Chapter XII: A Dereliction

Eight bells—midnight.

The look-out in the crow’s-nest forward chanted his last melancholy “All’s well!” and gave way to the relief from the next watch. He climbed down by the cleats in the iron mast, and went to the starboard door in the forecastle. Other men followed him, jumping like cats along the streaming decks; and others came a little later—dingy fellows with neckclouts like dishcloths, who went in at the port door; these last being the goats of shipboard, the firemen and trimmers, who were divided off from the more high-caste deck-hands by a fore-and-aft bulkhead.

The third mate and the quartermaster, too, from the upper bridge, were replaced by another quartermaster and another mate; and they also went to the places appointed for them, and the snores of their breathing soon rattled against the bunk coamings. Only two men on the _Port Edes_, who were not on the roster of duty, stood that windy morning’s first watch. Under the lee of the canvas shelter Captain Kettle sat huddled on his camp-stool in a style which no man could distinguish with certainty between wakefulness and sleep; and below in his room, which opened off the main cabin, and was next the treasure-chamber, Patrick Onslow was dabbling in something which the laws of nations would stigmatize as felony, and that of complex degree.

There were two berths in the room—the upper one against the window port, which he slept in, and the lower, which contained two spread-out portmanteaus. Beneath this last were drawers in which the captain’s steward kept table linen, disused corks, the carpet which the chart-house sported in harbor, and other articles of ship’s use. Onslow had two of these drawers out on the floor, and from the recess of their site had drawn two fine green-silk-covered wires.

He disentangled the coils, taking care to avoid a kink, and then unscrewed the porcelain switch which governed the room’s electric lamp. Beneath were certain pieces of metal embedded in vulcanite.

Patrick Onslow gave his arms a preliminary stretch, a bare wire terminus in each hand. His fingers were trembling, as whose would not have been in the same situation?

He noticed it, and commented to himself on the circumstance: “That’s excitement, I suppose—excitement pure and understandable. Not being a man of stone, I can’t help being thrilled with the majesty of the moment, the sublime vagueness of my knowledge of what will happen when a current flashes through these wires. I’m not a coward. People who write about other men’s feelings when Death is beginning to paw them on the shoulder, write mostly from the imagination; and, so far as I’ve seen, they all do it wrong. I’ve been there; I’ve felt the old man’s bony touch more than once; and so I know. A man isn’t of necessity terrified; phantoms of his past deeds do not invariably flash before him; nor does he always lose his nerve, and move like a cheap automaton. I can’t speak for others; but what I personally have felt has been a dull carelessness for what is going to happen, and a curiosity about what will come afterwards. It seems to me that a thinking man, with the ambition of a mouse, should never fear death, because once dead, he becomes wiser than all the living remnant of the human race. There are men, I know, whom physical danger turns into a helpless mass of palpitating nerves. Shelf, for instance, is one of those. By Jove!”—he smiled grimly—“by Jove! I’d give a finger to have Theodore Shelf in my shoes just now, and force him to couple these wires, and spring the mine with his own fat, white fingers. I believe—yes, I verily believe the experience would turn him honest. Ah, there goes one bell. Time’s up.”

Through a lull in the wind, the tenor clang of the ship’s bell came down to him, and on its heels, more dimly, the look-out’s dissyllabic assurance in the dismal minor key that he was awake, and had nothing to report.

Then Patrick Onslow made connection, and sent through the green-silk covered wires a current direct from the steamer’s dynamo; and on that moment was thrown against the iron roof of the state room as though the infernal machine had exploded beneath his very feet.

* * * * *

The camp-stool was kicked into the air, the wet canvas dodgers shed water in streams, and Captain Owen Kettle fell spread-eagled on the planking of the bridge. From the hatch in the fore-deck before him had sprung a volcano of ruddy flame spurting through vast billows of smoke; the iron plating round it buckled and split; and the whole steamer gave a trembling, frightened leap. Presently, from the black, windy night above, there fell an avalanche of _débris_ which smote the steamer and the water round, like canister-shot from a distant cannonade.

Then came a thumping jar from the engine-room, repeated twice over; and then the engines stopped.

“My God,” thought Kettle, “he’s overshot the mark! If she’s broken down, we’re done for.”

But for all that he did not lose for an instant his presence of mind or instinct of command; but, picking himself up, clapped a stumpy leaden whistle between his lips and blew shrilly.

At first no one answered his summons. From the forecastle, from the stokehold, from aft, came the ship’s company, making by instinct for the high land of the bridge deck; and from his eminence the little captain scowled down upon them and swore. It is not a wholesome sight to see grown men screaming through sheer terror; and the sooner they are dissociated, either by words or blows, from this frame of mind, the more they will be able subsequently to respect themselves. By dint of a vinegar tongue, and suggestive movements towards a pair of implements which bulged his jacket pockets, Kettle drove a gang of five to set the mizzen trysail to keep the steamer head to sea. She was rapidly losing her way, and if she broached-to beam-on with that heavy sea running, the lower decks would be filled with green water continuously, and that, with such a gaping rent where the hatch had been, meant simply a rapid swamping.

Then the captain looked round him, seemingly for a messenger. The mate of the watch hung on to the handle of the engine-room telegraph, which still pointed to “full speed ahead,” looking dazed and helpless. The quartermaster’s hands were mechanically sawing at the spokes of the wheel, but it was equally evident that he also did not know what he was doing. Just then Onslow raced up the bridge ladder three steps at a time.

“Ah,” cried Kettle, “now you are a man who can keep his head in a bit of a fluster, and by James you’re the only one on board. Just tumble forward, will you, and get down into that hold? See what’s wrong.”

Onslow nodded and turned to go without a word. From two or three of the men a thin cheer rose as he passed them, and before he had gained the bottom of the ladder on to the iron lower deck, half a dozen were on the top rungs after him. Sailors will seldom refuse to follow when a superior shows the way; and besides, these fellows were getting over their first panic, and were beginning to be ashamed of themselves for giving way to it.

The mizzen trysail was not then set, and because the steamer’s way had left her, she was falling off into the trough, and rolling bulwarks under to every sea. She was shipping water fast. The creaming, solid masses sluicing across the deck-plates smote the men breech high with the weight of rams; and he who, when the waters were upon him, left his hold, would have been swept like a cork to leeward. But, by the hatch-coamings, the winches, and odd wet streamers of rope, they clawed their way forward, and cowered round the great hole made by the explosion, holding there by the edge of the twisted, riven plates. The seas creamed over their heads, falling in noisy cascades into the blackness below, and from out of that darkness, above all the bellowing of wind and the clanging of iron and the other din, came a sodden whistling of water, which seemed to confirm the worst fears.

“Pooh!” said some one, trying to be cheery, “that’s only the small sup she’s shipped since the hatches were blown off. The bilge pumps’ll soon kick that drop overboard.”

“Guess you lie,” said another, with a weary shake of the head.

Then the ink of the heavens overhead was splashed with a vivid fork of lightning, and the men saw Onslow, with his face as white as his teeth, lowering himself over the brink, and gripping with his knees a twisted iron pillar below. The light above slapped out, and within the dim, jagged outline of where the hatch had been all was blackness. And overhead the thunder rumbled like the passing of a Titan’s gun-train. The men shivered. One of them, an old, white-haired able-seaman, was physically sick. And meanwhile the _Port Edes_ rolled through forty-two degrees, and the Gulf water flowed in green and black over each bulwark alternately.

The men hung over the dark abyss of the hatch listening intently, and above the noises of the gale they could hear the sullen wash of water in the hold growing heavier and more sullen with every roll. Another flash of lightning blazed out overhead, painting white the shaft of the hatch, and showing at its foot a muddy sea, full of floating straws, and barrel staves, and litter. Onslow was out of sight. And the lower hold was afloat almost to its deck-beams.

But presently the explorer returned, swimming rather than walking—as another flash showed them—and he leaped to the battens which made the stairway to overhead with the haste of a man who knows that the waste of moments may well cost human lives. The men clustered about him round-eyed as he gained the deck for a word of what he had seen, but he brushed through them roughly and made for aft. It seemed to them that no spoken sentence could have given a worse report of what had befallen than this mute action. The fellows knew that officers always made the best of everything, if there is a best to be made; and so the silence was terribly suggestive.

At the same moment, as if to confirm their worst fears, the steamer took a heavy sea clean over her forecastle head; and above the din of the water, as it came cascading down into the lower deck, there arose wild cries of, “She’s sinking!” “Her bottom’s blown out!” “She’s settling by the head!”

Yelling these tidings, the men scampered back to the bridge-deck, where, saving for the few driven off to set the mizzen trysail, all the rest of the steamer’s complement were collected.

“She’s settling by the head! It’s making a clean breach over her this minute! She’ll be down with us if we don’t look quick!”

Then another voice cried: “Let the foul old tramp go to hell by herself. She shan’t drown me, for one, while she’s got a boat that’ll swim. Come along, boys!” Whereupon a mixed half-dozen of deck-hands and firemen made a rush for the foot of the upper bridge ladder.

At the head of that ladder stood Captain Kettle, grinning like a tortured fiend. The crew were acting precisely as it had been planned that they should act. They were doing what a laboriously-formed plot had compelled them to do. But at that moment the little captain’s weakness for battle nearly got the better of him, and was within an ace of making him attempt to upset the entire apple-cart. The idea of his men—the despised all-nation rabble, whom he had brow-beaten into subjection all across the broad Atlantic—taking the initiative into their own hands now, was too much for him to swallow in a single dose. Sooner than submit, he would have ruined everything ten times over. Consequently he drew on the first man who advanced up the ladder, and his eyes lit up with the steady, passionless glare of slaughter.

The fellow was brave enough—desperate, too, as a man could be—but upon certain death he hesitated to advance. Indeed, when Kettle, coming down the ladder himself, thrust him furiously back with a black pistol muzzle, he retreated to the bridge-deck, as did those who were with him.

But the other men of that worthy crew had no mind to be tyrannized over any longer when the steamer was momentarily settling down under their feet, and drowning was an immediate question. By the funnel stays and by one another’s backs they swarmed on to the top of the fiddley, and thence gaining the boat platforms, set about cutting adrift the grimy awnings with their knives, and clearing away the tackles and falls. They shipped rudders and fitted the plugs, and one or two, with more forethought than their frightened fellows, shouldered the boats’ water-breakers and took them aft to where the condenser-tap gave upon the lower deck.

Kettle did not interfere. He had held the bridge-deck ladders against all comers, and in some cranky way felt that his honor was unsmirched. But he gave no help, no hint, no further order, and surveyed the scene with folded arms and a sour, thin smile. Patrick Onslow, being moved by a different set of feelings, acted more humanely.

“Take time, men,” he sung out coolly, “if you will be cowards and leave the ship. I don’t think she’ll sink—at any rate not yet.”

The men had knocked away the chocks, hoisted the boats, and swung the davits outboard.

“Keep your heads, you trembling idiots! Pass your painters forward before you begin to lower, and don’t lower till you’ve victualled the boats. You’ve at least a hundred-and-fifty mile run before you can make Charlotte Harbor, which is your best port with this wind blowing; and as like as not you’ll miss your road when you get inshore among the keys and reefs, and be a week getting there.”

A few of the men, seeing the force of this, ran below and raided the galley and the steward’s store-room of what they could lay hands upon. But they only brought up one load of tins. They were frightened lest the others should in their terror go off without them. So they bundled their gleanings pell-mell on to the floor gratings, and, with a dozen men in each, the boats began to lower away. When they touched water, the falls were let go to overhaul as they chose, and then unhooked. The boats rode by their painters, swooping on one sea up to the level of the bridge-deck, diving twenty feet down in the next trough, and lying in very great danger of being stove to pieces.

A man in each was standing by the painter, others were getting out oars.

“Where’s the donkeyman?” cried some one.

“And Mr. Onslow?”

“And the skipper?”

“Oh, in the boat.”

“Then cast off. We’ve got all, and we must be clear of the ship before she founders, or she’ll take us down too in her wash.”

The painters were slipped, and from either beam the steamer’s lifeboats diverged under the backing impulse of their oars. Out of sight of one another they dropped astern, and each picking a favorable chance, they slewed round in a pother of spray.

Then they stepped their masts; and then, one under a jib, and the other under close-reefed lug, they drove away before the wind, leaving the setting of a course for after consideration.

Steamer sailors are not used to small-boat sailing in a heavy sea, and it takes them some time to wear down the novelty of it. By a providence, there was the second mate in one, an old North Sea smacksman, to take the tiller, and an able seaman from the same school in the other boat, who was also competent to manage her. The boats were built for the weather, but they required handling; and excepting these two men, there were no others up to the task. The rest trimmed ship, some of them baling, some too frightened to do anything but cling on to a thwart—these last from the fireholds mostly—and with their complements in this danger and disorder, the _Port Edes’_ two lifeboats drove away into the night and the north-north-east.

Three men on the steamer, from inside the chart-house, watched the boats go away; and one of them, the donkeyman, was wondering what kind of fool to call himself for being left.