consternation! And they say old Mr. Apse was so annoyed when they told him that he took to his bed and died. The old gentleman had retired from the firm twenty-five years before, and was ninety-six years old if a day, so his death wasn’t, perhaps, so surprising. Still Mr. Lucian Apse was convinced that his father would have lived to a hundred. So we may put him at the head of the list. Next comes the poor devil of a shipwright that brute caught and squashed as she went off the ways. They called it the launch of a ship, but I’ve heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river. She snapped all her checks like pack-thread, and went for the tugs in attendance like a fury. Before anybody could see what she was up to she sent one of them to the bottom, and laid up another for three months’ repairs. One of her cables parted, and then, suddenly — you couldn’t tell why — she let herself be brought up with the other as quiet as a lamb.
“That’s how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend on them behaving rationally. With that ship, whatever you did with her you never knew how it would end. She was a wicked beast. Or, perhaps, she was only just in-sane.”
He uttered this supposition in so earnest a tone that I could not refrain from smiling. He left off biting his lower lip to apostrophize me.
“Eh! Why not? Why couldn’t there be something in her build, in her lines corresponding to — What’s madness? Only something just a tiny bit wrong in the make of your brain. Why shouldn’t there be a mad ship — I mean mad in a ship-like way, so that under no circumstances could you be sure she would do what any other sensible ship would naturally do for you. There are ships that steer wildly, and ships that can’t be quite trusted always to stay; others want careful watching when running in a gale; and, again, there may be a ship that will make heavy weather of it in every little blow. But then you expect her to be always so. You take it as part of her character, as a ship, just as you take account of a man’s peculiarities of temper when you deal with him. But with her you couldn’t. She was unaccountable. If she wasn’t mad, then she was the most evil-minded, underhand, savage brute that ever went afloat. I’ve seen her run in a heavy gale beautifully for two days, and on the third broach to twice in the same afternoon. The first time she flung the helmsman clean over the wheel, but as she didn’t quite manage to kill him she had another try about three hours afterwards. She swamped herself fore and aft, burst all the canvas we had set, scared all hands into a panic, and even frightened Mrs. Colchester down there in these beautiful stern cabins that she was so proud of. When we mustered the crew there was one man missing. Swept overboard, of course, without being either seen or heard, poor devil! and I only wonder more of us didn’t go.
“Always something like that. Always. I heard an old mate tell Captain Colchester once that it had come to this with him, that he was afraid to open his mouth to give any sort of order. She was as much of a terror in harbour as at sea. You could never be certain what would hold her. On the slightest provocation she would start snapping ropes, cables, wire hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy — but that does not quite explain that power for mischief she had. You know, somehow, when I think of her I can’t help remembering what we hear of incurable lunatics breaking loose now and then.”
He looked at me inquisitively. But, of course, I couldn’t admit that a ship could be mad.
“In the ports where she was known,” he went on,’ “they dreaded the sight of her. She thought nothing of knocking away twenty feet or so of solid stone facing off a quay or wiping off the end of a wooden wharf. She must have lost miles of chain and hundreds of tons of anchors in her time. When she fell aboard some poor unoffending ship it was the very devil of a job to haul her off again. And she never got hurt herself — just a few scratches or so, perhaps. They had wanted to have her strong. And so she was. Strong enough to ram Polar ice with. And as she began so she went on. From the day she was launched she never let a year pass without murdering somebody. I think the owners got very worried about it. But they were a stiff-necked generation all these Apses; they wouldn’t admit there could be anything wrong with the Apse Family. They wouldn’t even change her name. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ as Mrs. Colchester used to say. They ought at least to have shut her up for life in some dry dock or other, away up the river, and never let her smell salt water again. I assure you, my dear sir, that she invariably did kill someone every voyage she made. It was perfectly well-known. She got a name for it, far and wide.”
I expressed my surprise that a ship with such a deadly reputation could ever get a crew.
“Then, you don’t know what sailors are, my dear sir. Let me just show you by an instance. One day in dock at home, while loafing on the forecastle head, I noticed two respectable salts come along, one a middle-aged, competent, steady man, evidently, the other a smart, youngish chap. They read the name on the bows and stopped to look at her. Says the elder man: ‘Apse Family. That’s the sanguinary female dog’ (I’m putting it in that way) ‘of a ship, Jack, that kills a man every voyage. I wouldn’t sign in her — not for Joe, I wouldn’t.’ And the other says: ‘If she were mine, I’d have her towed on the mud and set on fire, blamme if I wouldn’t.’ Then the first man chimes in: ‘Much do they care! Men are cheap, God knows.’ The younger one spat in the water alongside. ‘They won’t have me — not for double wages.’
“They hung about for some time and then walked up the dock. Half an hour later I saw them both on our deck looking about for the mate, and apparently very anxious to be taken on. And they were.”
“How do you account for this?” I asked.
“What would you say?” he retorted. “Recklessness ! The vanity of boasting in the evening to all their chums: ‘We’ve just shipped in that there Apse Family. Blow her. She ain’t going to scare us.’ Sheer sailor-like perversity! A sort of curiosity. Well — a little of all that, no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The answer of the elderly chap was:
“‘A man can die but once.’ The younger assured me in a mocking tone that he wanted to see ‘how she would do it this time.’ But I tell you what; there was a sort of fascination about the brute.”
Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in sulkily:
“I saw her once out of this very window towing up the river; a great black ugly thing, going along like a big hearse.”
“Something sinister about her looks, wasn’t there?” said the man in tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. “I always had a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more than fourteen, the very first day — nay, hour — I joined her. Father came up to see me off, and was to go down to Gravesend with us. I was his second boy to go to sea. My big brother was already an officer then. We. got on board about eleven in the morning, and found the ship ready to drop out of the basin, stern first. She had not moved three times her own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on the check rope — a new six-inch hawser — that forward there they had no chance to ease it round in time, and it parted. I saw the broken end fly up high in the air, and the next moment that brute brought her quarter against the pier-head with a jar that staggered everybody about her decks. She didn’t hurt herself. Not she! But one of the boys the mate had sent aloft on the mizzen to do something, came down on the poop-deck — thump — right in front of me. He was not much older than myself. We had been grinning at each other only a few minutes before. He must have been handling himself carelessly, not expecting to get such a jerk. I heard his startled cry — Oh! — in a high treble as he felt himself going, and looked up in time to see him go limp all over as he fell. Ough! Poor father was remarkably white about the gills when we shook hands in Gravesend. ‘Are you all right?’ he says, looking hard at me. ‘Yes, father.’ ‘Quite sure?’ ‘Yes, father.’ ‘Well, then good-bye, my boy.’ He told me afterwards that for half a word he would have carried me off home with him there and then. I am the baby of the family — you know,” added the man in tweeds, stroking his moustache with an ingenuous smile.
