wagon-driver. Glad to do anything not to starve. That’s what he had come down to.
“However, there he was, with his head inside the door, on the girl’s shoulder as likely as not — officer of the watch! The helmsman, on giving his evidence afterwards, said that he shouted several times that the binnacle lamp had gone out. It didn’t matter to him, because his orders were to ‘sail her close.’ ‘I thought it funny,’ he said, ‘that the ship should keep on falling off in squalls, but I luffed her up every time as close as I was able. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand before my face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.’
“The truth was that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a single soul in her being aware of it. Wilmot himself confessed that he had not been near the standard compass for an hour. He might well have confessed! The first thing he knew was the man on the look-out shouting blue murder forward there.
“He tore his neck free, he says, and yelled back at him: ‘What do you say?’
“‘I think I hear breakers ahead, sir,’ howled the man, and came rushing aft with the rest of the watch, in the ‘awfullest blinding deluge that ever fell from the sky,’ Wilmot says. For a second or so he was so scared and bewildered that he could not remember on which side of the gulf the ship was. He wasn’t a good officer, but he was a seaman all the same. He pulled himself together in a second, and the right orders sprang to his lips without thinking. They were to hard up with the helm and shiver the main and mizzen-topsails.
“It seems that the sails actually fluttered. He couldn’t see them, but he heard them rattling and bang-ing above his head. ‘No use! She was too slow in going off,’ he went on, his dirty face twitching, and the damn’d carter’s whip shaking in his hand. ‘She seemed to stick fast.’ And then the flutter of the canvas above his head ceased. At this critical moment the wind hauled aft again with a gust, filling the sails and sending the ship with a great way upon the rocks on her lee bow. She had overreached herself in her last little game. Her time had come — the hour, the man, the black night, the treacherous gust of wind — the right woman to put an end to her. The brute deserved nothing better. Strange are the instruments of Providence. There’s a sort of poetical justice —”
The man in tweeds looked hard at me.
“The first ledge she went over stripped the false keel off her. Rip! The skipper, rushing out of his berth, found a crazy woman, in a red flannel dressing-gown, flying round and round the cuddy, screeching like a cockatoo.
“The next bump knocked her clean under the cabin table. It also started the stern-post and carried away the rudder, and then that brute ran up a shelving, rocky shore, tearing her bottom out, till she stopped. short, and the foremast dropped over the bows like a gangway.”
“Anybody lost?” I asked.
“No one, unless that fellow, Wilmot,” answered the gentleman, unknown to Miss Blank, looking round for his cap. “And his case was worse than drowning for a man. Everybody got ashore all right. Gale didn’t come on till next day, dead from the West, and broke up that brute in a surprisingly short time. It was as though she had been rotten at heart.” … He changed his tone, “Rain left off? I must get my bike and rush home to dinner. I live in Herne Bay — came out for a spin this morning.”
He nodded at me in a friendly way, and went out with a swagger.
“Do you know who he is, Jermyn?” I asked.
The North Sea pilot shook his head, dismally. “Fancy losing a ship in that silly fashion! Oh, dear! oh dear!” he groaned in lugubrious tones, spreading his damp handkerchief again like a curtain before the glowing grate.
On going out I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, bar-maid of the Three Crows.
A DESPERATE TALE
AN ANARCHIST
THAT year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of the estates — in fact, on the principal cattle estate — of a famous meat-extract manufacturing company.
B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement pages of magazines and newspapers, in the windows of provision merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The “art” illustrating that “literature” represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease, weakness — perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. 0. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen — even as the love of the father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings.
Of course the capital of a country must be pro-ductively employed. I have nothing to say against the company. But being myself animated by feelings of affection towards my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.
In various parts of the civilized and uncivilized world I have had to swallow B. 0. S. with more or less benefit to myself, though without great pleasure. Prepared with hot water and abundantly peppered to bring out the taste, this extract is not really unpalatable. But I have never swallowed its advertisements. Perhaps they have not gone far enough. As far as I can remember they make no promise of everlasting youth to the users of B. 0. S., nor yet have they claimed the power of raising the dead for their estimable products. Why this austere reserve, I wonder? But I don’t think they would have had me even on these terms. Whatever form of mental degradation I may (being but hu-man) be suffering from, it is not the popular form. I am not gullible.
I have been at some pains to bring out distinctly this statement about myself in view of the story which follows. I have checked the facts as far as possible. I have turned up the files of French newspapers, and I have also talked with the officer who commands the military guard on the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne. I believe the story to be in the main true. It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify a perverted vanity.
It concerns the engineer of the steam-launch belonging to the Maranon cattle estate of the B. 0. S. Co., Ltd. This estate is also an island — an island as big as a small province, lying in the estuary of a great South American river. It is wild and not beautiful, but the grass growing on its low plains seems to possess exceptionally nourishing and flavouring qualities. It resounds with the lowing of innumerable herds — a deep and distressing sound under the open sky, rising like a monstrous protest of prisoners condemned to death. On the mainland, across twenty miles of
