THE END OF AN ODYSSEY

Hughie reckoned that they might have to steam eastward for quite three or four days before they sighted land.

This was an underestimate.

The history of the Orinoco's last voyage will never be written. In the first place, those who took part in it were none of them men who were addicted to the composition of travellers' tales; and in the second, their recollections of the course of events when all was over, were hopelessly and rather mercifully blurred. Not that they minded. One derives no pleasure or profit from reconstructing a nightmare—especially when it has lasted for sixteen days and nights.

Some events, of course, were focussed more sharply in their memories than others. There was that eternity of thirty-six hours during which the Orinoco, with every vulnerable orifice sealed up or battened down, her asthmatic engines pulsing just vigorously enough to keep her head before the wind, rode out a north-easterly gale which blew her many miles out of her reckoning. ("Not that that matters much," said her philosophic commander. "We don't know where we are now, it's true; but then we didn't know where we were before, so what's the odds? We'll keep on steering away about north-east, and as we are aiming at a target eight hundred miles wide we ought to hit it somewhere.") Then there was a palpitating night when the faithful engines, having wheezily but unceasingly performed their allotted task for a period long enough to lull all who depended upon them into an optimistic frame of mind, broke down utterly and absolutely; and the fires had to be banked and the Orinoco allowed to wallow unrestrainedly in the trough of the sea while the entire ship's company, with cracking muscles and heart-breaking gasps, released a jammed crosshead from the guides and took down a leaky cylinder.

They were evidently out of the ordinary sea-lanes, for they sighted only one steamer in ten days, and her they allowed to go by.

"None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that—yet. After all, we only want to know where we are. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions. It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe."

"Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the time, captain."

And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pass by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence.

But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel—sometimes lashed to it—in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion.

Still, one can get used to anything. They even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract la joie de vivre out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie.

And they got to know each other, thoroughly,—a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance.

It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease—few enough now—he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever.

Walsh in a sense was the weakest of the quartet. He was a capable engineer and an honest man, but he lacked the devil-may-care nonchalance of the other three; for he had a wife and eight children waiting for him in distant Limehouse, and a fact like that gives a man a distaste for adventure. He was a disappointed man, too. He had held a chief engineer's "ticket" for seven years, but he had never held a chief engineer's billet. He could never afford to knock off work and wait until the right berth should come his way: he must always take the first that offered, for fear that the tale of boots and bread in Limehouse should diminish. As a crowning stroke of ill-luck, he had been paid off from his last job because his ship had collided with a New York lighter and been compelled to go into dry dock for three months; and by shipping in the Orinoco he was barely doing more than work his passage home. His ten-year-old dream of delivering Mrs. Walsh from her wash-tub for all time, and exalting her from the res angustÆ of Teak Street, Limehouse, to a social environment reserved exclusively for the wives of chief engineers, seemed as far from fulfilment as ever. Still, he maintained a stiff upper lip and kept his watch like a man, which is more than most of us would have done under the circumstances.

But it was Goble who interested Hughie most. In the long night-watches, as they swung the heavy fire-shovels in the stokehold, or heaved the ever-accumulating clinkers over the side, or took turn and turn about to gulp tepid water out of a sooty bucket, or met over a collation of coffee and ship's biscuit—the supper of one and the breakfast of the other—in the galley, Goble would let fall dry pawky reflections on life in general, with autobiographical illustrations, which enabled Hughie to piece together a fairly comprehensive idea of his companion's previous existence.

John Alexander Goble had played many parts in his time, like most vagrants. He had been born a gamekeeper's son in Renfrewshire, and had lost his father early, that devoted upholder of proprietary rights having been shot through the head in a poaching affray. After this catastrophe the widow, who had openly pined for her native Glasgow during the whole of her husband's lifetime, had returned to that municipal paradise; and the ripening youth of John Alexander Goble had been passed in a delectable locality, known as "The Coocaddens," to which he could never refer without a gleam of tender reminiscence in his eyes.

Why John Alexander had ever deserted this Eden Hughie could never rightly ascertain. His references to that particular epoch in his career were invariably obscure; but since he darkly observed on one occasion that "weemen can mak' a gowk o' the best man leevin'," Hughie gathered that Mr. Goble's present course of life owed its origin to a tender but unsatisfactory episode in the dim and distant days of his hot youth.

"After that," John would continue elliptically, "I went tae Motherwell. D'ye ken Motherwell? A grand place! Miles and miles of blast-furnaces, and the sky lit up day and nicht, like the Last Judgment. I did a wheen odd jobs there. Whiles I would hurl a trolley wi' coke, whiles I would sort coal wi' some lassies, and at last I got a job as a moulder."

"What's that?" inquired the ever-receptive Hughie.

"What else but a body that makes moulds?"

"Yes, but how does he do it?"

"Weel, there's a sort o' sandy place at the fit o' each smelting-furnace—like a bit sea-shore, ye'll understand—and every four-and-twenty hours they cast the furnace. They let oot the melted ore, that is, and it rins doon intil moulds that hae been made in the sand. (Ye dae it by just buryin' baulks o' timber in rows and then pickin' them oot again, and the stuff rins intil the hollows that have been left. When it's cauld they ca' it pig-iron.) Well, I stuck tae that job for a matter o' sax months. But it was drouthy work, besides bein' haird on the feet,—you go scratch-scratching in the sand wi' your bare soles makin' the moulds,—and presently I gave it up and took tae daen' odd jobs among the trucks and engines in the yairds. I liked that fine, for machinery is the yin thing that really excites me. First I was a coupler, then I was a fireman, then I got tae drivin' a wee shunting engine, dunting trucks about the yaird. And at last I was set in charge o' a winding-engine at a pit-heid. That was a grand job; but it didna last long. I was drinkin' haird by this time—I'd stairtit after I left the Coocaddens—and yin' day I was that fou' I let the cage gang doon wi' a run tae the bottom o' the shaft."

"Was there anybody in the cage?" inquired Hughie, as Goble paused, as if to contemplate some mental picture.

"There was not, thank God! But there was a bit laddie doon ablow in the pit, that was sittin' on his hutch—his truck, that is—at the fit o' the shaft, waitin' on the cage. He wasna expectin' the thing tae fall doon like a daud o' putty, so he was no' sittin' quite clear; and the cage cam' doon and took off baith his feet. Man, I hae never forgotten his mither's face when they brought him up. I lost ma job, and I hae never touched a drop since. For seven-and-twenty years have I been on the teetotal—seven-and-twenty years! It'll shorten ma life, I doot," he added gloomily; "but I'll bide by it!"

"What became of the boy?" inquired Hughie.

"He's gotten twa wooden feet the noo," replied Goble more cheerfully, "and he's been minding the lamp-room this twenty year. I've heard frae him noo and again, and we've always been freens; but his auld mither has never forgiven me. She's ower seventy the day, but Jeems tells me she aye lets a curse every time he mentions ma name."

A further instalment of Mr. Goble's adventures explained how he took to the sea.

"After I cleared oot o' Motherwell I went to the Clydeside. I was a fair enough mechanic by this time, but I had tak'n a sort o' skunner at machinery—no wi'oot some reason—and I tried for to get taken on as a dock-hand. I had no luck there, and I was fair starvin' when yin day I met a freend o' min' on the Dumbarton Road, and he asked me would I like tae wash dishes and peel potaties on a passenger steamer. I would hae been pleased tae soop the lums o' muckle Hell by that time, gin it was for a wage, I was that thrawn wi' hunger; so I jist said, ''Deed ay!'

"For a hale summer I sat peelin' potaties and washin' dishes on board the Electra, her that has done a trip doon the watter, roond about Arran and Bute, and hame by Skelmorlie ilka day o' the summer season for twenty-twa years. When the winter cam' on I dooted I would be oot o' a job again; but bein' nowadays permanently on the teetotal, and varra dependable, I was shifted tae the auld Stornoway, o' the same line, carryin' goods, cattle, and passengers tae the West Highlands—Coll, Tiree, Barra, Uist, Ullapool, and a wheen places in and oot o' sea-lochs up and doon that coast. She loused frae the Broomielaw every Thursday at three o'clock in the afternoon, and she was back there, week in week out, summer and winter, by eleven in the forenoon o' the following Wednesday. The folk along by Largs, where her cap'n lived, used tae set their watches by her. She was a fine auld boat, the Stornoway: she piled herself up on the rocks below the Scuir of Eig, where she had no call tae be, in a snowstorm seven winters syne. I was a cabin steward nowadays, ye'll unnerstand; and once we were roond the Mull and the passengers had thrawn up what they'd had tae their tea off Gourock and tak'n a dander ashore at Oban, appetites was big and I was busy. It was the first time I had seen the gentry at their meals, and it improved my mainners considerable. Never since then have I skailed ma tea intil ma saucer: I jist gie a bit blow on it noo. Yon's Mr. Allerton roarin' for to be relieved at the wheel."

On another occasion Goble explained how he came to forsake the fleshpots of the Stornoway and take to the high seas.

"I was aye hankerin', hankerin' after the machinery," he explained. "A body canna serve tables all his life. So after twa years on the Stornoway I shippit as a fireman on a passenger steamer outward bound frae Glasgow tae Bilbao. There I left her, tae be second engineer on a wee tramp carrying iron-ore tae the Mediterranean. That was nigh twenty years ago, and I've never set fit in Scotland since. Weel, weel! Aha! Mphm!" (Ad lib. and da capo.)

So he would discourse, in a manner which passed many a weary hour for both, and added considerably to Hughie's stock of human knowledge.

The days wore on. The work and long hours were beginning to tell their tale, but the entire crew kept grimly to it. Their nerves were in good order too. Even when, on the morning of the sixteenth day, as they groped their way through a streaming wet fog, a great ghostly monster of a liner suddenly loomed out of the wrack, and, as she shouldered her way past them, actually scraped the starboard counter with her stern, while the look-out on her forward deck yelled frantically, and a frightened man up aloft on the bridge flung his wheel over with great rattling of steam steering-gear to avoid a collision, the sole occupant of the Orinoco's deck—it was Goble: he was steering while Hughie and Walsh took their turn in the stokehold and Allerton slept—did not deem the occasion sufficiently important to merit a report until he was relieved from duty two hours later.

But this encounter provided that pawky philosopher with a valuable clue as to their whereabouts.

"She was a Ben liner," he intimated to Hughie in describing the event. "I saw the twa bit stripes roond her funnel, and her name, Ben Cruachan, on her stern. They're Glasgow boats, and sail every other Thursday tae Buenos Ayres, calling at Moville on Lough Foyle tae tak' up Irish passengers. It's no' near Cape Clear we are, anyway. We're somewhere off the north coast o' Ireland, sir. I kenned fine we were near land: this is a ground swell that's throwin' us aboot noo. Aiblins we'll be gettin' a dunt against the Giant's Causeway if we're no' canny."

There was something in Goble's conclusions, for after they had steamed dead slow all night the rising sun licked up the fog; and there, ten miles to the south of them, lay a long green seacoast; and straight before them uprose what looked like a rocky island, with a homely-looking white lighthouse perched half-way up its rugged face.

"If that land to the right is Ireland," said Hughie, "we can't be very far from Scotland. I wonder what that great rock ahead of us can be. Lucky we didn't reach it a couple of hours ago!"

"Don't you think," suggested Allerton, putting his head out of the engine-room hatchway, "that as we have a pukka Scot on board, we had better rouse him up and see if he can identify his native land?"

It was Goble's turn for sleep, but Allerton's suggestion was adopted, and he was haled on deck.

"Do you happen to recognise that island straight ahead, Mr. Goble?" inquired Hughie.

Goble surveyed the rock and the lighthouse, and though his countenance remained unmoved, his eye lit up with proprietary pride.

"Island? Yon's no' an island," he replied. "'Tis Scotland hersel'. Sir, 'tis the Mull o' Kintyre! It rins straight awa' back tae Argyllshire. We're at the varra mouth o' the Clyde. We micht hae been drawed there across the Atlantic by a bit string! God presairve us, it's a miracle!"

"The Clyde?" shouted Hughie. It seemed too utterly good to be true. "Are you sure, Goble? Is that really the Mull?"

"Sure?" Goble's expression was a mixture of pity and resentment. "Man, I'm tellin' ye I sailed roond it twice a week for the best pairt o' twa years. I was awfu' sick the first time. The second—"

All this time the Mull of Kintyre was growing nearer.

"What's the course?" queried Walsh, leaning over the bridge. "Do I turn up New Cut, Mr. Goble, or keep straight along the Blackfr'ars Road?"

Everybody's spirits were soaring marvellously at the sight of the blessed green land. Walsh's wife was within twenty-four hours of him.

"Keep yon heap o' stanes on your left hand, ma mannie," replied the greatly inflated Goble, facetiously indicating the towering headland before them, "and then straight on Ailsa Craig. You're daen' fine. Mr. Marrable, will you rin her up tae the Tail o' the Bank, off Greenock, or gi'e a cry in at Campbeltown Bay? It's jist roond the corner."

"Hang it! we'll take her all the way, now we have got so far," said Hughie. "We're home! I was reckoning on bringing up in Plymouth Sound; but that's a detail. Come on, Allerton, let's go below and fire up for the last time. We'll bring her in in style!"

And so it came about that not many hours later the Orinoco, a rotting hulk, clogged with weed, corroded with rust, caked with salt, feebly churning up the water with her debilitated propeller, steamed painfully but grandly past the Cloch Light and into the mouth of the Clyde. A sorry object she may have seemed to the butterfly host of natty paddle-steamers which was pouring down the river under the forced draught of triple competition, carrying the Glasgow man, released from office, to Dunoon and Rothesay and other summer repositories for wife and family. But to those who knew, she was no uncleanly tramp, but a battle-scarred veteran,—a ship that had deserved well of the Republic of the high seas,—another little Golden Hind, though laden with nothing nearer to Spanish ingots than bottles of imitation French claret. Every scar on her sides was an honourable wound; every groan and creak that rose from her starting timbers a pÆan; every cough and wheeze that proceeded from her leaky cylinders a prayer of joyful thanks. The Orinoco had graduated high in the nameless but glorious band of those who have illustrated, not altogether without profit and pride, the homely truth that

And so she turned the last corner of her long and painful Odyssey, and came home to lay up her bones by the Clyde, which had given them birth. And by a happy chance the unconscious Hughie, instead of navigating her to the Tail of the Bank as he had intended, changed his mind, put over his helm, and conned her up to the head of that beautiful Gareloch which, many many years ago, had given the little ship her maiden name.

There, swinging at her rusty cable, with the clear green water laving her weary forefoot, and the hills above Roseneath and Shandon smiling reassuringly down upon her in the glow of the evening sun, we will leave her. Molliter ossa cubent!

The law's delays are proverbial, and the task of getting even with Mr. Noddy Kinahan involved Hughie in endless encounters with those in high places, several appearances (with suite) in the abodes of the Law, and another trip to New York—by Cunarder this time.

However, grim determination will accomplish most things; and when some months later Hughie finally sailed from New York for his native land, the labour of love had been completed, and Mr. Noddy Kinahan was duly regretting, for a term of years, the fact that he had ever been born.

This consummation was followed by another, depressing but inevitable. The Orinoco Salvage Company, having served its purpose, paid Nature's debt and ceased to exist. The circumstances connected with its demise, together with the respective fates of Hughie's little band of Argonauts, will best be gathered from the following epistolary excerpts:—

No. I (N. B. Spelling corrected)

? Mistress Howieson,

17 Candlish Street, Greenock.

To H. Marrable, Esq.:—

Sir,—I thank you for cheque, and have disposed of same. I also thank you for offer to find a job for me. But I would prefer to bide by you, as I feel I will not get a better job than that. I would like fine to be your servant. You will be needing some one to redd up your quarters and keep your clothes sorted, now you are ashore. (Women is no' to be trusted.) Of course I would not want a big wage: the siller from the Orinoco will do grandly for a long time. I ken fine the way to wait at table and clean silver, having been steward, as I once telled you, on the old Stornoway, where they had a cuddy full of gentry every trip.—Your servant (I am hoping),

Jno. Alex. Goble.

No. II

(Extracts. No date or address, but obviously written in a public-house)

... So you must take the money back. It is no use to me: all I should get out of it would be a d—d bad headache. Also, it might give me ideas above my station, which is bad for the lower orders at any time. Give it to Walsh; but don't let on, of course, that it comes from me: let him believe that it is part of his natural share of the salvage. I have kept back enough to pay for a new suit (which I am now wearing) and one big bust before I sail next week as deck steward on an Aberdeen liner.

... Well, it was a great trip. We have all got something out of it. You have got an adventure and incidentally done a big thing, and I have spent a month of absolute happiness in the society of men who regarded me neither as an object of pity nor as a monster of depravity, but were content to let me go my own way as a man who prefers to live his own life and be asked no questions.... Your offer to set me on my legs again and make me a respectable member of society is friendly and, I suppose, natural; but it threatens a happy episode with a sad ending. I'm not cut out for conventionality, and (pace your kind references to my "sterling merit and latent force of character") I am not of the stuff that successful men are made of. I have only done two big things in my life. One was getting elected to Pop at Eton, the other was helping you to bring the old Orinoco home. I think I'll rest on my laurels now. I suppose I was born a rotter, and if you were to endeavour to raise me to your giddy heights I should only fall down again, and the bump at the bottom might hurt. I am safer where I am: the beauty of lying on the floor is that you can't fall off.

... Well, chin, chin! If I may be permitted to gush for a moment, I should like to tell you that you are a good sort.—Yours ever,

Lionel Allerton.

No. III

No. 4 Teak St., Limehouse.

Dear Sir,—I beg to acknowledge with thanks your cheque for share of salvage. It was far more than I expected, and the Adm'ty C'ts have certainly done well by us. At the best, I had hoped for suffic'nt to rig out the nippers with boots and duds for the winter and give the missis a week or two off the laundry work. We have all been fair barmy the last few days. Square meals and a big fire, and you can't hear yours'lf talk for the squeaking of the new boots. We are settling down a bit now, and I have put the rest of the money in the bank and told the old woman she is to burn her wash-tubs. Catch her: I d'n't think! With my new clothes I have obt'd a berth as Chief on board s.s. Batavia, of the Imperial Line, and sail on 21st inst. Her engines are (several lines of hopeless technicalities omitted). It was a lucky day for me when I struck the Orinoco, and luckier when Angus doctored my grog.

On returning from voyage will take the lib'ty of calling on you in London at the address you gave.—Yrs. respect'fly,

Jas. Walsh
(Chief Engineer s.s. Batavia).

Postscript (In a larger and less educated hand)

Mr. Marrable, Dear Sir,—The children and me begs to thank you for all your kindness to father. Father he is very greatful himself, but would rather leave it to me to tell you, as he don't like. Mr. Marrable, sir, if you could only see the diff'nce in the children, espec'y little Albert, what was always sickly, since they got good boots and food inside them you would feel well paid for your kindness. I know the money did not come from you, but it was through you we got it. God bless you, sir.—Yours resp'fly,

Mrs. Martha Walsh.

P. S.—Our ninth, which has just come, we are taking the liberty to call by your name.