“Lay hold of all the rope we can find and get down to the village,” said Isaac. “See if we can salvage any of the wood. See what’s happened to old man Parker and the Thrush.”
“Old man Parker will have been too canny to leave Wellington,” growled Scant. “An’ if we’d had a grain of sense we’d have shipped this wood a fortnight back. . . . Damn fools.”
Punished, thought William. The wilds have lost patience this time, and no mistake about it. I always knew they would. And he wondered again about the settlement, and the huts in the clearing in the forest. And above all he wondered about Marianne.
They covered the dead men with branches and left them where they were, for later tapu Maoris, outcasts who alone might handle the dead, would fetch them to the village for their burial with all due honor and the funeral rites of their tribe. Then they made a litter for the bruised and plaintive Kapua-Manga, took ropes from the barge and set out upon the mile-long journey. The going was appalling, climbing over the trunks of uprooted trees, fighting their way through the wreckage of the ferns and undergrowth. The rain poured down on them and the gale screamed in their ears, and as they came nearer to it they could hear the sea pounding madly on the rocks. But William, thinking of Marianne, was almost oblivious of the storm. It was not only the danger to her and her child that he feared for her, but also the setback to her hopes and ambitions. There was not only the probable loss of a valuable load of timber to be reckoned with, there was the damage to property. It might be that that fine new office of hers in Wellington was a pile of rubble by this time. It would be a case of starting all over again, just when she thought that prosperity was well within her grasp. Those who had been living a pioneer life for as long as he had were used to starting all over again; he and Tai Haruru had done it several times; but in Marianne’s cool grey Island this sort of thing did not happen, and she was not used to it. Poor girl, he thought, poor Marianne. And then was suddenly surprised by the depth of his pity and concern. Had he, then, already ceased to hate the little woman? The question came upon him like a burst of sunlight. He was not quite sure of the answer but it was a wonderful thing that, he could even ask it.
“My God!” ejaculated Isaac suddenly.
They had left the forest behind them and reached the shore, and it was as though they had reached Muri-ranga-whenua, the last bounds of earth, and stood upon the brink of all things. Buffeted by the gale, clinging to the stark rocks of the headland, they stared in dismay. This coast line was never at any time soft or sentimental, it was always firm, clear-cut, cold, but in this storm it was so stark and terrible that it struck awe to the soul. Its great beauty, the exquisite opal coloring of rock and sky and sea, the glow of the blond grass and golden sand, had been swept away by the storm. Sea and sky were merged in a grey mist of driving rain and spume, the sandy bay was a boiling cauldron of white waves hurling themselves upon the splintering iron-grey rocks that were accustomed to rear themselves twenty feet above the water, and now showed only their bared fangs above the smother of foam. With the wind behind it the sea had come in like a tidal wave, leaping upon the land like a wolf at a sheep’s throat. Where it met the creek in full spate there was a wall of furious water that flung great trees tossing upward as though they were mere twigs, and lashed at the sky as though it would drag that too to destruction.
“Where are those new sheds of ours?” shouted William above the roar of the storm. “And the jetty?”
Scant laughed shortly and harshly but said nothing, and a low, wailing cry broke from the Maoris because once there had been a Maori village on this shore and now there was simply no sign of it at all. And there was no sign, of course, of Tai Haruru’s beautiful barges. They and the timber had been matchwood long ago.
So great was the disaster that even in this land of disasters it struck like a stunning blow. After that one cry the Maoris were as silent as the white men, clinging to whatever handhold they could find to brace themselves against the storm.
“What’s that?” asked Isaac suddenly.
Away to the left a gun had boomed. Then came the faint, thin clanging of a bell.
“Ship in distress,” said William, and started running along the clifftop to the left. The others followed him, stumbling over the wet tussocks of grass, breathless with the wind, cursing the luck that had sent a shipwreck to top up all the other misfortunes of the storm. Guided by the signals of distress, they ran on until the clanging of the bell seemed to come eerily from close beside them. Then they stopped, peering seaward through the driving mist and rain. The storm had moderated a little, but at first they could see nothing. Then a gleam of sunlight suddenly tore the mist apart before their eyes, so that they looked as through a rent curtain over the drenched grass and stones of the headland where they clung and down to a patch of bright sea beyond. A reef of jagged rocks stretched out into the brightness like a long sword, and impaled upon the point of it was the wreck of what had once been a lovely and incomparable ship. Then the rain poured down again, and each man would have thought that what he had seen had been a dream had it not been for the evidence of the others, and of the clanging bell.
“The Thrush?” asked Scant in horror.
“No,” said Isaac. “It was a clipper.”
“Bring those ropes!” yelled William, and then, running and stooping low against the wind, he disappeared into the rain. He was clambering down over the cliff, clawed at by the wind, numbed hands and feet clinging to the wet, slippery rock and hard put to it to support his great bulk, in peril but uncaring. In that one moment of vision he had known without the shadow of a doubt that the ship was the Green Dolphin. It only needed this to fill up the cup of disaster to the brim. And he did not care in the very least if he flung away his life in attempting to save Captain O’Hara and Nat. His life would be only a small thing to give in payment of the debt he owed them.
Chapter III
It began as a halcyon voyage, decked out with all the trappings of a fairy tale. They were late in sailing, for Captain O’Hara had been laid up with an attack of the gout and obstinately refused to leave Canton while still supporting his great bulk upon two sticks. A skipper on two sticks was incapable of exercising a proper authority, he had averred to the protesting Nat. It might be late in the season, as Nat kept repeating so monotonously, but he was damned if he’d go to sea on two sticks. He’d wait till he had the use of his legs before he set sail, if he had to wait till kingdom come. Yet when at last the Green Dolphin left Canton, the weather had not broken. It was a blue day of balmy weather, and she sailed proudly between the green shores of the estuary, past the lemon-sailed fishing boats and the men-of-war and merchantmen of many nations, conscious as always of possessing a presence and dignity second to none, and a beauty mellowed but not diminished by the passing of the years. In her hold were chests of tea and spices, bales of silk and fine muslin, and cedarwood boxes full of trinkets and adornments of jade and ivory. Captain O’Hara liked these romantic cargoes. The consciousness of treasure in the hold gave him a sense of affluence agreeable to his natural arrogance, and the thought of disgorging it in a needy country was pleasing to his generosity. He was well satisfied as he snuffed the air upon his poop. Increasingly, as he grew older, he liked the blue air of balmy days.
It was one of those days when the whole universe seemed a crystalline bubble that enclosed one treasure only: a lovely white-winged ship.
“Same sort o’ thing as those ships in bottles you see in the old junk shops,” said Captain O’Hara.
Nat, his hands holding the spokes of the wheel firmly, yet with that intermittent caressing movement of the thumbs that was characteristic of him, hissed gently in answer. He knew perfectly well what the Skipper meant.
“Am I gettin’ old, Nat?” questioned Captain O’Hara. “Eh? Am I gettin’ old?”
Nat hissed an affirmative through the only two rotting stumps of teeth that were now left in his head. It
was a slightly surprised affirmative, for it amazed him that this obvious fact should not hitherto have come home to the Skipper. Doubtless it was his magnificent set of white china teeth from Paris that had prolonged the illusion of youth in Captain O’Hara. He could still masticate salt beef and Harriet Lane with enjoyment while Nat had to soak his Liverpool pantiles in his tea: it is when a man has to soak his biscuits in his tea that he knows he’s old.
A sudden rage seized Captain O’Hara. “Old, is it?” he bellowed. “Divil a bit. An’ who the hell are ye to go tellin’ me I’m old, an’ you without a tooth in your head worth mentionin’, an’ bald as a tortoise beneath that bloody nightcap? You’ve never deceived the world with that nightcap of yours, Nat, any more than with that glass eye. ’Tis not for stylishness ye wear it day an’ night. There’s not a hair on your head, Nat, not a hair, begorra!”
Nat grinned broadly and Captain O’Hara stumped off in a fury to take an angry constitutional round his ship. Old, was it? Divil a bit. It was not any weakness in himself that made him find it nowadays a tough job to keep the crew with their noses to the grindstone. Sailormen were not the men they used to be. They were darned, lazy, insolent fellows nowadays, not like the old shellbacks who had leapt aloft like kangaroos to a brief order, and shaken like aspen leaves if caught in the gale of their Skipper’s annoyance. But these fellows nowadays, a man had to bellow himself hoarse to get ’em aloft, and they lay out on the yards with the gingerliness of old ladies with rheumatics lying down on feather beds. And when sworn at, they grinned. And there was a fellow on board who had dared, in his captain’s presence, to spit to windward, though he’d rounded the Horn a mere five times. . . . He’d had the cat-o’-nine-tails for that, and serve him damn right. . . . Captain O’Hara did not know what sailormen were coming to nowadays. Maybe he’d not be so sorry, after all, to leave the sea.
Not be sorry to leave the sea? Faith, an’ what was he saying? Leave the Green Dolphin? He paused in his angry peregrination and looked up at her. A fair wind was thrumming through the rigging and booming like distant organ music in her canvas, and she was bowing gracefully to the swell. In the bright sunlight her fair-weather sails were bright as gulls’ wings, and seemed to tower up and up to the zenith of the sky. He counted them all with pride, like a father counting his children or a shepherd his sheep. There they were, always the same. The men who stowed them might change and worsen, but they never changed, and their deep organ music never changed, nor the singing of the wind in the shrouds. It was the sweetest music that a man could hear, just as the sight of the great sails was the grandest sight a man could see. His incomparable ship! His eyes followed her lovely lines, designed for speed; the great length of her, the height of the raking masts. Beneath his feet the tremor of her timbers as the sea struck her seemed to answer the beating of his heart, her rise and fall as she bowed to the swell and rose again to echo the rhythm of his own breathing. They were one, himself and his ship. He might find it harder than formerly, now that storms were more violent than they used to be, to put his imprint on the sea, he might find the men under his command less pliable to his will now that seamanship was deteriorating, but between himself and his ship there was no change in the perfection of a lifelong comradeship. They had grown old together, like man and wife, and to be parted one from the other would be to either of them now a living death. Leave the sea? Not if he knew it. He and the Green Dolphin would sail on together for years yet. Getting old? Faith, no. He was as good a man as ever he’d been, and the Green Dolphin was as good a ship.
He inflated his chest and went back to Nat at the wheel. Nat was humming the familiar old tune to which so many times he had marched round and round the capstan:
“We’re homeward bound,
I heard them say,
Good-by, fare ye well.
Good-by, fare ye well.
We’re homeward bound.”
“We’re nothing o’ the sort, Nat,” boomed Captain O’Hara. “It’s outward bound we are, begorra, and with as good a prospect of a fair voyage as ever I saw. Grand weather. Not a cloud in the sky.”
Nat gazed at the sky, spat, and continued obstinately with his tune. There was a certain monotonous mournfulness in his rendering of it that set Captain O’Hara’s teeth on edge, and he swore and stumped off down to his cabin.
The fair weather continued until they were only a couple of days from Wellington, when in the late afternoon they ran into a grey sea beneath a hazy sky and a queer oppressive atmosphere, as though the air were dust-laden. At nightfall Captain O’Hara would have made the ship snug against possible unpleasantness had not this course been suggested to him by the mate, an arrogant young man from Aberdeen who always thought he knew better than his elders.
“Dirty weather?” boomed Captain O’Hara at the arrogant young man. “No, Sir. Wasn’t I sailing these seas when you were squalling in a cradle in that damned draughty town of Aberdeen that I’ve only set eyes on the once, and hope never to set eyes on again, begorra? Dirty weather be damned. That haze is for heat, Sir. I don’t take a rag off her for your moonstruck fantasies. I’m behind time on this voyage, and I’ll not dawdle through the night like a cow going home for the milking. Do ye hear, Sir? I will not, begorra.”
He stumped below to his cabin and reached for the whiskey bottle. The glass was falling, but he disregarded the fact. A slight fall, nothing to be disturbed about. It was his pride that he was considered one of the most punctual skippers in the Merchant Service. Owing to the attack of gout that had delayed him at Canton, he was now more behind time on a voyage than he had ever been, and he was damned if he was going to take a rag off her tonight to please an impudent nincompoop of a Scotchman young enough to be his own grandson. Damned if he was. The young needed taking down a peg or two. All the young nowadays needed to be taught their places. Impudent young devils. No respect for their elders. Made one wonder what the world was coming to. William, now, he’d never been impudent. And Marianne, the little green enchantress, though she was a proud piece and had always spoken her mind in a way unbecoming to a female, had never at any time made him feel like an old molting cock who had outstayed his welcome in his own barnyard. But these young men nowadays, when you gave them an order, they obeyed it—if they did obey it—with a cold gleam in their eye and a quirk to the corners of their mouths that made a man feel his trousers were slipping, or his wig on hind part before; molting, in fact. William and Marianne had never made him feel he was molting.
Slowly absorbing his whiskey, he gave himself over to thoughts of William and Marianne. In all lives there are moments that seem to detach themselves from the enigma called time and to travel along with a man through his whole life. Such, for Captain O’Hara, had been that moment when he had come up on deck in the early morning and seen St. Pierre reflected in the bright waters of the island harbor. Shutting his eyes, swilling his whiskey, he could see it now as vividly as he had seen it then. He saw the tall houses rising above the wharfs and the long line of the harbor wall, up and up, one behind the other, lit with the colors of the morning. And built above and around the first city was a second formed of piled golden cloud, both so drenched in light that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended, and both reflected in the water of the harbor, so that reality and reflection together made up a perfect circle, a habitable globe in miniature, the earthly city encircled by the heavenly.
He refilled his glass and turned up the lamp, for it seemed to him that his cabin was growing uncommonly dark and cold. And then quite suddenly he wanted Nat, good old Nat, who was also an old man and had companioned him through most of his seafaring life. He levered himself half up out of his chair to bellow for him, remembering just in time that at this hour Nat was standing his trick at the wheel again. A nice thing for the Skipper to start bellowing for the man at the wheel to come and hold his hand against the fear of the dark!
His head was muzzy and he was confused by t
he way the things in his cabin seemed dancing round him: the ribald dragons on the curtains that hid his bunk, the stuffed baby crocodile, the octopus, the three tattooed cannibals’ heads; they were all swaying and surging as though the sea were flowing through the cabin, carrying them this way and that on its ebb and flow, endowing them with the movement of its own life. The ribald dragons put out their scarlet tongues at him, the crocodile snapped its jaws, the octopus waved its tentacles, and the cannibals grinned. Even the carved creatures he was sitting on, Timothy Haslam’s whales and dolphins and mermaids and fish and crabs, seemed alive, for he could feel them stir under him as though his body had lost its living weight, had become bloated like a balloon, so that it rose upward. . . . Terror seized him; he stumbled suddenly to his feet, his flesh pricking and his hands clinging to the edge of the old teak table. . . . Strange fish were swimming lazily through his cabin, fish with golden eyes and delicately laced thin bones showing through phosphorescent bodies, Timothy’s fish off the chair. And all the creatures swaying this way and that in his cabin were singing, their myriad tiny voices making a music that one could hear and not hear, like the sound of bells that the wind is always catching away. “We’re homeward bound, I heard them say. Fare ye well.”
Captain O’Hara took a firmer grip of the teak table. “You’re drunk,” he told himself. “Drunk at sea with dirty weather blowin’ up. Ye old fool. Better turn in. You’re old and drunk, Denis O’Hara. Better turn in.”
His familiar world steadied about him again. Timothy’s fish swam back to the chair and stayed there. The cannibals’ heads, the crocodile and the octopus were once more dead things nailed to the bulkheads, the dragons on the curtains swayed only with the motion of the ship. But as he fumbled at his clothes, his fingers still shook. He’d take another tot before he turned in.
He slept too well that night. When the storm broke and woke him, his scuttle was already grey with the dawn. “But for that damn gout we’d have been in Wellington before this,” was the thought that flashed through his mind as he tumbled out of his bunk, dragged on his oilskins and stumped up on deck into the murkiest, filthiest morning he had ever set eyes on. The sea was running half up the sky, moaning and hissing, and the wind came from the lowering clouds like a flail, steel-tipped with savage ice, slashing and clawing at the booming sails, the creaking timbers and the wavering, nebulous shadows that were running, leaping men.