Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (71 page)

Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks — Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand — talking “cod” meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on which the “hog-yoke” was worked.

In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age handicapped him. As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the
We’re Here
just when she needed it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey.

Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc’sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and boiling-down, and that terrible “nip” of ‘71, when twelve hundred men were made homeless on the ice in three days — wonderful tales, all true. But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the keel.

Long Jack’s tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent with ghastly stories of the “Yo-hoes” on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd’s men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbor in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their old-fashioned boat, whistling — not calling, but whistling — for the soul of the man who broke their rest.

Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portires. He laughed at the ghost-tales, — not as much as he would have done a month before, — but ended by sitting still and shuddering.

Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio in flogging days, with a navy more extinct than the dodo — the navy that passed away in the great war. He told them how red-hot shot are dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay between them and the cartridge; how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood, and how the little ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and shouted to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade — long weeks of swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had used up their coal (there was no chance for the sailing-ships); of gales and cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the galley was as red-hot as the fort’s shot, and men drank cocoa by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot booms.

Manuel’s talk was slow and gentle — all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. Salters was mainly agricultural; for, though he read “Josephus” and expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy “Orange Judd” books from his bunk and intoned them, wagging his finger at Harvey, to whom it was all Greek. Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters’s lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey.

The cook naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he spoke only when it was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of speech descended on him, and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken English, an hour at a time. He was especially communicative with the boys, and he never withdrew his prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan’s master, and that he would see it. He told them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer
Arctic
, that breaks the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze; and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd idea for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was to his taste; and this always made the “second half” laugh. Yet they had a great respect for the cook’s judgment, and in their hearts considered Harvey something of a mascot by consequence.

And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the We’re Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day’s work was out of common, but the average days were many and close together.

Naturally, a man of Disko’s reputation was closely watched — ”scrowged upon,” Dan called it — by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognized leader. “Let the two Jeraulds lead ‘em,” said Disko. “We’re baound to lay among ‘em for a spell on the Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won’t hev to lay long. Where we are naow, Harve, ain’t considered noways good graound.”

“Ain’t it?” said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. “Shouldn’t mind striking some poor ground for a change, then.”

“All the graound I want to see — don’t want to strike her — is Eastern Point,” said Dan. “Say, Dad, it looks’s if we wouldn’t hev to lay more’n two weeks on the Shoals. You’ll meet all the comp’ny you want then, Harve. That’s the time we begin to work. No reg’lar meals fer no one then. ‘Mug-up when ye’re hungry, an’ sleep when ye can’t keep awake. Good job you wasn’t picked up a month later than you was, or we’d never ha’ had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin.”

Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn — a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. “Square-rigger bellowin’ fer his latitude,” said Long Jack. The dripping red head-sails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the
We’re Here
rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.

The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.

“Frenchman,” said Uncle Salters, scornfully. “Miquelon boat from St. Malo.” The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. “I’m ‘most outer ‘baccy, too, Disko.”

“Same here,” said Tom Platt. “Hi! Backez vous — backez vous! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from — St. Malo, eh?”

“Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet — St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon,” cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, “Bord! Bord!”

“Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin’ America’s fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine’s good enough fer them; an’ I guess it’s abaout right, too.”

Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark.

“Seems kinder uneighbourly to let ‘em swedge off like this,” Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets.

“Hev ye learned French then sence last trip?” said Disko. “I don’t want no more stone-ballast hove at us ‘long o’ your callin’ Miquelon boats ‘footy cochins,’ same’s you did off Le Have.”

“Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise ‘em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We’re all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don’t you speak French?”

“Oh, yes,” said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled: “Hi! Say! Arretez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac.”

“Ah, tabac, tabac!” they cried, and laughed again.

“That hit ‘em. Let’s heave a dory over, anyway,” said Tom Platt. “I don’t exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an’ interpret.”

The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark’s black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin — the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognized Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it — American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman’s wheel. It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus:

“Par derriere chez ma tante,
Il’y a un bois joli,
Et le rossignol y chante
Et le jour et la nuit....

Que donneriez vous, belle,
Qui l’amenerait ici?
Je donnerai Quebec,
Sorel et Saint Denis.”

“How was it my French didn’t go, and your sign-talk did?” Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among the We’re Heres.

“Sign-talk!” Platt guffawed. “Well, yes, ‘twas sign-talk, but a heap older’n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chockfull o’ Freemasons, an’ that’s why.”

“Are you a Freemason, then?”

“Looks that way, don’t it?” said the man-o’-war’s man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon.

CHAPTER VI

The thing that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the
We’re Here
under her lee and gave the skipper a piece of his mind. “Where might ye be — eh? Ye don’t deserve to be anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin’ the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an’ your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o’ in your silly heads.”

At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko’s own eyes. “We haven’t had an observation for three days. D’you suppose we can run her blind?” he shouted.

“Wa-al, I can,” Disko retorted. “What’s come to your lead? Et it? Can’t ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?”

“What d’ ye feed ‘em?” said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. “They say they fall off dretful on a v’yage. Dunno as it’s any o’ my business, but I’ve a kind o’ notion that oil-cake broke small an’ sprinkled — ”

“Thunder!” said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. “What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?”

“Young feller,” Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, “let me tell yeou ‘fore we go any further that I’ve — ”

The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I’ve asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye may per-haps condescend to enlighten us.”