The Jonas Lie Megapack: 14 Classic Novels and Stories Page 23

  The constant strain upon his energy became at last like a fever in his blood, and the life he was leading began to show itself in his face. He had come to be reckoned on board as one of those stubborn, unruly spirits that are common enough among the dregs of humanity to be met with in ships’ holds in that quarter of the globe, and who usually end their career at the yard-arm, or by a bullet from the captain’s revolver. In this very ship, before they came into Rio, at the time the Irishman had been put in irons, the captain had, without any hesitation, shot down from the yard one of the crew, whom he supposed to be the ringleader of the mutineers. He looked upon Salvé now with increasing distrust, wondering how he could ever have been so mistaken in a man as he had been in him. “But put a man to herd with rabble, and it’s hard for him not to become one of them,” he said; and, deteriorated though he was, Salvé was still the smartest sailor he had on board.

  The boatswain kept out of his way now as much as possible, for he had heard that Salvé had sworn to tear his entrails out if he gave him any fresh cause for offence. The latter knew very well, though, that he was meditating something against him, and was not surprised therefore at being called aft one day to stand a formal trial before the captain for the expression which he had used with regard to the boatswain, and which he did not affect to deny, “as the boatswain,” he said, “had wished to take his life.”

  “I mean to leave the ship,” he said, “the moment we come to Valparaiso. I am only engaged so far. But, indeed, I care little what becomes of me,” he ended, gloomily.

  The captain probably had his own notions with regard to the boatswain, as Salvé escaped the severe punishment he had expected, and was only condemned to solitary confinement for fourteen days on bread-and-water.

  “That will take you down a bit, my lad,” said the captain.

  The boatswain, however, made up for the leniency of his superior by a little ingenuity of his own; and every day, when Salvé was enjoying his meagre fare in his place of confinement, the mulatto, whom he had triumphed over, by the boatswain’s orders, took his dinner of hot meat and ate it outside the door, close to the hole through which the light was admitted, that the savoury smell might make its way in and tantalise him.

  At first, Salvé rather enjoyed the repose which his confinement afforded him; but as his hunger increased he grew irritable, and at dinner-time one day he approached his face to the opening.

  “Mulatto!” he began; and the other looked up and grinned with his white teeth, pleased to see some sign at last that his attentions had not been thrown away—“that’s good food you have there.”

  “Excellent,” replied the other, mischievously, and with an inward chuckle.

  “It makes me picture to myself your future,” Salvé continued, placidly, “how it will be with you when I come out again. You will be like that lobscouse, my friend. Had that never occurred to you?”

  The mulatto went on eating, but grew absent. His nature, as before observed, was not a courageous one, and it was obvious that his food at last began to stick in his throat.

  “It is much the same as if you were sitting there and feeding on yourself,” said Salvé, after a longer pause, during which he had watched the other’s lengthening countenance. “That’s just what it will be, my dear friend, unless—”

  “Unless—?” repeated the mulatto, pricking up his ears.

  “Unless you take good care to pass your dinner in here to me every day from this time. There are only five days more, and I have fasted for nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply enough. If the boatswain sees you passing in food to me, you’ll be punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in my face.”

  These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply. He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful attitude. But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his hand up in front of the opening, and Salvé mercilessly took every morsel there was on it.

  It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.

  It was not out of any respect for him that Salvé took his part. He looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these characteristics. But he helped him on the strength of that comradeship which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than that, there was something akin to a personal friendship existing between them. Federigo was decidedly interesting. He could talk more or less on almost every subject, and he was full of theories which he propounded during their watches together, and to which Salvé eagerly listened. There was, he said, among other remarks, and in a superior manner, no such thing as religion, no such being as God. Such ideas were only for dunderheads, who, moreover, in every country had their own particular form of belief for the clever people and the priests to turn to their own purposes. In reference to that, he told many stories of the impositions practised by the priests in Brazil; and had many agreeable anecdotes, too, about the beliefs of the wretched little race whose Sun land they were passing at the time. He pronounced, in a word, for the right of the strongest, and for piastres, women, and freedom as the great objects of existence. What other god than Salvé, he once asked ironically, had prevented the Irishman from taking the life of the miserable Spaniard down there in the hold? or what god other than Fear prevented the boatswain from felling Salvé himself to the deck with a handspike? Although Salvé despised the speaker, his arguments made no slight impression upon him. What god, he asked himself, would save him, if he did not take care of himself among all these ruffians who surrounded him? and had there been any such controlling Power in the world, he thought with bitterness, a great deal in his life would have been very different. Conversations of this kind always made him feel thoroughly bad.

  “What do you suppose,” he suddenly asked, one evening as they were talking together on their watch, “your sister meant to do with me, Federigo, if I had not escaped?”

  Up to this they had avoided touching upon this tender subject, and Federigo answered, evasively—

  “I’m sure I don’t know. She takes wild notions sometimes.”

  “Yes—but what do you think? I know you had no hand in the matter.”

  “H’m! I had rather not say,” replied Federigo, obviously relieved, but with a peculiar smile, as if his fancy was ranging not without enjoyment through the region of possibilities. “She scalded a monkey once, that had bitten her, slowly to death with boiling-water. But her ingenuity was endless.”

  Salvé felt a shudder run through him, and something in his face told the other that he had better not indulge his fancy any further; and he hastened, therefore, to add half in joke and half by way of consolation—

  “Poor Antonio Varez will pay for her having been obliged to marry him, never fear. Yes, she is rich and happy,” he concluded with a sigh, as if he envied her; and the subject dropped.

  CHAPTER XVII

  They doubled Cape Horn, and came to Valparaiso. But, on the morning they were to enter the harbour, Salvé, to his intense exasperation, was put under arrest. The captain found him too useful in keeping the crew in order forward, and therefore took the most effectual means of preventing him from putting into execution his declared determination to leave the ship on their arrival at that port.

  After leaving Valparaiso they called at the Chincha Islands, took in a cargo of guano for China, and shaped their course then eastward across the calm southern ocean, whose lon
ely monotony was only broken by the occasional appearance of one of the larger kind of sea-birds, or by the distant spouting of a whale. On board, however, the same peace was far from prevailing. That little nut-shell that crept like a dot across the limitless expanse of waters was a little floating hell, where every evil passion raged from morning until night; and it was only by secretly fomenting discord and divisions among the crew that the officers could sleep with any sense of security in their berths. As it was, a large section of them, with the Irishman at their head, had a project on hand for murdering their officers, and converting the ship into a whaling vessel. And even Salvé, in moments of bitterness and indignation at the tyranny to which he was subjected by these men, whose lives were at the mercy of the crew, would sometimes entertain the thought of joining with the mutineers, who were restrained from carrying out their designs mainly by the fear which he had inspired, and by the refusal of his sanction. Many a desperate struggle with himself he went through when one of his tyrants passed him on deck in the dark, and the temptation to stick a knife into his back would rise strong within him, and almost master him. The other’s life hung upon a hair, and Salvé knew it; but that hair was stronger than he thought. Elizabeth’s face, and the still unexhausted might of early impressions, made him always shrink from the thought of having a murder on his conscience, and to that depth he never fell, deteriorated though his character gradually became, from daily association with everything that was vile, to that degree that he lost all power of believing in the existence of good amongst his fellow-creatures, or in a higher Power.

  We need follow no further this dark period of his life. After a year and a half on board the Stars and Stripes, and many a wild scene of turbulence and riot, he brought his connection with her to a close at last at New Orleans, where the accumulation of his wages was handed over to him.

  The life on board the other vessels in which he afterwards served did not differ greatly from that which he had left; but he had become accustomed to it, and his sensibilities were blunted by long habit. It was not until some four years had thus passed that he again began to feel a longing for Europe—he would not acknowledge to himself that it was Norway exactly that he wanted to see again;—and after looking out then for some time for a suitable ship for the home voyage, he found himself at last with his Brazilian friend on board a large barque that was homeward bound from Curaçoa, with tobacco and rum, for Rotterdam and Nieuwediep.

  Federigo had been his inseparable companion through all the vicissitudes of his southern life; the secret of his faithful attachment, as Salvé suspected, being that the latter had saved money, which he had turned into gold pieces and kept in a belt round his waist. He had never, like Federigo, sought occasions to squander his pay on land in gambling or in other diversions. He hated women; and in the taverns which were frequented by sailors he was looked upon as a dangerous customer, to whom it was prudent to give as wide a berth as possible. Federigo, he fancied, looked upon him as his reserve cash-box; and when on one occasion, after they came into port, the Brazilian proposed that they should desert and put their money into some mines that were very favourably reported of just then, and share the profits, Salvé remarked with perfect composure that he thought it highly probable that if they started upon any expedition of the kind, his friend, if he got him alone some fine night in a lonely place, would quietly stick his knife into him and make off with the whole. He therefore declined the proposition, but their relations nevertheless continued as friendly as before. Money was the only power, Salvé reflected with bitterness, and this satisfaction at least he could now enjoy in life.

  It had become so obvious to him that Federigo’s attachment was more to his money than to himself, that he determined to get rid of his irksome attentions. Accordingly, when they arrived at Nieuwediep, he made all his arrangements for leaving the vessel, legally this time, without saying a word to him of his intention; and Federigo only heard of it at the last moment when he met him coming up with his hammock clothes. He turned pale, and tears came into his eyes,—whether from a feeling of injured friendship, or from disappointment, Salvé could not quite make out. The expression of his face, with his restless small black eyes, resembled that of a disturbed rat. At last he fell on Salvé’s neck in his impetuous way, and broke out—

  “But at any rate we must have one parting glass together this evening. I don’t know how I shall ever do without you—it is so long now since we two have chummed together.”

  Against his better reason Salvé allowed himself to feel a little softened at the thought; and the remembrance of all the attachment this scoundrel had shown for him aroused something that almost resembled emotion.

  “It is no use, my friend,” he replied; “what is done can’t be undone. But I’ll give you this evening, at all events. You’ll find me waiting for you in the Aurora.”

  As usual at this season of the year, there were a great many vessels in the harbour, and the Aurora tavern was full that evening of seafaring folk laughing and talking and singing, and renewing, or laying the foundations of, acquaintanceships over brandy or gin; while in the little room over the bar, dance music was going on uninterruptedly, and the boards were creaking under alternate Dutch schottische and English hornpipe.

  To properly appreciate a genuine sailors’ reel or hornpipe, one should see it danced by men who for a whole year at a time have been battling with the waves and storms in every corner of the world, and who during all that time have hardly set eyes upon a female form. They come on shore bursting with a full masculine longing for the society of the other sex, with a year’s stored-up feeling to let out; and there is a positive intoxication to them in the mere dance—in the mere holding at Nieuwediep Anniken or Bibecke, or at Portsmouth Mary Ann, by the waist; and Mary Ann and Bibecke perfectly understand this, and for the moment feel themselves persons of no small importance. There is no element of coarseness in the feeling. The sailor is more given to sentiment proper than perhaps any other class of men, and generally speaking a more romantic feeling for woman is cherished on board ship than anywhere else in the world. If we wish to find in these times quietly romantic enthusiasm, we must be the companion of the sailor on his lonely watch, or listen to him as he lies on the forecastle and talks with naïvesimplicity about his wife or his sweetheart—how their attachment came about, and what he means to buy for her when he gets into port. Love on board ship is a more naturally rich and varying theme than it is in the peasant’s monotonous life; and being in love, by reason of separation from the object of his love, is a different thing to the sailor, a something more entirely of the heart and the imagination, which does not lose its ideal hue in the wear and tear of everyday use. A married sailor is always an object of quiet respect to his comrades who have not had means to take the same step themselves; and without exaggeration it may be said that woman is present in her truest sense in the midst of the often outwardly rough life on board ship—warm, loving, and venerated, and surrounded by all the enchantment which distance can supply. If we are tempted to think otherwise, we have not penetrated to the simple, childlike nature which underlies the sailor’s rough exterior.

  The exteriors, indeed, in the dancing-room of the Aurora that evening were rough enough. Through the cloud of steam and tobacco-smoke, men of the most various physiognomies were to be seen, the majority tanned and bearded, with their hats on the back of their heads, and short clay pipes in their mouths, and all in the wildest state of enjoyment, dripping with perspiration and dancing indefatigably. There were French and Swedish sailors in their red woollen shirts, Norwegians and Danes in blue, with white canvas trousers, Yankees and English all in blue; and as they swung the gracefully dressed Dutch girls with their small white caps and little capes, and petticoats fastened up to do justice to the neat shoes and white stockings below, vying with each other who should dance the best and longest, the foundation of many a friendship or enmity was laid, to be prosecuted lat
er on in the evening over a bottle of brandy or in a stand-up fight.

  Salvé and Federigo were sitting over their gin in a side-room which opened into the dancing-room, and was filled with men talking and drinking, or with couples who came in to rest for a moment. Neither took part in the dancing. Salvé was gloomy and out of tune for pleasure, although, for Federigo’s sake, he made his humour as little apparent as possible. Federigo looked very disconsolate, and during the early part of the evening sat and sipped his glass abstractedly. But as the time wore on he kept filling Salvé’s glass unconsciously as it were, and getting apparently more and more drunk himself, until he several times spilt the contents of his own glass on the floor. He became very talkative, recalling incident after incident of their life together. “I shall never forget you,” he cried, with open-hearted impulsiveness, “never!” And as he repeated the word, there was a gleam of suppressed feeling of some kind or other in his eye.

  Salvé’s attention was preoccupied at the moment. He had heard two voices speaking Norwegian by the window at his back, and it made his heart knock against his ribs—it was so long since he had heard his mother-tongue. They were two men belonging to timber ships, and one of them, very red and excited, was singing the praises of one of the girls in the other room.

  “Ah!” broke in the other, a Tonsberger, “you should have seen handsome Elizabeth in ‘The Star’ at Amsterdam. But she wasn’t for such as you to dance with, my lad.”