Part 5

And, indeed, poor P—, quite young, and a smart seaman, was very hard of hearing. At the same time, he had the name of being the very devil of a fellow for carrying on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully clever at concealing his deafness, and, as to carrying on heavily, though he was a fearless man, I don’t think that he ever meant to take undue risks. I can never forget his naïve sort of astonishment when remonstrated with for what appeared a most dare-devil performance. The only person, of course, that could remonstrate with telling effect was our captain, himself a man of dare-devil tradition; and really, for me, who knew under whom I was serving, those were impressive scenes. Captain S— had a great name for sailor-like qualities—the sort of name that compelled my youthful admiration. To this day I preserve his memory, for, indeed, it was he in a sense who completed my training. It was often a stormy process, but let that pass. I am sure he meant well, and I am certain that never, not even at the time, could I bear him malice for his extraordinary gift of incisive criticism. And to hear him make a fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed one of those incredible experiences that take place only in one’s dreams.

It generally happened in this way: Night, clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an immense white sheet of foam level with the lee rail. Mr. P—, in charge of the deck, hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked on somewhere to windward of the slanting poop, in a state of the utmost preparedness to jump at the very first hint of some sort of order, but otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state of mind. Suddenly, out of the companion would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded, with a short white beard of a perpendicular cut, very visible in the dark—Captain S—, disturbed in his reading down below by the frightful bounding and lurching of the ship. Leaning very much against the precipitous incline of the deck, he would take a turn or two, perfectly silent, hang on by the compass for a while, take another couple of turns, and suddenly burst out:

“What are you trying to do with the ship?”

And Mr. P—, who was not good at catching what was shouted in the wind, would say interrogatively:

“Yes, sir?”

Then in the increasing gale of the sea there would be a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence.

“By Heavens, Mr. P-! I used to carry on sail in my time, but—”

And the rest would be lost to me in a stormy gust of wind.

Then, in a lull, P—’s protesting innocence would become audible:

“She seems to stand it very well.”

And then another burst of an indignant voice:

“Any fool can carry sail on a ship—”

And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a heavier list, a noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to leeward. For the best of it was that Captain S— seemed constitutionally incapable of giving his officers a definite order to shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily vague row would go on till at last it dawned upon them both, in some particularly alarming gust, that it was time to do something. There is nothing like the fearful inclination of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to bring a deaf man and an angry one to their senses.

XII.

So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her. However, all the time I was with them, Captain S— and Mr. P— did not get on very well together. If P— carried on “like the very devil” because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was, Captain S— (who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr. P—’s desperate goings on. It was in Captain S—’s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not carrying on quite enough—in his phrase “for not taking every ounce of advantage of a fair wind.” But there was also a psychological motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that iron clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore. There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts—who knows? Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan. Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines at bow and stern. It is impossible to say. She was built in the East Indies somewhere, of teak-wood throughout, except the deck. She had a great sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The men who had seen her described her to me as “nothing much to look at.” But in the great Indian famine of the seventies that ship, already old then, made some wonderful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras.

She took the secret of her speed with her, and, unsightly as she was, her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea.

The point, however, is that Captain S—, who used to say frequently, “She never made a decent passage after I left her,” seemed to think that the secret of her speed lay in her famous commander. No doubt the secret of many a ship’s excellence does lie with the man on board, but it was hopeless for Captain S— to try to make his new iron clipper equal the feats which made the old Tweed a name of praise upon the lips of English-speaking seamen. There was something pathetic in it, as in the endeavour of an artist in his old age to equal the masterpieces of his youth—for the Tweed’s famous passages were Captain S—’s masterpieces. It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad that, what between Captain S—’s yearning for old triumphs and Mr. P—’s deafness, I have seen some memorable carrying on to make a passage. And I have carried on myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde shipbuilder’s masterpiece as I have never carried on in a ship before or since.

The second mate falling ill during the passage, I was promoted to officer of the watch, alone in charge of the deck. Thus the immense leverage of the ship’s tall masts became a matter very near my own heart. I suppose it was something of a compliment for a young fellow to be trusted, apparently without any supervision, by such a commander as Captain S—; though, as far as I can remember, neither the tone, nor the manner, nor yet the drift of Captain S—’s remarks addressed to myself did ever, by the most strained interpretation, imply a favourable opinion of my abilities. And he was, I must say, a most uncomfortable commander to get your orders from at night. If I had the watch from eight till midnight, he would leave the deck about nine with the words, “Don’t take any sail off her.” Then, on the point of disappearing down the companion-way, he would add curtly: “Don’t carry anything away.” I am glad to say that I never did; one night, however, I was caught, not quite prepared, by a sudden shift of wind.

There was, of course, a good deal of noise—running about, the shouts of the sailors, the thrashing of the sails—enough, in fact, to wake the dead. But S— never came on deck. When I was relieved by the chief mate an hour afterwards, he sent for me. I went into his state-room; he was lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow under his head.

“What was the matter with you up there just now?” he asked.

“Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir,” I said.

“Couldn’t you see the shift coming?”

“Yes, sir, I thought it wasn’t very far off.”

“Why didn’t you have your courses hauled up at once, then?” he asked in a tone that ought to have made my blood run cold.

But this was my chance, and I did not let it slip.

“Well, sir,” I said in an apologetic tone, “she was going eleven knots very nicely, and I thought she would do for another half-hour or so.”

He gazed at me darkly out of his head, lying very still on the white pillow, for a time.

“Ah, yes, another half-hour. That’s the way ships get dismasted.”