“Back with him! Throw him on board!”
The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Scraps, after a brief flight through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the Mary Turner’s deck. At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough joke, and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in anticipation of what new delights of play were to be visited upon him. He reached out, with an enticing growl of good fellowship, for Michael, who was now free on deck, and received in return a forbidding and crusty snarl.
“Guess we’ll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?” Daughtry observed, sparing a moment to pat reassurance on the big puppy’s head and being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the puppy’s blissful tongue.
No first-class ship’s steward can exist without possessing a more than average measure of executive ability. Dag Daughtry was a first-class ship’s steward. Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook of safety, and setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat and hooking on the falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill kegs of water from the scant remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to clear out the food in the galley.
The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat. So near did she come that the rowers on the side next to her pulled in their oars. The surge she raised, heeled the loaded boat gunwale under, so that a degree of water was shipped ere it righted. Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up in the sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself, was staggered by the lurch of the boat. In his instinctive, spasmodic effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the pistol, which fell into the sea.
“Ha-ah!” Daughtry girded. “What price Nishikanta? I got his number, and he’s lost you fellows’ goats. He’s your meat now. Easy meat? I should say! And when it comes to the eating, eat him first. Sure, he’s a skunk, and will taste like one, but many’s the honest man that’s eaten skunk and pulled through a tight place. But you’d better soak ’im all night in salt water, first.”
Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best, grasped the situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a quick upstanding, and hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat pawnbroker around the back of the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.
“Ha-ah!” said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.
Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for himself.
“Want to come along?” he called to Daughtry.
“No, thank you, sir,” was the latter’s reply. “There’s too many of us, an’ we’ll make out better in the other boat.”
With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and passed up more provisions.
It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just for’ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the mizzen-shrouds. In the next roll of the huge, glassy sea, the mizzen-mast fell overside.
“My word, some whale,” Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.
Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry, Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her out.
“We’ll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in, an’ get outa this,” the steward told the Ancient Mariner. “Lots of time. The schooner’ll sink no faster when she’s awash than she’s sinkin’ now.”
Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her rolling in the big sea was sluggish.
“Hey!” he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of sea to Captain Doane. “What’s the course to the Marquesas? Right now? And how far away, sir?”
“Nor’-nor’-east-quarter-east!” came the faint reply. “Will fetch Nuka-Hiva! About two hundred miles! Haul on the south-east trade with a good full and you’ll make it!”
“Thank you, sir,” was the steward’s acknowledgment, ere he ran aft, disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back to the boat.
Almost, from the whale’s delay in renewing her charging, did they think she had given over. And while they waited and watched her rolling on the sea an eighth of a mile away, the Mary Turner steadily sank.
“We might almost chance it,” Daughtry was debating aloud to Big John, when a new voice entered the discussion.
“Cocky! – Cocky!” came plaintive tones from below out of the steerage companion.
“Devil be damned!” was the next, uttered in irritation and anger. “Devil be damned! Devil be damned!”
“Of course not,” was Daughtry’s judgment, as he dashed across the deck, crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its many stays that blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel of life perched on a bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting and flattening its rosy crest, and cursing in honest human speech the waywardness of the world and of ships and humans upon the sea.
The cockatoo stepped upon Daughtry’s inviting index finger, swiftly ascended his shirt sleeve, and, on his shoulder, claws sunk into the flimsy shirt fabric till they hurt the flesh beneath, leaned head to ear and uttered in gratitude and relief, and in self-identification: “Cocky. Cocky.”
“You son of a gun,” Daughtry crooned.
“Glory be!” Cooky replied, in tones so like Daughtry’s as to startle him.
“You son of a gun,” Daughtry repeated, cuddling his cheek and ear against the cockatoo’s feathered and crested head. “And some folks thinks it’s only folks that count in this world.”
Still the whale delayed, and, with the ocean washing their toes on the level deck, Daughtry ordered the boat lowered away. Ah Moy was eager in his haste to leap into the bow. Nor was Daughtry’s judgment correct that the little Chinaman’s haste was due to fear of the sinking ship. What Ah Moy sought was the place in the boat remotest from Kwaque and the steward.
Shoving clear, they roughly stored the supplies and dunnage out of the way of the thwarts and took their places, Ah Moy pulling bow-oar, next in order Big John and Kwaque, with Daughtry (Cocky still perched on his shoulder) at stroke. On top of the dunnage, in the sternsheets, Michael gazed wistfully at the Mary Turner and continued to snarl crustily at Scraps who idiotically wanted to start a romp. The Ancient Mariner stood up at the steering sweep and gave the order, when all was ready, for the first dip of the oars.
A growl and a bristle from Michael warned them that the whale was not only coming but was close upon them. But it was not charging. Instead, it circled slowly about the schooner as if examining its antagonist.
“I’ll bet it’s head’s sore from all that banging, an’ it’s beginnin’ to feel it,” Daughtry grinned, chiefly for the purpose of keeping his comrades unafraid.
Barely had they rowed a dozen strokes, when an exclamation from Big John led them to follow his gaze to the schooners forecastle-head, where the forecastle cat flashed across in pursuit of a big rat. Other rats they saw, evidently driven out of their lairs by the rising water.
“We just can’t leave that cat behind,” Daughtry soliloquized in suggestive tones.
“Certainly not,” the Ancient Mariner responded swinging his weight on the steering-sweep and heading the boat back.
Twice the whale gently rolled them in the course of its leisurely circling, ere they bent to their oars again and pulled away. Of them the whale seemed to take no notice. It was from the huge thing, the schooner, that death had been wreaked upon her calf; and it was upon the schooner that she vented the wrath of her grief.
Even as they pulled away, the whale turned and headed across the ocean. At a half-mile distance she curved about and charged back.
“With all that water in her, the schooner’ll have a real kick-back in her when she’s hit,” Daughtry said. “Lordy me, rest on your oars an’ watch.”
Delivered squarely amidships, it was the hardest blow the Mary Turner had received. Stays and splinters of rail flew in the air as she rolled so far over as to expose half her copper wet-glistening in the sun. As she righted sluggishly, the mainmast swayed drunkenly in the air but did not fall.
“A knock-out!” Daughtry cried, at sight of the whale flurrying the water with aimless, gigantic splashings. “It must a-smashed both of ’em.”
“Schooner he finish close up altogether,” Kwaque observed, as the Mary Turner’s rail disappeared.
Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when the stump of her mainmast was gone. Remained only the whale, floating and floundering, on the surface of the sea.
“It’s nothing to brag about,” Daughtry delivered himself of the Mary Turner’s epitaph. “Nobody’d believe us. A stout little craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale! No, sir. I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin’ of the Essex, an’ no more will anybody believe me.”
“The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft,” mourned the Ancient Mariner. “Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three-masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward.”
Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored – Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy. And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.
The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory-picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was sensationless between his eyebrows, as he said:
“Well, children, rowing won’t fetch us to the Marquesas. We’ll need a stretch of wind for that. But it’s up to us, right now, to put a mile or so between us an’ that peevish old cow. Maybe she’ll revive, and maybe she won’t, but just the same I can’t help feelin’ leary about her.”
CHAPTER XVI
Two days later, as the steamer Mariposa plied her customary route between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing deck quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker, their novels and deck chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small boat that skimmed to them across the sea before a light following breeze. When Big John, aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the sail and unstepped the mast, titters and laughter arose from the passengers. It was contrary to all their preconceptions of mid-ocean rescue of ship-wrecked mariners from the open boat.
It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its freightage of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two dogs, a white cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly pallid-haired giant, a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient Mariner who looked every inch the part. Him a facetious, vacationing architect’s clerk dubbed Noah, and so greeted him.
“I say, Noah,” he called. “Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?”
“Catch any fish?” bawled another youngster down over the rail.
“Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a case!”
Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic island by volcanic and earthquake action.
“I’m a steward,” Dag Daughtry told the Mariposa’s captain, “and I’ll be glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the glory-hole. Big John there’s a sailorman, an’ the fo’c’s’le ’ll do him. The Chink is a ship’s cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms’ll be none too good for him, sir.”
And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of the three-masted schooner, Mary Turner, smashed into kindling wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the yarn of the sunken island.
“Captain Hayward,” one of them demanded of the steamer’s skipper, “could a whale sink the Mariposa?”
“She has never been so sunk,” was his reply.
“I knew it!” she declared emphatically. “It’s not the way of ships to go around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?”
“No, madam, I assure you it is not,” was his response. “Nevertheless, all the five men insist upon it.”
“Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?” the lady voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query.
“Worst liars I ever saw, madam. Do you know, after forty years at sea, I couldn’t believe myself under oath.”
* * * * *
Nine days later the Mariposa threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San Francisco. Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school, tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the steamship Mariposa had rescued some sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-bull story that not even the reporters believed. Thus, silly reportorial unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar. It is the way of cub reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world and all its spaciousness does not exist.
“Sunk by a whale!” demanded the average flat-floor person. “Nonsense, that’s all. Just plain rotten nonsense. Now, in the ‘Adventures of Eleanor,’ which is some film, believe me, I’ll tell you what I saw happen.. ”
So Daughtry and his crew went ashore into ’Frisco Town uheralded and unsung, the second following morning’s lucubrations of the sea reporters being varied disportations upon the attack on an Italian crab fisherman by an enormous jellyfish. Big John promptly sank out of sight in a sailors’ boarding-house, and, within the week, joined the Sailors’ Union and shipped on a steam schooner to load redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon. Ah Moy got no farther ashore than the detention sheds of the Federal Immigration Board, whence he was deported to China on the next Pacific Mail steamer. The Mary Turner’s cat was adopted by the sailors’ forecastle of the Mariposa, and on the Mariposa sailed away on the back trip to Tahiti. Scraps was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left in the bosom of his family.
And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings, to rent two cheap rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities, namely, Charles Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least, Cocky. But not for long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live with him.
“It’s not playing the game, sir,” he told him. “What we need is capital. We’ve got to interest capital, and you’ve got to do the interesting. Now this very day you’ve got to buy a couple of suit-cases, hire a taxicab, go sailing up to the front door of the Bronx Hotel like good pay and be damned. She’s a real stylish hotel, but reasonable if you want to make it so. A little room, an inside room, European plan, of course, and then you can economise by eatin’ out.”
“But, steward, I have no money,” the Ancient Mariner protested.
“That’s all right, sir; I’ll back you for all I can.”
“But, my dear man, you know I’m an old impostor. I can’t stick you up like the others. You.. why.. why, you’re a friend, don’t you see?”
“Sure I do, and I thank you for sayin’ it, sir. And that’s why I’m with you. And when you’ve nailed another crowd of treasure-hunters and got the ship ready, you’ll just ship me along as steward, with Kwaque, and Killeny Boy, and the rest of our family. You’ve adopted me, now, an’ I’m your grown-up son, an’ you’ve got to listen to me. The Bronx is the hotel for you – fine-soundin’ name, ain’t it? That’s atmosphere. Folk’ll listen half to you an’ more to your hotel. I tell you, you leaning back in a big leather chair talkin’ treasure with a two-bit cigar in your mouth an’ a twenty-cent drink beside you, why that’s like treasure. They just got to believe. An’ if you’ll come along now, sir, we’ll trot out an’ buy them suit-cases.”
Right bravely the Ancient Mariner drove to the Bronx in a taxi, registered his “Charles Stough Greenleaf” in an old-fashioned hand, and took up anew the activities which for years had kept him free of the poor-farm. No less bravely did Dag Daughtry set out to seek work. This was most necessary, because he was a man of expensive luxuries. His family of Kwaque, Michael, and Cocky required food and shelter; more costly than that was maintenance of the Ancient Mariner in the high-class hotel; and, in addition, was his six-quart thirst.
But it was a time of industrial depression. The unemployed problem was bulking bigger than usual to the citizens of San Francisco. And, as regarded steamships and sailing vessels, there were three stewards for every Steward’s position. Nothing steady could Daughtry procure, while his occasional odd jobs did not balance his various running expenses. Even did he do pick-and-shovel work, for the municipality, for three days, when he had to give way, according to the impartial procedure, to another needy one whom three days’ work would keep afloat a little longer.
Daughtry would have put Kwaque to work, except that Kwaque was impossible. The black, who had only seen Sydney from steamers’ decks, had never been in a city in his life. All he knew of the world was steamers, far-outlying south-sea isles, and his own island of King William in Melanesia. So Kwaque remained in the two rooms, cooking and housekeeping for his master and caring for Michael and Cocky. All of which was prison for Michael, who had been used to the run of ships, of coral beaches and plantations.
But in the evenings, sometimes accompanied a few steps in the rear by Kwaque, Michael strolled out with Steward. The multiplicity of man-gods on the teeming sidewalks became a real bore to Michael, so that man-gods, in general, underwent a sharp depreciation. But Steward, the particular god of his fealty and worship, appreciated. Amongst so many gods Michael felt bewildered, while Steward’s Abrahamic bosom became more than ever the one sure haven where harshness and danger never troubled.
“Mind your step,” is the last word and warning of twentieth-century city life. Michael was not slow to learn it, as he conserved his own feet among the countless thousands of leather-shod feet of men, ever hurrying, always unregarding of the existence and right of way of a lowly, four-legged Irish terrier.
The evening outings with Steward invariably led from saloon to saloon, where, at long bars, standing on sawdust floors, or seated at tables, men drank and talked. Much of both did men do, and also did Steward do, ere, his daily six-quart stint accomplished, he turned homeward for bed. Many were the acquaintances he made, and Michael with him. Coasting seamen and bay sailors they mostly were, although there were many ’longshoremen and waterfront workmen among them.
From one of these, a scow-schooner captain who plied up and down the bay and the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, Daughtry had the promise of being engaged as cook and sailor on the schooner Howard. Eighty tons of freight, including deckload, she carried, and in all democracy Captain Jorgensen, the cook, and the two other sailors, loaded and unloaded her at all hours, and sailed her night and day on all times and tides, one man steering while three slept and recuperated. It was time, and double-time, and over-time beyond that, but the feeding was generous and the wages ran from forty-five to sixty dollars a month.
“Sure, you bet,” said Captain Jorgensen. “This cook-feller, Hanson, pretty quick I smash him up an’ fire him, then you can come along.. and the bow-wow, too.” Here he dropped a hearty, wholesome hand of toil down to a caress of Michael’s head. “That’s one fine bow-wow. A bow-wow is good on a scow when all hands sleep alongside the dock or in an anchor watch.”
“Fire Hanson now,” Dag Daughtry urged.
But Captain Jorgensen shook his slow head slowly. “First I smash him up.”
“Then smash him now and fire him,” Daughtry persisted. “There he is right now at the corner of the bar.”
“No. He must give me reason. I got plenty of reason. But I want reason all hands can see. I want him make me smash him, so that all hands say, ‘Hurrah, Captain, you done right.’ Then you get the job, Daughtry.”
Had Captain Jorgensen not been dilatory in his contemplated smashing, and had not Hanson delayed in giving sufficient provocation for a smashing, Michael would have accompanied Steward upon the schooner, Howard, and all Michael’s subsequent experiences would have been totally different from what they were destined to be. But destined they were, by chance and by combinations of chance events over which Michael had no control and of which he had no more awareness than had Steward himself. At that period, the subsequent stage career and nightmare of cruelty for Michael was beyond any wildest forecast or apprehension. And as to forecasting Dag Daughtry’s fate, along with Kwaque, no maddest drug-dream could have approximated it.