Sunday came, a day of sullen fear and foreboding on the Bristol Girl. Henry finished his work in the galley and went on deck. An aged seaman was sitting on a hatch plaiting a long splice. His fingers seemed each a nimble intelligence as they worked, for their master never looked at them. Instead, his small blue eyes, after the manner of sailors’ eyes, looked out beyond the end of things.
“So you would know the secrets of the lines?” he said, without moving his gaze from the horizon. “Well, you must just watch. It’s so long I’ve been doing it that my old head has forgotten how; only my fingers remember. If I think what I’m doing I get muddled up. Will you be a sailor and go aloft one day?”
“Why, I’d like to, if I could learn the workings,” Henry said.
“It’s not so hard to learn the workings. You must learn first to bear things that landsmen never heard of. That’s the first thing. It’s very cruel, but you may never leave it once you start. Here I’ve been trying to take my old hulk ashore and berth it in front of a fire for a dozen years. I want to think awhile and die. But it’s no use. Every time I find myself running my legs off to get aboard some ship or other.”
He was interrupted by a vicious ringing of the ship’s bell.
“Come,” he said, “the master will be telling us the hot ta1es now.”
The skull-faced master stood before his crew, armed with his God. The men looked fearfully at him, as small birds gaze at an approaching snake, for his faith was in his eyes and words of fury fell from his thin lips.
“God has struck you with only the title of his shattering might,” he shouted. “He has shown you the strength of His little finger that you may repent before you go screaming in hell-fire. Hear the name of the Lord in the frightful wind and repent you of your whorings and your blasphemies! Ah! He will punish you even for the wicked thoughts in your heads.
“There is a parable in the sea that should close about your throats like a freezing hand and choke you with the terror. But now the storm is done you have forgotten it. You are happy, and contrition is not in you. But take warning of the lesson of the Lord. Repent! Repent! or the wrath destroys you.”
He swung his arms wildly and spoke of the poor lonely dead, suffering and burning for dear human faults; and at last he sent his men terrified away.
“That is not so,” said the old sailor fiercely to Henry. “Do not be taking stock in his crazy talk. Who made the storm—God or devil—made it for itself and took joy of it. What being could hurl the wind so would not be bothering himself about a chip of a boat floating in immensity. I know I would not, if I were that god or devil.”
The Bo’s’n, Tim, had come up with his last words, and now he took Henry’s arm protectingly.
“True for you,” he said; “but do not let it get back to him that you say such things or even hear them with your ears, or he will be demonstrating the might of God to you with a rope’s end. He and his God are a hard pair to be getting down on you, and you a boy scrubbing pots in the galley.”
The trade wind blew on unceasingly, and, when his scouring and peeling were done, Henry talked with the men while he laid hand to the ropes and went aloft and learned the names and workings of the ship’s gear. The sailors found him a quiet, courteous boy with a way of looking at them as though their speech were a great gift and they wise, kind men to be giving it to him; and so they taught him what they could, for very plainly this boy was born to the sea. He learned the short and long haul chanteys, the one quick and nervous and the other a slow, swinging rhythm. He sang with them the songs of death and mutiny and blood in the sea. To his lips came the peculiar, clean swearing of sailors; phrases of filth and blasphemy and horror, washed white by their utter lack of meaning in his mouth.
And in the nights he lay back quietly while the men talked of wonders seen and imagined; of mile-long serpents which coiled about ships and crushed and swallowed them, and of turtles so huge that they had trees and streams and whole villages on their backs and only sank once in five hundred years. Under the swinging lamps they told how Finns could whistle up a deadly storm for their revenge; how there were sea-rats that swam to the ships and gnawed holes through the planking until the ships sank. They spoke shudderingly of how one, sighting the dread, slimy kraken, might never see land again for the curse that was on him. Water spouts were in their speech, and mooing cows that lived in the sea and suckled their calves like land cows; and ghost ships sailing endlessly about the ocean looking for a lost port, their gear worked by seamen who were bleached skeletons. And Henry, lying there, reached breathless for their words with his avidity.
“On such a night, Tim stretched himself and said, “I know nothing of your big snakes at all, nor have I seen the kraken, God save me! But I’ve a bit of a tale myself if you’ll be listening.
“ ’Twas when I was a boy like this one here, and I sailing in a free ship that tucked about the ocean picking up here and there—sometimes a few black slaves and now and then a gold ring from a Spanish craft that couldn’t help itself—whatever we could get. We had a master by election and no papers at all, but there were different kinds of flags, and they on the bridge. If we did be picking out a man o’ war in the glass, then we ran for it.
“Well, anyway, as I’m telling you, one morning there was a little barque to the, starboard, and we wetting sail to run her down; and so we did, too. Spanish, she was, and little enough in her but salt and green hides. But when we turned out the cabin there was a tall, straight woman with black hair to her, and a long white forehead, and the slenderest fingers I ever looked on with my eyes. So we took her aboard of us and didn’t take the rest. The captain was for leading the woman to the quarter deck alongside of him, when the bo’s’n stepped up.
“We’re a free crew,’ he says, ‘and you the master by election. We want the woman, too,’ he says, and if we don’t be getting her there’ll be a bit of mutiny in a minute.’ The captain scowled around, but there was the crew scowling back at him; so he pulled up his shoulders and laughed—a nasty kind of laugh.
“ ‘How will you be deciding?’ he asks, thinking there would be a grand fight over the woman. But the bo’s’n slipped some dice out of his pocket and threw them on the deck.
“ ‘We’ll use these!’ he says, and in a minute every man of the crew was on his knees and reaching for the dice. But 1 was taking a long sight of the woman there alone. I says to myself, ‘That do be a hard kind of woman, and one that might be doing cruel things to hurt the man she hated. No, my boy,’ I says, ‘you’d best not be coming in on the game.’
“But just then the dark woman ran to the rail and picked a round shot out of the racks and jumped overside, hugging it in her arms. That was all! We ran to the rail and looked—but only a few bubbles there were to show.
“Well, it was two nights later, the afterwatch was for running into the fo’c’sle and the hair bristling up on his head. ‘There’s a white thing, and it swimming after us,’ he says, ‘and the looks on it like the woman that went overboard.’
“Of course we ran and looked over the taffrail, and I could see nothing at all; but the others said there was a thing with long white hands reaching out for our stern post, not swimming but just dragging after us like the ship was lodestone and it a bit of iron, You can know there was little enough sleeping that night. Those that did dust off cried and moaned in their sleep; and I need not tell you what that same thing signifies.
“The next night, up comes the bo’s’n out of the hole screaming like a mad one, and the hair all turned gray on his head. We did be holding him and petting him awhile and finally he managed to whisper,