McClure's Magazine/Volume 30/Number 1/The Brute
THE BRUTE
A PIECE OF INVECTIVE
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
ON dodging in from the rain-swept street, I exchanged a smile and a glance with Miss Blank in the bar of the Three Crows. This exchange was effected with extreme propriety. It’s a shock to think that, if still alive, Miss Blank must be something over sixty now. How time flies!
Noticing my gaze directed inquiringly at the partition of glass and varnished wood, Miss Blank was good enough to say, encouragingly:
“Only Mr. Jermyn and Mr. Stone in the parlor, with another gentleman I’ve never seen before.”
I moved towards the parlor door. A voice discoursing on the other side (it was but a matchboard partition) rose so loudly that the concluding words became quite plain in all their atrocity.
“That fellow Wilmot fairly dashed her brains out, and a good job, too!”
This inhuman sentiment, since there was nothing profane or improper in it, failed to do as much as to check the slight yawn Miss Blank was achieving behind her hand. And she remained gazing fixedly at the window-panes, which streamed with rain.
As I opened the parlor door the same voice went on in the same cruel strain:
“I was glad when I heard she got the knock from somebody at last. Sorry enough for poor Wilmot, though. That man and I used to be chums at one time. Of course that was the end of him. A clear case, if there ever was one. No way out of it—none at all.”
The voice belonged to the gentleman Miss Blank had never seen before. He straddled his long legs on the hearth-rug. Jermyn, leaning forward, held his pocket handkerchief spread out before the grate. He looked back dismally over his shoulder, and as I slipped behind one of the little wooden tables I nodded to him. On the other side of the fire, imposingly calm and large, sat Mr. Stone, jammed tight into a capacious Windsor armchair. There was nothing small about him but his short white side-whiskers. Yards and yards of extra superfine pilot-cloth (made up into an overcoat) lay piled up on a chair by his side. And he must just have brought some liner from sea, because another chair was smothered under his black waterproof, made of threefold oiled silk, double-stitched throughout. A man’s hand-bag of the usual size reposing on the floor was dwarfed to a child’s toy by the striking proportions of his boots.
I did not nod to him. He was too big to be nodded to in that parlor. He was a senior Trinity pilot, and condescended to take his turn in the cutter only during the summer months. He had been many times in charge of royal yachts, in and out of Port Victoria. Besides, it’s no use nodding to a monument. And he was like one. He didn’t speak, he didn’t blink, he didn’t budge. He just sat there, holding his handsome old head up, immovable and almost bigger than life. It was extremely fine. Mr. Stone’s presence reduced poor old Jermyn to a mere shabby wisp of a man, and made the talkative stranger in tweeds on the hearth-rug look absurdly boyish. This last must have been a few years over thirty, and was certainly not the sort of individual that gets abashed at the sound of his own voice, because, gathering me in, as it were, by a friendly glance, he kept it going without a check.
“I was glad of it,” he repeated, emphatically. “You may be surprised at it, but then you haven’t gone through the experience I’ve had of her. I can tell you, it was something to remember. Of course, I got off scot-free,—as you can see,—though she did her best to break up my pluck for me. She jolly near drove as fine a fellow as ever lived into a madhouse. What do you say to that—eh?”
Not an eyelid twitched in Mr. Stone’s enormous face. Monumental! The speaker looked straight into my eyes.
“It used to make me sick to think of her going about the world murdering people.”
Old Jermyn approached the handkerchief a little nearer to the grate and groaned. It was simply a habit he had.
“I’ve seen her once,” he declared, with mournful indifference. “She had a house —”
The stranger in tweeds turned to stare down at him, surprised.
“She had three houses,” he corrected, authoritatively. But Jermyn was not to be contradicted.
“She had a house, I say,” he repeated, with dismal obstinacy,—“A great—big—ugly—white thing. You could see it from miles away—sticking up.”
“So you could,” assented the other readily. “It was old Colchester’s notion, though he was always threatening to give her up. He couldn’t stand her any more; he declared it was too much of a good thing for him; he would wash his hands of her, if he never got another—and so on. I dare say he would have chucked her, only—it may surprise you—his missus wouldn’t hear of it. Funny, eh? But with women, you never know how they will take a thing. Mrs. Colchester, with her moustaches and big eyebrows, set up for being as strong-minded. She used to walk about dressed in brown silk, with a great gold cable flopping about her bosom. You should have heard her snapping out ‘Rubbish!’ or ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ I daresay she knew when she was well off. They had no children, and had never set up a home anywhere. When in England Mrs. Colchester stayed with some of her relations or just made shift to hang out anyhow in some cheap hotel or boarding-house. I dare say she liked to get back to the comforts she was used to. She knew very well she couldn’t gain by a change. And, moreover, Colchester, though a first-rate man, was not what you may call in his first youth, and perhaps she may have thought that he wouldn’t be able to get another (as he used to say) so easily. Anyhow, for one reason or another, it was ‘Rubbish’ and ‘Stuff and nonsense’ for the good lady. I once overheard Mr. Lucian Apse himself say to her confidentially, ‘I assure you, Mrs. Colchester, I am beginning to feel quite unhappy about the name she’s getting for herself.’ ‘Oh!’ she said, with her deep little horse-laugh, ‘if one took notice of all the silly talk!’ and she showed Apse all her ugly false teeth at once. ‘It would take more than that to make me lose my confidence in her, I assure you,’ she says.”
At this point, without any change of facial expression, Mr. Stone emitted a short, sardonic laugh. It was very impressive, but I didn’t see the joke. I looked from one to the other. The stranger on the hearth-rug had an ugly smile.
“And Mr. Lucian Apse shook both Mrs. Colchester’s hands, he was so pleased to hear a good word said for their favourite. All these Apses, young and old, you know, were perfectly infatuated with that abominable, dangerous—”
“I beg your pardon,” I interrupted, exasperated, for he seemed to be addressing himself exclusively to me, “but who on earth are you talking about?”
“The Apse family,” he answered, courteously.
Miss Blank put her head in and said that the cab was at the door, if Mr. Stone wanted to catch the eleven-three up.
At once the senior pilot rose in his mighty bulk and began to struggle into his coat, with awe-inspiring upheavals. The stranger and I hurried impulsively to his assistance, and directly we laid our hands on him he became perfectly quiescent. We had to raise our arms very high and to make efforts. It was like caparisoning a docile elephant. With a loud “Thanks, gentlemen!” Mr. Stone dived under and squeezed himself through the door in a great hurry.
We smiled at each other in a friendly way.
“I wonder how he gets up a ship’s side-ladder,” said the man in tweeds; and poor Jermyn, who was a mere North Sea pilot without official status or recognition of any sort, pilot only by courtesy, groaned.
“He makes eight hundred a year.”
“Are you a sailor?” I asked the stranger, who had gone back to his position on the rug.
“I used to be till a couple of years ago, when I got married. I even went to sea first in that very ship we were speaking of when you came in.”
“What ship?” I asked, puzzled. “I never heard you mention a ship.”
“I’ve just told you her name, my dear sir,” he replied. “The ‘’Apse Family’’. Surely you’ve heard of the great firm of Apse & Sons, ship-owners. They had a pretty big fleet. There was the ‘’Lucy Apse’’, and the ‘’Harold Apse’’, and ‘’Anne, John, Malcolm, Clara, Juliet’’, and so on—no end of ‘’Apses’’. Every brother, sister, aunt, cousin, wife—and grandmother, too, for all I know—of the firm had a ship named after them. Good, solid, old-fashioned lot they were, too, built to carry and to last. None of your newfangled labor-saving appliances in them, but plenty of men and plenty of good salt beef and hardtack put aboard—and off you go to fight your way out and home again.”
Old Jermyn made a sound of approval which sounded like a groan of pain. Those were the ships for him. He pointed out in doleful tones that you couldn’t say to labor-saving appliances, “Jump lively now, my hearties.” No labor-saving appliance would go aloft on a dirty night, with the sands under your lee.
“No,” assented the stranger, with a wink at me. “The Apses didn’t believe in them either, apparently. They treated their people well—as people don’t get treated nowadays—and they were awfully proud of their ships. Nothing ever happened to them. This last one, the ‘’Apse Family’’, was to be like the others, only she was to be still stronger, still safer, still more roomy and comfortable. I believe they meant her to last forever. They had her built composite—iron, teak-wood, and greenheart, and her scantling was something fabulous. If ever an order was given for a ship in a spirit of pride! Everything of the best. The commodore-captain of the employ was to command her, and they planned the accommodation for him like a house on shore under a big, tall poop that went nearly to the mainmast. No wonder Mrs. Colchester wouldn’t let the old man give her up. Why, it was the best home she ever had in all her married days. Ah! she had a nerve, that woman.
“The fuss that was made while that ship was building! ‘Let’s have this a little stronger, and that a little heavier; and hadn’t that other thing better be changed for something a little thicker?’ The builders entered into the spirit of the thing, and there she was, growing into the clumsiest, heaviest ship of her size, right before all their eyes, without anybody getting aware of it, somehow. She was to be 2,000 tons register, or a little over; no less on any account. But see what happens. When they came to measure her she turned out 1,999 tons and a fraction. General consternation! And they say old Mr. Apse was so annoyed that he took to his bed and died. The old gentleman had retired from active business twenty-five years before, and was ninety-six at the time, if a day, so his death wasn’t perhaps so surprising. Still Mr. Lucian Apse was convinced that his father would have lived to a hundred. So we may put him at the head of the list. Next comes the poor devil of a shipwright that brute caught and squashed as she went off the ways. They called it the launch of a ship, but I’ve heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river. She snapped all the checks like pack-thread, and went for her own tugs in attendance like a fury. Before anybody could see what she was up to, she sent one of them to the bottom, and laid up another for three months’ repairs. One of her cables parted, of course, and then, suddenly—you couldn’t tell why—she let herself be brought up with the other as quiet as a lamb.
“That’s how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend on them behaving rationally. But with that ship, whatever you did with her, you never knew how it would end. Ah! she was a wicked beast. . . . Or, perhaps, she was only just insane.” He uttered this supposition in so earnest a tone that I could not refrain from smiling. He left off biting his lower lip to apostrophize me.
“Eh! Why not? Why couldn’t there be something in her build, in her lines corresponding to . . . What’s madness? Only something just a tiny bit wrong in the make of your brain. Why shouldn’t there be a mad ship?—I mean mad in a shiplike way, so that under no circumstances could you be sure she would do what any other sensible ship would naturally do for you. There are ships that steer wildly, and ships that can’t be quite trusted always to stay; others that want careful watching when running in a gale, and again there may be a ship that will lie to badly and make heavy weather of it in every little blow. But then you expect her to be always so. You take it as part of her character, as a ship, just as you take account of a man’s peculiarities of temper when you deal with him. But with her you couldn’t. She was unaccountable. If she wasn’t mad, then she was the most evil-minded, underhand, savage brute that ever went afloat. I’ve seen her run beautifully in a heavy gale for two days, and on the third broach to twice in the same afternoon. The first time she flung the helmsman clean over the wheel, but, as she didn’t quite manage to kill him, she had another try about three hours afterwards. She swamped herself fore and aft, burst all the canvas we had set, scared all hands pretty nearly into a panic, and even frightened Mrs. Colchester down there in those beautiful stern cabins that she was so proud of. When we mustered the crew there was one man missing. Swept overboard, of course, without being either seen or heard, poor devil; and I only wonder more of us didn’t go. Another voyage, one day—there was a little wind, but no sea to speak of—the mate hauls down the outer jib and sends some hands to stow it. That brute had been going along steady as a church all the morning. Directly the first two men got out on the boom, without any warning, she takes a confounded dive and snaps the spar short off by the cap. All in a minute, there she was up in the wind, with all the head-gear under her port bow, and only an old cloth cap tangled up in the wreckage left of the two men. Gone! Never had one single glimpse of either of them. “Always something like that—always. I heard an old mate tell Captain Colchester once that it had come to this with him—that he was afraid to open his mouth to give any sort of order. She was as much of a terror in harbor as at sea. You could never be certain what would hold her. On the slightest provocation she would start snapping ropes, cables, wire hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy—but that does not quite explain that power for mischief she had. Not to mer, anyhow. And I knew her well. You know, somehow, when I think of her, I can’t help remembering what we hear of uncontrollable lunatics breaking loose.”
He looked at me inquisitively.
“In the ports where she was known,” he went on, “they dreaded the sight of her. She thought nothing of knocking away twenty feet or so of solid stone facing off a quay or wiping off the end of a wooden wharf. She must have lost miles of chain and hundreds of tons of anchors, in her time. When she fell aboard some poor unoffending ship, it was the very devil of a job to haul her off again. And she never got hurt herself—just a few scratches or so, perhaps. They had wanted to have her strong, and so she was. Strong enough to ram polar ice with. And as she began, so she went on. From the day she was launched she never let a year pass without murdering somebody. I think the owners got very worried about it. But they were a stiff-necked generation, all those Apses. They wouldn’t admit there could be anything wrong with the ‘’Apse Family’’. They wouldn’t even change her name. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ as Mrs. Colchester said. They ought at least to have shut her up for life in some dry dock or other away up the river, and never let her smell salt water again. I assure you, my dear sir, that she invariably did kill some one every voyage she made. It was perfectly well known. She got a name for it, far and wide.”
I expressed my surprise that a ship with such a reputation could ever get a crew.
“Then you don’t know what sailors are, my dear sir. Let me just show you by an instance. One day in dock at home, while loafing on the forecastle head, I noticed two respectable salts come along, one a middle-aged, competent, steady man evidently, the other a smart youngish chap. They read the name on the bows, and stopped, looking at her. Says the elder man: ‘’ ‘Apse Family’’. That’s the sanguinary female dog’ [I’m putting it in that way] of a ship, Jack, that kills a man every voyage. I wouldn’t sign in her—not for Joe, I wouldn’t.’ And the other says: ‘If she were mine, I’d have her towed on the mud and set on fire, blame if I wouldn’t.’ Then the first man chimes in: ‘Much do they care. Men are cheap, God knows!’ The younger one spat in the water alongside. ‘They won’t have me—not for double wages.’ They hung about for some time, and then walked up the dock. Half an hour later I saw them both on our deck, looking round for the mate, and apparently very anxious to be taken on. And they were.”
“How do you account for this?” I asked.
“What would you say?” he retorted. “Recklessness? The vanity of boasting in the evening to all their chums: ‘We’ve just shipped in that there ‘’Apse Family’’. Blow her. She ain’t going to scare us.’ Sheer sailor-like perversity? A sort of curiosity? Well—a little of all that, no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The answer of the elderly chap was:
“‘A man can die but once.’ The younger assured me in a mocking tone that he wanted to see ‘how she would do it this time.’ But I tell you what: there was a sort of fascination about the brute.”
Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in sulkily:
“I saw her once out of this very window towing up the river. A great, black, ugly thing, going along like a big hearse.”
“Something sinister about her looks, wasn’t there?” said the man in tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. “I always had a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more than fourteen, the very first day—nay, hour—I joined her. Father came up to see me off, and was to go down to Gravesend with us. I was his second boy to go to sea. My big brother was already an officer then. We. got on board about eleven in the morning, and found the ship ready to drop out of the basin, stern first. Ten minutes afterwards the voyage began. She had not gone three times her own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on the check rope—a new six-inch hawser—that forward there they had no chance to ease it round in time and it parted. I saw the broken end fly up high in the air. Next moment she came against the pier-head with a jar that staggered everybody about her decks. She didn’t hurt herself—not she. But one of her boys the mate had sent aloft on the mizzen to do something, came down on the poop-deck—thump! right in front of me. He was not much older than myself. We had been grinning at each other only a few minutes before. He must have been handling himself carelessly, not expecting to get such a jerk. I heard his startled cry, ‘Oh!’ in a high treble, as he felt himself going, and looked up in time to see him go limp all over as he fell. Ough! Poor father was remarkably white about the gills when we shook hands in Gravesend. ‘Are you all right?’ he says, looking hard at me. ‘Yes, father.’ ‘Quite sure?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘Well, then good-bye, my boy.’ He told me afterwards that at half a word from me he would have carried me off home with him there and then. . . . I am the baby of the family; you know,” added the man in tweeds, stroking his moustache with an ingenuous smile.
“This might have utterly spoiled a chap’s nerve for going aloft, you know, utterly. He fell within two feet of me, cracking his head on a mooring-bitt. Never moved. Stone dead. Nice looking little fellow, he was. I had just been thinking we would be great chums. . . . However, that wasn’t yet the worst that brute of a ship could do. I served in her three years of my time, and then I got transferred to the ‘’Lucy Apse’’, for a year. The sailmaker we had in the ‘’Apse Family’’ turned up there too, and I remember him saying to me, one evening after we had been a week at sea: ‘Isn’t she a meek little ship?’ No wonder we thought the ‘’Lucy Apse’’ a dear, meek, little ship after getting clear of that big, rampaging, savage brute. It was like heaven. Her officers seemed to me the restfulest lot of men on earth. To me who had known no other ship but the ‘’Apse Family’’, the ‘’Lucy’’ was like a sort of magic craft that did what you wanted her to do of her own accord. One evening we got caught aback pretty sharply from right ahead. In about ten minutes we had her full again and going along easy, sheets aft, tacks down, decks cleared, and the officer of the watch leaning against the weather rail peacefully. It seemed simply marvellous to me. The other, most likely, would have stuck in irons for half-an-hour, rolling her decks full, knocking the men about—spars cracking, braces snapping, yards taking charge, and a confounded scare going on aft about her beastly rudder, which she had a way of flapping about fit to raise your hair on end. I couldn’t get over my wonder for days.
“Well, I finished my last year of apprenticeship in that jolly little ship {she wasn’t so little, either, but after that other heavy devil she seemed but a plaything to handle}—I finished my time and passed my exam for second mate; and then, just as I was thinking of having three weeks of good time on shore, I got at breakfast a letter asking me the earliest day I could be ready to join the ‘’Apse Family’’ as third officer. I gave my plate a shove that shot it into the middle of the table. Dad looked up over his paper; mother raised her hands in astonishment; and I went out bareheaded into our bit of garden, where I walked round and round for an hour.
“When I came in, mother was out of the dining-room, and dad had shifted berth into his big armchair by the fire. The letter was lying on the mantelpiece.
“‘It’s very creditable to you and very kind of them,’ he said. ‘And I see also that Charles has been appointed chief mate of that ship for one voyage.’
“There was a P.S. overleaf Mr. Apse’s own handwriting, which I had overlooked. Charley was my big brother.
“’I don’t like very much to have two of my boys in the same ship,’ father goes on in his deliberate, solemn way; ‘and I may tell you that I would not mind writing Mr. Apse a letter to that effect.’
“Dear old chap! He was a wonderful father. What would you have done? The mere notion of going back (and as an officer, too) to be worried and bothered, and kept on the jump night and day by that brute made me feel sick. But she wasn’t a ship you could afford to be shy of openly. Besides, the most genuine excuse could not be given without mortally offending Apse & Sons. The firm, and I believe the whole family down to the old unmarried sisters in Lancashire, had grown desperately touchy about that accursed ship’s character. This was a case for answering ‘Ready now’ from your very death-bed if you wished to die in their good graces. And that’s precisely what I did answer—by wire.
“The prospect of being shipmates with my big brother cheered me up considerably, though it made me a bit anxious, too. Ever since I remember myself as a little chap he had been very good to me, and I looked upon him as the finest fellow in the world. And so he was. No better officer ever walked the deck of a merchant ship. And that’s a fact. He was a fine, strong, upstanding, sun-tanned, young fellow, with his brown hair curling a little, and an eye like a hawk. He was just splendid. We hadn’t seen each other for many years, and even this time, though he had been in England three weeks already, he hadn’t showed up at home yet, but had spent his spare time in Surrey somewhere, making up to Maggie Colchester, old Captain Colchester’s niece. Her father, a great friend of my dad, was in the sugar-broking business, and Charley made a sort of second home of their house. I wondered what my big brother would think of me. There was a sort of sternness about Charley’s face which never left it, not even when he was larking in his rather wild fashion.
“He received me with a great shout of laughter. He seemed to think my joining as an officer the greatest joke in the world. There were eleven years between our ages, and I suppose he remembered me best in pinafores. I was just four when he first went to sea. It surprised me to find how boisterous he could be.
“‘Now we shall see what you are made of,’ he cried. And he held me off by the shoulders and punched my ribs, and hustled me into his berth. ‘Sit down, Ned. I am glad of the chance of having you with me. I’ll put the finishing touch to you, my young officer, providing you’re worth the trouble. And, first of all, get it well into your head that we are not going to let this brute kill anybody this voyage. We’ll stop her racket.’
“I perceived he was in dead earnest about it. He talked grimly of the ship, and how we must be careful and allow no carelessness of any sort: take no chances, and look after the men as if they were five-year-old kids. And we must never allow this ugly beast to catch us napping with any of her damned tricks.
“He gave me a regular lecture on special seamanship for the use of the ‘’Apse Family’’; then changing his tone, he began to talk at large, rattling off the wildest, funniest nonsense, till my sides ached with laughing. I could see very well he was a bit above himself with high spirits. It couldn’t be because of my coming—not to that extent. But, of course, I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking what was the matter. I had a proper respect for my big brother, I can tell you. But it was all made plain enough a day or two afterwards, when I heard that Miss Maggie Colchester was coming for the voyage. Uncle was giving her a sea-trip for the benefit of her health.
“I don’t know what could have been wrong with her health. She had a beautiful color, and a deuce of a lot of fair hair. She didn’t care a rap for wind or rain, or spray, or sun, or green seas, or anything. She was a jolly girl of the very best sort, but the way she cheeked my big brother used to frighten me. I always expected it to end in an awful row. However, nothing decisive happened till after we had been in Sydney for a week. One day, in the men’s dinner hour, Charley put his head into my cabin. I was stretched out on my back on the settee, smoking in peace.
“‘Come along ashore with me, Ned,’ he says, in his curt way.
“I jumped up, of course, and away after him down the gangway and up George Street. He strode along like a giant, and I at his elbow, panting. It was confoundedly hot. ‘Where on earth are you rushing me to, Charley?’ I made bold to ask.
“‘Here,’ he says.
“It was a jeweler’s. I couldn’t imagine what he could want there. It seemed a sort of mad freak. He thrusts under my nose three rings which looked very tiny on his big, brown palm, growling out:
“‘For Maggie. . . . Which?’
“I got a kind of scare at this. I couldn’t make a sound, but I pointed at the one that sparkled white and blue. He put it in his waistcoat pocket, paid for it, and bolted out. When we got on board I was quite out of breath. ‘Shake hands, old chap!’ I gasped out. He gave me a thump on the back. ‘Give what orders you like to the boatswain when the hands turn-to,’ says he. ‘I am off duty this afternoon.’
“Then he vanished from the deck for a while; but presently he came out of the cabin with Maggie, and those two went over the gangway publicly, before all hands, going for a walk together on that awful blazing hot day with clouds of dust flying about. They came back after a few hours looking very staid, but didn’t seem to have the slightest idea where they had been. Anyway, that’s the answer they both made to Mrs. Colchester’s question at tea-time.
“And didn’t she turn on Charley with her voice like an old night cabman’s: ‘Rubbish! Don’t know where you’ve been! Stuff and nonsense. You’ve walked the girl off her legs. Don’t do it again.’
“It’s surprising how meek Charley could be with that old woman. Only on one occasion he whispered to me, ‘I’m jolly glad she isn’t Maggie’s aunt, except by marriage. That’s no sort of relationship.’ But I think he let Maggie have too much of her own way. She was hopping all over that ship in her yachting skirt and a red tam-o’-shanter like a bright bird on a dead black tree. The old salts used to grin when they saw her coming along, and offered to teach her knots or splices. I believe she liked the men, for Charley’s sake, I suppose.
“As you may imagine, the diabolic propensities of that cursed ship were never spoken of on board—not in her cabin, at any rate. Only once, on the homeward passage, Charley incautiously said something about bringing all her crew home this time. Old Colchester began to look uncomfortable at once, and that silly, hard-bitten old woman flew out at Charley as though he had said something indecent. I was quite confounded myself; as to Maggie, she sat completely mystified, opening her dark eyes very wide. Of course, before she was a day older she wormed it all out of me. She was a very difficult person to lie to.
“‘How awful!’ she said, quite solemn. ‘So many poor fellows! I am glad the voyage is nearly over. I won’t have a moment’s peace about Charley now.’
“I assured her Charley was all right: it took more than that ship knew to get over a seaman like Charley; and she agreed with me.
“Next day we got the tug off Dungeness; and when the tow-rope was fast Charley rubbed his hands and said to me in an undertone:
“‘We’ve baffled her, Neddy.’
‘“Looks like it,’ I said, with a grin at him. It was beautiful weather, and the sea as smooth as a mill-pond. We went up the river without a shadow of trouble except once, when, off Hole Haven, she took a sudden sheer and nearly had a barge anchored just clear of the fairway. But I was aft, and she did not catch me napping that time. Charley came up on the poop looking very concerned. ‘Close shave,’ says he.
“‘Never mind, Charley,’ I answered cheerily. ‘You’ve tamed her.’
“We were to tow right up. The river pilot boarded us well down, and the first words I heard him say were: ‘You may just as well take your port anchor inboard at once, Mr. Mate.’
“This had been done when I went forward and saw Maggie on the forecastle head enjoying the bustle. I begged her to go aft, but she took no notice of me, of course. Then Charley, who was very busy, caught sight of her and shouted in his biggest voice: ‘Get off the forecastle head, Maggie. You’re in the way here.’ For all answer she made a funny face at him, and I saw poor Charley turn away, hiding a smile. She was flushed with the excitement of getting home again, and her eyes seemed to snap live sparks as she looked at the river. A collier-brig had gone round just ahead of us, and our tug had to stop her engines in a hurry to avoid running slap bang into her.
“In a moment, as is usually the case, all the shipping in the reach seemed to get into a hopeless tangle. A schooner and a ketch got up a small collision all to themselves right in the middle of the river. It was exciting to watch. Meantime our tug remained stopped. Any other ship than that brute could have been coaxed to keep straight for a couple of minutes. But not she! Her head fell off at once; she swung athwart the stream and began to drift down, taking her tug along with her, too, at that. I noticed a cluster of coasters at anchor, within a quarter of a mile of us, and I thought I had better speak to the pilot. ‘If you let this brute get amongst that lot,’ I said, quietly, ‘she will stop there for hours, grinding some of them to bits before we get her out again.’
“‘Don’t I know her!’ cries he, stamping his foot in a perfect fury. And he out with his whistle to make that bothered tug get the ship’s head up-stream again as quick as possible. He blew like mad, waving his arm to port, and presently we could see that the tug’s engines had been set going ahead. Her paddles churned the water, but it was as if she had been trying to tow a rock—she couldn’t get an inch out of that ship. Again the pilot blew his whistle, and waved his arm to port. We could see the tug’s paddles turning faster and faster away broad on our bow.
“For a moment tug and ship seemed to hang motionless in a crowd of moving shipping, and then the terrific strain that evil, stony-hearted brute would always put on everything, tore the towing-chock clean out of her. The tow-rope surged over, snapping the iron stanchions of the head-rail one after another, as if they had been sticks of sealing-wax. It was only then I noticed that, in order to have a better view over our heads, Maggie had stepped upon the port anchor as it lay flat on the forecastle deck.
“It had been lowered properly into its hardwood beds, but there had been no time to take a turn with it; anyway, it was quite secure as it was for going into dock; but I could see directly that the tow-rope would sweep under the fluke in another second. My heart flew up right into my throat, but not before I had time to yell out: ‘Jump clear of that anchor!’ . . .
“But I hadn’t time to shriek out her name. I don’t suppose she heard me at all. The first touch of the rope against the fluke threw her down heavily; she was up on her feet again quick as lightning, but she was up on the wrong side. There came a horrid scraping sound, and then that anchor, tipping over, rose up like something alive; its great, rough iron arm caught her round the waist, seemed to clasp her close with a dreadful hug, and flung itself with her downwards and over in a terrific clang of iron, followed by heavy ringing blows that shook the ship from stem to stern—because the ring-stopper held!”
“How horrible!” I said.
“I used to dream for years afterwards of live anchors catching hold of girls,” said the man in tweeds, a little wildly. He shuddered.
“With a most pitiful howl Charley was over after her almost on the instant. But, Lord! he didn’t see as much as a gleam of her red tam-o’-shanter in the water. Nothing! Nothing whatever! In a moment there were half a dozen boats around us, and he got pulled into one. I, with the boatswain, and the carpenter, let go the other anchor and brought the ship up somehow. The pilot had gone silly. He walked up and down the forecastle-head, wringing his hands and muttering to himself: ‘Killing women, now! Killing women now!’ Not another word could you get out of him.
“Dusk fell, then a night black as pitch; and, peering upon the river I heard a low, mournful hail, ‘Ship, ahoy!’ Two boatmen came alongside. They had a lantern in their boat, and looked up the ship’s side, holding on to the ladder without a word. I saw a lot of loose fair hair down there. Brrrr!”
He shuddered again.
“After the tide had turned, Maggie’s body had floated clear of one of the mooring-buoys,” he explained. “I crept aft, feeling half dead, and managed to send a rocket up—to let the other searchers know on the river. And then I slunk away forward like a cur, and spent the night sitting on the heel of the bowsprit, so as to be as far as possible out of Charley’s way.”
“Poor fellow!” I murmured.
“Yes; poor fellow!” he repeated, musingly. “Ah! she wouldn’t let him—not even him—baffle her of her prey. But he made her fast in dock next morning. He did. We hadn’t exchanged a word—not a single look, for that matter. I didn’t want to look at him. When the last rope was fast, he put his hands to his head and stood gazing down at his feet as if trying to remember something. The men waited on the main deck for the word that ends the voyage. Perhaps that is what he was trying to remember. I spoke for him: ‘That’ll do, men.’
“I never saw a crew leave a ship so quietly. They sneaked over the rail one after another, taking care not to bang their sea chests too heavily. They looked our way, but not a single one had the stomach to come up and offer to shake hands with the mate, as is usual.
“I followed him all over the empty ship to and fro, here and there, with no living soul about but the two of us, because the old ship-keeper, who had known him from a boy, had locked himself up in the galley—both doors. Suddenly poor Charley mutters in a crazy voice, ‘I’m done here,’ and strides down the gangway, with me at his heels, up the dock, out at the gate, on towards Tower Hill. He used to take rooms with a decent old landlady in America Square, to be near his work.
“All at once he stops, turns round, and comes straight at me. ‘Ned,’ says he, ‘I am going home.’ I had the good luck to sight a four-wheeler, and got him in. His legs were beginning to give way. In our hall he fell down on a chair, and I’ll never forget father’s and mother’s amazed, perfectly still faces as they stood over him. They hadn’t heard, and couldn’t understand what had happened to him till I blubbered out, ‘Maggie got drowned.’
“Mother let out a little cry. Father looks from him to me and from me to him, as if comparing our faces—for, upon my soul, Charley did not resemble himself at all. Nobody moved; and the poor fellow raises his two big brown hands slowly to his throat and with one single tug rips everything open—collar, shirt, waistcoat, into rags—a perfect wreck and ruin of a man. Father and I got him up-stairs somehow, and mother pretty nearly killed herself nursing him through a brain-fever.”
The man in tweeds nodded at me significantly.
“Ah! there was nothing that could be done with that brute. She had a devil in her.”
“Where’s your brother?” I asked, expecting to hear he was dead. But he was commanding a ship on the China coast and had not been home for years.
Old Jermyn fetched a heavy sigh, and the handkerchief being now sufficiently dry, put it up tenderly to his red and lamentable nose.
“You understand now,” the man in tweeds started again, “why I was glad to hear that lunatic Wilmot had managed to dash her brains out on some rocks in Spencer Gulf. She was a ravening beast. A ship may be given a certain latitude in her temper—but when it comes to killing women! . . . Old Colchester put his foot down and resigned; and—would you believe it?—Apse & Sons wrote to ask whether he wouldn’t reconsider his decision! Anything to save the good name of the ‘’Apse Family!’’ Old Colchester went to the office then and said that he would reconsider: he would take charge again, on condition of taking her out into the North Sea and scuttling her. He was nearly off his chump. He used to be iron-gray, but he had gone snow-white in a fortnight. And Mr. Lucian Apse (they had known each other as young men) pretended not to notice it. Eh! Here’s infatuation, if you like, Here’s pride for you.
“They jumped at the first man they could get to take her, for fear of the scandal of the ‘’Apse Family’’ not being able to find a skipper. He was a festive soul, I believe, but he stuck to her grim and hard. Wilmot was second mate. A harum-scarum fellow and pretending to a great scorn for all the girls. The fact is, he was really timid. But let only one of them do as much as lift her little finger in encouragement, and there was nothing that could hold him. As apprentice he deserted abroad after a petticoat, once, and would have gone to the dogs then if his skipper hadn’t taken the trouble to find him and lug him by the ears out of some house of perdition or other.
“It was said that one of the firm had been heard once to express a hope that this brute of a ship would be lost soon. I can hardly credit it, unless it might have been Mr. Alfred Apse, whom the family didn’t think much of. They had him in the office, but he was considered a bad egg altogether, always flying off to race meetings and coming home drunk. You would have thought that a ship so full of deadly tricks would run herself ashore some day out of sheer cussedness. But not she! She was going to last for ever. She had a nose to keep off the bottom.”
Jermyn made a grunt of approval.
“A ship after a pilot’s own heart,” jeered the man in tweeds, “eh? Well, Wilmot managed it. He was the man for it, but even he, perhaps, couldn’t have done the trick without the green-eyed governess or nurse or whatever she was to the children of Mr. and Mrs. Pamphilius.
“They were passengers in her from Port Adelaide to the Cape. Well, the ship went out and anchored outside for the day. The skipper—hospitable soul—had a lot of guests to a farewell lunch, as usual with him. It was five in the evening before the last boat-load left the side, and the weather looked ugly and dark in the gulf. There was no reason for him to get under way. However, as he had said he would go that day, he imagined it was proper to do so anyhow. But as he had no mind after all these festivities to tackle the straits in the dark with a scant wind, he gave orders at nine o’clock to keep her under the lower topsails and foresail as close as she would lie, dodging along the land till daylight. Then he sought his virtuous couch, I suppose. The mate was on deck having his face washed very clean with hard rain squalls. Wilmot relieved him at midnight.
“The ‘’Apse Family’’ had, as you observed, a house on her poop . . .”
“A big—white—thing—sticking up,” Jermyn murmured, sadly, at the fire.
“That’s it; a companionway for the cabin stairs and chart-room combined. The rain drove in gusts on the sleepy Wilmot. The ship was then surging slowly to the southward along the shore, close hauled, with the coast within three miles or so on her port side. There was nothing to look out for in that part of the gulf, and Wilmot went round to dodge the squalls under the lee of that chart-room, whose door on that side was open. The night was black like a barrel of coal-tar. And then he heard a woman’s voice whispering to him.
“That confounded green-eyed girl of the Pamphilius people had put the kids to bed long time ago, of course, but it seems she couldn’t sleep herself. She heard eight bells struck and the chief mate come below to turn in. She waited a bit, then got into her dressing-gown, and stole into the empty saloon and up the stairs into the chart-room. She sat on the settee near the open door to cool herself—perhaps. I couldn’t make it out when Wilmot was telling me; he would break off to swear at every second word. We were standing on the quay, and he had an apron of sacking up to his chin and a big whip in his hand. Driver of a wool-wagon. Glad to do anything not to starve. That’s what he had come to.
“I suppose it was as if somebody had struck a match in the fellow’s brain. There he was with his head inside the door, on the girl’s shoulder as likely as not—officer of the watch! And meantime the wind was hauling aft in gusts. The helmsman, when giving his evidence afterwards, said that he shouted several times that the binnacle-lamp had gone out. He couldn’t use the compass-card, but it didn’t matter to him, because his orders were to sail her close. ‘I thought it funny,’ he said, ‘that the ship should keep on falling off in squalls like this, but I luffed her up every time as close as I was able. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand before my face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.’
“It seems that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a single soul in her being aware of it. Wilmot himself confessed that he had not been near the standard compass for an hour. He might well have confessed! The first thing he knew was the man on the lookout shouting blue murder forward there.
“He tore his neck free, he says, and yelled back at him: ‘What do you say?’
“‘I think I hear breakers ahead, sir,’ howled the man, and came rushing aft with the rest of the watch in the ‘awfulest blinding deluge that ever fell from the sky,’ Wilmot says. He wasn’t a good officer, but he had in him the making of a seaman. For a second or so he was so scared and bewildered that he could not remember on which side of the gulf the ship was. But he pulled himself together at once. His first orders were: ‘Hard up. Shiver the main and mizzen topsails!’—which was perfectly right, and it seems that he heard the sails actually fluttering. ‘But she was too slow in going off,’ Wilmot went on telling me, his dirty face twitching, and the damned carter’s whip shaking in his hand. ‘She seemed to stick fast.’ The flutter of the canvas above his head ceased. At this critical moment the wind hauled aft with a gust again, filling the sails, and sending the ship with a great way upon the rocks on her lee bow. She had been too slow and had overreached herself in her last little game. Her time had come—the hour, the man, the blind night, the gust of wind, the right woman to put an end to her. She deserved nothing better. Strange are the instruments of Providence! There’s a sort of poetical justice, too. . . . ”
The man in tweeds looked hard at me.
“The first ledge she went over stripped the false keel off her. Rip! The skipper, rushing out of his berth, found a crazy girl, in a red dressing-gown, flying round and round the saloon, screeching like a cockatoo—the next bump knocked her clean under the cabin table. It also started the stern-post and carried away the rudder. And then the brute ran up on to a shelving rocky shore, tearing her bottom out, till she stopped and the foremast dropped over the bows like a gangway.”
“Anybody lost?” I asked.
“No—unless that fellow Wilmot, and that’s rather worse than death,” answered the gentleman, unknown to Miss Blank, looking round for his cap. “They got ashore all right. She didn’t begin to break up till next day. . . .Rain left off,” he went on. “I must get my bike. I live in Herne Bay—came out for a spin this morning.”
He nodded at me in a friendly way, and went out with a swagger.
“Do you know who he is, Jermyn?” I asked.
The North Sea pilot shook his head, dismally. “I’m waiting for my ship to come down,” he said in a lugubrious tone, again spreading his damp handkerchief like a curtain before the glowing grate.
On going out, I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows.