The Saturday Evening Post/The Next Vacancy

by Perceval Gibbon

THE NEXT VACANCY

By PERCEVAL GIBBON

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN

FROM the wing of the bridge, Mr. Gowan, chief officer of the Chandos, temporarily in command, watched the pilot's boat come crawling crablike across the slow surges. It was a day of haze; the horizon was lost in the gray of it, and ahead the line of the coast was a darker smear upon the distance.

"Put that ladder over!" said Mr. Gowan curtly, without moving.

He was a man of fifty, handsome and gray, with that touch of distinction that men gain whose business is the exercise of authority. As he leaned with folded arms upon the rail he offered to the eye the spectacle of a seaman shaped to his trade by five-and-thirty years of life afloat; massively assured, impassive, grave and responsible. His eyes, puckered at the corners with gazing up the wind on a score of seas, were gray and reposeful; the whole of him spoke of confidence and security. There was not a sign to show that Mr. Gowan, who had left his captain in the cemetery at Port Said and brought his ship home, was athrill with old hopes suddenly revived and a balked ambition newly grown strenuous.

The boat rode in toward the steamer's side on the top of a sea and the big pilot, with his long black oilskin coat ballooning about his legs, stepped to a rung of the rope ladder with the ease and certainty of a man walking upstairs in his own house. His large pink face was upturned as he climbed, and it was subdued already to the sort of solemnity that men put on at a funeral. As he came over the rail and lowered himself to the deck there was that in his movements which suggested a man moving on tiptoe.

"He'd know, of course," reflected Mr. Gowan, walking across to the head of the bridge ladder to receive him.

In the chartroom, through whose open door they could see the boat working down to the cutter again, the pilot spoke across the rim of his tumbler.

"And so the old captain's gone," he said. "Well, it's what happens to all of us. I was at his wedding, 'way back in the eighties; and now he's gone."

He shook his great fair head gloomily, and drank.

"Good passage?" he asked perfunctorily.

Mr. Gowan nodded. "Nothing to complain of," he answered. "Bit of a dusting in the Bay, that's all. Shall we catch the tide, d'you think?"

"Just about," said the pilot. "Gosh, I can't get the old skipper out of my head. You don't see many like him nowadays."

Mr. Gowan agreed. He had served with the late captain of the Chandos for several years and knew him exhaustively. It had not been an easy service, for the old man had added to the infirmities of his age a petulance and ill humor that lived in the mate's memory like a bad taste in the mouth. Even as he answered the pilot he had in mind the spare figure with its thin raw neck, the voice of rasping complaint and the cold uncertain eyes of the dead captain.

"No," he said thoughtfully. "No; not many like him."

"Well," said the pilot, "we'd better be getting her in. All clear for'ard for anchoring?"

"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Gowan, following him out to the bridge.

He stood by while the pilot got his bearings and shifted the steamer's course for the channel to the river's mouth, fettered by a diffidence that was new to him. There was a question he wanted to put; it pressed for utterance, but he could not manage it. The pilot went about his work with a kind of cheerful absorption in it that was almost exasperating to see. His large fresh face wore an absent smile as he gazed ahead for his marks, and he dropped the orders over his shoulder in a murmur to the man at the wheel. For the time he seemed to have forgotten the old captain. "The lead," he said at last.

Mr. Gowan shouted the order and moved to the engine-room telegraph to slow the steamer. It was then, while they waited for the leadsman, that the pilot returned to the topic.

"The old captain," he said; "he had her since she was launched, didn't he?"

"I believe so," answered the mate. "Er—do you know who gets her now?"

It was as near as he could get to the question that was within him. The pilot looked at him with a sharp turn of the head.

"Why, ain't you got her?" he demanded.

The leadsman's voice, chanting below them, interrupted:

"By the deep, seven!"

"Shove her along," commanded the pilot. "That'll do the lead."

He walked over to the binnacle and considered the course for a moment.

"Ain't you got her?" he demanded, returning.

"I don't know," answered the mate. "My orders were to bring her home. That's all I've heard as yet. I thought you might know."

The pilot shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I made sure—but I don't know. You think maybe they'll appoint some one over you?"

The mate shrugged his thick shoulders; just that thought had filled his mind since the Chandos left Port Said. He had never had a command; he was one of those men whose fine ability and entire worthiness avail nothing to lift them up that final step that is the crucial ascent in a seaman's career. Interest with owners, some subtle quality of adroitness to place himself on the right footing with the men who control ships from their desks ashore—these were lacking to him. He knew it, and the night watches had been peopled for him with visions of what might be doing while he was bringing the Chandos home. As he paced the bridge he saw a man going to and fro with his orders safe in his breast-pocket to take command of the Chandos on her arrival.

"It 'ud be hard," said the pilot; "but owners are a queer lot. I wouldn't be too sure about it if I was you."

"Oh, I'm not breaking my heart," said the mate shortly, and turned away.

The pilot could not abandon the topic so easily. He chewed upon it as he took the steamer in. The coastline rose before them like a hedge, and they drew past the nodding buoys to the mouth of the river, fringed with chimneys like the hair about some monstrous mouth.

"You'll know inside of an hour," he said then; "but I wouldn't build on it if I was you."

The mate was thankful that he had his hands full. The ship got orders to go into dock at once instead of anchoring in the river, and the mate had to see to getting the hawsers out for making her fast. In the urgency of his work he managed to lose his preoccupation; his was the sailor's gift to expand the whole of his powers on the matter in hand. As the Chandos worked into the basin he was again the quick, resourceful mate, dexterous and accomplished in the arts of his calling. The steamer was alongside and made fast fore and aft before his anxiety came back to him. He walked aft frowning; he did not quite know what the next step should be.

At the gangway the pilot waited, with his oilskin coat over his arm.

"You'll soon know now," he said encouragingly. "Take it easy, mister. I don't see, myself, how they can get out of giving you the command."

"Lord knows," said Gowan.

The burly pilot held out his hand. "Good luck to you, anyhow," he said heartily.

Gowan shook hands with him, smiling under the close, gray-streaked mustache that veiled his mouth, and the big man went ashore. On the quay, standing at the very edge, with the square toes of his boots projecting over the water, he turned for a last word.

"Don't build on it," he recommended soberly, and stood aside to make way for a man who had come through the warehouse sheds and was waiting to get on board the steamer.

The newcomer brushed past him and stepped down to the Chandos' deck, looking about him sharply. He was a youngish man, smart after a style in his neat shore clothes and black hat.

"Anything I can do for you?" asked Mr. Gowan.

"Yes." The other spoke with the sharpness of an irritable man. "Where's the mate?"

"I'm the mate," replied Mr. Gowan.

"Oh, are you?" The stranger cocked a pale eye at him. He had a narrow face and a thin mouth; he looked like some shrewd clerk. He stared at Mr. Gowan with something satirical in his gaze, the humor of a malicious purpose. "You're the mate, are you? Well, I'm Captain Sleeman; I'm taking this steamboat over."

"Takin' her over!" Mr. Gowan repeated the words slowly, as though flavoring at length the substance of his disappointment. The new captain watched him with the beginnings of a grin on his features.

"Yes," he said. "Sorry for you, of course, if you were expecting to get her. Still"—he waved a hand that disposed of the mate's case with a single motion—"you're not thinking of leaving her, I suppose?"

There was a peremptoriness in his manner of speaking, an almost contemptuous harshness, that restored the mate to his balance much as water dashed in the face restores a man in a faint.

"No, sir," he answered civilly.

"That's all right, then," said the new captain. "You won't find me hard to get on with. Know your work and do it right away—that's the way to keep on the right side of me. And now, Mr. Mate, I'll have a look at your papers."

"Very good, sir," said the mate, and followed the captain of the Chandos obediently.

The mate's home was in one of those streets that make up so large a part of the English seaport town. They are ruled into lines as straight as if they were laid off on a chart; a dull uniformity and the sterility of bare bricks make up their character—scores upon scores of unbeautiful little houses to which the mail brings letters from every part of the world. Here abide the patient women who see their husbands perhaps once in a year; here grow the children who know their father but as a photograph of a man in brass buttons and a badged cap, posed strikingly against a local photographer's marine background. It is for these houses, narrow as graves, and for what they hold, that men drive steel prows over the oceans—the British Empire is a by-product.

Mrs. Gowan was gray like her husband, but gray in that genuine fashion which enhances the appeal of a soft face and gentle manners. She was little and slender; at his side she was like a yacht ranging alongside the Chandos. She gave him the greeting that a man needs when he comes home from the sea, and presently, in the little parlor of which the windows looked out to the bare street, he was telling her of it. He had the armchair beside the fireplace; she had the low chair opposite, and listened with her face propped in her hands and her elbows on her knees.

"He asked me if I was thinking of leaving her," the mate explained. "Thinkin' of leaving her! I was thinking that minute of taking him in my two hands and heaving him into the dock. He's got a voice like an ashhoist; it simply jars a man to be talked to in his fashion."

Mrs. Gowan made some soft noise; the mate shook his head.

"If I left now who's to say when I'd get a ship?" he said. "But Captain Sleeman's the limit. Looks just like a landsman to me; I tell you he's the livin' image of a shipchandler's tout. He went over the papers in the chartroom. Soon as he sat down he shouted for the steward. 'I shouldn't be surprised if you could tell him where to lay hands on a bottle of whisky,' he said to me, with a snort of sneer. When he got it he poured himself out a nip, a regular bo'sun's four fingers, and took it off without blinking an eyelid. It was enough to make any other man half drunk by itself; but he turned to at once and went at those papers like a regular clerk. Oh, he's smart, I'll grant that; but it's the kind of smartness I don't want to see on a steamer's bridge."

"No," agreed Mrs. Gowan, very thoughtfully.

"When he was through he made up a packet and asked me to leave it at the office on my way up here," continued the mate. "So I took 'em. There were orders to show me in to the senior partner when I came; they wanted to cut my claws, I suppose. There I found old Mr. Deeming, wool-gathering at his desk as usual; fire in the grate, carpet on the floor, photographs of steamboats on the walls, a white rose in a glass of water on the window-sill. He's got whiskers and a beard like thin white silk, you know; you can see the curves of his jaw through them. A clean, pink old man; he's rich and he looks rich. He lifted his head as I came in, so mild and soft you could almost kiss him. 'Ah, Mis-ter Gow-an!' he says, chirping like a bird. 'So you've brought the Chan-dos home. I knew she was in good hands, Mis-ter Gow-an; good hands, good hands!' He beamed at me as if he loved me. 'Thank you, sir,' I said. 'I'd hoped my hands were good enough to leave her in.' He didn't stop smiling for a moment; there's no more in him than there is in a ghost. 'Ah!' he said; 'you mustn't be in too much of a hur-ry, Mis-ter Gow-an. But we haven't for-got-ten you, by an-ny means. No, no!' I could hardly keep from shouting at him; it was no use staying. He doddered at me amiably as I went out; that sweet style of his must save him pounds. Outside the door I met Proctor, the junior partner. He's young, you know; young and as keen and hard as the edge of a knife. There's no real harm in Proctor. 'That you, Gowan?' he called. 'Seen Captain Sleeman?' I told him I had. 'Hope you'll get on with him,' he said. 'We want a business man on the Chandos. You're disappointed, eh?' Proctor's a man you can talk straight to, and I did. I told him what I couldn't have told old Deeming, and he only nodded. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You couldn't have her, and that's all there is to it; but you make it your business to get on with Captain Sleeman now. Let's have no trouble and you shall have the next command that falls vacant. I can't say more than that.'"

"Well," said Mrs. Gowan, "that's a promise, anyhow."

"Yes," said Gowan. "It's a promise that might take years to fall due. The skippers in our line aren't old, and I am."

"Old!" cried Mrs. Gowan. "You!" She was full of protest, and with her denial the conversation passed from Chandos to other matters. It was treatment on the lines of counter-irritant, but it was not without effect. Within half an hour Gowan was hearing, with intelligent interest, an account of a new niece who had arrived since last he was at home. She was stated to be a remarkable child in point of beauty and virtue, but small.

It was with something that did duty for resignation that he faced the future at last. The junior partner's promise was still something to look forward to—the time ahead was not entirely empty; and when Gowan returned to work he was again the silent, capable chief officer. As a rule, the captains he served were only too glad to place reliance in his unfailing trustworthiness. They talked of him. "I've got a real mate at last," one of them used to say. "I only go to sea for the look of the thing; the mate's the boss." But Captain Sleeman was slow to such perceptions. Instead of staying ashore while the Chandos lay in dock, taking the dignified ease proper to a master and commander, he moved into his cabin and lived on board. There could be no doubt about his capability; Gowan was too good a seaman to fail to do him credit. The captain thrust Gowan to one side, made him of no account, interfered with his arrangements, ordered him about in his harsh, querulous way; but he knew how things should be done and how to get them done. He did not look like a sailor; he had come through his apprenticeship to the sea and risen through the grades of second mate and mate without gaining that salt and finished quality by which seamen judge one another. It was as if a shopman or a woman were to become expert out of books.

The season was late autumn and he would flit about the long decks in an overcoat, a figure of scorn. His thin and rather long face never relaxed from its official cast; to live with him was like living with incarnate law.

To put the finish upon him, he drank. It was such drinking as Gowan had no experience of. He knew the man whose visits to the shore are debauches; he knew the captain who comes upon the bridge at sea inflamed with steady tippling; he had learned how to deal with both of these, but Captain Sleeman drank in a fashion quite unknown to Gowan. During the day he worked with keen purpose and a head as clear as the mate's. The whisky seemed powerless. Then, when evening came and the hands knocked off, people would come down to meet him—loud and light-hearted young men of the offices in the town. "Well, Mr. Mate, I'm off," he would remark, and add a string of orders about trifling matters. Gowan would see them go along the quay in a group, skylarking and shouting, and that would be the last of them till midnight. Then, if he chanced to be still on board, he might witness the captain's return to his ship, alone. He would come haltingly, as though making sure of each step before he took the next, lurching across the hawsers and around the mooring-posts, silent, very grim and suspicious and economical of speech. He would answer the mate's "Good night" with a coughing sound, and grope to his cabin; but next morning would find him on deck early, acute and self-possessed, free from all traces of his drink.

"It can't last," Gowan told his wife. "It may be all right ashore, but it won't do at sea. There'll be trouble some day."

"And then," said his wife reflectively, "there'll be the vacancy that Mr. Proctor spoke of."

Gowan laughed sourly. "Oh, I've thought of that," he said. "I've thought of that, but see how it stands: Sleeman's a business man; so long as he's sober enough to go ashore in port and hustle after freights—and he's the very man for that job—he's what they want. And at sea, they've got me to see he doesn't pile the old Chandos up through seeing lights that aren't there. That's how it is."

Mrs. Gowan pondered. "He might fall overboard some day," she suggested hopefully. "When you're not looking," she added; "and then——"

"Then," said Gowan, "we'd go on and leave him to swim home, wouldn't we, dear?"

The Chandos was loading coal. She was made fast under the tip; a gaunt fabric of iron, like the skeleton of a factory, took the trucks as they were backed down, and emptied them above a hatchway. The slow trains of coal came at all hours, and there were many nights when Gowan must be on duty to sign the notes of delivery, writing on the rail under the white glare of the tall arc-lamps, while the coal roared unseen to the trimmers below in the hold. To him, one night, as he sat reading in the chartroom, came Proctor. It was late, and the dock was working in full swing; its black waters were powdered with reflected lights, and around it were the shapes of steamers with their derricks hoisted, noisy with their business.

"Captain on board?" asked Proctor, putting his head in at the chartroom door.

"Hullo, Mr. Proctor!" cried Gowan. "No, the captain's ashore. Come in, sir; I've got some coffee coming."

"Right," said Proctor. "Jove! This coaldust is beastly. How's the loading getting along?"

He was a man of thirty, tall, serious and carelessly agreeable. The captains and officers in the firm's employ liked him for his mere humanity. "You can say what you mean to Proctor, and he'll tell you to go to blazes yourself," they said of him.

"Coal doesn't come very quick," Gowan told him. "There's forty trucks due now. Did you want to see the captain himself or is it something I can handle for you?"

Proctor had taken a seat on the lockers. "Oh, I didn't want anything," he said. "The lock's open and I couldn't get back, so I thought I'd look him up; but you'll do instead."

The coffee arrived at that moment, and they sat talking idly while they drank it, till Gowan put his cup down and sat up.

"Was that some one shouting to us?" he said.

He rose and went forth to the bridge and scanned the littered quay. Proctor, behind him, lit a cigar and yawned.

"Chandos ahoy!"

"Why!" said Gowan; "it's from the other side. Must be a boat."

Proctor followed him across the bridge and stood at his side.

"Might be the captain," he suggested. "The lock's open; so he might have taken a boat."

Gowan nodded. "Listen!" he said.

They listened. The noise of coal-loading from a big steamer across the basin traveled over the water to them. On a bark, moored in the middle of the dock, a man was singing.

"Yes, it's a boat," said Gowan. "I can hear the oars." They were plainly to be heard a minute later—an irregular clacking that made Proctor frown. He had been a rowing man at Cambridge.

"His boatman seems to be drunk," he said. "Listen how he pulls."

The boat came out from a bank of shadows to the lighted water; there were three or four people in it. Their voices were suddenly audible; there seemed to be the makings of a quarrel among them. Some one was talking in a high, passionate quaver; the two men on the bridge of the Chandos could make out some of the words and hear the short, guttural bark of the man who answered. The man at the sculls rowed jerkily, but without ceasing.

"Captain Sleeman can't be there," said Proctor decisively.

There was an interval of a moment before Gowan replied. His lifelong habit of loyalty to his shipmates was too strong for him. He longed for Proctor to know the truth. His eyes, habituated to staring through the darkness, had recognized the narrow shoulders of the captain in the man who was rowing. This was a festive evening closing with a visit to the ship. But he turned to Proctor quietly.

"No, sir," he agreed. "Some clerks from the dock offices. You don't want to see 'em. If you'll go into the chartroom I'll attend to them all right."

"No," said Proctor shortly.

It was not possible for Gowan to urge him further. At that moment the voice of the man who complained tailed off to a scream, and he leaned forward and struck. The other man rose and they clinched. Their figures were black against the lighted water as they swayed.

"Look out, there!" roared Gowan, but it was too late. One of them thrust the other back; they lurched together, there were shouts and the stamping of feet on the bottom-boards of the boat, and she was overturned. It was as brief a piece of violence as one could witness. In an instant the boat was floating bottom-up and a head was bobbing near it. Of the others there was no sign.

Gowan made a trumpet of his hands. The salt-sea roar woke the echoes along the dock. "Man overboard!" it sounded, reverberating along the quays. "Boat wanted! Man overboard!"

Behind him Proctor made sounds like whimpering. "They won't be in time," he was crying. "They won't be in time."

Gowan jerked him away with a sweep of his arm. "Out of the road!" he cried, and his coat, as he flung it off, took the younger man in the face. He had not time for his inarticulate protest before Gowan went overboard, head first, from the wing of the bridge.

He struck the water awkwardly and the impact drove the breath out of him. He came up gasping and struck out for the overturned boat, tearing his way through the water with all the wasted energy of an unaccustomed swimmer. The bobbing head went down just before he reached it; he raised his arms and let himself sink after it. Cold gripped him and wrung him, and he felt of a sudden lost and helpless. Then a hand touched his face, clawed for a hold and slipped off; he reached violently, found an arm and came up with it. The drowning man clutched him with his legs about the body, and he had but one glimpse of the light before he was dragged down again. There was water in his mouth and the sour taste of fear; he set himself to fight loose. In the depths he could not strike, could not thrust; it was a battle of some oppressive nightmare. He heard a clangor in his ears; he ceased to struggle, and then he was up in the air again and some one had hold of his collar. He was still gripping the arm of the man he had saved. Men were leaning above him from a boat; he could hear their voices as though through a closed door. He never remembered how he was lifted aboard the boat and taken ashore to the little office where the brisk fire kept somebody's coffee hot.

"As plucky a thing as you'd want to see," some one was saying, as Gowan lay on his back and slowly returned to mastery of himself.

"He'll do all right," said another voice.

He opened his eyes. A man in a black coat, palpably a doctor, nodded to him with a smile. Near by was Proctor, still white and shaking. A couple of others were talking to them. One of them had a notebook.

Gowan sat up. Everybody turned to him.

"Didn't I save him, then?" he demanded of Proctor. "Didn't I save him?"

Proctor made motions with his hands as if he were hushing a child.

"It's all right," he said. "It's all right. You did all you could."

But Gowan was determined to know; and so they moved asunder, that he might see upon the table, from which the teacups had been removed, the still form shrouded under a sheet. He gazed at it with uncomprehending eyes, into which there crept a quick light of horror. He lay back with a sigh.

The man with the notebook nudged Proctor.

"Gowan's the name, I think you said, Mr. Proctor? Yes. Mate of the Chandos, isn't he?"

Proctor coughed. "No," he said. "Not now. Put him down Captain."