The Mutiny of the Elsinore

universe, reduced the next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of the philosopher.  And in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by means of a stick of wood brought sharply in contact with his skull.

If Tony the Greek be accounted an appearance , what was he now?—a disappearance ?  And if so, whither had he disappeared?  And whence would he journey back to reoccupy that body when what we call consciousness returned to him?  The first word, much less the last, of the phenomena of personality and consciousness yet remains to be uttered by the psychologists.

Pondering thus, I chanced to lift my eyes, and the glorious spectacle of the Elsinore burst upon me.  I had been so long on board, and in board of her, that I had forgotten she was a white-painted ship.  So low to the water was her hull, so delicate and slender, that the tall, sky-reaching spars and masts and the hugeness of the spread of canvas seemed preposterous and impossible, an insolent derision of the law of gravitation.  It required effort to realize that that slim curve of hull inclosed and bore up from the sea’s bottom five thousand tons of coal.  And again, it seemed a miracle that the mites of men had conceived and constructed so stately and magnificent an element-defying fabric—mites of men, most woefully like the Greek at my feet, prone to precipitation into the blackness by means of a rap on the head with a piece of wood.

Tony made a struggling noise in his throat, then coughed and groaned.  From somewhere he was reappearing.  I noticed Mr. Pike look at him quickly, as if apprehending some recrudescence of frenzy that would require more boat-stretcher.  But Tony merely fluttered his big black eyes open and stared at me for a long minute of incurious amaze ere he closed them again.

“What are you going to do with him?” I asked the mate.

“Put ’m back to work,” was the reply.  “It’s all he’s good for, and he ain’t hurt.  Somebody’s got to work this ship around the Horn.”

When we hoisted the boat on board I found Miss West had gone below.  In the chart-room Captain West was winding the chronometers.  Mr. Mellaire had turned in to catch an hour or two of sleep ere his watch on deck at noon.  Mr. Mellaire, by the way, as I have forgotten to state, does not sleep aft.  He shares a room in the ’midship- house with Mr. Pike’s Nancy .

Nobody showed sympathy for the unfortunate Greek.  He was bundled out upon Number Two hatch like so much carrion and left there unattended, to recover consciousness as he might elect.  Yes, and so inured have I become that I make free to admit I felt no sympathy for him myself.  My eyes were still filled with the beauty of the Elsinore .  One does grow hard at sea.

CHAPTER XIX

One does not mind the trades.  We have held the north-east trade for days now, and the miles roll off behind us as the patent log whirls and tinkles on the taffrail.  Yesterday, log and observation approximated a run of two hundred and fifty-two miles; the day before we ran two hundred and forty, and the day before that two hundred and sixty-one.  But one does not appreciate the force of the wind.  So balmy and exhilarating is it that it is so much atmospheric wine.  I delight to open my lungs and my pores to it.  Nor does it chill.  At any hour of the night, while the cabin lies asleep, I break off from my reading and go up on the poop in the thinnest of tropical pyjamas.

I never knew before what the trade wind was.  And now I am infatuated with it.  I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever mate has the watch.  Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr. Pike, on these delicious nights, stands his first watch after midnight in his pyjamas.  He is a fearfully muscular man.  Sixty-nine years seem impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed like fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge muscle.  A splendid figure of a man!  What he must have been in the hey-day of youth two score years and more ago passes comprehension.

The days, so filled with simple routine, pass as in a dream.  Here, where time is rigidly measured and emphasized by the changing of the watches, where every hour and half-hour is persistently brought to one’s notice by the striking of the ship’s bells fore and aft, time ceases.  Days merge into days, and weeks slip into weeks, and I, for one, can never remember the day of the week or month.

The Elsinore is never totally asleep.  Day and night, always, there are the men on watch, the look-out on the forecastle head, the man at the wheel, and the officer of the deck.  I lie reading in my bunk, which is on the weather side, and continually over my head during the long night hours impact the footsteps of one mate or the other, pacing up and down, and, as I well know, the man himself is for ever peering for’ard from the break of the poop, or glancing into the binnacle, or feeling and gauging the weight and direction of wind on his cheek, or watching the cloud-stuff in the sky adrift and a-scud across the stars and the moon.  Always, always, there are wakeful eyes on the Elsinore .

Last night, or this morning, rather, about two o’clock, as I lay with the printed page swimming drowsily before me, I was aroused by an abrupt outbreak of snarl from Mr. Pike.  I located him as at the break of the poop; and the man at whom he snarled was Larry, evidently on the main deck beneath him.  Not until Wada brought me breakfast did I learn what had occurred.

Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face, and his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some unlucky whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of darkness on the main deck.  But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of the poop, had picked the offender unerringly.  This was when the explosion occurred.  Then the unfortunate Larry, truly half-devil and all child, had waxed sullen and retorted still more insolently; and the next he knew, the mate, descending upon him like a hurricane, had handcuffed him to the mizzen fife-rail.

Imagine, on Mr. Pike’s part, that this was one for Larry and at least ten for Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  I’ll not be so absurd as to say that the mate is afraid of those gangsters.  I doubt if he has ever experienced fear.  It is not in him.  On the other hand, I am confident that he apprehends trouble from these men, and that it was for their benefit he made this example of Larry.

Larry could stand no more than an hour in irons, at which time his stupid brutishness overcame any fear he might have possessed, because he bellowed out to the poop to come down and loose him for a fair fight.  Promptly Mr. Pike was there with the key to the handcuffs.  As if Larry had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged man!  Wada reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a couple of front teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day.  When I met Mr. Pike on deck after eight o’clock I glanced at his knuckles.  They verified Wada’s tale.

I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little events like the foregoing.  Not only has time ceased, but the world has ceased.  Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these weeks I have received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no visitor.  I have not been to the play.  I have not read a newspaper.  So far as I am concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers.  All such things have vanished with the vanished world.  All that exists is the Elsinore , with her queer human freightage and her cargo of coal, cleaving a rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen miles away.

I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture, who for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be alive.  Not until the world learned of his death was he anything but alive to the world.  By the same token, was he not alive?  And by the same token, here on the Elsinore , has not the land-world ceased?  May not the pupil of one’s eye be, not merely the centre of the world, but the world itself?  Truly, it is tenable that the world exists only in consciousness.  “The world is my idea,” said Schopenhauer.  Said Jules de Gaultier, “The world is my invention.”  His dogma was that imagination created the Real.  Ah, me, I know that the practical Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful exercise of my wits.

To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read The Daughters of Herodias to Miss West.  It was superb in its effect—just what I had expected of her.  She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for her father while I read.  (She is never idle, being so essentially a nest-maker and comfort-producer and race- conserver; and she has a whole pile of these handkerchiefs for her father.)

She smiled, how shall I say?—oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh, with all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm, long gray eyes, when I read:

“But they smile innocently and dance on,