Western Ocean in one of the very worst of his moods. She was making shocking weather of it. She rolled, she pitched, she wallowed, she did every conceivable thing a deeply laden and ill-designed ship could do in a seaway. Her iron decks were most of the time under water, and the atmosphere of the stuffy little cabin, with every scuttle shut and the lamp smoking villainously as it swung in its gimbals, resembled that of the infernal regions.
But still, whenever Ferguson and Kavanagh met, the argument continued without abatement. They went on with it grimly, with their legs hooked on those of the cabin table, and their backs braced against the backs of their chairs, while, in spite of the fiddles that had graced the board for weeks, every roll of the ship added yet further contributions of cold potato and congealed meat to the dreary confusion of the cabin floor.
And so they might have gone on to the crack of doom had nothing happened to interrupt them.
In this case what happened was the sighting of the derelict.
It was about the end of the morning watch, one dark, dreary morning, when a late livid dawn was just creeping over the rim of the heaving waste of waters. Kavanagh was cold, tired, and depressed, and his reflections, as he stood on the bridge of the “Gairloch,” were in harmony with the time and the weather. The future stretched before him no more cheerfully than that expanse of grey Atlantic—dreary, monotonous, and dismal to a degree. He didn’t expect he would ever get a command. He ought to have gone into steam earlier. He might have got into one of the big liner companies. Now——
Precisely at this point in his meditations he sighted the deserted ship—now visible on the crest of a roller, now lost to sight as she slid drunkenly down into the trough of the sea.
It was evident at a glance that she was not under control. She was yawing helplessly hither and thither in the seas, her yards, with the rags of their sails still fluttering in the wind, pointing as if in mute appeal to the four quarters of the heavens.
“‘Maria’—Genoa,” said Kavanagh, with his glasses to his eyes, “and built on the Clyde by the looks of her.... I think she’s been abandoned—I don’t make out anyone moving, or any signal.”
He handed the glasses to Captain Harrison, who had just come on to the bridge.
“Aye—she’s derelict right enough,” said the captain after a prolonged scrutiny. “Well, I’ll have to report her—can’t do anything more. It’s out of the question taking a ship in tow in a sea like this.”
He pulled at his sandy-grey beard in his worried way.
Kavanagh, in his gloomier moments, used to picture himself becoming like Captain Harrison. He was a harassed-looking little man, who was haunted by a nightmare-like dread of losing his ship and his ticket. He had a sickly wife and a brood of young children at home, and his indecision had prevented him from climbing any higher on the ladder of success than the rung which was represented by the command of the “Gairloch.”
“Glass falling,” mumbled the captain into his sparse beard, “sea rising ... in for a night of it....”
Kavanagh hardly heard him. His eyes glued to his glasses, he gazed with a passionate intensity at the abandoned vessel.
It was queer. He couldn’t explain it—couldn’t understand it! But there was something about that ship that made him feel that, at all costs, he must save her! He could no more turn tail and leave her to perish than if there had been human lives at stake. He could no more do it than a knight of old could calmly ride away and leave a distressed damsel making signals from a turret top. And, indeed, as her masts dipped and rose again in the sea, she did somehow seem to be making signals—personal signals—to him and to no one else: to be saying, “Come! You’re surely not going to leave me to it, are you?”
“She’d be well worth salving,” he said, trying to keep some of the eagerness out of his voice as he turned towards his captain. “Mean a lot of money ... if you could spare the hands——”
Captain Harrison shook his head. He looked almost terrified. But Kavanagh had seen the momentary gleam in his eyes at the mention of the money, and his hopes rose.
“I don’t see how I’m going to spare the men,” said the captain, “and besides what good would these chaps be for a job like that. I doubt if there’s more than two or three of ’em have ever been in sail at all.”
“She isn’t a big ship, sir,” urged Kavanagh. “If you could let me have half a dozen hands I could manage her all right.”
Captain Harrison pulled a minute longer at his ragged beard; then broke out hurriedly, as if afraid that his own indecision might get the better of him again: “Well, have it your own way—your own responsibility, mind—and you’ll have to ask for volunteers. I’m not going to order men away on a job like that. Madness, you know, really. I oughtn’t to do it—oughtn’t to do it——”
There was, as it turned out, no need to order. Out of the twenty-six hands comprising the deck department of the “Gairloch” a dozen volunteered at once, and Kavanagh had a hard job to pick his salvage crew.
Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to pick among them! Only two had had a brief experience in sail. As for the rest, what they lacked in knowledge they made up in enthusiasm. The donkeyman unexpectedly manifested a romantic yearning to “’ave a trip in one o’ them there,” but him Captain Harrison, resolute for once, flatly declined to spare.
Kavanagh was hard put to it to hide a rueful grin when he saw his crowd ranged up before him. They were a scratch lot if ever there was one! He foresaw that it would be up to him to combine as best he could the duties of mate, second mate, bos’n, and general bottle-washer with those of temporary skipper of “‘Maria’—Genoa.”
Scratch lot or not, however, the salvage crew were mightily pleased with themselves as they pulled away for the barque, and they raised a highly creditable cheer by way of farewell to their shipmates lined up along the bulwarks of the “Gairloch.”
One of the last things Kavanagh saw was Ferguson’s hairy countenance thrust over the rail.
“Every yin to his taste!” bawled the engineer. “Ah wouldna trust ma precious life to thon bluidy auld windbag in the gale o’ wund that’s gaun to blaw the nicht!”
His last words were caught up and whirled away on one of the short, fierce gusts which blew out of the west at ever shorter intervals, and Kavanagh heard no more.
A scene of chaos welcomed him as he climbed aboard the “Maria.” She had a big deck-load of lumber, which had broken adrift, and lay piled up against the temporary topgallant rail, together with an empty hencoop, a stove-in barrel, and a number of other miscellaneous items. That in itself was enough to account for the list of the vessel. Aloft she was in better case than a casual glance suggested. Her spars were all intact, in spite of the bad dusting she had evidently been through, but every sail had been blown out of the bolt-ropes, with the exception of the fore-lower topsail, and that was split from head to foot. The gale had evidently struck her when she was carrying a fair amount of canvas, and Kavanagh conjectured that the crew had turned panicky and made no attempt to save the ship, but had jumped at the chance of being taken off by some passing vessel.
He signalled to the “Gairloch,” which was still standing by, that he was able to carry on, and with a farewell hoot of her siren she rolled off again on her homeward road. Soon her smoke was lost to view in the gathering dusk. The derelict was on her own now, for good or ill.
Kavanagh set his crew to work at once heaving the deck-load over the side, and himself went below, accompanied by one of his few “sail” men, a young seaman named Rawlings, to investigate matters below.
The sense of desolation which always pervades any place inhabited by man when man’s presence is removed was strong upon him as soon as he began to descend the companion which led to the saloon. That he had looked for, however, and silence he had also looked for: so that it was with an unpleasant sensation of shock that he became suddenly aware of a strange voice speaking in rapid and monotonous tones, and in some language, too, which he could not at all make out.
There was someone on board all the time, then! And yet—it was a peculiar sort of voice—a voice with a strange, a hardly human ring in it—unnatural, uncanny. Kavanagh stopped short half-way down the companion. His scalp crept; indeed, he felt convinced that his cap must be standing at least a quarter of an inch off his head. He restrained, not without difficulty, a primitive impulse to bolt up on deck again—an impulse which the consciousness of Rawlings’ round eyes and open mouth just behind him helped him to check.
The voice ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence which followed it was worse than the sound.
“Wot the ’ell is it?” came the hoarse voice of Rawlings.
“Sounds like someone crazy,” pronounced Kavanagh; “sick, perhaps, and they couldn’t get him away——”
He pulled himself together with an effort, and they completed the descent into the saloon.
They stood together, Rawlings and he, in the little saloon, panelled with bird’s-eye maple in the style once considered the last word in elegant ship decoration, with its shabby padded settees, its mahogany table marked with the rings of many glasses, its spotted and tarnished mirrors, and its teak medicine chest in the corner.
It was a sorrowful, haunted little place. A smell of stale cigar-smoke hung about it. The air was chilly, yet stuffy. The uncanny silence of the deserted ship was all around—a silence only intensified by the monotonous booming and crashing of the seas, and the occasionally spasmodic thrashing of a loose block on the deck overhead.
The mysterious voice broke forth anew in a torrent of unintelligible speech. The sound came this time almost as a relief to the tension. It was so unmistakably real, now that it was at closer quarters, that half its terrors fled.
“Whatever it is,” exclaimed Kavanagh, “it’s in here!”
Flinging open a door on his right hand, he stepped boldly in.
The next moment he burst into a shout of laughter. It was a large and imposing stateroom with a big teak bed—evidently the captain’s, a relic of the days when the captain of a crack sailing ship was decidedly a somebody, and when, moreover, he frequently took his wife to sea with him. And in the middle of the bed was a brass cage containing the owner of the voice—a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo, which was even now pouring forth a flood of the choicest polyglot oaths Kavanagh had ever heard.
It was astonishing what a reaction that bird brought about. All the haunted air of the ship seemed to have been effectually dispelled. Kavanagh’s spirits began to rise unreasonably as he continued his tour of his new command.
The sail locker yielded up only the remains of a fine-weather suit, mostly patches. Kavanagh whistled softly to himself as he fingered the thin canvas, and thought about the swiftly falling glass and the fierce gusts which blew ever more frequently out of the angry winter sunset.
Still, there was nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job, so, leaving one of his best men at the wheel, he set about the task of getting off the rags of the fore-lower topsail and bending the new (or rather the whole) sail in its place.
And what a job that was! Never to the day of his death will Kavanagh forget it. He had worked with scratch crews in his time, but never before with a crowd like those well-meaning steamer deck-hands who had never seen a sail in their lives at such close quarters.
Swearing, struggling, hanging on with teeth and nails, they sweated and toiled on their unaccustomed perch, until at last—it seemed like a miracle—all was as snug aloft as was possible in the circumstances. The chaos on deck was reduced to something approaching order, though the ship still lay over to it rather more than Kavanagh liked. And now, the watch being set and look-outs posted, he had time to do what he had been longing to do—find out, if he could, what the old ship’s past had been.
He felt convinced that she was the product of some crack Aberdeen or Clydeside builder, for, in spite of her dirty and neglected condition, there was about her the unmistakable air of decayed gentility. The brass on capstan and wheel was so caked with rust and paint that the letters of the builder’s name could not be discerned, and it was only by chance, while making an inspection of the miscellaneous junk in the lazarette, that he made the great discovery.
This was, in the first place, nothing more important than an old ship’s bell with a crescent-shaped fragment broken out. It had evidently been thrown down there when it was replaced by a new one. It was thick with dirt and verdigris; but, pressed for time as he was, an instinct of curiosity made him linger while he scraped off some of the deposit with his knife to see if anything lay beneath.
His first find was a date—1869.
“Hallo! This gets interesting!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a letter—‘D’—no, ‘P,’ ‘L’ something, an ‘M,’ another ‘M’——”
His breath began to come fast with excitement. He scraped away harder than ever.
“It can’t be,” he gasped, sitting back on his heels, “but, by George, it is!... The ‘Plinlimmon’!”
Possibly few people outside that comparatively restricted circle which is closely interested in sailing ships and their records could understand the feeling of almost reverential awe with which the mate of the “Gairloch” gazed at the dim lettering on that old broken bell. To most laymen—indeed, to many seamen of the more modern school—it would have stood for nothing but an old outworn ship—a good ship, no doubt, in her day, a day long since over and done.
But to Kavanagh and to his like the name “Plinlimmon” had a very different significance.
Some ships there are whose names remain as names to conjure with long after they themselves are gone—names about which yarns will be spun and songs sung while still any live who have felt their spell. Such a ship was the “James Baines” of mighty memory; such also were the glorious “Thermopylæ,” the lovely “Mermerus”; such the evergreen “Cutty Sark” and her forerunner “The Tweed.” And—though perhaps in a lesser degree—such was also the “Plinlimmon.”
And to Kavanagh she was even more.
She was like something belonging peculiarly to his own youth. She was inextricably interwoven with the memories of his boyhood, of his first voyage—those memories which for him now held the wistful golden glamour of youth departed.
For, though he had never before this moment beheld her with his bodily eyes, he had been brought up, as it were, in the “Plinlimmon” tradition. There had been an old fellow in his first ship—they called him Old Paul. He had served in the “Plinlimmon” in the days when she was commanded by the famous “Bully” Rogers: had, indeed, enjoyed the signal honour of being kicked off the poop by that nautical demigod. He was a hoary old ruffian, was Old Paul, but a seaman of the old stamp; and he had that curious, almost poetic, delight in the beauty of a ship which belonged to so many unlettered old seadogs in the days of sail.
Kavanagh had sat and listened to that old man’s yarns for many and many an hour. The name “Plinlimmon” recalled to him a hundred memories he had thought forgotten. He almost seemed to hear the ghostly echo of the gruff old voice: “Ah, them was ships, them was, sonny.... When Bully Rogers set a sail, w’y, ’e set it.... Number One canvas, ’is royals was, an’ they ’ad to stop there till it blew outer the bolt-ropes.... ‘Hell or Melbourne’ ... that was the game in them days in the ol’ ‘Plinlimmon.’...”
Why, he had all but forgotten Old Paul.... Where was the old chap now, he wondered.... Dead, no doubt, long ago.... He must have been seventy and more then, though he never owned to more than fifty-two....
But in the meantime there were other things to think of. The ship to bring into port ... the glass falling ... the wind and sea rising.... He turned away from the old bell and its memories and went back on deck.
The light was all but gone, and before the strength of the westerly wind the old ship was foaming gallantly along under her scanty sail, leaving a seething white wake faintly luminous in the dusk—the wind all the while in her rigging humming the song of the storm.
Just for a moment Kavanagh’s heart sank at the thought of that fine weather lower topsail. Oh, for a bolt or two of Bully Rogers’ Number One canvas, he thought; but it was only for a moment.
A curious exaltation gripped him.... “By God, she shall do it!” he said to the sea and the darkness.
. . . . .
Looking back in after years upon the events of the next few days, Kavanagh could never feel quite certain how long they really occupied.
Time—there was no time! There was just a never-ending succession of low, hurrying, ragged-edged clouds chasing over a confusion of white-crested waves that came charging perpetually out of the dim vapour that shrouded the meeting of sea and sky. There must have been days—there must have been nights. But he hardly noticed either their coming or their going. He was intent, his whole being was intent, on one thing, and one thing only—saving that old ship from her old rival the sea.
How they worked, those amazing, those indomitable steamboat-men! It was as if the spirits of all the “Plinlimmon’s” old sailors had come back to join in the struggle. They fought with strange monsters in the shape of sails and ropes, they groped in tangles and labyrinths of unaccustomed rigging; and their great hearts kept them going. While there was breath in their bodies to work they pumped, and when they could do no more they dropped in their tracks and slept the sleep of sheer exhaustion.
Once the whole crew was washed overboard clinging to the lee forebrace, only to be sucked back again with the next roll of the ship. Once Kavanagh heard a man pouring out a flood of the vilest oaths in a tone of mild expostulation, as he nursed a hand streaming with blood which had been jammed between a block and the pin-rail. And once he remembered seeing that lower topsail, bent with such pains and peril, simply fade out of the bolt-ropes and be seen no more. It didn’t split or tear. It just vanished....
But there always seemed to him to be a sort of dream-like atmosphere about the whole thing. He was never quite sure what did happen and what didn’t happen. It was impossible on the face of it, for instance, that Old Paul should have been there hauling with the rest—yet at the time Kavanagh was quite sure that he saw him. It was also impossible that there should have been a dozen men on the yard when there were only half a dozen in the whole blessed ship—yet Kavanagh was equally sure at the time that he saw and counted them. He even remembered some of their faces—a huge fellow with a bare, tattooed chest, in particular, that he hadn’t seen about the ship before.... Not that he ever mentioned it to anyone else. He might have been asleep and dreamed it, for all he knew. Still, it served a useful purpose at the time. It put heart into him. And he needed it before the end!...
At last—at long last—came a grey dawn that broke through ragged clouds upon a sea heaving as with spent passion, upon a handful of weary, indomitable men, upon an old ship that still lived!
Kavanagh was suddenly aware that he was tired—dog-tired; that his wrists were red-raw with the chafing of his oilskins; that the weight of uncounted days and nights without sleep was weighing down his eyelids like lead.
But he had won—he had won! And he had commanded the “Plinlimmon”! Whatever the years to come might bring or take away, they could never rob him of that glory. They could bring him no greater prize.
There was a yell from the look-out, and a faint answering shout came back out of the grey dawn.
“The ba-arque, aho-oy!”
A boat scraped against the ship’s side. One by one, a succession of familiar faces topped the “Plinlimmon’s” rail. The “Gairloch’s” donkeyman, the “Gairloch’s” cook, the “Gairloch’s” boy clutching and being desperately clutched by the “Gairloch’s” cat!
Last of all, Ferguson climbed heavily over the rail and sat down on a spare spar, wiping his face with a lump of waste.
“A steamer—a Dago—rin the auld girl doon,” he said, “an’ the swine sheered off an’ left us to droon, for all he knew.”
He paused a moment, then went on, his voice rising suddenly to a lament:
“She wasna muckle to look at ... but, man, she’d gran’ guts in her!”
Kavanagh let him have the last word. In the circumstances, he felt he could afford it.