TALES OF THE CLIPPER SHIPS

TALES OF THE
CLIPPER SHIPS

BY
C. FOX SMITH

WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY
PHIL W. SMITH



BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1926


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID
OF ATHENS”

TALES OF
THE CLIPPER SHIPS

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE “MAID OF
ATHENS”

“You’d otter’ave seen ’em when they buried the lickle girl yesterday,” pursued Mrs. Wilkins.

“I was put out, missin’ that, but there, I ’ad to take ar Florence to the ’orspittle for ’er aneroids,” sighed Mrs. Pettefer, glancing malevolently at “ar Florence” as if she would gladly have buried her, without flars, too, by way of paying her out. “I do love a lickle child’s fruneral.”

“Mask o’ flars, the corfin was,” went on Mrs. Wilkins. “The harum lilies was lovely. And one big reaf like an ’arp. W’ite ribbinks on the ’orses, an’ all....”

The connoisseurs in grief dispersed. The driver of the hearse replaced the black gloves of ceremony by the woollen ones of comfort, for the day was raw and promised fog later: pulled out a short clay and lit it, climbed to his box and, whipping up his horses (bays with black points—“none of your damned prancing Belgians for me,” had been one of Old Featherstone’s last injunctions), set off at a brisk trot, he to tea and onions over the stables, they to the pleasant warmth of their stalls and their waiting oats and hay. Four of old Thomas’s nearest relatives piled into the first carriage, four more of his remoter kindred into the second, and the lawyer—Hobbs, Senior, of Hobbs, Keating & Hobbs, of Chancery Lane—who had lingered behind to settle accounts with the officiating clergyman, came hurrying down the path between ranks of tombstones, glimmering pale and ghostly in the greying November afternoon, to make up a mixed bag in the third and last with Captain David Broughton, master of the deceased’s ship “Maid of Athens,” and Mr. Jenkinson, the managing clerk from the office in Billiter Square.

The lawyer was a small, spare man, halting a little from sciatica. Given a pepper-and-salt coat with wide tails, and a straw in his mouth, he would have filled the part of a racing tipster to perfection; but in his sombre funeral array, with his knowing, birdlike way of holding his head, and his sharp, darting, observant glance, he resembled nothing so much as a lame starling; and he chattered like a starling, too, as the carriage rattled away in the wake of the others through the darkening streets towards the respectable northern suburb where old Featherstone had lived and died.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, gentlemen,” he said, settling himself in his place as the coachman slammed the door on the party. “Well, well ... everything’s passed off very nicely, don’t you think?”

Both Captain Broughton and Mr. Jenkinson, after due consideration, agreed that “it” had passed off very nicely indeed; though, to be sure, it would be hard to say precisely what conceivable circumstance might have occurred to make it do otherwise.

Little Jenkinson sat with his back to the horses. He was the kind of person who sits with his back to the horses all through life: the kind of neat, punctual little man to be found in its thousands in the business offices of the City. He carried, as it were, a perpetual pen behind his ear. A clerk to his finger-tips—say that of him, and you have said all; unless perhaps that in private life he was very likely a bit of a domestic tyrant in some brick box of a semi-detached villa Tooting or Balham way, who ran his finger along the sideboard every morning to see if his wife had dusted it properly.

Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals—that indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands, cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees. “Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time, contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his hands into ’em?”

A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well. A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause, and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an uncomfortable one.

“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer; “depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for business, though—our business and doctors’ business, what! More people get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing on damp ground. Nothing worse—nothing! And then no hats. That’s where our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles—eh, Mr. Jenkinson? If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it? Ever hear the story about the feller—Spurgeon, was it—or Dr. Parker—Spurgeon, I think—one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much matter, really—and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon—yes, I’m pretty sure it was Spurgeon—‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in my synagogue’—ha ha ha—good, wasn’t it?...

“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh, you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron—you know. Hot as you can bear it. Best thing going—ab-so-lutely....”

He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.

“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton, don’t you agree?”

Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really, whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were feverishly busy with your own thoughts.

“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the best of ’em. But not now—not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....

“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept—fine cellar! ‘I don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I like what I have good....’”

II

Old Featherstone’s home was a dull, ugly, solid, inconvenient Victorian house in a dull crescent of similar houses. It stands there still—it has been more fortunate than Featherstone’s Wharf in Limehouse and the little dark office in Billiter Square with “T. Featherstone” on its dusty wire blinds and the half model of the “Parisina” facing you as you went in. They are gone; but the house I saw only the other day—its rhododendrons perhaps a shade dingier, a trifle more straggly, and “bright young society” (for the place is a select boarding establishment for City gents nowadays) gyrating to the blare of a loudspeaker in what was aforetime old Thomas Featherstone’s dining-room. And the legend “Pulo Way,” in tarnished gilt on black, still gleams in the light of the street lamp opposite on the two square stone gateposts—bringing a sudden momentary vision of dark seas and strange stars, of ships becalmed under the lee of the land, of light puffs of warm, spicy air stealing out from unseen shores as if they breathed fragrance in their sleep; so that the vague shapes of “Lyndhurst” and “Chatsworth” and “Bellavista” seem the humped outlines of islands sheltering one knows not what of wonder and peril and romance....

A maidservant had come in and lighted the gas in the dining-room, lowered the drab venetian blinds in the bay window, and drawn the heavy stamped plush curtains which hung stiffly under the gilt cornice. Broughton sipped his glass of wine and ate a sandwich, surveying the familiar room with that curious illogical sense of surprised resentment which humanity always feels in the presence of the calm indifference of inanimate things to its own transiency and mortality.

He knew it well, that rather gloomy apartment with its solid Victorian air of ugly, substantial comfort. He had been there before many times. It had been one of Thomas Featherstone’s unvarying customs to invite his skippers to a ceremonial dinner whenever their ships were in London River. An awful sort of business, Broughton had always secretly thought these functions; and, like the lawyer on the present occasion, had been heartily glad when they were over. The bill of fare never varied—roast beef, baked potatoes, some kind of a boiled pudding, almonds and raisins, and a bottle of port to follow. “Special Captain’s port,” that turbulent Irishman, Pat Shaughnessy, of the “Mazeppa,” irreverently termed it: adding, with his great laugh, “You bet the old divvle don’t fetch out his best vintage for hairy shellbacks like us!”

Thirteen—no, it must be fourteen—of those dinners Broughton could remember. They had been annual affairs so long as the “Maid of Athens” could hold her own against the steamers in the Australian wool trade. Latterly, since she had been driven to tramping the world for charters, they had become movable feasts, and between the last two there had been a gap of nearly three years.

Broughton’s eyes travelled slowly from one detail to another—the mahogany chairs ranged at precise intervals against the dull red of the flock-papered walls; the round table whose gleaming brass toes peeped modestly from beneath the voluminous tapestry table cover; the “lady’s and gent’s easies” sitting primly on opposite sides of the vast yawning cavern of the fire-place; the mantelpiece where the black marble clock ticked leisurely between its flanking Marly horses and the pair of pagoda vases, with their smirking ladies and fierce bewhiskered warriors, that one of the old man’s captains had brought years ago from Foochow; the mahogany sideboard whose plate-glass mirror gave back every minutest detail of the room in reverse; the inlaid glass-fronted bookcase with its smug rows of gilt-tooled, leather-bound books—the Waverley Novels, Falconer’s “Shipwreck,” Byron’s poems.

Thomas Featherstone seldom used any other room but this. He possessed a drawing-room: a bleak chill shrine of the middle-class elegancies where the twittering Victorian niece who kept house for him—a characterless worthy woman with the red nose which bespeaks a defective digestion—was wont to dispense tepid tea and flabby muffins on her periodical “At Home” days. He had no study: he had his office for his work, he said, and that was enough for him. He had been brought up to sit in the dining-room at home in his father’s, the ship-chandler’s, house in Stepney, and he had carried the custom with him into the days of his prosperity.

So there he had sat, evening after evening, with his gold spectacles perched on his high nose, reading “Lloyd’s List” and the commercial columns of “The Times,” the current issues of which were even now in the brass newspaper rack by his empty chair: occasionally playing a hand of picquet with the twittering niece. He was a man of an almost inhuman punctuality of habit. People had been known to set their watches by Old Featherstone. At nine o’clock every morning of the week round came the brougham to drive him into the City. At twelve o’clock he sallied forth from Billiter Square to the “London Tavern,” and the table that he always occupied there. At half-past one, back to the office; or, if one of his ships were due, to the West India Docks, where they generally berthed. At five the brougham appeared in Billiter Square to transport him to “Pulo Way” again.

A strange, colourless, monotonous sort of life, one would think; and one which had singularly little in common with the wider aspects of the business in which his money had been made. Of the romantic side of shipping, or indeed of its human side, he seemed to have no conception at all. A consignment of balas rubies, of white elephants, of Manchester goods, of pig iron, they were all one to him—so many items in a bill of lading, no more, no less. Ships carried his house-flag to the four corners of the earth: no one of them had ever carried him farther than the outward-bound pilot. No matter what outlandish ports they visited, it stirred his blood not a whit. Perhaps it was one of the secrets of his success: for imagination, nine times out of ten, is a dangerous sort of commodity, commercially considered; and if Old Featherstone had gone a-gallivanting off to Tuticorin or Amoy or Punta Arenas or Penang or Port au Prince or any other alluringly-named place with which his ships trafficked, instead of sitting in Billiter Square and looking after his business—why, no doubt his business would have been vastly the sufferer! And, indeed, since he found such adventure as his soul needed no farther afield than between the marbled covers of his own ledgers, there would have been no sense in looking for it elsewhere.

You saw the old man’s portrait yonder over the mantelpiece, behind the marble clock and the Marly horses—keen eyes under bushy eyebrows, side whiskers, Gladstone collar, slightly sardonic smile. Broughton indulged in a passing speculation as to what they did with his glass eye when they buried him. The picture was the work of an unknown artist. “If I’d been fool enough to pay for a big name,” old Thomas had been wont to say, “I’d have got a worse picture for three times the money”; and the old man had not forgotten to drive a hard bargain, the recollection of which had perhaps a little coloured the artist’s mood. The unknown had caught his sitter in a characteristic attitude: sitting erect and rigid, his hands clasped one above the other on the silver knob of his favourite Malacca walking-stick. A shrewd old man, you would say, a shrewd, hard, narrow old man, and not have been far wrong in your estimate; though, as even his enemies were bound to admit, he was not without his moments of vision, his odd surprising streaks of generosity.

A man of but little education—he had run as a child daily to a little school in Stepney, kept by the widow and daughters of a shipmaster, and later had gone for a year or two to an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen somewhere off the East India Dock Road—he was wont to say, and to say as if it were something to boast of, that he had never read but two books in his life—Falconer’s “Shipwreck” and Byron’s poems, both of which he knew from cover to cover. For the latter he had a profound and astonishing admiration, so much so that all his ships were named after Byronic heroes and heroines.

The “junk store” some wag once called the Featherstone fleet: and the gibe was not far wide of the mark. Anyone who has the patience and the curiosity to search the pages of a fifty-or sixty-year-old “Lloyd’s Register” will find in that melancholy record of human achievement and human effort blown like dead leaves on the winds of time and change sufficient reason for the nickname. Everywhere it is the same tale—“Mazeppa” ex “Electric Telegraph,” “Bride of Abydos” ex “Navarino,” “Zuleika” ex “Roderick Random,” “Thyrza” ex “Rebel Maid.” Old Featherstone had at one time more than fifty ships under his house-flag, not one of which had been built to his order. “The man who succeeds,” was one of his sayings, “is the man who knows best how to profit by other men’s mistakes.”

The doctrine was one which he put very effectively into practice. He had an almost uncanny nose for bargains; but, what was more than that, he was gifted in a most amazing degree with that peculiar and indefinable quality best described as “ship sense”—an ability amounting well-nigh to a genius for knowing a good ship from a bad one which is seldom found but in seamen, and is rare even among them.

Someone once asked him the secret of his gift, but I doubt if he got much satisfaction out of the answer.

“Ask me another,” snapped out the old man in his dry, staccato fashion. “I’ve got a brother can waggle his ears like a jackass. How does he do that? I don’t know. He don’t know. Same thing in my case, exactly.”

And certainly where he got it is something of a mystery. But since there had been Featherstones buried for generations where time and grime combine to make a hallowed shade in the old parish church of Stepney, there may well have been seafaring blood in the family, and likely enough the founder of the little bow-windowed shop in Wapping Wall was himself a retired ship’s carpenter.

Whatever the explanation, there was undeniably the fact. He bought steamers that didn’t pay and had never paid and that experts said never would pay: ripped the guts out of them, and in a couple of years they had paid for themselves. He bought unlucky ships, difficult ships, ships with a bad name of every sort and kind. Ships that broke their captains’ hearts and their owners’ fortunes, ships that wouldn’t steer, that wouldn’t wear, that wouldn’t stay. And never once did his bargain turn out a bad one.

III

From Old Featherstone’s portrait, and that painted ironical smile which still had the power to call up in him a feeling of vague discomfort, Broughton’s eyes travelled on to the portraits of ships which—Old Featherstone excepted—were the room’s sole artistic adornment.

Over there in the corners—one each side of the portrait—were the old “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan.” They were the first ships Old Featherstone bought, in the distant days when he was still young Featherstone, a smart young clerk in Daly’s office, whose astonishing rise to fortune was yet on the knees of the gods.

They were old frigate-built East Indiamen, both of them, the “General Bunbury” and “Earl Clapham,” from some Bombay or Moulmein dockyard: teak through and through, but as leaky as sieves with sheer age and years of labouring in seaways. Young Featherstone bought them for a song: gutted them, packed their roomy ’tween-decks with emigrants like herrings in a barrel, and hurried them backwards and forwards as fast as he dared between London and Australia while the gold rush of the ’sixties was at its hottest. He was in too big a hurry even to give them new figureheads to match their new names, with the result that a portly British general and a highly respectable peer of Evangelistic tendencies had to endure the indignity of an enforced masquerade, the one as the wandering “Childe,” the other as the disreputable “Don” of many amours.

Goodness knows how these two old ships’ venerable ribs managed to stick together running down the Easting: nor indeed how it was that they didn’t carry their freight of hopeful fortune seekers to the bottom before they were well clear of the Channel. However, by hook or by crook, stick together they did, long enough at any rate to lay the foundation of Featherstone’s success. The “Childe Harold”—she who was the “General Bunbury”—created a bit of a sensation in the last lap of her third voyage by sinking, poor old soul, in the West India Dock entrance at the head of a whole fleet of shipping crowding in on the tide. The “Don Juan”—the backsliding “Earl Clapham”—came to grief, by a stroke of luck, just off the Mauritius, and her old bones (it must have taken a small forest of teak to build her) fetched double what Featherstone had paid for her for building material. But they had served their purpose. Thereafter, Featherstone never looked behind him.

The old “Giaour”—she started life as a steamer, in the days when steam was suffering from over-inflation, and a good many speculators were scalding their fingers badly with it. The “Cottonopolis,” of the defunct “Spreadeagle” Line—that was how she began. Her accommodation was the talk of the town, said to be the most lavish ever seen—a wash basin to every six cabins—but she devoured such quantities of fuel, as well as turning out such a brute in a seaway that her passenger list was never more than half full, that the shareholders were glad to get rid of her at a loss. There she was—an ugly great lump of a ship, with masts that had a peculiar rake to them, something after the style of a Chinese junk. Sail, too ... like a witch, she did!... Then the little “Thyrza”—she was a pretty little butterfly of a thing; but she was as near being a mistake as any purchase Featherstone ever made. He had bought her, so it was believed, with the intention at the back of his mind of winning the China tea race; but the tea trade petering out, he put her into the wool fleet instead. Broughton had seen the dainty little ship many a time: a regular picture she used to look, beating up to the Heads just as old Captain Winter had painted her. Rare hand with a paint-brush that old chap was, and no mistake! Give him one good look at a ship, and he’d get her likeness to a gantline ... notice things about her, too, sometimes, that even her own skipper hadn’t found out....

There was the “Manfred”—the unluckiest ship, surely, that ever left the ways! The “Young Tamlin” was the name she used to go by, in the days when she used to kill two or three men every trip. That was before Old Featherstone got hold of her, of course: and her owners—she belonged to a little one-ship company—got the jumps about it and sold her. Sold her cheap, too ... but, bless you, that stopped her gallop all right! She drowned no more men afterwards.

And—last of all—the “Maid of Athens.” ...

Broughton’s own ship—the pride of his heart, the apple of his eye, the guiding motive, the absorbing interest of his life for more than twenty-five years.

Broughton didn’t care much about that picture—never had done, though he didn’t trouble to tell the old man so. No use asking for trouble: and he was a contrary old devil if you crossed him! A Chinese ship-chandler’s affair, it was, and moreover it showed the “Maid” with a spencer at the main which she never carried: at least, not in Broughton’s time. A good long time that meant, too ... ah well! They had grown old together, his ship and he!

He remembered the day he got command of her as clearly as if it were yesterday. He was chief officer of the “Haidée” at the time—getting along in years, too, and beginning to wonder if he would ever have the luck to get a ship of his own. She was a nice little ship, the “Haidée,” the last of Daly’s fleet, and Featherstone bought her after old Daly, who had given him a stool in his office years before, shot himself in that very office in Fenchurch Street when the news came of the wreck of the “Allan-a-Dale,” his favourite ship, on the Calf of Man. Quite a nice little ship, but nothing out of the common about her: nothing a man could take to particularly, somehow. And yet at the time he had wanted nothing better than to be her skipper.

Old Captain Philpot had been queerish all that voyage; he used to nip brandy on the quiet a lot, and take drugs when he could get them as well. Soon after they left the Coromandel coast he went out of his mind altogether, and Broughton found him one day, when he went down to dinner, crawling round the cabin on all fours and complaining that he was King Nebuchadnezzar and couldn’t find any grass to eat.

Good Lord! that was a time, too ... made a man sweat to think of it, even after all these years! Hurricane after hurricane right through the Indian Ocean: on deck most of the time, and sitting on the Old Man’s head when he got rumbustious during the watch below. However, the poor old chap died as quiet as a child, when he smelt the Western Islands, and Broughton as chief officer took the vessel into port.

Old Featherstone came on board, as his custom was, as soon as she was fairly berthed, and Broughton—tongue-tied and stammering as he always was on important occasions of the kind—gave an account of his stewardship. The old man listened with never a word, only just a grunt or a brusque nod now and again; and when the tale was told made no comment whatever beyond a curt “Humph! Well, you can’t have command of this ship. She’s promised to Allinson. Can’t go back on him. Besides, he’s senior to you.”

Then, with one foot on the gangway, he turned back and barked out:

“I’ve bought a new ship. ‘Philopena’ or some such outlandish name. She’s at Griffin’s Wharf, Millwall. Better go and look at her. You can have her if you fancy her.”

Half-way down the gangway he turned again.

“Come and dine with me at Blackheath on Thursday. Seven o’clock. And don’t keep me waiting, mind! I’m a punctual man, or I shouldn’t be where I am.”

That invitation—invitation? it was more like a Royal command—as Broughton well knew, set the seal on his promotion.

The ship was the “Maid of Athens.”

IV

Broughton went in search of her as soon as he had finished up on board the “Haidée” and turned her over to the care of the old lame shipkeeper.

He didn’t feel particularly excited; his feeling, naturally enough, was one of pleasurable anticipation of an improvement in his material circumstances—no more than that, as he realized with that wistful sense of flatness and disappointment which inevitably accompanies the discovery that some long-desired consummation has lost through the lapse of time its power to excite and to intoxicate the mind. “If this had happened ten years ago,” he thought rather sadly, “Lord, how full of myself I should have been!” forgetting that middle age, when it does make acquaintance with passion, seldom does it by halves.

He found the “Philopena” in a derelict, melancholy wet dock somewhere among vacant lots and chemical works down in the Isle of Dogs, along with a couple of dilapidated coasting colliers and a broken-down tug—a smoky Thames-side sunset burning like a banked fire behind the cynical-looking sheds of a shadowy and problematical Griffin—and he fell in love with her on the instant.

There is—or perhaps one should rather say was, since it is doubtful if the Age of Steam has cognizance of such sentimental weaknesses—a certain kind of thrill, not to be satisfactorily defined in words, which runs through a man’s whole being when first his eyes fall upon the one ship which, out of all the thousands which sail the seas, seems especially made to be the complement of his own being, as surely as a woman is made for her mate. It is a feeling to which first love is perhaps the thing most nearly comparable—it can make the most commonplace of men into a poet; and even that lacks one of its qualities—its pure and sexless virginity. Other ships there may be more beautiful; but they leave him cold. They are not for him as she is for him....

That thrill it was—that awakening of two of the root instincts of mankind, the instinct to cherish, and the instinct to possess—which ran (surprising even himself) through that most matter-of-fact and unimaginative of men, David Broughton, when he first set eyes on the ship that for twenty-odd years to come was destined to provide the main interest and object of his existence.

There seemed to be nobody about the wharf, but Broughton untied a leaky dinghy that he found moored under the piles and pulled out to her. The nearer he got to her the better he liked her. Stern a bit on the heavy side, he fancied—with too much weight aft she’d be inclined to run up into the wind if you didn’t watch her. She’d want some handling, all right, but it wouldn’t do to be afraid of her, either. Her lines were a dream! He pulled all round her, viewing her from every angle; and as he rowed under her keen bow he caught himself fancying that her little dainty figurehead looked down upon him with a kind of wistful appeal—a sort of “You won’t go away and leave me, will you?” look that won his heart on the spot.

He made the boat fast to the crazy Jacob’s ladder and swung himself on board. She was filthily dirty, appallingly neglected, with that unspeakably forlorn and abandoned look which ships seem to get after a long lay-up in port. The grime and litter everywhere made his heart ache. The Dagoes had had her for the last year or two, and her little cabin reeked of garlic and stale cigar smoke. The shipkeeper, a drink-sodden old ruffian with a horrible red-running eye, who was probably none too pleased at the prospect of losing his job now his temporary home was sold, followed Broughton round grumbling and croaking. Lor’ bless you, she wouldn’t sail, not she! No more’n a mule’ll go if he don’t want to! There was plenty had had a try at her, and they all told the same tale. Somethink wrong with the way she was built, must be ... or else they’d laid her keel of a Friday or summat....

Broughton smiled to himself. Somehow, he thought, that ship was going to sail for him! He couldn’t have explained the feeling for the life of him, but there it was.

And so, in point of fact, things turned out. Just as a horse which is an unmanageable fiend in the hands of a crack jockey will let some snip of a stable lad do what he will with him—just as a dog made savage by ill-usage will attach himself for life (and perhaps—who knows?—beyond) to someone who first masters him and then shows him kindness—so did this little wild “Philopena” under her new name of “Maid of Athens” show no sign of the tricks and vices, whatever they might be, which had brought her, like some lovely but wilful lady fallen among evil companions, to the obscene desolation of that forlorn Millwall wet dock. Twenty-five years ago ... ah, well, they had been happy years, on the whole! A reserved and rather lonely man, not over fond of company, Broughton had drifted into a negatively disastrous sort of marriage in his young days with a woman considerably older than himself. With the best will in the world to do so, he had been unable to feel any but a superficial grief at her death a few years later; and in the house where his married stepdaughter now lived he always felt like a stranger on sufferance during his brief periods ashore. But he had found an abiding content in the daily routine of his life at sea. He gave himself up to his ship without grudging. She was his one interest in life, his hobby, his love. He laid out his spare cash on little items of personal adornment for her as for a loved woman, and on the new gear of which Old Featherstone stinted her as his natural tendency to stinginess increased with age.

It was a brother skipper, Tom Pellatt, of Maclean’s pretty little clipper “Phoebe Maclean”—a silly, noisy chap Broughton privately thought him—who had first put the idea into his head that the “Maid of Athens” might one day become his own property in name as she already was in spirit.

Pellatt had been dining on board when both ships were in Sydney Harbour, and just as he was going he said:

“Tell you what, Broughton, you’ve been the making of this ship; and if old Nethermillstone don’t leave her to you in his will he damn well ought to, that’s all!”

Broughton put the suggestion aside with a laugh. Pellatt, who was one of those people who, as the phrase goes, “talk as they warm,” and simply said it out of a desire to say something complimentary and pleasing to his host—Broughton’s absorption in his ship being something of a standing joke among his fellow-captains when his back was turned—probably forgot he had ever said it before he got back to his own ship. But the words had sown their seed.

At first Broughton only played with the idea at odd moments: he would do this, he would do that, if the ship were his—treating it as a pleasant kind of game of make-believe wherewith to beguile an idle minute; but always with the mental proviso that, of course, no one but a silly gabbling ass like Pellatt would ever have thought of such a thing.

Then, gradually, he began to wonder if it really was such a ridiculous notion, after all. Old Featherstone’s business would die with him, that was very certain. Hadn’t he said as much himself, the last time Broughton dined at Blackheath, about the time young Daly, whose father Featherstone had worked for in his clerking days, came such a holy mucker in the Bankruptcy Court?

“I don’t intend to leave my house-flag to be trailed through the mire!” he had said.

And hadn’t he said, too, not once but many times:

“I shall never sell the ‘Maid of Athens’!”

Presently, from being a desirable but remote possibility, he began to consider it in the light of a probability; and from that it was but a short step to take to begin to look upon it as a right. Who, he asked himself, had a stronger claim to the ship than he—if, indeed, half so strong?

He began by degrees to make his plans more definitely. It was no longer “if the ship were mine,” but “when she is mine.” He hugged the thought to him, fed upon it, lived with it night and day. He hoped he could honestly say he had never wished Old Featherstone’s death; but when the news of his death had come he had not been able to repress a thrill of exultation as the thought rose to the surface of his mind, “Now, at last, she will surely be mine!”

It had been the old man himself who had finally turned what had until then been no more than a vague hope into a virtual certainty.

It was on the occasion of that last dinner at Blackheath, a matter of six weeks ago, just before the attack of bronchitis that had finished the old fellow off. There he had sat in his big easy-chair by the fire, looking incredibly frail and shrunken, his eyes, for all that, as keen as ever in their sunken caves as they wandered from Broughton’s face to the counterfeit presentment of the “Maid of Athens” riding proudly on her painted sea.

“Well, Broughton,” he had snapped out, suddenly, for a moment almost like his old self again, “you’ve thought a lot of the old ship, haven’t you?”

Broughton, taken by surprise, and feeling, no doubt, just a little guilty about those secret aircastles of his, said, stammering, well, yes, he supposed he had.

And there the matter stopped. Not much, perhaps; but straws show which way the wind blows. Broughton thought he was justified in reading a certain significance into the incident.

And again, on the way up to the funeral that morning, he had looked in at a little club he belonged to, and met half a dozen skippers of his acquaintance: always the same tale—“Hello, Broughton! Off to plant old Feathers, I suppose! Hope he’s come down handsome in his will.”

“Bless you, I’m not expecting anything!” had been Broughton’s answer, as much to the jealous Fates as to them.... Well, it would soon be settled now one way or the other. He didn’t really, in his heart of hearts, believe in the possibility of that other way at all; but he included it in his mind as a matter of form—again with that vague half-superstitious notion of propitiating some watchful and sardonic Destiny.

He was surprised to find himself so little excited now that the great moment had arrived. He had had to keep a tight hand on himself on the way up from the cemetery, lest he should betray his fever of nervous impatience to his companions, and he had been relieved when the lawyer’s constant flow of chatter obviated the necessity of his taking any share in the conversation. Now, he was glad to find, he had got himself well under control. He was even able to derive a certain quiet interest from observing the suppressed eagerness on the decorous countenances of Old Featherstone’s relations. A so-so lot, on the whole! Broughton thought by the looks of ’em that old Thomas must have had the lion’s share of the family wits.

Funny that a man should spend all his life piling money up, and then have no one to leave it to that he really cared for! “My brother’s children’ll get my money when I’m gone,” Old Featherstone used to say; “don’t think much of ’em, but there it is! I hope they’ll enjoy spending it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it.” ...

The little lawyer sipped the last of his port, drew his chair up to the table, and rummaged in the depths of his shabby brown bag with the air of grave importance of a conjurer about to produce rabbits from a hat.

Ah, here was the rabbit—a blue, folded paper which he unfolded, flattened with immense deliberation, and began to read in the dead silence which had suddenly fallen on the room.

By George, thought Broughton, the old fellow was warm and no mistake! Houses here, houses there, shares in this railway, that bank, the other mine. It didn’t interest him much personally, but it was as good as a play to see the pale gooseberry eyes of that grocer-looking chap bulging with excitement until they bade fair to drop out of his head.

“The house ‘Pulo Way’ and the contents thereof (with the exception of certain items specified elsewhere),” droned on the lawyer’s unmusical, monotonous voice, “to Rosina Barratt for her life.” ... Rosina Barratt—that was the dyspeptic niece. Broughton felt glad to know he’d done the proper thing by her. She deserved it. A decent woman: and he must have been a crotchety old devil to live with in his latter days!

Good Lord, what an interminable rigmarole this legal business was! Broughton moved restlessly in his seat. The ships—the ships! Was he never coming to them?

His own name, starting at him out of the midst of the formal phraseology, made his heart miss a beat. Here it was at last: but no—not yet——

“To Captain David Broughton my oil painting of the clipper ship ‘Maid of Athens’ in gold frame, knowing his regard for the ship and that he will value the painting on that account....”

Broughton just managed to bite back a laugh in time. If the old chap had known what he really thought about that picture!

The lawyer droned on. Somebody got that black clock on the mantelpiece—somebody else the old man’s Malacca cane—two hundred pounds to little Jenkinson—a hundred to the lawyer. The little clerk sat up and smirked like a Sunday School kid that hears its name read out for a prize; but the lawyer, Broughton thought not without a touch of amusement, didn’t look any too well pleased with his.

The ships—the ships—what about the ships?...

“I desire that my two ships, ‘Maid of Athens’ and ‘Thyrza,’ shall be sold within twelve months after my decease, and the proceeds of the sale divided amongst the legatees aforesaid in the same proportion as the rest of my estate.”

It seemed to Broughton that the lawyer’s respectfully modulated tones went roaring and echoing round the room, with a note of derision in them like the ironical laughter of fiends. A black mist swam before his eyes for a minute or two, obscuring the prim Victorian dining-room and its familiar contents—a mist through which the three lit gas-globes on the brass chandelier shone large, round, and haloed like sun-dogs in the Far North.

The mist, clearing, left everything distinct again. The thundering voice subsided again to its former dry monotone. The lawyer brought his reading to a close, folded his eyeglasses, and replaced his documents in his bag. A discreet murmur of excited talk broke out among the relatives.

The dyspeptic niece, important in the consciousness of her legacy, came twittering up to Broughton as he rose to go.

“So kind of you to come, Captain Broughton! My uncle would have appreciated your being here. And you’ll let me know where to send your picture, won’t you? I’m so glad it’s going to you. One likes to think things are going to those who will appreciate them.”

The picture! Broughton nearly laughed in the woman’s face—nearly told her to keep the damned picture. But he thought better of it—it wasn’t the poor silly creature’s fault, after all!

The lawyer hailed him as he stood on the steps, buttoning his overcoat, while he waited for his hansom.

“Can’t I give you a lift anywhere, Captain Broughton? Going to be a foggy night, I fancy.”

Broughton shook his head with a curt “No, thanks—walking!”

The little lawyer, who was a shrewd observer of men and, like most chatterboxes, a kindly soul, and who was, moreover, none too pleased with his own legacy, shook his head and sighed as he watched the square-set figure disappear into the fog and darkness.

“That man’s had a bit of a knock,” he reflected. “Wonder if he’s got anything to live on? Not much, I dare say. Wouldn’t have hurt that stingy old devil to leave him a hundred or two.... Ah well....”

V

Broughton strode away through the foggy suburban streets. He was afraid he’d been a bit offhand with that lawyer chap. Well, he couldn’t help that! He felt he couldn’t stand his gabble—not at present.

He wanted above everything else to be alone. He didn’t feel as if he could face the well-meant curiosity and the equally well-meant sympathy of those men who had wished him luck that morning. His wound had struck too deep for such superficial salves to be other than an added irritation. Normally inclined to err on the side of amiability, he felt just now at odds with all the rest of humankind. He could fancy the whispers that would follow him—“There goes poor Broughton—feeling pretty sickish, you bet!”

The first staggering sensation of blank and bewildered disappointment had passed away, and in its place there surged up within him a cold tide of black anger against Old Featherstone.

So the old devil had been laughing at him in his sleeve that night—even as he was laughing at him now, very likely, in whatever unholy place he was gone to! He had guessed his thoughts, he supposed, in that damned uncanny way he had. If the dead face now lying under the cold cemetery mould had lain in Broughton’s pathway now he would have ground his heel into the sardonic smile that still curled its stiff and silent lips.

Him and his blasted picture!... A thing that wasn’t worth giving wall-space to! A damned ship-chandler’s daub! Why, give him a few splashes of ship’s paint and a brush and he’d make a better fist at it himself!

He strode blindly on, through interminable crescents of smug villas, their pavements greasy with fallen leaves, along dreary streets of shabby “semis,” without noticing or caring where he was going: swinging his neatly rolled umbrella regardless of the fine rain which had begun to fall and was gathering in a million glistening drops on his black coat. His mood cried aloud for the relief of physical effort, of physical discomfort. Now and then he was brought up short by a blank wall that drove him back upon his traces; now and then he cannoned unnoticing into passing pedestrians, who turned, conscious of something unusual in his manner, to watch him out of sight, then continued their way wondering if he were drunk or mad.

Presently the streets of dull “semis” gave place to streets of seedy rows, with here and there a corner off-licence or a fried-fish shop discharging its warm oily odours upon the chill air; and at last, turning a corner, he found himself suddenly in a wide road whose greasy pavements were lined with stalls and flares, yelling salesmen, and groups of draggle-tailed women.

He looked about him stupidly, uncertain of his bearings, though the blare of a ship’s syren striking on his ear told him that he was not far from the river. He was suddenly aware that he was wet and hungry and very tired, and that his feet in his best boots hurt him abominably, for he was no better a walker than most sailormen. He asked a passing pedestrian where he was.

“Lower Road, Deptford.”... Why, he was less than a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Surrey Commercial Docks, where the “Maid of Athens” was even now lying, having just finished discharging the cargo of linseed she had loaded at the River Plate. He couldn’t do better than get on to the ship, he decided; he had been knocked out of time, and no mistake, and there he would be able to sit down quietly and think things over.

The fog, which had been comparatively light on the higher ground, had been steadily growing denser as he neared the river. There were haloes round the flares that roared above the street stalls, and the lighted shop windows were mere luminous blurs in the surrounding murk.

“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no mistake—thick as ever I see it!”

Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel—a solid mass of clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand, getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. You couldn’t see your hand before your face.

Broughton groped his way along the narrow, slimy causeway which lay between the stacks of piled-up lumber, exuding their sharp, damp, resinous fragrance, and the intense darkness, broken occasionally by a vague tremulous reflection where some ship’s lights contrived to pierce it, which brooded over the unseen waters of the dock. Lights showed forlornly here and there at the openings of the lanes which led away between the piled deals—abysses of blackness as dark as the Magellanic nebulæ. Ship’s portholes gleamed round and watchful as the eyes of huge monsters of the slime. Bollards started up suddenly out of the fog like menacing figures, and cranes straddled the path like black Apollyons in some marine Pilgrim’s Progress. Once Broughton pulled himself up only just in time to save himself from stepping over the edge of a yawning pit of nothingness in which the water lipped unseen against the slimy piles. The thought involuntarily crossed his mind that perhaps he might have done worse; but he put it from him resolutely. His code, a simple one, did not admit suicide as a permissible solution of the problems of life.

All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted as the grave—nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain, once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock, and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his memories.

Old Mike came hobbling out at the sound of Broughton’s step on the plank.

“’Strewth, Cap’n,” he exclaimed in astonishment, “you’ve chose a grand night to come down an’ no fatal error! Will I make a bit o’ fire in the cabin an’ brew ye a cup o’ tea? Sure you’re wet to the skin!”

“Poor old chap!” Broughton thought, as he watched him busying himself about his fire-lighting with the gnarled and shaking hands that had hauled on so many a tackle-fall in their day. It would be a hard blow for him when he knew that ship was to be sold. He had served in Featherstone’s ships many years as A.B. and latterly as bos’n, until a fall from aloft put an end to his seagoing days; and this little job of shipkeeping was one of the very few planks between him and the workhouse.

The world was none too kind to old men who had outlived their usefulness. What was it that old flintstone had said: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? Well, that was true enough, anyway!

He called to mind an incident that had happened in Sydney his last voyage there. An old man had come up to him begging for a job. He didn’t care what—night watchman, anything; and he had opened his coat to show that he had neither waistcoat nor shirt beneath it.

“You don’t remember me, Broughton,” the old fellow had said; and, looking closer, he had recognized in that incredibly seedy wreck one of his own old skippers—before whose almost godlike aloofness and majesty he had once trembled in mingled fear and awe. It was a pitiful tale he had to tell. He had been thrown out of a berth at sixty-five, through his ship being lost by no fault of his own, and couldn’t get in anywhere. That proud, arrogant old man, full of small vanities!... Broughton had had little enough cause in the past to think of him over kindly; but the memory of the encounter had remained with him for weeks at the time, and returned to trouble him now with an added significance.

Old Mike’s bit o’ fire smouldered a little and went out, leaving nothing but an acrid stink to mark its passing. The well-stewed tea in the enamel cup at his elbow, with the two ragged slices of margarine-plastered bread beside it in the slopped saucer, grew cold unheeded. Outside, the rain dripped down like slow tears. And there he sat, with his clenched hands before him on the table, staring into the Past.

There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing more than he could help. But he—what had he given to her? Money—well, he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of, sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin.

The years of his life had gone into her—affection, understanding, ungrudging service, sleepless nights and anxious days. What wonder that she seemed almost like a part of himself? What wonder that to a man of his rigid, slow-moving type of mind a future in which she had no part was a thing unthinkable?

His memory passed on to all the mates and second mates who had faced him at meals over that very cabin. A regular procession of them—Marston—Reid—what was the name of that chap with the light eyelashes?—Barnes, was it?—Digby—he was a decent chap, now—went into steam years ago and was chief officer in one of the B. I. ships last time Broughton heard of him. That was what he ought to have done. He had known it at the back of his mind all along. But he couldn’t leave her—he couldn’t leave her!

Well, well, there was no use meeting trouble half-way! What was it old Waterhouse, his first skipper in his brassbound days, used to say? “If you’re jammed on a lee shore and can’t stay, why, then try wearing. If that don’t work, try boxing her off. But whatever you do, do something! Don’t sit down and howl!”

They used to laugh at him and mimic him behind his back, cheeky young devils; but it was damned good advice for all that. He was on a lee shore now right enough; but there was bound to be a way out somewhere if he kept his head.

An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him—just such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay down on the cabin settee.

A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out ... if he could only think of it ... somewhere....

VI

He awoke to a flood of bright sunshine streaming in through the skylight. The wind had driven fog and rain before it, leaving a virginal and new-washed world under a sky of pale, remote blue.

Broughton heaved himself off the settee, catching a glimpse of himself—haggard, rumpled, and unkempt—in the mirror over the sideboard, as he did so.

“By George!” he said to himself, viewing his reflection, “Marianne would have looked down her nose at me if I’d turned up at Sibella Road like this. She’d have thought I’d been having a thick night, and small blame to her!”

There was no doubt that he presented a sorry spectacle. His trousers were still damp and splashed with mud-stains; his collar was creased and black with fog. He was stiff and tired in body; but his mind, naturally resilient, was infinitely refreshed by the long hours of sleep.

His spirits rose every minute. He whistled to himself as he rummaged out a blue suit from his cabin, washed, and shaved. He even indulged in a smile as he recalled the little lawyer and his two singlets.

After all, looked at in the light of day, things might have been a whole lot worse. There was always a chance that one of the three or four British firms who still owned sailing ships might buy the old girl. She had a great name; and people were beginning to be a bit sentimental about sailing ships now they were mostly gone. Or one of the big steamship lines might take her on for training purposes. If either of those things happened, it wasn’t likely they would want to put anyone else in command. It was common knowledge, though he said it himself, that no one could get what he could out of her. They would very likely put her into the nitrate trade. Of course it would be a bit of a come-down, still—any port in a storm! He remembered how sick he had been about it the first time she loaded coal at Newcastle. He had felt like going down on his knees and apologizing to her for the outrage! Or, again, there was lumber—plenty of charters were to be had up the West Coast. True, her size was against her; with her reputation and twice her tonnage she wouldn’t have had to wait long for a purchaser. But she would be a good investment, for all that. Why, damn it all, if he had the money loose he’d buy her himself without thinking twice about it! But twenty pounds a month doesn’t leave much margin for such luxuries as buying ships.

He paused half in and half out of his coat, struck by a sudden idea.

His half-brother Edward! Why, he was the very man—just the very man! Rolling in money that he made at that warehouse where he sold staylaces or something up in the City! The blighter was as sharp as a needle—always had been from the time when he used to drive bargains over blood alleys with the other kids at school. He’d see the advantage of a proposition like this fast enough! He could either lend the money on reasonable interest on the security of the ship, or if he liked he could buy her himself and let Broughton manage her for him.

He hurried over the rest of his toilet, swallowed a cup of tea and a rasher old Mike had got ready for him, and started off for the City, all on fire with his new project.

How did that piece of poetry go that Old Featherstone got the ship’s name from? He had read it once, but he wasn’t much at poetry: he couldn’t make much of it.