All hands in Yamba hut had turned in, except a couple at the end of the long rough table.
These late birds were playing euchre by the flickering light of an evil-smelling slush lamp. The cook had banked up the fire for the night, but the myall ashes still glowed redly and cast heat around. On the stone hearth stewed a bucket of tea. But for the snores of the men in the double tier of bunks ranged ship-fashion along both sides of the big hut, the frizzling of the grease in the lamp, and the muttered exclamations of the players, everything was very quiet.
‘Pass me!’
‘Make it!’
‘Hearts!’
And both men dropped their hands and sprang up in affright as a wild scream rang out from the bunk just above them.
As they gazed, a white face, wet with the sweat of fear, poked out and stared down upon them with eyes in which the late terror still lived.
278‘What the dickens is up?’ asked one, recovering from his surprise, whilst the grumbles of awakened sleepers travelled around the hut.
‘My God! what a dream! what a dream!’ exclaimed the man addressed, sticking out a pair of naked legs, and softly alighting on the earthen floor, and standing there trembling.
‘Shoo!’ said the station wit, as he turned for a fresh start; ‘it’s only Jack the Sailor had the night-horse.’
But the man, crouching close to the players, and wiping his pallid face with his loose shirt sleeve, still exclaimed,—
‘What a dream! My God! What a dream!’
‘Tell us what it were all about, Jack,’ asked one of the others, handing him a pannikin of tea. ‘It oughter been bad, judgin’ by the dashed skreek as you give.’
‘It was,’ said the other—a grizzled, tanned, elderly man—as he warmed his legs, and looked rather ashamed of himself. ‘But hardly enough to make such a row over as you chaps reckons I did. I was dreamin’,’ he continued, speaking slowly, ‘as I was at sea again. It was on Christmas Day, an’ the ship was close to Cape Horn. How I knowed that, I can’t tell. But the land was in sight quite plain. Me an’ another feller—I can see his ugly face yet, and sha’n’t never forget it—was makin’ fast one of the jibs. Presen’ly we seemed to ’ave some words out there, hot an’ sharp. Then I done a thing, 279the like o’ which ud never come into my mind when awake—not if I lived to the age of Methyuseler—I puts my sheath-knife into him right up to the handle.
‘The weather were heavy, an’ the ship a-pitchin’ bowsprit under into a head sea. Well, I was just watchin’ his face turn sorter slate colour, an’ him clingin’ on to a gasket an’ starin’ hard, when she gives a dive fathoms deep.
‘When I comes up again I was in the water, an’ there was the ship half-a-mile away.
‘Swimmin’ an’ lookin’ round, I spies the other feller alongside me on top of a big comber, with the white spume all red about him.
‘Nex’ minute, down he comes, an’ I feels his two hands a-grippin’ me tight by the throat. I expect’s it was then I sung out an’ woke myself,’ and the man shivered as he gazed intently into the heart of the glowing myall ashes.
‘Well, Jack Ashby,’ said one of his hearers, gathering up the scattered cards, ‘it wasn’t a nice dream. If I was you I should take it as a warnin’ never to go a-sailorin’ no more. Never was at the game myself, and don’t want to be. There can’t be much in it, though, when just the very thoughts o’ what’s never ’appened, an’ what’s never a-goin’ to ’appen, is able to give a chap such a start as you got.’
‘Ugh!’ exclaimed the sailor, getting up and shaking himself as he climbed into his bunk. ‘No, I’ll never go back to sea again!’
280But, in course of time, Jack Ashby became tired of station life—became tired of the everlasting drudgery of the rouseabout, the burr-cutting, lamb-catching, and all the rest of it.
He had no more dreams of the kind. But when o’ nights the wind whistled around and shook the crazy old hut, he would turn restlessly in his bunk and listen for the hollow thud of the rope-coils on the deck above, the call of ‘All hands,’ the wild racket of the gale, and the hiss of stormy waters.
So his thoughts irresistibly wandered back again to the tall ships and the old shipmates, and all the magic and mystery of the great deep on whose bosom he had passed his life. He knew that he was infinitely better off where he was—better paid, better fed, better off in every respect than he could ever possibly hope to be at sea.
Battling with his longing, he contrasted the weevilly biscuits and salt junk of the fo’k’stle with the wholesome damper and fresh mutton and beef of the hut.
He thought of the ‘all night in’ of undisturbed rest, contrasting it with the ‘Watch ahoy! Now then, you sleepers, turn out!’ of each successive four hours.
He thought, too, of tyrannous masters and mates; of drenched decks and leaking fo’k’stles, of frozen rigging, of dark wild nights of storm, and of swaying foot-ropes and thundrous canvas slatting like iron plates about his ears; of hunger, wet, and misery.
Long and carefully he thought of all these things, and weighed the balance for and against. Then, one 281morning, rolling up his swag hurriedly, he went straight back to them.
Even the thought of his dream had no power to stay him.
But he made a reservation to himself. Said he,—
‘No more deep water! I’ll try the coast. I’ve heard it’s good. No more deep water; and, above all, no Cape Horn!’
He shipped on board a coaster, and went trips to Circular Head for potatoes; got bar-bound for weeks in eastern rivers looking for maize and fruit; sailed coal-laden, with pumps going clanketty-clank all down the land, and finally, after some months of this sort of work, found himself in Port Adelaide, penniless, and fresh from a gorgeous spree. Here he fell in with an old deep-water shipmate belonging to one of the vessels in harbour.
‘Come home with us, Jack,’ said his friend. ‘She ain’t so bad for a limejuicer—patent reefs, watch an’ watch, an’ no stun’s’ls for’ard. The mate’s a Horse. But the ole man’s right enough; an’ he wants a couple o’ A.B.’s.’
‘No,’ said Jack Ashby, firmly, ‘I’ll never go deep water again. The coast’s the ticket for this child. I’ve got reasons, Bill.’
And then he told his friend of the dream.
The latter did not appear at all surprised. Nor did he laugh. Sailors attach more importance to such things than do landsmen. All he said was,—
‘The Dido’s a fine big ship. She’s a-goin’ home by 282Good Hope. Was it a ship or a barque, now, as you was on in that dream?’
‘Can’t say for certain,’ replied Ashby, reflectively; ‘but, by the size o’ her spars, I should reckon she’d be full-rigged. Howsomever, if ever I clap eyes on his ugly mug again—which the Lord forbid—you may bet your bottom dollar, Bill Baker, as I’ll swear to that, with its big red beard, an’ the tip o’ the nose sliced clean off.’
‘A-a-a-h!’ said the other, staring for a minute, and then hastily finishing his pint of ‘sheoak.’ And he pressed Ashby no more to go to England in the Dido.
But the latter found it just then anything but easy to get another berth in a coaster. Also he was in debt to his boarding-house; and, altogether, it seemed as if presently he would have to take the very first thing that offered, or be ‘chucked out.’
‘Two A.B.’s wanted for the Dido,’ roared the shipping master into a knot of seamen at his office door one day shortly after Jack and his old shipmate had foregathered at the ‘Lass o’ Gowrie.’ And the former, feeling very uncomfortable, and as a man between the Devil and the Deep Sea, signed articles.
His one solitary consolation was that the Dido was not bound round Cape Horn. He cared for none other of the world’s promontories. Also, as he cheered up a little, it came into his mind that it would be rather pleasant than otherwise once more to have a run down Ratcliffe Highway, a lark with the girls in Tiger Bay, and a look-in at the old penny gaff in Whitechapel. 283But the main point was that there was no Cape Horn. Had not Bill Baker told him so? ‘Falmouth and the United Kingdom,’ said the Articles. Certainly there was no particular route mentioned. But who should know if Bill Baker did not?
But all too surely had the thing that men call Fate laid fast hold on the Dreamer. And the boarding-house-keeper cashed his advance note—returning nothing—and carted him to the Dido, and left him stretched out on the fo’k’stle floor, not knowing or caring where he was, or who he was, or where he was going, and oblivious of all things under the sun.
Nor did he show on deck again until, in the grey of next morning, a man with a great red beard and a flat nose looked into his bunk and called him obscene names, and bade him jump aloft and loose the fore-topsail, or he would let him know what shirking meant on board of the Dido.
‘This is a bad beginning,’ thought Jack Ashby, as, with trembling body and splitting head, he unsteadily climbed the rigging, listening as one but yet half awake to the clank of the windlass pawls and the roaring chorus of the men at the brakes. ‘That’s the feller, sure enough!’ he gasped, as, winded, he dragged himself into the fore-top. ‘I’d swear to him anywhere. Thank the Lord we ain’t goin’ round the Horn! I wonder if he knowed me? He’s the mate. An’ Bill was right; he is a Horse. Damn deep water!’
‘Now then, fore-top, there, shift your pins or I’ll haze you,’ came up in a bellow from the deck, making poor 284Jack jump again as he stared ruefully down at the fierce upturned face, its red beard forking out like a new swab.
‘Thank the Lord, we ain’t goin’ round the Horn!’ said Jack Ashby, as, with tremulous fingers, he loosened the gaskets and let the stiff folds of canvas fall, and sang out to sheet home.
Down the Gulf with a fair wind rattled the Dido, through Investigator Straits and out into the Southern Ocean, whilst Jack cast a regretful look at the lessening line of distant blue, and exclaimed once more,—
‘Damn deep water!’
That evening the officers spin a coin, and proceed to pick their respective watches.
To his disgust, Jack is the very first man chosen by the fierce chief mate, who has won the toss, and who at once says,—
‘Go below the port watch!’—his own.
It is blowing a fresh breeze when he comes on deck again at eight bells. It is his wheel. He finds his friend Bill Baker there.
‘East by sowthe,’ says Bill emphatically, giving him a pitying look, and walking for’ard.
‘East by sowthe it is,’ replies Jack, mechanically.
Then, as he somewhat nervously, after the long absence, eyes the white bobbing disc in the binnacle, and squints aloft at the dark piles of canvas, it suddenly bursts upon him. Whilst he has been asleep the wind has shifted into the west. It blows now as if it meant to stay there. They are bound round Cape Horn after all.
‘Mind your hellum, you booby,’ roars the mate, just 285come on deck. ‘Where are you going to with the ship—back to Adelaide? I’ll keep an eye on you, my lad,’ lurching aft, and glancing first at Jack’s face and then at the compass.
Truth to tell, the latter had been so flustered that he had let the Dido come up two or three points off her course. But he soon got her nose straight again, with, for the first time, a feeling of hot satisfaction at his heart that, upon a day not far distant, he and the man with the red beard, and tip off his nose might, if there was any truth in dreams, be quits. Be sure that, by this Jack’s story was well known for’ard of the foremast. Bill Baker’s tongue had not been idle, and, although a few scoffed, more believed, and waited expectantly.
‘There’s more in dreams than most people thinks for,’ remarked an old sailor in the starboard watch, shaking his head sagely. ‘The first part o’ Jack’s has comed true. If I was Mister Horse I’d go a bit easy, an’ not haze the chap about the way he’s a-doing of.’
But the chief officer seemed to have taken an unaccountable dislike to Ashby from the moment he had first seen him. And this dislike he showed in every conceivable way until he nearly drove the poor chap frantic.
At sea an evil-minded man in authority can do things of this sort with impunity. The process is called ‘hazing.’ The sufferer gets all the dirtiest and most disagreeable of the many such jobs to be found on shipboard. He is singled out from his fellows of the watch and sent aloft with tarry wads to hang on to a stay by his 286eyelashes. Or he is set to scraping masts, or greasing down, or slung outboard on a stage scrubbing paintwork, where every roll submerges him neck high, whilst his more fortunate companions are loafing about the decks.
If the hazed one openly rebels, and gives his persecutor a good thrashing, he is promptly ‘logged,’ perhaps ironed, and at the end of the passage loses his pay, holding himself lucky not to have got six months in gaol for ‘mutiny on the high seas.’ There is another thing that may and does happen; and every day the crew of the Dido watched placidly for the heavy iron-clad block, or marlingspike, sharp-pointed and massive, that by pure accident should descend from some lofty nook and brain or transfix their first officer—the Horse, as unmindful of the qualities of that noble animal, they had named him. But Jack Ashby never thought of such a thing. Nor did he take any notice of friendly hints from his mates—also sufferers, but in a less degree—that the best of spike lanyards would wear out by constant use, and that the best-fitted block-strops would at times fail to hold.
Jack’s mind was far too much occupied by the approaching test to which his dream was to be subjected to bother about compassing a lesser revenge that might only end in maiming.
He, by this, fully believed things were going to turn out exactly as he had seen them that night in Yamba men’s hut in the far-away Australian Bush. Therefore he looked upon himself and his tyrant as lost men.
At times, even, he caught himself regarding the first 287officer with an emotion of curious pity, as one whose doom was so near and yet so unexpected. And, by degrees, the men, recognising this attitude of his, and sympathising heartily with it in different fashions, and different degrees of credulity, forbore further advice, and waited with what patience they might.
It was getting well on towards Christmas.
. . . . . . . . . .
I no more wished to go to London via Cape Horn than did John Ashby. But my reasons were altogeth............