By Lincoln Ross Colcord
I
It was at the time of New England’s success and prosperity on the sea that young Captain Bradley took the ship Viking on her maiden voyage. In those days the building and sending forth of a ship was a community enterprise. One sharp November morning, the seaport that had seen her keel laid down the previous winter, had watched her rise on the stocks through the long days of summer, and had launched her successfully in the early fall, turned out to bid the Viking good-bye and Godspeed. Her crew was made up of home boys; Captain Bradley himself had been born and reared in the town. He had started out before the mast at the age of fifteen; now, at twenty-four, he had set his foot on the top rung of the nautical ladder. The town was proud of him. It was proud of all its boys; but especially of one who had shown such steadiness and ability as young Frank Bradley, the old man Jabez Bradley’s son.
Perhaps Captain Bradley was a little proud of his own achievement. He could look back over a clean, hard record. In his nine years of seafaring he had not spared himself. Obey, work, learn, develop judgment and decision, be able to handle any job or meet any emergency; these principles had ruled his life, the sine qua non of old-fashioned seamanship. The reward had come unexpectedly. Captain Marshall, the leading shipowner of the town, whose fortune and influence lay behind the building of the Viking, had offered him the ship that summer as she stood on the stocks.
“I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, Frank” the old man had told him “I knew your father before you, and you’re a chip off the same block. I guess you’re just the man for my new ship”
But young Bradley had already received too many hard knocks, had learned too thoroughly how to discipline himself, to be unduly puffed up over success that came in the course of a deserved advancement. His real pride, from that moment, was in his ship. She was the finest square-rigger that had ever been launched in the town, a ship of eighteen hundred tons, crossing three skysail yards. Her lines were those of the moderate or commercial clipper. As he looked up from the quarter-deck at her lofty spars that November morning, while they waited for the tide—at the maze of freshly tarred rigging and new manila running gear, at the brightly varnished yards, at the furled sails that stretched from yardarm to yardarm like caps of snow—a thrill of genuine sentiment coursed through his blood. His ship—and he loved her already. Soon those white sails would be set to the breeze, soon those strong, slender masts would sway against the sky, bearing aloft their press of flattened canvas, soon those new ropes would snap and sing, settling into a taut network from deck to truck and from masthead to masthead, whose every strand would have its use and meaning. Soon the ship would surge beneath him—his to control, to guide, to learn, to play upon, as an organist brings out the tone and volume of his instrument. His trust, too, and his future; at moments like this responsibility weighed with crushing force. The greater the chance, the greater the danger; the greater the success, the greater the failure if things went wrong.
“I won’t fail her!” he cried in a rush of emotion “We’re going on together, the Viking and I. By God, I’ll sail her as long as she stays afloat. She shall be my first and last command”
Suddenly he thought of the face that would be appearing every few minutes, on this morning of his departure, at the southern window of a house in town. He could see the house plainly, a high brick mansion facing the bay. “It will be only a year” he had told her the previous evening “Then I’ll be back, dear, and we can be married, and you can go to sea with me. No more of this sailing and staying at home alone; it’s a miserable business”
She had looked up at him bravely. “Yes, Frank, I know. But come back safely. Think what might happen in a year!” It was the cry of the sailor-woman. She had learned it from her mother—and from her father, who had been lost at sea with all hands on one voyage when his family had remained at home.
An hour later, when, with all sail set, the Viking had gathered headway before the light land-breeze, taking her first steps into the world, Captain Bradley went to the stern-rail and gazed back at the lessening town. He stood there a long while, lost in thought. He could still make out the familiar pattern of streets and houses. Home. It seemed to him as if he had always been either leaving or returning. His short, quick boyhood was already half-forgotten, like a snatch of another existence. Five years before, his mother had died there in the town; he had received the news on his arrival in Singapore. His father had vanished in a sea tragedy long before he could remember. No home for him remained, either there or here; he would have to make one. What was this seafaring life, that he had now asked a young girl to share? Every day he heard men call it a dog’s life, growl that the game wasn’t worth the candle. Perhaps so—but she knew all about it. She had been born in a ship’s cabin; she loved the sea. And here was the Viking, young, strong and beautiful—what better? A fierce determination swept over him to make life worth while, even the life beyond the horizon; to give her a worthy gift, a home of love and happiness, all he had. Any life could be worth while, if full enough of love.
Glancing over his shoulder, to make sure that no one observed him, for it would not do to give his men the materials of a jest, he leaned across the rail and waved his handkerchief toward the town. She would expect it—would be watching with the glasses from that southern window. Sailor women saw the last of their grief; they didn’t turn away and hide.
“I’ll try to make up for the waiting, Grace” he whispered; then swung forward resolutely, to face the coming years.
II
Autumn returned to the old seaport, and with it the Viking, back from her first China voyage. Captain Bradley was welcomed with a hearty “well done” The voyage had been prosperous; the homeward run from Hong Kong had been made in the remarkably fast time of eighty-two days. Hereafter the Viking would be a favourite among Chinese shippers.
A month after his arrival, young Captain Bradley was married in the high house fronting the bay. That night he and his wife left town to join the ship, loading in New York for Yokohama.
Then began ten happy years of life. They were the last ten years of American maritime prosperity, the close of the sailing ship era. Charters were plentiful; the Viking made money. Captain Bradley found himself a man of means. Without question, he invested his earnings in ship-property; most of the transactions passed through Captain Marshall’s hands. Why not put his money into ships? Ships had been his life and the life of five generations before him, had made him a good living, had taught him all he knew. Most of his friends were doing the same thing. Few there were in those days among the old shipping people, who saw into the next quarter-century, who realized the nature and magnitude of the coming change.
One year, five thousand dollars went to build a new house in the home town. Every captain built a new house, whether he used it or not. Captain Bradley’s house was occupied for the length of one China voyage, while Mrs. Bradley remained ashore and gave birth to a son, their only child. Except for this voyage, she accompanied her husband constantly on the sea. She had been reared to the life of wind and wave. In the Viking’s spacious and comfortable cabin, they made their home from year to year. Their son passed his boyhood on ship-board. He was the apple of his father’s eye. Captain Bradley invariably spoke of him as “my Frankie” with a note of pride and affection in his voice. Sturdy and manly, the little boy filled the ship with the interest and activity of childhood.
On a quiet evening in the trade winds, when Frankie had placed his mother’s deck-chair near the weather rail and crouched beside her, perhaps weaving for her amusement one of the strange fancies of which his head was full, it seemed to Captain Bradley that life had brought him all that a man could desire. A happy wife, a beautiful son, a splendid ship—good times, comfortable circumstances, a pleasant prospect: in youth he had dared to hope for such things, but had not expected to see the hope come true. Now life had given him confidence. He would sit on the weather bitts beside them, dreaming of the future, of that day when their son would be grown up, when he and his wife would retire from the sea.
But the future, in those years, after all seemed unsubstantial; Captain Bradley believed in enjoying the present reality. A large share of the money that he earned he spent. He spent it extravagantly, spent it with a flush hand. In the China ports whither all of his charters led him, there were always a dozen or twenty American vessels lying in the roads. Lavish entertainment went the round of the fleet. “What’s a little money, more or less?” Captain Bradley was fond of saying. “Times are good, aren’t they? More will come” He was for ever buying pieces of cloisonné and rare porcelain for his empty house at home, silks and embroideries for his wife; things to be packed away in camphor wood chests after she was dead. The habit of extravagance grew upon him; he spent more money than he realized.
In fact, from a selfish standpoint, Captain Bradley was a poor business man. Seamanship was his vocation; he understood few of the ins and outs of a financial order founded on usury. Its sentiment and psychology he understood not at all; these were considerations entirely alien to him. To his mind, money, to be clean, had to be straightforwardly earned. The plain transactions of a ship’s business were all he needed to know. A certain sum of money put into a ship would, if she were properly handled, yield certain dividends: a charter at so much the lump sum, would pay so much on the voyage. Thus it always had been; thus, if he ever gave the matter a thought, he supposed it always would be.
As the flush years went by, he developed into a typical sea captain of the old school; a man of honour, of ideals, of simple dignity and original thought, careless, buoyant, at times a little reckless, a stern disciplinarian, a wise judge of human nature, a sentimentalist at heart, a believer in the inherent righteousness of things, a man of sincerity and individuality. Dishonesty, laziness, hypocrisy, he hated as he hated crime. Inefficient men found him a hard taskmaster. By nature and training he was arrogant and imperious; the instinct of command ran strongly in his blood. He spoke his mind at all times; he was equally ready to defend his position. His pride in his wife, in his boy, in his ship, in everything he loved, was enormous. In short, he was a man singularly adapted to the high and responsible calling of master mariner—singularly ill-fitted for his coming encounter with the world.
III
The first stroke fell out of a clear sky. Captain Marshall died suddenly, leaving his business affairs in a bad way. For three months, the town was in turmoil. At the end of that time, it became apparent that the old shipowner had involved all of his own property, as well as that of many others, in a series of disastrous speculations. No one hinted at dishonesty, but the hard fact remained. Ship property had greatly fallen off in value in the last few years; this, it would seem, had been the immediate cause of Captain Marshall’s financial stringency. He, too, had banked heavily on the old times.
Captain Bradley arrived that year from Hong Kong, to find himself poorer by more than half of his modest fortune. All of his ready money was gone in the wreck; what remained was a bundle of pieces of vessels, quarters and sixteenths and thirty-seconds. Worst of all, the Viking, the one ship that Captain Marshall had owned outright, with the exception of the eighth share standing in Captain Bradley’s name, would have to be sold by auction to satisfy the creditors. In this crisis, Captain Bradley’s idealism overcame all other considerations. “By God, I’ll buy her myself!” he cried. His friends told him that he was a fool; but this only heightened his determination. He called the creditors together, and made them an offer. By great exertions, he managed to negotiate on his various ship holdings, disposing of some at figures below their value, mortgaging others, selling the house, and finally raising sufficient money to carry out his word. It took all he had; but he was glad that he possessed enough property to do it. When he sailed from New York on the next voyage, he was the sole owner of the vessel. His confidence, momentarily shaken by the failure of one of the pillars of his world, had begun to return. He realized that times were not what they had been; but it seemed impossible that the demand for sailing ships would ever wholly go by.
The next few years, however, seriously undermined his assurance. Freights were falling rapidly, were even becoming hard to get. One time he had laid her up in Hong Kong for six months, resolving to wait for a better figure than had been offered, and had at length been obliged to accept a charter that barely paid the ship’s way. Steam was to blame for it all. He began to hate steamers with a bitter and unreasoning hatred. They were driving the fine old sailing ships off the sea.
Then, as suddenly as the financial crash, came the blow from which he never fully recovered. On the homeward passage, shortly after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, his wife sickened and died. She had been ailing ever since they left Anjer, but he had not realized the seriousness of her condition. They had already caught the trades in the South Atlantic; it was hopeless to think of putting back to Capetown. He urged the ship with every rag of sail, trying to reach St. Helena in time; but the trades held light, the elements were against him. For three days of nearly flat calm he paced the deck in agony, or sat beside his wife’s bunk while she talked to him in a low voice, telling him of her love, of what to do when she was gone; trying to make it easy for him, for she knew that she was dying. On the third day, she died in his arms. That night his hair turned from black to white. He came on deck the next morning an old and broken man. The wind continued light and uncertain, there was no chance of reaching St. Helena in time for the last rites; and he buried her there in the deep sea.
That voyage, they had left their son at home in school. Alone now in the empty cabin, Captain Bradley’s thoughts were much of his boy. He himself could stand it, must stand it. But how could he tell Frankie, his Frankie? Night after night he paced the narrow floor below, going back over life, living in the past from which he had now been definitely cut adrift. Perhaps he was not quite sane for the remainder of the passage; he could never remember clearly those weeks before his arrival. But always, behind every conscious thought, lay the dread of what he would have to tell Frankie. This he remembered; it seemed to have been beaten into his brain.
Then a wonderful thing happened. He arrived home to find that the boy they had left behind had grown into a young man, had developed a strong and resolute character of his own. He came to meet his father at the train; the news had reached him already. “I did all that I could, Frankie” were Captain Bradley’s first words, as they faced each other on the gloomy platform. His son looked at him steadily, fighting back the tears. “I know you did, sir” It was the son who put his arms around the father’s shoulders; Captain Bradley had felt a strange hesitation, almost akin to shame or fear. But now his heart rose for the first time since his wife had gone. This was the stuff that men were made of. His son.
They entered the house together—the old Bradley house, where Frankie lived with his aunt when he was at home. Captain Bradley greeted his sister, took off his hat and sat down heavily. Suddenly the boy cried out and fell at his father’s feet, holding him by the knees, his whole body shaking.
“My God, father, your hair is white!”
“Yes, yes, Frankie. That doesn’t matter. Poor mother, poor mother!” He leaned forward to hold the heaving shoulders. For a long while they cried in each other’s arms.
As the days went by, Captain Bradley found himself depending more and more on the new young strength. The two were inseparable; they seemed to meet on common ground. Captain Bradley was one of those men who never lose their youthful outlook; while the boy was in reality older than his years.
When the time came to sail on another voyage, Frankie insisted on leaving school and going away with his father. For the next eighteen months they lived together on the ship, at sea and in foreign ports, and their intimacy grew profound. They talked, read aloud in the evenings, studied navigation and history, discussed the mysteries of life and love; side by side they stood on the quarter-deck through storm and fair weather, and Frankie learned the lore of seamanship at the hands of a past-master. Gradually, Captain Bradley got back his grip on life. The boy had renewed his courage. He even began to dream of the future again—of marriage and a career for Frankie, no following the sea, but a safe career ashore.
Then another long voyage, alone this time, for Frankie had entered college to tackle his education in earnest. He had decided to become a civil engineer. This voyage was in many ways a hard one for Captain Bradley. Business was poor; he had a great deal of trouble with his crew, for only the outcasts of society could now be induced to enter the forecastle of a sailing ship; a succession of storms followed him, and at last he lost a foretopmast off the coast of Luzon. He had to face the fact that the Viking was growing old; for several years he had been acutely aware that her top-hamper needed extensive overhauling.
As for himself, he knew too well that he had turned the corner of life. The voyage dragged on to its close. He reached the Atlantic Coast in the dead of winter. Three weeks of threshing around outside in the teeth of northeast snowstorms and icy northwesters completed the disheartenment. But at length ship and man, ice-bound and weary, passed in by Sandy Hook and made a harbour once more.
The news that met Captain Bradley seemed too heavy to be borne. A month before his arrival, when the Viking had been somewhere off the Windward Islands, running up in the northeast trades, his son, skating on the river beside the college, had fallen through the ice and been drowned.
IV
After a while, Captain Bradley gathered up the fag-ends of his life and started out in the Viking on another voyage. She was all he had now. A few more years went by, years of increasing discouragement, aimless and fugitive. Times were becoming very hard. The day of China charters was over; steamers monopolized that business now. The Viking became a tramp ship, they picked up what freights they could get, and the old ports knew them no longer. The vessel barely paid her way; operating expenses were retrenched on every hand, there was no money left for upkeep, and Captain Bradley saw her literally falling to pieces before his eyes. But the old hull remained sound.
He lived a blank life; but he continued to live, which was something. The old days were indeed passing, and with them the ships and the men. Sailors were not what they used to be; business ethics was not what it used to be. He began to feel as if the very fibre of mankind had changed. Nothing seemed left but memory and the remnants of an invincible pride. He could not realize that he had made what would be commonly called a mistake, in buying the Viking with his last dollar. His philosophy did not provide the materials for such a conception.
The day came when the old Viking was almost the last of her race, the only wooden full-rigged three-masted ship to sail out of Atlantic ports. All her lofty companions had passed away, or had been converted into coal barges. Her arrival in New York was an item of news. This was the one substantial reward of Captain Bradley’s declining years as a ship-master; he had sailed his ship beyond her era, he had flaunted her in the face of a new generation. That compact made with the Viking in her maiden hour had been no idle sentiment; it had been life’s supremest dedication, and he had kept the vow.
A few old friends remained to him, though he had made no new ones in the latter years. These friends kept urging him, every voyage, to sell the Viking for a coal barge while there was time, while even this way offered for the disposal of an outworn hull. The coal companies were beginning to build their own barges. The Viking would still be worth some fifteen thousand dollars as a coal barge. He could retire on the proceeds, and live in modest comfort for the rest of his days.
“Never!” he invariably answered “Do I look like a man who needs to retire? She shall never be a coal barge while I live”
Yet it had to come to that; perhaps he had long foreseen it, perhaps the vehemence of his denial was only the face of pride set against the inevitable. On a certain voyage he had been obliged to run into debt, to fit out the vessel. The voyage netted less than nothing. When he returned to New York the ship was attached for the debt. There was no business in sight; the bottom had at last dropped out of the shipping world. He did all that was possible, but he could not raise the money; he and the Viking were no longer a good risk as borrowers—their credit was gone. The ship was sold at auction, in equity proceedings, and was bid in by one of the large coal companies operating along the Atlantic Coast. Captain Bradley, at sixty years of age, found himself stranded on South Street without a penny in his pocket. The proceeds of the sale had barely covered the debt. But his honour, at any rate, was clear.
“Another wreck for Snug Harbour” the word was passed, as he stalked out of the room where the transaction had been completed. But they reckoned without their host. That afternoon the Viking was towed to Erie Basin, to be stripped for a coal barge. At almost the same hour, Captain Bradley disappeared from South Street. The shipping world never saw him again.
V
A tramp steamer, dirty and ill-kept about decks, streaked with iron-rust alongside, came up the bay from Sandy Hook and anchored off Quarantine. She had arrived from a long and wandering voyage. When the health officer had left the vessel, the captain called the second mate to the bridge. An old man stumbled up the steps.
“Mr. Bradley, get your things together and go ashore with me. I’ll pay you off at once. You old trouble-maker, you’re not going to stay aboard the ship an hour longer”
The old mate gazed at his superior officer in silence. Tears of anger rose to his eyes. He turned away to hide them, walking to the end of the bridge. His cup of bitterness was running over. Frank Bradley, commander on the high seas for forty years, discharged from a second mate’s billet on a tramp steamer—discharged by an incompetent captain, because his incompetence had been found out. He shut his jaws grimly, recalling the scene of two days before. Out there in the fog he had refused to obey the captain’s orders; had wrested the wheel from the hands of the quartermaster, had held them both off with threats of physical violence, while he steered the ship himself; and thus had kept her from running ashore on Diamond Shoal. The captain’s orders had been completely wrong. He had probably said some sharp things about them; it had been no time for mincing words. Touch and go—but he had saved the ship—saved the captain’s certificate, too.
He stood at the end of the bridge, staring down at the grey water. What should he do now? While he struggled with himself, his eyes rose slowly, resting on a hulk that lay at anchor close alongside, between the steamer and the hills of Staten Island. For a moment he regarded her with a dazed and absent concern, trying to fathom the significance of half-awakened sensations. Then, with a suddenness that stopped his throat, his heart gave a great leap of recognition. Neither coal dust nor dismantlement could hide those familiar lines. The Viking, his old ship, lay before him.
A hoarse cry escaped him. Through the dreadful pall of the latter years, through bitterness, shame and inertia, burst in a blinding flood the memory and presence of other days. The shock passed instantaneously, and left him utterly changed. Facing his old ship, he became once more the man her master had been. Decision and authority returned to him, as they always did in a crisis; for they were intrinsic, in spite of life and destiny.
A rowboat was passing the steamer; he hailed it sharply. “Rowboat ahoy! Come alongside, and wait there for me” He crossed the bridge with strong steps, stood before the captain, gazed at him steadily, until the eyes of the other fell.
“I’ll leave your dirty tramp immediately, sir. You can keep my wages—I don’t want them. Take them and buy a book on seamanship. You’ll need it the next time you get in shoal water”
“You insolent old devil…!”
“Don’t touch me!” The old man’s voice was level and hard; his hands swung at his sides. He advanced threateningly. “You didn’t dare touch me at sea; don’t do it now. I…” Speechlessness overcame him. Too much: it could never be put into words. “My God!” he murmured, turning away “I was master of a ship before he was born”
Ten minutes later, seated in the rowboat with all his worldly belongings stacked around him, he directed the boatman to row him aboard the Viking. As they passed under her stern, he looked up at the well-remembered letters. They were dim now; time and weather had worn off the gilt. An afternoon in Hong Kong harbour came back to him; he recalled it vividly. He had been coming off from shore in his sampan, full of news; the ship had been chartered for home. Grace would be delighted. Approaching the ship, he had overhauled her with a critical eye, and found no blemish in her; then, as they rounded the stern, had looked up at these same letters. His Frankie had called from the rail, running forward to meet him at the gangway. Time and weather—the awful dimming of life. He bowed his head in his hands, and wept like a child.
VI
A stroke of luck was about to befall Captain Bradley. When he gained the Viking’s deck, he found no one in command of the barge. Four frightened sailors gathered around him, taking him for their new captain. Piecing together their incoherent stories, he learned that the captain of the barge had been killed that morning in an accident at the loading berth. A hopper had broken loose, and had brained him as he stood beside the hatch. The mate, a drunken rascal, had disappeared on shore the evening before, and the captain had not expected him to return. The moment the scene of the accident had been cleaned up, they had towed the barge into the stream, in order to free the loading berth. There she lay, waiting for a new set of officers to be sent off from shore.
When he had learned this much, a strange idea came to Captain Bradley. It seemed a slender chance; but a surprising energy and hope had taken possession of him. He got the address of the coal company’s shipping office, the place where these men had found their jobs; left his things aboard the Viking, gave the boatman two dollars to hurry him ashore, and went at once to the number on West Street where he had been told to apply. Luck followed him. He found the shipping office in a quandary over the Viking’s case; they had no waiting list of barge officers, the tow for Boston was to be made up that afternoon, and the barge could not be sent to sea without someone in command. Captain Bradley told his story simply, showing papers that covered a career of nearly fifty years on the sea. His dignified and authoritative presence bore out the tale.
“Well, Captain Bradley” said the shipping superintendent kindly “the job is yours. I guess you deserve it, sir”
“Thank you” Captain Bradley gave a wry smile “I think I can fulfil my duties. I’ll try to give satisfaction, sir”
He had not told them of his own relation to the Viking, fearing the injection of sentiment into a business-like application. That afternoon he joined his old command, at forty dollars a month and all found.
He would not have called it a stroke of luck in the other days. How incredible, then, to look ahead, would have seemed the natural development that time had wrought. Could he have foreseen the end that he was coming to, he would have blown out his brains. But life had accomplished it easily and inexorably; failure had at last ground down the keen edge of his spirit, disappointment had rounded off the corners of his imperative nature. As he stepped across the rail of the barge Viking, only a great and pathetic happiness found place in his heart. His fight was finished. He had kept his pride at too terrible a cost. Now he gave it up, freely, gladly. Perhaps he would be allowed to die in peace, aboard the ship that had shared his better days.
Fine old ship—life had gone hard with her, too. The lofty masts and spreading spars had been lopped away; nothing remained above decks but the three lower masts. The decks themselves were grimy with coal dust; the woodwork had not seen paint for years. How well Captain Bradley remembered her appearance, when, spick and span from the shipyard, the best production of her day, he had taken her on her maiden voyage. It seemed impossible that a whole era of such intense human activity could so completely disappear, carrying its lore, its lessons, its origins, its very worth and meaning, into the oblivion of time. An economic empire had passed away.
Dingy, battered, neglected, yet Captain Bradley loved the old vessel—loved her all the more for the hard knocks she had seen. A sentiment that he had thought to be dead reawoke in his heart. He had not known, he had not dared to admit, how much he had missed her. He felt as if he had come home.
His duties were light. There were on the barge four men besides himself. He found time to clean her up. After every loading or discharging, he would have the decks thoroughly swept and washed down, and all the paintwork scrubbed. Later, out of his own pocket (he had no use for money now), he bought paint and freshened her appearance about decks; for the coal company, knowing that she would not last much longer, would provide nothing for upkeep. The cabin, the scene of so much that was sacred to him, he scrubbed and painted with his own hands, spending many quiet hours over the task while the barge was towing up and down the coast. It was a labour of peace and love.
For a long while the matter of sails gave Captain Bradley deep concern. The barge was rigged on the three lower masts with fore-and-aft sails, to be used in an emergency, when she had broken adrift from her tow. Often these sails would be set to assist her progress when the wind was fair. Smothered in coal dust, exposed to sun and rain, the first suit that had been given her as a barge was now worn out; the canvas would hardly hold together to be hoisted. Not that Captain Bradley cared a pin for his own safety; nothing would have better pleased him than to be lost at sea aboard the Viking. But the condition offended his sense of seamanship and responsibility. It was an indecency to the old ship to fail to provide her with the ordinary weapons of battle; and there were other lives than his involved.
At length, seeing that it was hopeless to expect her owners to furnish the barge with a new suit of sails, he began to save his money. In a year’s time he had laid up enough to supply them at his own expense. It seemed like a touch of the old seafaring activity to be drawing up their specifications; he ordered thick duck and stout bolt-ropes, for this was to be a suit of real heavy-weather sails. When, one afternoon under the coal chute at Perth Amboy, he was able to stow away this strong white canvas in the lazaret, together with a couple of coils of first-grade Manila for reeving off new sheets and halyards, he felt that he could go to sea again with a clear conscience.
That evening he sat for a long while alone in the cabin. The interest of looking over and stowing away the sails had passed; he saw the truth now, saw how things really stood. Buying a suit of sails for a coal barge: was it for this that he had spent his hard apprenticeship, had learned and practised the intricate lore of the sea? He could remember greater triumphs. For two hours of grim thought he sat with hands clenched on the arms of the chair, facing the world’s defeat without surrender. In his heart of heart he knew that he had not failed. He had kept respect and dignity, saved his honour, been true to himself through it all.
He sat on into the night; the storied cabin enclosed him as if with loving arms; slowly, as the mood of revolt wore away, his mind drifted back into the old days. He remembered how his wife used to sit there beside him, on evenings at sea, busy with her sewing; he remembered how little Frankie used to come running in. These things had happened so often, so naturally. But not for a long, long time….
Gone with the era, gone with manhood and success, gone with the further use of life’s endeavour. The old man’s head fell back against the chair; tears streamed down his cheeks and sank into his beard.
“What have I done?” he cried in agony. “I cannot understand it. What have I done?”
VII
Two more years passed by, and winter came on. It was the hardest winter in a decade along the Atlantic Coast. Beginning in the latter part of November, snowstorm after snowstorm struck in from sea in quick succession; one of those easterly spells that, to the mariner, seems destined to hang on for ever. Early in January, the wind backed for a few days into the northwest, and the harsh weather offered a temporary respite. Seizing the opportunity, three heavily laden coal barges, in tow of a powerful seagoing tugboat, set out from Hampton Roads bound for Boston. The old Viking was the last barge of the string.
The weather permitted them to get well outside the Capes of the Chesapeake; then it changed. Wisps of clouds gathered in the southern sky, a heavy bank loomed just above the horizon; the wind began to sing in the rigging with a low moaning sound. Captain Bradley, pacing his quarter-deck at the tail of the tow, plainly recognised the signs. Another spell of easterly weather was coming on.
They were already too far outside to think of turning back, and too far offshore to run for Sandy Hook. Nothing for it but to push on toward Vineyard Haven. The towboat was doing her best; a nasty head sea remained from the last storm, and began to pick up as the wind veered to the northward and eastward. The barges strained at their hawsers, pitching and rolling incessantly. Captain Bradley could never accustom himself to this motion, so different from the motion of a ship under sail. It annoyed and distressed him to the core of his being. Together, he and the Viking had once roamed the sea boldly, the man striking off the course, the ship leaping forward along it, bending to the wind, sailing free under the sun and stars. Now they dragged about at the end of a hawser, engaged in a servile traffic, trailing in the wake of steam.
Minute by minute the clouds piled up from the southward; a grey gloom fell on the ocean. The wind, now settled in the northeast, rose steadily, lifting the sea before it. The air grew colder, the chill of the coming storm. The old ship wallowed and plunged, groaning in every timber. She was very low in the water; already green seas were coming over her bows. Soon the night shut in, black as a cavern—and Gay Head light not yet in sight.
At six o’clock Captain Bradley went below to put on his oilskins and drink a cup of tea. Coming on deck a little later, rigged for the storm, he paused a moment beside the binnacle, as an officer fresh from below always will. In that instant, the hawser parted. He heard no sound, he saw no sign; but he knew that the ship was free. The fact was communicated to him through the deck, through the motion of the hull. He sprang to the rail, and ran forward along the starboard alleyway. Abreast of the mainmast, he stumbled against the mate in the darkness.
“Hawser’s parted, sir!”
“I know it. Turn out all hands, and loose the foresail. She’s falling off to the westward—the wrong way. We must wear her around on the other tack, and scratch offshore”
“They’ll be back to pick us up, Captain, as soon as they miss us”
“Not if they know their duty. It would endanger the other two barges; this is going to be a bad blow. We’ll have to look out for ourselves now”
“Good Lord, sir, what can we do with this old hooker?”
“Do?—everything! Do as I say. Up with that foresail, now, and be handy about it. There was a time when you wouldn’t have called her an old hooker! I’ll show you what she’s made of”
Then it was that the labour of love which Captain Bradley had expended on the Viking bore worthy fruit. Every block was in order, every rope was clear and fast in its proper pin. Unconsciously, under his training, the crew had acquired a measure of seamanship. They had learned to obey orders, at any rate; had learned, too, to respect and trust their old wind-jammer commander.
For the first time in many years, an emergency confronted Captain Bradley. He faced it without hesitation, filled with a certain fierce joy, sure of his power and ability. Almost before the ship had lost her towing headway, he had decided on his course. He and the Viking had more than once clawed off the Jersey shore in the teeth of a northeaster. They could do it again. Then, when the storm had broken, he would take her to New York, as if they were arriving from a China voyage.
Before the little foresail, the ship wore around sweetly, came up to the wind with her nose pointed toward the broad Atlantic, and hung there steady and true. The old free motion had returned to her deck, the old life ran along her keel. Immediately, they set the spanker, mainsail and jib; this was all the sail she had. The whole area of it would hardly have equalled her former mainsail, dropping its solid square of canvas from an eighty foot mainyard; but it was enough for the purpose, and the Viking answered to it. The gale had struck; the ship heeled sharply, plunging forward on the port tack at a three-knot gait. She made considerable leeway, but headed up to east-south-east. Captain Bradley knew that if he could drive her on this course for the next twelve hours, they would stand a chance of clearing the danger that lay under their lee.
Pacing once more the quarter-deck of a ship under sail, a tempest of recollections beset the old man’s mind. Past voyages, dangers, storms, past conquests of the elements, thronged upon him at the call of an awakened vocation. Adrift, now, in a long-pent flood of creative effort, other memories flashed before his eyes; scenes of love and achievement, scenes of weakness and self-indulgence, scenes of error and wrong. Life had always been hard for him to live, even at its happiest; his high spirit had ever been in arms against itself. He seemed to-night to be able to remember all of it—snatches of conversations, lights and colours, tones and meanings, touches of hands and the unspoken messages of hearts—all that had ruled his life and formed his character.
Through these recollections constantly appeared the figures of his wife and child. He thought of them deeply, tenderly, calmly. Once, when they had been at sea with him, the Viking had run into a cyclone off Mauritius; he recalled his going below in the midst of it, to reassure them. “How is it, Frank? Will it blow much harder?” “No, dear, the worst has passed” “Oh, Papa, aren’t you afraid?” “No, my son, there is nothing to be afraid of in the world” He had said those words—he laughed, now, to remember. God had punished him well for his audacity.
He was surprised to find himself thinking of these things without pain. A change had taken place within him, a change born of the familiar exigency. In some inexplicable way, he was happy again. A task of seamanship lay before him; lives depended on his strength. He was a master mariner, in charge of his old ship—his ship, as truly as she had been that other morning, when, full of ambition and pride and courage, he had looked up at her untried sails. He felt her surge beneath the heavy cargo, rising, flanking the seas, flinging them off savagely, like a man striking out from the shoulder. He knew, he understood—that was the way he felt about it, too. A couple of old hulks, living beyond their time; but the spirit was in them still.
Unseen, surrounded by darkness, Captain Bradley stood upright against the weather rail, an indomitable figure, facing the storm. The world could crush them—never the sea and the wind. The sea was their home, the wind was their brother. This was the fight that found them armed.
VIII
The storm increased; the air was thick with snow, cold with the breath of Arctic winter. In the middle of the night, the foresail and mainsail blew out of the bolt-ropes. They bent and set the heavy new sails. Soon the spanker went, and was replaced. Captain Bradley was driving the ship without mercy; for the wind was hauling inch by inch into the east, heading them off toward the dangerous lee shore. The Viking stood the strain; her seaworthiness had never been put to a harder test, had never shown itself so handsomely. She had been built in a day when work and honour had gone hand in hand.
The morning dawned on a wild scene. Great waves rushed at the ship, lifted her high in air, broke above her bows, and stopped her progress as if she had run against a wall. It was high time to heave her to. They lowered the mainsail, foresail and jib, and managed somehow to get them furled. The quarter-deck was comparatively dry; they had no difficulty in double-reefing the spanker. In his specifications to the sailmaker, Captain Bradley had insisted on a double row of reef-point for this sail.
To this tiny patch of canvas the Viking rode hove-to for the next forty-eight hours, while the storm howled down on them from the waste of waters. The decks were piled with snow, the ropes and sails were clogged with ice; slowly, mile after mile, the ship drifted against a pitiless lee shore. Captain Bradley constantly kept the deck. There was nothing more to be done—but he had to see the business through.
When the storm broke, they were less than five miles off the Jersey shore at Atlantic City—so close had been their call. The drive through the night at the beginning of the storm had saved them; without the offing made at that time, they would long since have landed in the breakers at Barnegat. The wind jumped into the southwest, the clouds quickly rolled away. They chopped the gaskets, cleared the ice away from the booms and sheets and halyards, and set all sail. The ship paid off, heading up the coast; from the frozen and snowbound shore the sweet land-smell, always a miracle to sailors nearing port in winter, came off to them. Night fell, the air grew crystalline, stars sparkled white and big in the cloudless sky. Minute by minute the easterly swell decreased, knocked down by the offshore wind, as the old barge crept northward. She sunk the lights of Atlantic City, picked up Barnegat, brought it abeam, dropped it on her port quarter. Then Captain Bradley left the deck, for almost the first time in three days.
He could not have kept on his feet any longer. The pain in his chest, that had set in the night before and grown by leaps and bounds during the last day of the storm, had now become so intense, at spasmodic intervals, that he felt unable to conceal his distress. At times it was well-nigh unbearable. His heart seemed trying to burst out of his body. Perhaps rest would ease the pain. At any rate, he wanted to sit down somewhere, alone, in an effort to face and compass this new development. He wanted to give his courage an overhauling.
They had sounded the pumps at sunset, with no result; the splendid old hull had not leaked a drop throughout the storm. But at midnight they found two feet of water in the hold. The mate, frightened half out of his wits, rushed below with the news. Captain Bradley sat like a statue in the big chair, gripping the arms, his face white and drawn. In his excitement, the mate did not notice his extraordinary pallor and rigidity.
“Captain, Captain, she’s sprung a leak! There’s two feet of water in the hold already!
“Two feet of water? … Impossible!”
The old man heaved himself to his feet and stumbled on deck, walking slowly and carefully, holding tight to the rail. The shock of the news had loosed the terrible pain again; at every breath he drew, something seemed to be stabbing him with daggers. He sounded the pumps with his own hands, to find that the mate’s discovery was only too true.
“What can have happened, what can have happened?” he kept muttering “The change of tack must have done it. That’s it!—the change of tack” Now that he had found an explanation, he could face the issue. They manned the pumps at once—this was before the day of steam pumps aboard coal barges. But the leak gained steadily on them, in spite of all they could do.
It was a race with time now—for both of them. Captain Bradley gave a bitter laugh; he and the Viking were throwing up the sponge together. The breeze had freshened, but the old ship was pitifully slow. He swore to himself as he clung to the weather rail, watching the water drag past. He was thinking of the speed that she would have shown under her former canvas; twelve to fifteen knots, she would easily have reeled off with sky-sails set in this smashing breeze. While he watched, the swift stabbing went on in his chest, as if some invisible enemy were taking full and cruel satisfaction. Was he not to be permitted to bring his old ship to port? Was this final insignificant success to be denied him?
The winking eye of Navesink came in sight just before dawn. At eight o’clock, they were abreast the Highland lightship. The old barge was very low in the water, but she still retained a margin of buoyancy. With Captain Bradley, conditions for the last hour had been a little better. He had kept the deck since the pumps began, refusing to give up to a physical encumbrance; and the pain had eased away, as if temporarily succumbing to his invincible will.
Soon after passing the lightship, a towboat approached them, hauling up alongside.
“Barge ahoy! What barge is that?”
“Viking. Broke adrift from a tow—three days ago—off Montauk Point”
“The devil you say! I’ll send a hawser right aboard”
“You’d better. Snatch us—up the bay—quick as you can. Five feet of water—in the hold”
“Perhaps I’d better beach you somewhere inside the Hook?”
“No—tow us in. I guess—the leak will stop—in quiet water”
Whether it was judgment or prescience, Captain Bradley’s surmise proved correct. As they towed up the bay, pumping continually, the water in the hold at first remained for a while at a constant level, then began slowly to fall, enough to show that they were gaining on the leak.
Below the Narrows, the tugboat dropped astern, ranging up on the Viking’s quarter.
“Well, old man, where have you decided to go?”
Captain Bradley stood in the starboard alley-way, one hand grasping the rail, the other the corner of the after house. It was the only way that he could hold himself upright. In the last half hour the pain had returned with fresh violence. Since its return, he had known what he would have to do. The ship was all right now; but, for him, little time remained.
“Anchor us—at Tompkinsville—close inshore. Send word to my office. Get some men—my crew are—worn out. Bring off a doctor—for God’s sake!…” The strained voice broke in a shrill cry.
The mate ran aft along the alley-way. “Captain!—what’s the matter, sir?”
“Sick” Captain Bradley’s hand flew to his breast, clutching his coat in a great handful. His face turned deathly white, his eyes closed, his mouth twisted in the intensity of the pain. For an instant he swayed; then opened his eyes again, and pulled himself upright against the rail.
“I brought her in!” he cried loudly “My old ship … under sail”
The mate was just in time to catch him as he pitched forward insensible.
IX
The doctor came out of the captain’s stateroom with a grave look on his face. The mate stood in the middle of the cabin floor, nervous and unstrung; he had been fond of Captain Bradley. The afternoon sun streamed through the cabin skylight. For several hours they had been watching the old man struggle for breath. The mate’s gaze roved uneasily over the top of the chart table, where, according to his invariable habit, the captain had that morning spread the tablecover that he used in port, and had set out a few pictures and ornaments, to make the cabin look more homelike. He had done it between spasms of pain, while they had been towing up the bay; had done it for something to occupy his mind. He always tried to arrange the things as he remembered his wife used to do.
“He can’t last much longer” said the doctor “His heart is practically gone”
The mate nodded without looking up. “Is he suffering much pain?”
“Not now. I’ve just given him another hypodermic. That’s all we can do for him”
They went together into the stateroom. Captain Bradley lay quietly against a heap of pillows, with his eyes half closed. He had regained consciousness as soon as they had brought him below. As the mate bent above him, he opened his eyes and stared dully around the room. He was muttering to himself. The mate leaned closer—then drew back sharply, realizing that the words were only the product of delirium.
“Hello, hello! … that you, Sargent? When did you arrive? Let’s get a couple of chairs this afternoon, and go along Glenealy Road. I want to see Hong Kong harbour again through the bamboo trees…. Remember that day we had a picnic on Glenealy Road? You had your wife with you that voyage. My Frankie got tired: I had to carry him in my arms…. Frankie never grew up. No…. He died”
The mate shook his head violently, as if to throw off the mortality of the scene. He turned away from the bunk. “Why does the old man have to wander so?” he demanded sharply.
“The opiate” said the doctor “Don’t worry—he isn’t suffering now”
Captain Bradley regarded his officer with a long and profound stare. Suddenly, recognition dawned in his eyes.
“Oh, Foster!—what do you say? How much water do the pumps give now? Any chance of the leak drying up?”
“Only a couple of feet left in her, Captain. Four men have come off from shore to relieve our crew. We’ll soon have her as dry as a bone, sir”
“No use” Captain Bradley rolled his head on the pillow “You’ll find her larboard strake started—port side of the keel. She’s finished. She’ll have to go to the junk heap now” He lay quiet a moment, thinking. “If I had my way, she should be towed to sea, and sunk in deep water. I ought to go along with her…. But I suppose she’s worth a few dollars as junk” Suddenly he sat up in bed, threw off the clothes, and raised his clenched hands above his head. “Oh, my God!” he screamed “I’ve been working all my life, and I haven’t a few dollars to redeem my old ship!”
“Lie down, Captain. You must keep quiet. Lie down, sir. You’ll feel better in a little while”
“Yes, yes” The paroxysm passed; the old man fell back exhausted. Again his mind wandered; he seemed to be sinking off into a doze. Like a child at the end of the day, half way between sleeping and waking, he babbled of endeavours on the playground of the world.
“After that typhoon, I rigged a jury rudder and brought her into Manila…. Oh, yes, they said it was…. You wouldn’t expect an accident in the trade winds. The fore-topmast went at the head of the lower mast, carrying the jibboom with it; but in a couple of weeks you couldn’t have told that anything had happened…. Pleasant weather, pleasant weather…. I looked up, and saw his green light almost hanging over my bow…. Funny, isn’t it, how things come round?…”
Gradually he stopped muttering. The doctor took his pulse, then beckoned the mate to follow him into the cabin. “It can’t be long now” he whispered “Who was the old fellow, anyway? He seems to have a strange assortment on his mind”
“I don’t know much about him. He was a fine man…. Say, you stand in the door, there, and tell me when he’s finished. I can’t bear to watch him any longer”
They had been waiting some time in silence, when a quick movement in the bunk started them running toward the stateroom. Captain Bradley was sitting up in bed again. All trace of pain had left his features. His hands lay quietly on the coverlet, his eyes were fixed on something far away. The faint shadow of a smile crossed his face, illuminating it with an expression of wisdom and serenity.
“Grace! Frankie! Under sail!” he cried in a loud voice—then settled slowly back among the pillows.
When they reached him, the old man was dead.
