THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF ATHENS” (continued 2)

“‘I want the fore upper topsail reefed and set, Mr. Kennedy.’

“I was so surprised that I just stood and gaped for a minute or so. He looked at me in a sort of a challenging way, and said:

“‘Didn’t you hear the order? What are you waiting for?’

“I pulled myself together, said ‘Fore upper topsail it is, sir!’ and off I went. And I can tell you that for the next half hour or so I had plenty to occupy me without worrying my head about what the Old Man was thinking of.

“Well, we got the sail reefed and set. By this time the ship was ripping along at a good sixteen knots or more. You could see her wake spread out a mile behind her like a winding sheet. It was quite dark by this time. Her lee rail was right under, and making our way aft was like going through a swimming-bath.

“The Old Man was still standing just as I had left him, holding on with both hands to the weather rigging, and bracing his feet against the slant of the deck. I had hardly got my foot on the poop ladder when he turned his head and called to me. I could see his lips move, but I could hear nothing for the noise of the wind and sea.

“‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I yelled into the din.

“This time I managed to catch a word or two, but I could make nothing of it. It sounded like topgallantsails, but in spite of what had just happened I couldn’t believe my own ears.

“‘Are you deaf, or what’s the matter with you?’ yells the Old Man then. ‘That’s twice I’ve had occasion to repeat an order. Don’t let it occur again!’

“Well, off I struggled again forrard! ‘What price Bully Forbes of the “Marco Polo,”’ says I to myself; and I tried to fancy the old B.O.T. examiner’s face that passed me for second, if I’d answered his pet question, ‘Running before a gale, what would you do?’ with ‘Cram on more sail and chance it!’

“It took us a good ten minutes to make our way through the broken water on deck. We’d struggle forward a few yards, then—flop!—would come a big green one over the rail and send us all jumping for our lives—on again, and over would come another; still we got there at last, and after a bit we managed to set the sail. Then came the big tussle, at the braces up to our necks in water! More than once I thought we were all gone; but at last everything was O.K., gear turned up and all, and we hung on to windward as well as we could and put up a silent prayer—at least I know I did—that the Old Man wouldn’t take it into his head to fly any more kites just yet.

“I’d always rather envied the fellows who were at sea twenty years or so before my time—the chaps who had such wonderful yarns to tell about the dare-devil skippers and the incredible cracking on in the China tea ships and the big American clippers. Well, I don’t mind owning I was getting all of it I wanted for once!

“Mind you, it didn’t worry me any! On the whole, I liked it. I was a youngster, with no best girl or anything of that sort to trouble about, and I enjoyed it. There was something so wonderfully fine and exciting in the feel of the thing, even when you knew at the back of your mind that she might go to glory any minute and take the whole blessed shooting-match along with her. But there wasn’t much time to worry about details like that; and anyhow, after a certain point you just get beyond thinking about them one way or the other. It’s all in the day’s work, and there you are!

“But our precious mate, I must tell you, didn’t like it a bit—not a little bit! He was a fellow called Arnot, rather a poisonous little bounder; I guess he’d none too much nerve to start with, and he’d played the dickens with what he had while we were in Iquique, running after what he called “skirts” and soaking aguardiente. The skipper’s carrying on got on his nerves frightfully. He was scared stiff. He went about dropping dark hints about barratry, and chucking the ship away, and he wasn’t the man to hold his tongue if he ever got back to England, and so on. He used to buttonhole me whenever we met and start burbling away about the Old Man being out of his mind.

“I ran bung into him one day as I came out of my room. It was blowing like the dickens and the ship tearing along hell-for-leather. I won’t say what sail she was carrying, because I don’t want to get the name of being a liar. She was a wonderful old ship to steer (I hardly ever knew her need a lee wheel) or she could never have kept going as she did under all that canvas. If she’d once got off her course it would have been God help her!

“Mister Mate and I did one or two impromptu dance steps in each other’s arms before we got straightened up again. I noticed two things about him while we were thus engaged. One was that by the smell of him he’d been imbibing a drop of Dutch courage from a private store I suspected he kept in his room—the other that he was fairly shaking with fright.

“‘I s-s-say, you know, th-this is awful! He’s—he’s m-m-mad,’ he stuttered. You really couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little beast in a way. I believe he was nearly crying!

“‘Mad nothing!’ I said. ‘Anyway, mad or sane, he knows a damn sight more about seamanship than either of us.’ I’d a good mind to add that so far as he was concerned that wasn’t saying much.

“Arnot moaned, ‘He’ll drown us all, that’s what he’ll do!’ gave a despairing little flop with his arms, and dived into his room, for all the world like a startled penguin.

“I jolly well wasn’t going to take sides against the skipper with a little squirt like Arnot, but in my own mind I was far from happy about him.

“What was he driving at? God knows!... Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. Was he trying to throw his ship away after all those years of command? I can’t say. I know I knocked a couple of Mister Arnot’s teeth into the back of his head for saying so, after it was all over; but that was more a matter of principle, and by way of relieving my feelings, than anything else. It looked like it, I must own. And yet I don’t think it was quite that. It was more, if you understand me, that he just felt as if things had gone too far for him—so he threw his cards on the table, and left it to—well, shall we say Providence to shuffle them!

“Well, Mister Mate was going to have worse to put up with yet!

“The big blow lasted off and on for four days, and then it began to ease off a bit. I went below for a sleep: I was fairly coopered out. I just flopped down in my wet clothes and was off at once.

“When I came on deck again for the middle watch we were right in the thick of a dense white fog. There was a cold wind blowing steadily out of nowhere, and the ship was still going along, as near as I could judge, at about thirteen or fourteen knots. The first person I saw was the old bos’n—a Dutchman, and a real good sailorman, though a bit on the slow side, like most Dutchmen—standing under the break of the poop with his nose thrown up to windward, sniffing like an old dog.

“‘Ice!’ he said. ‘I schmell ice!’

“I should think he did ‘schmell’ it! Phoo! but it was cold! The sails were like boards—as stiff and as hard. I doubt if we could have furled them if we had wanted to. The helmsman, when the wheel was relieved, left the skin of his fingers on the spokes. It was a queer, uncanny experience ... the ship ripping along through that blanket of fog, as tall and white as the ghost of a ship.... If there had been anyone else to see her, they might have been excused for thinking they’d met the ‘Flying Dutchman’ a few thousand miles off his usual course.

“And ice—there was ice everywhere! It must have been all round us, though we never saw it, only, as the bos’n said, ‘schmelt’ it and heard it. Sometimes there would be the sound of the seas breaking along it for miles; sometimes there would be the weird noises—shrieks and groans—that the bergs make when they are ‘calving’; now and then cracks like musketry fire—and in the midst of it all the penguins would make you jump out of your skin with calling out exactly like human voices.

“There the Old Man stood on the poop, the whole time, more like a frozen image than a man—his arms laid along the spanker boom, and his chin resting on them—for hours, never speaking or moving.

“I went up to him at last and begged him to lie down, promising to call him if anything happened. He seemed to wake out of a dream just as he had done that day in the cabin at Victoria. His breath had congealed and frozen his beard to his sleeve, and he had to give a regular tug to get it loose. And he had to tear his hand away from the iron of the spar and leave the skin behind.

“I got him a cup of coffee, and he drank it down, and then he lay down on the settee in the chart-room. He called me back as I was leaving him, as if he were going to say something. But he only said, ‘Never mind—it is nothing,’ and lay down again.

“I looked in on him when the mate relieved me at eight bells. He was still fast asleep, and it came over me all of a sudden how old and tired he looked. I didn’t see any sense in waking him, so I tiptoed off and left him.

“When I woke at seven bells I could tell at once by the movement of the ship that she had much less way on her. I don’t mind owning I was more than a little relieved. The Old Man’s cracking on had begun to get on my nerves a bit since the fog had come on. It was so unusual there was something uncanny about it. I don’t suppose I should have cared a cuss if he’d been one of your dare-devil, Hell-or-Melbourne, what-she-can’t-carry-she-must-drag sort of blighters. But, being the man he was, that he should suddenly bust out like this—well, it staggered me. It was like one’s favourite uncle going Fanti.

“What had really happened, as it turned out, was that Mister Mate had taken the bull by the horns, and shortened sail while the Old Man was safely out of the way. It was dead against his orders, and when the skipper came on deck, which he did just as I turned up, there was a rare to-do.

“I never saw a man in such a passion. He was white and shaking with anger. He went for Arnot in a regular fury. Was he master of his own ship, or was he not? and so on, and so on. And then Arnot, who had lost his head altogether, started bawling back at him about barratry and Board of Trade inquiries.

“‘You damned insubordinate hound!’ yells the Old Man. I could see the big veins swell up on his forehead. I thought he would have struck the mate.

“And then—something happened. There was a jar and a grinding crash forward, and we were all thrown sprawling in a heap on the deck.

“The ship had driven bows on into a berg nearly as big as a continent, and then slowly slid off again. Nobody was hurt. The men came tumbling out of the deckhouse where they berthed before you could look round. I don’t suppose any of them was asleep, for every one was getting a bit jumpy since we had been among the ice.

“The first thing I saw when I picked myself up was Arnot crawling out of the scuppers with such a comical look of surprise that I had to laugh. Then I saw the Old Man—and the laugh died.

“I shall never forget his face—miserable and yet lifted up both at once, if you understand me, like old what’s-his-name—you know—sacrificing his daughter. There he stood, on the break of the poop, quite calm and collected, seeing to the swinging out of the boats, and making sure that they had food and water. Then at the last he went back to the chart-room to fetch the ship’s papers.

“He sighed once, and looked round—a long look as if he were saying good-bye to it all in his heart. He let his hand rest on her rail for a minute, and I saw his lips move as if he were speaking to himself. Then he sighed again, and went in.

“The ship settled down very fast. We waited five minutes—ten minutes. I began to feel uneasy and went along to see what was detaining him. I glanced into the chart-room. He was sitting by the table: I could see his grey head—the hair getting a bit thin on top—just as I’d seen it scores of times. Nothing wrong that I could see....

“Fifteen minutes—twenty—I shoved my head in to tell him the boat was waiting....

“But I never got him told.... He must have had some sort of a stroke—evidently when he was going to make a last entry in the log, for the book lay open before him. I wonder what he was going to write in it. I wonder! Ah, well, no one will ever know that but his Maker.

“He was still breathing when we got him into the boat, but it was plain to see that no Board of Trade inquiry would ever trouble him.

“We only just pulled away from the ship in time. She went down quite steadily, on a perfectly even keel. I suppose her cargo—she was loaded right down to her marks—helped to keep her upright. She just settled quietly down, with a little shiver now and then like a person stepping into cold water. Her sails kept her up a little until they were soaked through. She looked—oh, frightfully like a drowning woman! The fog shut down like a curtain just at the finish, and the last I saw of her was like a white drowning hand thrown up out of the water. I was glad from my heart the Old Man couldn’t see her. It was bad enough for me—a young fellow with all the world before me. I tell you, the salt on my cheeks wasn’t all sea water! What it would have been like for him——

“He was dead by the time a steamer picked us up, twelve hours later, and we buried him the same day, not many miles from the place where the old ‘Maid of Athens’ went down.

“Somehow, I think he would have been pleased if he knew.... You see, he thought a lot of the old ship....”