I was a lot o’ things,” replied Harbutt. “Wished I’d never left them to join this b—y business, but it’s the same ashore, owners all the time stuffin’ themselves and gettin’ rich, workers starvin’.”
Raft belonged to the old time labour world dating from Pelagon, he grumbled, but had no grudge against owners in general, it was only in drink that Pelagon rose in him. Harbutt was an atom of the new voice that is heard everywhere now, even in fo’c’sles. He had failed in everything on land and a’board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a voice and an A.B. at the same time.
“What was your last job ashore?” went on Raft with the persistence of a child, always wanting to know.
“Cleanin’ out pig sties,” said Harbutt viciously. “Drove to it. I tell you when a chap’s down he’s down, the chaps that has money tramples on the chaps that hasn’t. I’ve been through it and I know. It’s the rich man does it.”
“Well,” said Raft, “I don’t even remember seeing one.”
“Haven’t you ever been in no cities?”
“I’ve been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side.”
“Well, you’ve seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin’ in carriages, that’s the sort that keeps us down, that’s the sort we’ve got to make an end of.”
Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot—but he could not see how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and always busy about their own affairs—and how were they to be made an end of?
“Do you mean killing them?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s other ways than killin’,” replied Harbutt. “It’s not them, it’s their money does the trick.”
He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned in also and the fo’c’sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the straining timbers of the ship.
Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it, intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes, without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene, with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers and the boom of the waves. This is the fo’c’sle whose great, great, great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.
CHAPTER II
NORTH-WEST
The Albatross, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.
Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the deck with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast canvas, talking all the time of subjects half a world away.
It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so. It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before him in dreamland.
“I’ve always dreamt before that I was starting from there,” said he, “but last night I was getting the old Albatross in, and the tow rope went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung round and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside in her night attire shouting to me to put the helm down—under hare sticks in the docks, mind you!”
“Dreams are crazy things,” said Mason. “I don’t believe there’s anything in them.”
“Well, maybe not,” said Pound. He glanced at the binnacle card and then went below.
Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more suggestive of power and the daring of man than the sight of those leviathan spars and vast sail spaces rising dizzily from main and foresail in pyramids to where the truck works like a pencil point writing on the sky. Nothing more arresting than the power of the steersman. A turn of the wheel in the hands of Raft would set all that canvas shuddering or thundering, spilling the wind as the water is spilled from a reservoir, a moment’s indecision or slackness might lose the ship a mile on her course. But Raft steered as he breathed, automatically, almost unconsciously, almost without effort. He, who ashore was hopelessly adrift and without guidance, at the helm was all wisdom, direction and intuition.
The wake of the Albatross lay as if drawn with a ruler.
His trick was nearly up, and when he was relieved he went forward; pausing at the fo’c’sle head to light a pipe he fell in talk with some of the hands, leaning with his back against the bulwarks and blown upon by the spill of the wind from the head sails.
An old shell-back by name of Ponting was holding the floor.
“We’re comin’ up to Kerguelen,” he was saying. “Should think I did know it. Put in there in a sealer out of New Bedford in ’82. I wasn’t more’n a boy then. The Yanks used to use that place a lot in those days. The blackest blastedest hole I ever struck. Christmas Island was where we lay mostly, for two months, the chaps huntin’ the wal’uses and killin’ more than they could carry. The blastedest hole I ever struck.”
“I was there in a Dane once,” began another of the crew. “It was time of year the sea cows was matin’ and you could hear the roarin’ of them ten mile off.”
“Dane,” said Ponting, “what made you ship a’board a Dane—I’ve heard tell of Danes. Knew a chap signed on in one of them Leith boots out of Copenhagen runnin’ north, one of them old North Sea cattle trucks turned into a passenger tramp, passengers and ponies with a hundred ton of hay stowed forward and the passengers lyin’ on their backs on it smokin’ their pipes, and the bridge crawled over with passengers, girls and children, and the chap at the wheel havin’ to push ’em out of the way, kept hittin’ reefs all the run from Leith to God knows where, and the Old Man playin’ the fiddle most of the time.”
“That
