THE clipper ship “Parisina” lay becalmed off the Western Islands. The gallant Nor’-East Trade which had hummed steadily through her royals for ten blue and golden days and star-sown nights had tailed away ignominiously into a succession of fitful, faint, and baffling airs which kept the wearied crew constantly hauling the yards at the bidding of every shift of the variable breeze, and withal scarcely served to give the clipper leeway; and had died off last of all into a flat calm.
She lay there as still as if she were at anchor. Her sails drooped against the masts with no more movement than banners slowly dropping to silent dust in the nave of some great cathedral. Their shadows on the white deck were clearly defined as shapes cut out of black paper. There was no sound aloft, not so much as the churring of a rope stirring in its sheave: only a faint creak by whiles, as the ship lifted imperceptibly on the long, low swing of the ocean.
A light haze hung over the outlines of the islands and over the horizon beyond, so that it was impossible to define where sea ended and sky began. A couple of fruit schooners about half a mile distant hovered above their own motionless reflections, like butterflies poised above flowers. So complete was the calm that even they could not catch a breath sufficient to keep them moving. They looked almost as if they were suspended in some new element, neither water nor air, yet partaking of the character of both.
Old “Sails” sat on the forehatch, spectacles on nose, stitching busily away at the bolt-rope of a royal which had come out second best from an argument with the stormy westerlies. A tall, thin, old man, he looked as he sat there with his shanks folded under him like one of those long-legged crabs the Cornish folk call “Gramfer Jenkins.” He had a short, white beard stained with chewing tobacco, and as he worked his jaws moved rhythmically in time with the movements of his active needle.
A boat had pulled out from the nearest island with baskets of fruit, and its owner, a swarthy negroid Portuguese with a bright handkerchief bound pirate-wise about his frizzy hair, was driving bargains with the men of the watch below amid much rough banter and chaff. The men laughed, called, shouted to one another, threw the fruit from hand to hand, eager as children.
From the main deck came the steady slish-scrape of holystones; the mate had taken advantage of the opportunity the calm offered of bringing the “Parisina’s” already bone-white planking nearer to that unattainable perfection of immaculate cleanliness which only exists in the dreams of New England housewives and particular-minded mates of sailing vessels. Mr. Billing, the mate, was an insignificant little man with sandy hair and a peculiar habit of sniffing to himself like a beetle-hunting hedgehog. He sniffed now as he hovered with a perpetual fussy watchfulness among the humped figures of his watch, squatting over their task like worshipping bronzes. Mr. Billing was of the housewifely type of mate. A man secretly of little courage and no initiative, he disliked the “Parisina’s” paces intensely. He was nervous of ships as some lifelong horsemen are nervous of horses. Calms, on the other hand, with the consequent time they afforded for ritual scouring and painting of wood and metal, he delighted in much as a house-proud woman of the suburbs delights in spring cleaning.
The men growled among themselves, sailor fashion, as they worked. “Gimme ol’ Stiff afore this ’ere bloody scrubbin’,” said one. “Same ’ere,” said another. “Why can’t it blow up ag’in, I says? A year an’ a ’arf’s bloomin’ pay I’ve got comin’ to me at Green’s ’Ome, an’ if it wasn’t for this ’ere blessed calm I’d be six ’undred mile nearer spendin’ of it by now.” “Sailorizin’s all right,” grumbled a third. “It’s this ’ere darned ’ouse-maidin’ as gets my goat.”
Up in the “Parisina’s” tiny chart-room Captain Fareweather—he was known through all the ports of the Southern Hemisphere, for good and sufficient reasons, as “Old Foul-weather”—carefully wetted his finger, and with a furrowed brow turned a leaf and prepared to make a fresh entry in the “Parisina’s” log-book.
Old Foul-weather was not fond of his pen, a fact to which the crabbed and painful handwriting which filled the preceding pages bore eloquent testimony. Spelling was an anguish to him; and indeed it is doubtful whether the hours of endurance and anxiety which the entries in the book represented were one half as irksome to him as the labour of recording them. But there were on this occasion other reasons for his look of depression.
Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps, that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth living, if she didn’t, it was not. Certainly it was not for those unfortunate beings who happened to be his shipmates for the time being.
“’Tain’t good reading,” said Old Foul-weather to himself, as he carefully blotted the new entry—it consisted of one word, “Same”—and replaced ink and pen.
He traced the lines of the uncongenial record with a stumpy forefinger.
“‘Winds puffey and varible. Ship scarcely moveing.’
“‘Very light airs.’
“‘Dead calm.’
“Wonder where old Jones and his blooming ‘Alcazar’ are,” he reflected. He sighed and closed the book.
No faintest air entered the stuffy little room. The voices of the men as they growled and grumbled over their work came clearly to him through the open port. From below there drifted up a pleasant tinkle and chink of crockery and cutlery as the steward laid the cabin dinner.
Through the open companion he could see the helmsman lolling beside the wheel, his outstretched arm resting along its rim, his fingers loosely gripping the spokes. He had for once the easiest job in the ship. It was not always so, for, though the “Parisina,” rightly handled, steered like a lamb, she needed humouring as much as a horse with a fine mouth. He was a handsome fellow, swarthy and black-eyed; under the thick growth of hair on his broad chest showed faintly some tattooed device in red and blue, a relic of his younger and less hirsute years.
A barefooted apprentice padded up the poop ladder and struck one bell: a mellow note that hung trembling on the still air, till it quivered away into silence high up among the sleeping royals. The boy wore a patched shirt and ragged dungaree trousers, and his arms and legs were burned black as mahogany by the tropic sun. He was a tall lad, with the lanky grace of adolescence; a faint down was just showing on his upper lip, and the sun gleaming upon the growth of fair hair on his arms and chest made him look as if powdered with gold dust.
Captain Fareweather sighed, put the log-book by, and descended to the cabin. McAllister, the second mate, a big-boned Aberdonian, perennially hungry, was already there, with one eye on the hash the steward had just set before the Old Man’s chair. He composed his features into an appropriate cast of pious decorum as the captain took his seat and placed his hand before his eyes for his customary grace. This rite was silent and lengthy; but Captain Fareweather’s officers knew better than to betray impatience or inattention while it lasted. Legend said that a second mate, greatly daring, had once begun to nibble his bread before the captain had finished, and at once there had come a voice from the behind the hand, like the voice of Mitche Manitou the Mighty, “Ye irreverential devil, can’t ye see I’m sayin’ grace?”
It was an uncomfortable meal. The skipper was moody, and McAllister was horribly nervous in consequence. The few small pebbles of conversation he cast into the silence fell with an appalling splash which instantly covered him with scarlet confusion to the tips of his large red ears, and it was with profound thankfulness that he welcomed the appearance of the mate with a basket of oranges.
“I thought you’d like a few,” explained Mr. Billing, “for dinner. They’re good. A bumboat feller brought ’em alongside.”
“Bluid oranges,” exclaimed McAllister. He dug his strong square teeth into the glistening rind, and the red juice squirted over his bony knuckles. “They’ve ay the best flavour.”
They seemed to light up the cabin like golden lamps, warm, glowing, still with the sunlight glory about them. Their fragrance filled the place, aromatic, pungent, cloying.
“I don’t care for ’em,” said the Captain suddenly. “The smell of ’em—too strong.”
He pushed back his chair as he spoke.
“Stuffy,” he muttered; “glad when we can get way on her again.”
He stumped off up the companion ladder: a square, stocky figure of a man, short-necked, broad of shoulder. The two mates looked at each other significantly.
“What bug’s bit the auld deevil now?” said McAllister in a conspiratorial whisper.
“God knows!” returned Mr. Billing. “He’s always this way when he can’t be at his cracking on. Old madman!”
“He’s a fine seaman, though,” replied McAllister. “I’ll say that for him.”
“Fine seaman!” breathed Mr. Billing bitterly. “You wait till he shakes the sticks out of her one fine night. That’s all.”
Old Foul-weather stood leaning on the poop railing, looking out across the still expanse of the waters with eyes which did not see the haze-dimmed islands or the motionless schooners poised above their reflected selves. Strange—something had stirred in its sleep a little while since at the sight of those very schooners—something had turned in its sleep and sighed at the sight of the young apprentice in his sunburned youth. And just now, with the scent of the oranges, it had stirred, turned again, sighed again, awakened—the memory of Conchita!
. . . . .
Conchita—why, he hadn’t thought of her for years. He wouldn’t like to say how many years. He had had plenty of other things to occupy his mind. Work, for one thing. And ships. Plenty of other women had come into his life and gone out of it, too, since then. Queer, how things came back to you; so that they seemed all of a sudden to have happened no longer ago than yesterday....
He was in just such a schooner as one of those yonder at the time. The “John and Jane” her name was—a pretty little thing, sailed like a witch, too. Lost, he had heard, a year or two ago on a voyage over to Newfoundland with a cargo of salt. It had been his first voyage South. He had been in nothing but billyboys and Geordie brigs until then. He had run his last ship in London. The skipper was a hard-mouthed old ruffian, the mate a trifle worse. Between them the boy Jim had a tough time of it. Then one day the captain caught him in the act of purloining the leg of a duck destined for his own dinner; and, pursuing him with a short length of rope with the amiable intention of flaying hell out of him, fell head foremost on the top of his own ballast and lay for dead. He wasn’t dead: far from it. But young Jim thought he was. So he pulled himself ashore in the dinghy and set off along Wapping High Street with only the vaguest idea where he was going.
He stuck to the water-side as a hunted fox sticks to cover. The Tower he passed quickly by: it looked too much like a lock-up, he thought. Presently he came to a church, and a big clock sticking out over the roadway; and close by a wharf where schooners were loading, and among them the “John and Jane.”
He liked the looks of her. She was clean and fresh and sweet-smelling. And the mate, who was superintending the lowering of some cases into the hold, had a red, jolly face that took his fancy.
The boy Jim peered down into the hold. It was full almost to the hatch-coamings. She must be going to sail soon.
The red-faced mate had given his last order, and was coming down the gangway with the virtuous and anticipatory look of one at ease with his own conscience after a spell of arduous toil, and about to reward himself for the same with liquid refreshment.
Young Fareweather stepped forward, his heart thumping.
“Was you wanting a hand, mister?”
The red-faced man looked at him consideringly.
“A hand? A s’rimp, you mean!” He guffawed slapping his hands on his fat thighs, a man well pleased with his own joke.
“Ah con do a mon’s work, though,” the youngster insisted.
“Ye can, can ye? Can ye steer.”
“Aye, Ah con that.”
“Can ye reef an’ furl, splice a rope-yarn, peel potatoes and cook the cabin dinner of a Sunday?”
“Ah con that.”
The mate roared.
“Sort of a admirayble bright ’un, I can see,” he said. “Well, I tell you what. Here’s the skipper comin’ down the wharf. We’ll see what he says.”
The captain, a fierce-looking little man with bushy eyebrows, indulged in a smile at the recital of Jim’s reputed accomplishments.
“Take him if ye like,” he said, “and, listen, you, boy” (bending the bushy brows on Jim), “if you’re tellin’ lies, it’s the rope’s-end you’ll taste, my lad.”
He spent the night curled up on a box in the corner of the galley, listening with one ear to the yarns of the old one-eyed shipkeeper, the other cocked for the ominous tread of the dreaded policeman. But dawn came, and brought no policeman, and by noon the “John and Jane” was dropping downstream with the tide.
It seemed to the boy Jim like a foretaste of Heaven. The captain was a kindly man for all his appearance of ferocity, the mate easier still. No one got kicked; nobody went without his grub—incidentally he was relieved to find that nothing further was said about cooking the cabin dinner; wonder of wonders, nobody was so much as sworn at seriously. True, the amiable mate was the most foul-mouthed man he had ever come across before or since. But then, hard words break no bones, especially on board ship, and the mate’s repertoire was generally looked on as something in the nature of a polite accomplishment: something like conjuring tricks or making pictures out of ink blots.
It was all a wonder to him, just as Oporto, whither the “John and Jane” was bound, was a wonder to him after the cold stormy North Sea, the bleak streets of Newcastle and Wapping which so far had been his only idea of seaports. The schooner, as has already been said, was an easy ship, and in port the hands had plenty of time to themselves. He liked the sun, the light, the warmth, the colour. He liked the laughing, lazy, careless children of the South. He liked the many-coloured houses that climbed the steep streets of the old town—and the bathing in the great river—and the little stuffy wineshops with their mixed smell of sour wine and sawdust and stale cigar-smoke and onions—and the bells that chimed day long, night long, from hidden convents in green gardens behind high walls. And the oranges——
The day he first saw Conchita, he had gone off for a walk by himself, and, the day being hot, had lain down by the roadside to rest. And as he lay there half asleep, lulled by the shrill song of the cicalas in the grass all round him, plop! something bounced on to his chest, rolled a little way, and lay still.
He reached out his hand and picked it up. An orange! Its skin was still warm with the sun, and it had that indefinable bloom on it that belongs to all fruit newly gathered. And then he looked round to see where it had come from, and saw—Conchita!
Conchita with her dark, vivacious little face, her eyes black as sloes, her red lips open in a wide laugh that showed a row of perfect teeth—Conchita with her full white sleeves under her stiff embroidery jacket, her wide gay-coloured petticoats, her dainty white-stockinged ankles and little slippered feet; why, she was almost like a talking doll, Jim thought, that he had seen in a big toyshop in Newcastle, and wished he had the money to buy for his sister! He felt as awkward, as clumsy with her as a boy with a doll. Goodness knows how they understood one another, those two young things! There is a sort of freemasonry, somehow or other, among young things that laughs at such difficulties as language. She knew a little broken English, which she was immensely proud of. She had picked it up at school from an English playmate. But Jim knew nothing but his own East Coast brand of his native speech. However, understand one another they did, somehow or other. He learnt her name, of course, and how she laughed at his attempts to say it as she said it! He learned, also, that she was sixteen, and that she was to be married some day to old João the muleteer, but that she did not like him because of “ees faze—o-ah, long, lak’ dees!” And she stretched out her arms to their full extent to indicate it. But she “lak’ Ing-lees sailor, o-ah ver-ree, ver-ree much”—and she “giv’ you—o-ah, ever so many orange—lak’ dees!” And she made a wide circle with her arms to show their number.
The boy went back to his ship in a kind of dream. Her warm Southern nature was riper far than his. He was swept clean off his feet by the fervour of her unashamed yet innocent lovemaking—by the feel of her warm body, of her warm lips, of her rounded cheeks soft and glowing, as sun-warmed oranges. Of course he went again—and many times again—and then there came the last night before the “John and Jane” was to sail.
It had been arranged that for once he was not to go alone. Perhaps Conchita, strange little blend of impulse and sophistication, had judged it best that their leave-taking should not be an affaire à deux. Jim was to bring some of his shipmates along: and Conchita would bring also some of the other girls. And it would “be fon—o-ah, yees, soch fon!”
He remembered the queer feeling of shrinking that came over him as they set out on that fatal expedition. What had happened he never really knew. Perhaps one of his shipmates had blabbed about it in the little wineshop on the quay; perhaps one of the other girls. What mattered was that somehow the jealous João, with the “faze long, lak’ dees,” had heard of it!
They went stumbling and whispering up the lane that led out of the town. He could remember the warm scent of that autumn night and the way the wind went sighing through the broad, dark leaves of the orange groves and the gnarled cork trees that bordered the stony mule-track by which they climbed. They passed a little inn by the wayside, where a man was playing a guitar and singing an interminable ballad full of wailing, sobbing notes, in the melancholy minor key common to folk-melodies the world over.
The moon was shining through the trees when they came to the rendezvous. They had brought sacks with them, and the girls shook the fragrant globes down while they gathered them into heaps.
And then, suddenly, all was changed. It was like a nightmare. There were lights, and people shouting. The girls screamed. Conchita cried out, “Run, run!” She clung round his neck, fondling his face, weeping. There was a fierce face, a lifted hand, something that sang as it fled. And Conchita was all of a sudden limp in his arms, her face, with a look of hurt surprise in its wide eyes and fallen mouth, drooping backward like a flower broken on its stalk. She seemed to be sinking, sinking away from him, like a drowned thing sinking into deep water....
He did not know who dragged that limp thing from his numb arms. He did not know who hustled him away, shouting in his ear, “Run, ye damned fool, run! Them bloody Dagoes’ll knife the lot of us.” He remembered being hurried down the lane, and past the lighted inn where the man was still at his interminable wailing songs. And then—no more, until he came to himself under the smelly oil lamp in the familiar forecastle.
The “John and Jane” sailed at dawn....
. . . . .
Captain Fareweather sighed, shifted his elbows on the rail, stiffened himself suddenly, and stood erect. The look of the sea had changed. Its surface was blurred as if a hand had been drawn gently across it.
One after the other the two schooners began to steal slowly, very slowly across his line of vision. He cast an eye aloft. There was a slight tremor in the hitherto motionless clew of the main royal.
He sniffed the coming wind as a dog sniffs the scent of its accustomed quarry; then he walked briskly across to the break of the poop and, leaning his hands on the rail, called to the mate.
“Mister!”
“Sir?”
“Stand by to square away your main yard! I think we’ll get a breeze afore two bells.”
He walked the poop fore and aft, rubbing his hands and whistling a little tune.
There was a scamper of bare feet on the planking. Men sang out as they hauled on the braces, “Yo-heu-yoi-hee!” Blocks sang shrill as fifes, reef points beat a tattoo on the tautened canvas. The sails filled with loud clappings. Out of the north-east came the wind—shattering the calm mirror of the sea into a million splinters—filling the royals like the cheeks of the trumpeting angels of the Judgment—burying under its mounded confusion the very memory of the vanished calm, even as the years lay mounded over the dead face of Conchita, whom the gods loved too well....
“We’ll beat that bloody ‘Alcazar’ yet, mister,” said Captain Fareweather.