CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
AN IMPRESARIO TUNES UP HIS PRIZE FOR BIG MONEY
I
Life aboard the Skipping Goone was much sobered by the death of the little baby. Lili, though her grief was genuine enough, found a vague refuge in knowing herself a center of sympathetic interest; but for a time Jerome was inconsolable.
However, though life was saddened, it must nevertheless go on. Some of the principal songbirds were preening themselves in anticipation of the furor they hoped to create in Africa. Fortunes had been made there. And you never could tell who might be listening. The excitement all round was naturally rendered much more pointed by the wonderful thing that had happened to Miss Valentine in Manila. It had come at last. She had received a cable message from America advising her that a private hearing was being arranged in Cape Town, and stating that a contract offer might depend on the verdict. The cable was signed by a name of such awful significance that the enraptured recipient trembled violently whenever she pronounced it, even to herself.
In her more confident moments Miss Valentine assured herself (and every one else, for that matter) that her reputation and fortune were already firmly established; but, being only human, and not so very far along, even yet, from the lowliness of her choir-singing days in Galesburg, the fortunate artist also experienced moments when she felt doomed to certain disaster. Something would be sure to go wrong. “I’ll be so nervous I can’t sing a note!” she confided to the contralto. But everybody told her of course she’d sing all right, and everybody was vociferous in congratulation exactly in proportion to the acuteness of his or her secret envy.
Mr. Curry smiled, then sighed. The bolt had fallen, though not, after all, quite from the blue. Bolts of this sort never did fall altogether from the blue any more. It only meant that in a little while another ornament would find its way on to his already crowded hands.
Naturally Miss Valentine spent nearly all of her time at the dinky piano in the cabin they called their “assembly saloon.” Early and late she worked, and swore a great deal under her breath, or sometimes proclaimingly, if the note happened to be very bad, and sometimes she would hurl her music on the floor and stamp on it, for she was a very temperamental artist indeed. But when things seemed to be going well, then she would be just lovely to every one, and say nice things like this: “I think you have one of the nicest contralto voices I’ve ever heard, dear,” or: “Now I’ve got those wretched Cs and D’s where I want them, I’m going to sit down and knit all day on a sweater for poor little Lili.”
One day she came running up on deck to Mr. Curry, crying miserably: “It’s gone! I can’t sing a single note any more that doesn’t sound like a tin whistle, and I feel just like drowning myself!”
“What’s all this?” asked the impresario cheerily.
“I tell you I can’t even get up to a B? without screeching,” she wailed, weeping copiously into a very small handkerchief. “And I think it’s just a shame, with the hearing so close!” Some of the songbirds began whispering a little.
Mr. Curry gave her one of his finest smiles. “You’ve just gotten yourself all tied up into about a hundred knots, that’s all. Don’t tell me it’s not so—can’t I see? Haven’t I got eyes? Now listen to me, my dear child. We’re going to walk up and down here on deck a few turns, and you’re going to take some very deep breaths of this sea air—oh, not little sniffs like that! What do you think you are, a rabbit? And now,” he ended confidently, “we’ll see what’s wrong in mighty short order!”
II
He sat at the piano and faced her, swinging idly back and forth, his hands loosely clasped. His lips were parted in a smile of quaint amusement.
“It will never do to try to sing with such a red nose,” he suggested.
She laughed, in spite of her plight, and struck out at him playfully in the air, then turned her back and spent an intensive moment before the tiny mirror of her vanity case.
Curry reached round to the keyboard with one bejewelled hand and struck a chord. “First your running scale—you know—with one over the octave.”
She started in bravely, though, just as she had expected, in no time he had stopped her, and was assuring her she was working too hard. “Didn’t I tell you you were all tied up?” Then he struck another chord. “Give me some soft work, please—some nice, quiet, smooth ‘ti-roos.’ No, no! Piano—piano! Wait a minute. You’re not on your breath.” He shook his head critically. “No, you’re not on your breath at all. Just relax—don’t be afraid—just feel restful. Let your shoulders down—there!”
“Relaxing won’t get the tin whistle out of my throat!” she lamented doggedly.
“We’ll see,” he soothed. “Try again—‘ti-roo.’” He listened carefully, his head on one side. “Put it more forward—right on your lips. Ti-roo-oo-oo. Let the breath carry it. Now once more.”
Half an hour passed, and still she was too “open.” The impresario, perspiring a little from concentrated exertion, scratched his head carefully, so as not to displace the shining toupee. Then, suddenly inspired, he jumped up from the piano stool.
“Look here,” he cried, “I want to see what your ribs are doing. Don’t you dare let them fall on the attack—if you do you’re lost! When you sing for those smug fellows in Cape Town I want you to think of your ribs every minute—you understand? Don’t think about who’s listening to you—think about your ribs!”
Placing one glistening hand intelligently against the singer’s ribs, Mr. Curry asked her to sigh for him. “Say: ‘Ooooooo.’” He waited breathlessly. “No—you let ’em fall! It’s just what I was afraid of!” He studied her a moment, very earnestly. Then his face lighted. “Try ‘Ahhhhh.’” And at last the effort succeeded. “You’ve got it!” he cried exultantly. “Didn’t I tell you they’d stay up if you went at ’em right? Now the same thing on your ‘ti-roo.’ Wait a minute and I’ll give you the key.”
The impresario, keeping one hand firmly on Miss Valentine’s ribs, reached far out to the piano with the other. “That’s it!” The next chord was triumphant, and the next chord after that was more triumphant still. His songbird was coming back into her own again.
“Feel as though you’re leaning on your face!” he cried. “Don’t be afraid of your face—it won’t fall out!”
Then he made her send air through her nose with her mouth open—which made her look a little ludicrous, but then, was there ever a genuine singer who cared how she looked when she sang? And he made her sing “La-la-la-la-la,” over and over again, and told her she ought to feel her tongue wag up from the bottom of her throat, and talked a great deal about a mysterious region in back of her teeth, and put her through the ordeal of the “silent attack.” And then—oh, well, there was nothing much left to do but sit back and enjoy the fruits of tireless patience. But they plunged into arpeggios, for good measure, and the impresario kept nodding, pleased and more pleased—though he had an eagle eye on her all the time, too.
She was really singing now—had got all untied—the tin whistle was cast out. After a little supplementary staccato work he turned to her with mild, appealing eyes, which glistened very suspiciously.
III
“This may be the last chance we’ll have together like this,” he said softly, “before the offer comes. While you’re still one of my songbirds, let me hear you sing some of the old pieces, like Annie Laurie and the Last Rose of Summer. I’ll play along and just dream.”
“Yes,” she replied warmly. “You’re an angel! I’ll sing anything you like.”
And so she sang him the old songs down in the stuffy little cabin; and his eyes kept right on glistening, though he smiled up at her from time to time quite happily. Yes, she sang as no one, surely, had ever heard her sing before. The impresario had tuned her up for big money; but now she was singing just for him.
When he had finished, stealthy forms might have been detected moving away from the passage outside—not only songbirds, but seamen too, the mate and the ship’s cook and the cabin boy; while up on deck Captain Bearman, who had been secretly listening himself at one of the ventilators, was roaring and cursing because his ship was lying all unmanned, at the mercy of the elements.
It was really a shocking state of affairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FLYING MOOR
I
The wind, capricious in the extreme, settled on the last day out from Borneo into an uncompromising head wind. The schooner laboriously plowed along toward Sandakan, on the Bornean north coast; it was necessary to tack constantly, and progress was heavy. The glass stood low. The air was thick and murky.
“I reckon there’s more rain in Borneo than anywhere else on earth,” observed the mate, as he and Captain Bearman stood conversing a few minutes near the wheel just prior to the latter’s going below for his usual four hours of sleep. The mate and the captain relieved each other every four hours, while the seamen worked on a schedule of two on and six off, day and night.
Bearman made some mumbling reply. Then he began issuing instructions—a great many more than were really necessary; and the mate, who knew his business, privately resented being treated like an apprenticed seaman.
All the passengers, assuming that port would not be made until morning, had gone below. Captain Bearman at first had figured that the coast ought to be picked up around noon, and his binoculars began to be a little in evidence soon after that—not seeking Borneo itself, but the islands which string along to the north-east. The wind was very unfriendly and the schooner laboured as though she had a barge in tow. It grew dark—and no Borneo. It was slow and heavy-going progress at best.
The dark came down, and with the early dark, the sky seemed to lighten a little, and a few stars emerged. The wind slackened, too. But the glass retained its pessimistic outlook, and clouds were slowly banking ahead.
II
Below, in the little cabin allotted to them at the time of their marriage, Jerome and Lili were quarreling. Jerome looked haggard and sombre since the death of his baby; but Lili, though she had cried a good deal and had a dull expression in her eyes sometimes, seemed not particularly altered.
They were not quarreling violently; it was more the irritability of fatigue and depressing emotion which found utterance in mutual dissatisfaction. Now that his little son was gone, Jerome was asking himself how much longer this farce with Lili would have to be kept up.
Her eyes grew heavier and heavier. Her sumptuous hair was done into a tight braid down her back. She was already in her bunk, while Jerome sat glumly on the edge, still in his clothes.
She nodded and half drifted off for a moment; then, as he moved, she opened her eyes. And she murmured, her voice obscurely troubled and with no longer the petulant ring it had more or less carried all the evening: “Jerry....”
“Well?”
“Don’t you care about me at all any more?”
“What did you say?” he demanded bluntly, coming back to his drab present apparently from very far off.
“Jerry, don’t you remember how you used to tease me to marry you?” she asked, her heavy eyes making a desperate effort to beam a little.
“Yes, I remember.” And he added, rather dryly: “How could any one forget a thing like that?”
“I suppose you’re glad it turned out so you couldn’t,” she said miserably, her words broadening off into an unquenchable yawn which seemed somehow, half pathetically, a keynote to her whole nature.
“I think,” he replied coldly, though in tones rather melancholy than bitter, “it’s a good thing for both of us.” And he concluded, getting to his feet: “I’m going up on deck for a smoke. It’s too stuffy to try to sleep down here.”
He left her without looking back.
III
On deck it was so dark that, until his eyes grew accustomed, he could see nothing at all. The few stars had gone under again and the bank of cloud ahead was higher in the sky. Jerome listlessly threw himself down on deck close to one of the gunwales and lighted his pipe. The voices of Bearman and his mate nearby made him feel drowsy. Captain Bearman was just issuing the last of his instructions before turning in. The ship’s bell sounded half past midnight.
“As I figure it now,” concluded the ship’s master through his fiery bush, “we ought to get in a little after dawn. We’ll be making good headway, and I want to try a flying moor. Of course,” he added whiningly, “I expect to see those fools make a mess of it and get the cables all tangled, the way they did off Port Phillip. But the harbour’s very good here, and we know every inch of it. We’ll try a flying moor, Mr. Nelson. And I wish you’d get the lashings off the anchors some time between now and daylight. You’ll have your hands full without going to work on the hatch covers. Besides, I think we’ll run into a thunder storm before morning.” He turned and walked off without saying good-night.
Jerome heard the mate mutter to himself, just once, in a disgusted tone: “A flying moor!” He thought of going over and talking with the mate; for the mate was a very decent chap. But he felt so comfortable and drowsy where he was that he decided not to move, even for the sake of learning what a flying moor was.
As a matter of fact, Captain Bearman wanted to enter with the finest flourish known to the profession because he had a firm persuasion that the Star of Troy would be found riding at anchor in the harbour. What a triumph to come dashing in at dawn, full sails, “a bone in her teeth,” and achieve a flying moor! But the mate was disgusted because he guessed the reason and he knew his skipper. It might very possibly be that the mate hadn’t carried his analysis far enough to know that his skipper possessed an inferiority complex. But he knew him for a disappointed and embittered man; had seen him play the satellite.
IV
Jerome slept. He could breathe up here under the open sky, and wanted to be alone. For the first time, consciously, in his life, he felt a full sufficiency in his own being. He had made a mess of wedding his destiny to other destinies. He was through with women, and wanted to feel himself free of them, quite free. It was sweet to lie up here in the dark all alone and mourn his baby’s death, and begin to pull himself together a little, and look toward the future.
His life, he felt, was pretty sombre and difficult, despite the high promise of the release which had given him a start in the great world. But at least he could take up his burden and go on alone. It no longer concerned him what Lili did, or what became of Lili. He was free. And with each puff of his little short-stemmed pipe, which now looked anything but jaunty, Jerome felt himself more a misogynist.
When his pipe was smoked out he did not refill it, but curled up instead, right where he was, with his head on one arm, and fell asleep.
During the hours that followed he was occasionally half conscious of voices and passing steps. He slept lightly, and, as the phrase has it, with one eye open, the way people often do who sleep out under the sky.
At a little before four o’clock Jerome woke suddenly and sat up. He felt vividly awake, yet there seemed no cause for it. Everything was quiet. There was less wind than at midnight. Dawn was in the sky; but it struggled as yet unequally with great rolling clouds, dense as boiling tar, which seemed to have broken loose from some mysterious mooring that had held them embanked all night. Jerome saw at once that Captain Bearman’s thunder storm was upon them at last. There was a clap quite close at hand, and then he realized that it was thunder which had aroused him from sleep.
Some of the top sails were flapping a little in a lull that would be broken any minute—the quietest and most sinister kind of lull in the whole realm of human experience.
Mr. Nelson, the mate, was giving orders. They could see the rain coming afar off across the troubled sea. A gust of wind made the sails strain and the rigging creak in an abrupt, complex way.
Jerome watched, and the spell of the sea was strong upon him. He had no terror left. A feeling of restlessness made him ask himself: “Why don’t I cut loose and ship before the mast?” He watched the mate and felt his cool authority; watched the seamen on duty going intelligently about their work, undismayed by the threatening chaos of the sky. “Yes. I love it,” Jerome murmured. And then he added, half to himself and half aloud: “It’s so big and free!”
The mate wanted to get up to the forecastle before the rain came, if he could, and see if the anchors were all ship-shape for Captain Bearman’s flying moor; but he waited for the wheelman to bring the vessel around into the starboard tack. In his effort to perform this manoeuvre neatly, the wheelman spun the wheel so far that the rudder jammed on the port side. He made a futile effort to release it and turned deploringly toward the mate.
Mr. Nelson swore at the man softly and effectively. There was no bluster about it. The mate knew, and the seaman knew, it is no light and airy calamity, getting the rudder jammed. Already the schooner was swinging around before the wind. In another moment the wind would come over the port quarter, and the sails would jibe.
“Run up forward and rouse the other men!” shouted the mate, his words snatched from his lips by a sudden rush of wind.
The storm was upon them—wind, thunder, rain. With her rudder disabled, the vessel lay helpless. And the mate had no more than spoken when the jigger topmast snapped with a sharp crack and came crashing down with the topsail and gaff. The splintered topmast lay on deck, but the gaff had fallen clean of the gunwale, and floated on the waves. Everything was in confusion. The sails were jibing, and the seamen were rushing about, ducking out of the way of the booms.
Captain Bearman came up the companion ladder to take possession of the deck. (It was the beginning of the morning watch.) He heard the crash and hastened, his face full of alarm. But as he emerged, the jigger boom swung round and struck him in such a way that he was swept clear of his ship, and, temporarily dazed, recovered his senses in the water.
V
From out the tempestuous maw of the sea came the bawling voice of the Skipping Goone’s unfortunate master.
“Help! Help! Throw me a line, d’you hear?”
But though the mate heard well enough, he was too good a seaman to take any heed. Out of the corner of his eye he had already noted that the jigger gaff floated near at hand. The captain could temporarily take care of himself, while the mate took care of the vessel.
It was time for quick action.
They were lowering the sails. That done, the mate caught one of the seamen by the arm and shouted in his ear: “Go aft and haul in the log!”
Then rapid preparations were made for taking a sounding.
“Run up forward with the deepsea lead, and carry the line from the poop, but keep it well outboard”—however, as they feared, the depth was beyond the reach of their cable.
Meantime, the storm had crashed and roared to the point of its fullest fury. There was not very much wind, but the rain was like a cloudburst, and lightning seemed to strike on all sides of the schooner at once.
“Help! Help!” bawled the voice of the skipper. “I can’t hold out much longer!”
They paid no attention, but set to work quickly to rig up a sea anchor.
“Take that broken jigger topmast,” ordered the mate, “and slash a piece of canvas—that will do—just slash it on there, and get some leads for the bottom....” When it was launched, the sea anchor made the schooner head up out of the trough.
Orders had to be shouted and reshouted on account of the fearful uproar of the skies.
“On the port side—”
“The rudder—”
Men called out and ran here and there shouting. But always the voice that dominated even the fury of the storm was the voice of the ship’s master out in the sea.
“Help! Help! Let down that boat, you swine!”
And then, in the midst of it all, the real calamity befell them. A bolt of lightening struck the mainmast, shivered it, and plunged on straight down into the hold of the ship. The crash of it was frightful.
Terrified faces appeared in the companionway. Songbirds came scrambling up to see what was happening to them. They trembled with dismay, and were instantly drenched by the rain.
At first the mate ordered them below, out of the way. But almost immediately a new crisis developed.
A seaman ran up, panting: “We’re afire!” His eyes rolled.
Flames, indeed, began almost at once shooting up out of the hold where the bolt had struck. Everything below was very dry. From this moment there was no time even to think of saving the vessel. And now the mate shouted:
“Get all hands on deck! Bring up blankets, and throw two chests of biscuit into the boats!”
The Skipping Goone was done for. It no longer mattered whether her rudder was jammed or whether it wasn’t. It no longer even mattered about her splintered masts. A bolt had plunged into her bowels, and no power on earth could save her now.
“I guess it’s our scenery that’s on fire!” said Mr. Curry wildly, rushing about in an effort to make sure all his songbirds were up from below. A look of amazement and deep anguish was in his face. “We must get these people off, Mr. Nelson! Where’s Captain Bearman? Lord, Lord!”—he was wringing his hands—“it doesn’t seem possible a thing like this has happened to us!”
The life boats could only be launched from two davits on the poop deck. One boat always hung there in readiness.
The sea was not running very high, so that it would be possible to launch the boats and then lower the passengers into them. The mate shouted his orders.
“Two men at each davit. Easy, easy! Don’t let that line get wedged there! Now lower!”
The boats were built to hold about twenty each. The ship’s cook, cabin boy, and two of the seamen went along in the first boat with the women. Then the second boat, already hauled up to the davits, was hoisted with some difficulty and maddening delays, out over the gunwale. Men began sliding down the rope ladder.
The fire spread rapidly through the hold of the ancient vessel. Smoke rolled up in huge spirals and puffs into the dawn of the breaking sky. The squall was passing rapidly up the world.
“Shove ’er off!” shouted Mr. Nelson hoarsely. And the second boat drifted loose. Jerome seized an oar, the impresario another, and they stroked side by side with the seamen.
Slowly the boats pulled away from the doomed old ship which had seemed to share with them such a deal of human drama, and which had valiantly brought them so far.
They picked the skipper up; and so overwhelmed was he by the immense misfortune which had come upon him in so short a time that he no longer bawled but seemed unable to do more than stare in a dazed way.
VI
It was a glorious dawn. The squall had cleared the air, and the sun emerged in a red glare to gaze upon this spectacle of disaster.
The two small boats kept together and moved slowly off toward the misty coast of Borneo. By noon, barring mishap, they would limp into the harbour. However, there would be no flying moor.
And the Skipping Goone—well, she had settled deeper and deeper into the sea, till at last, with a distant sound like a sigh, with her flaming wound and her shattered masts, she slipped down beneath the waves. The bolt had plunged through the hull, tearing a ragged gash. Perhaps it had plunged on down to the very bottom of the sea, for all anyone knew and for all it mattered now.
