The Mutiny of the Elsinore

storm and that the wind was boxing the compass.  I did notice that he kept his gaze pretty steadily fixed on the overcast, cloud-driven sky.  At last, when it seemed the wind could not possibly blow more fiercely, he found in the sky what he sought.  It was then that I first heard his voice—a sea-voice, clear as a bell, distinct as silver, and of an ineffable sweetness and volume, as it might be the trump of Gabriel.  That voice!—effortless, dominating!  The mighty threat of the storm, made articulate by the resistance of the Elsinore , shouted in all the stays, bellowed in the shrouds, thrummed the taut ropes against the steel masts, and from the myriad tiny ropes far aloft evoked a devil’s chorus of shrill pipings and screechings.  And yet, through this bedlam of noise, came Captain West’s voice, as of a spirit visitant, distinct, unrelated, mellow as all music and mighty as an archangel’s call to judgment.  And it carried understanding and command to the man at the wheel, and to Mr. Pike, waist-deep in the wash of sea below us.  And the man at the wheel obeyed, and Mr. Pike obeyed, barking and snarling orders to the poor wallowing devils who wallowed on and obeyed him in turn.  And as the voice was the face.  This face I had never seen before.  It was the face of the spirit visitant, chaste with wisdom, lighted by a splendour of power and calm.  Perhaps it was the calm that smote me most of all.  It was as the calm of one who had crossed chaos to bless poor sea-worn men with the word that all was well.  It was not the face of the fighter.  To my thrilled imagination it was the face of one who dwelt beyond all strivings of the elements and broody dissensions of the blood.

The Samurai had arrived, in thunders and lightnings, riding the wings of the storm, directing the gigantic, labouring Elsinore in all her intricate massiveness, commanding the wisps of humans to his will, which was the will of wisdom.

And then, that wonderful Gabriel voice of his, silent (while his creatures laboured his will), unconcerned, detached and casual, more slenderly tall and aristocratic than ever in his streaming oilskins, Captain West touched my shoulder and pointed astern over our weather quarter.  I looked, and all that I could see was a vague smoke of sea and air and a cloud-bank of sky that tore at the ocean’s breast.  And at the same moment the gale from the south-west ceased.  There was no gale, no moving zephyrs, nothing but a vast quietude of air.

“What is it?” I gasped, out of equilibrium from the abrupt cessation of wind.

“The shift,” he said.  “There she comes.”

And it came, from the north-west, a blast of wind, a blow, an atmospheric impact that bewildered and stunned and again made the Elsinore harp protest.  It forced me down on the rail.  I was like a windle-straw.  As I faced this new abruptness of gale it drove the air back into my lungs, so that I suffocated and turned my head aside to breathe in the lee of the draught.  The man at the wheel again listened to the Gabriel voice; and Mr. Pike, on the deck below, listened and repeated the will of the voice; and Captain West, in slender and stately balance, leaned into the face of the wind and slowly paced the deck.

It was magnificent.  Now, and for the first time, I knew the sea, and the men who overlord the sea.  Captain West had vindicated himself, exposited himself.  At the height and crisis of storm he had taken charge of the Elsinore , and Mr. Pike had become, what in truth was all he was, the foreman of a gang of men, the slave-driver of slaves, serving the one from beyond—the Samurai.

A minute or so longer Captain West strolled up and down, leaning easily into the face of this new and abominable gale or resting his back against it, and then he went below, pausing for a moment, his hand on the knob of the chart-room door, to cast a last measuring look at the storm-white sea and wrath-sombre sky he had mastered.

Ten minutes later, below, passing the open cabin door, I glanced in and saw him.  Sea-boots and storm- trappings were gone; his feet, in carpet slippers, rested on a hassock; while he lay back in the big leather chair smoking dreamily, his eyes wide open, absorbed, non-seeing—or, if they saw, seeing things beyond the reeling cabin walls and beyond my ken.  I have developed an immense respect for Captain West, though now I know him less than the little I thought I knew him before.

CHAPTER XIII

Small wonder that Miss West remains sea-sick on an ocean like this, which has become a factory where the veering gales manufacture the selectest and most mountainous brands of cross-seas.  The way the poor Elsinore pitches, plunges, rolls, and shivers, with all her lofty spars and masts and all her five thousand tons of dead-weight cargo, is astonishing.  To me she is the most erratic thing imaginable; yet Mr. Pike, with whom I now pace the poop on occasion, tells me that coal is a good cargo, and that the Elsinore is well-loaded because he saw to it himself.

He will pause abruptly, in the midst of his interminable pacing, in order to watch her in her maddest antics.  The sight is very pleasant to him, for his eyes glisten and a faint glow seems to irradiate his face and impart to it a hint of ecstasy.  The Elsinore has a snug place in his heart, I am confident.  He calls her behaviour admirable, and at such times will repeat to me that it was he who saw to her loading.

It is very curious, the habituation of this man, through a long life on the sea, to the motion of the sea.  There is a rhythm to this chaos of crossing, buffeting waves.  I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve it.  But Mr. Pike knows it.  Again and again, as we paced up and down this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the Elsinore smashed down on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that seemed never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt, snap-of-the-whip effect as she began the corresponding roll to windward.  In vain I strove to learn how Mr. Pike forecasts these antics, and I am driven to believe that he does not consciously forecast them at all.  He feels them; he knows them.  They, and the sea, are ingrained in him.

Toward the end of our little promenade I was guilty of impatiently shaking off a sudden seizure of my arm in his big paw.  If ever, in an hour, the Elsinore had been less gymnastic than at that moment, I had not noticed it.  So I shook off the sustaining clutch, and the next moment the Elsinore had smashed down and buried a couple of hundred feet of her starboard rail beneath the sea, while I had shot down the deck and smashed myself breathless against the wall of the chart- house.  My ribs and one shoulder are sore from it yet.  Now how did he know?

And he never staggers nor seems in danger of being rolled away.  On the contrary, such a surplus of surety of balance has he that time and again he lent his surplus to me.  I begin to have more respect, not for the sea, but for the men of the sea, and not for the sweepings of seamen that are as slaves on our decks, but for the real seamen who are their masters—for Captain West, for Mr. Pike, yes, and for Mr. Mellaire, dislike him as I do.

As early as three in the afternoon the wind, still a gale, went back to the south-west.  Mr. Mellaire had the deck, and he went below and reported the change to Captain West.

“We’ll wear ship at four, Mr. Pathurst,” the second mate told me when he came back.  “You’ll find it an interesting manoeuvre.”

“But why wait till four?” I asked.

“The Captain’s orders, sir.  The watches will be changing, and we’ll have the use of both of them, without working a hardship on the watch below by calling it out now.”

And when both watches were on deck Captain West, again in oilskins, came out of the chart-house.  Mr. Pike, out on the bridge, took charge of the many men who, on deck and on the poop, were to manage the mizzen-braces, while Mr. Mellaire went for’ard with his watch to handle the fore-and main-braces.  It was a pretty manoeuvre, a play of leverages, by which they cased the force of the wind on the after part of the Elsinore and used the force of the wind on the for’ard part.

Captain West gave no orders whatever, and, to all intents, was quite oblivious of what was being done.  He was again the favoured passenger, taking a stroll for his health’s sake.  And yet I knew that both his officers were uncomfortably aware of his presence and were keyed to their finest seamanship.  I know, now, Captain West’s position on board.  He is the brains of the Elsinore .  He is the master strategist.  There is more in directing a ship on the ocean than in standing watches and ordering men to pull and haul.  They are pawns, and the two officers are pieces, with which Captain West plays the game against sea, and wind, and season, and ocean current.  He is the knower.  They are his tongue, by which he makes his knowledge articulate.

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