The Mutiny of the Elsinore

I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made me catch my breath and gasp.  I had inhaled sulphur.  On the instant I forgot the Elsinore , the mutineers for’ard, everything save one thing.

The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily about the big after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and strangled me.  By the dim light of a sea-lantern I saw the old steward, on hands and knees, coughing and gasping, the while he shook awake Yatsuda, the first sail-maker.  Uchino, the second sail-maker, still strangled in his sleep.

It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I proved it when I dropped on my hands and knees.  I rolled Uchino out of his blankets with a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my head, face, and mouth, arose to my feet, and dashed for’ard into the hall.  After a couple of collisions with the wood-work I again dropped to the floor and rearranged the blankets so that, while my mouth remained covered, I could draw or withdraw, a thickness across my eyes.

The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the dizziness I suffered.  I blundered into the steward’s pantry, and out of it, missed the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard opening in the long hall, and found myself bent double by violent collision with the dining-room table.

But I had my bearings.  Feeling my way around the table and bumping most of the poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied stove, I emerged in the cross-hall and made my way to starboard.  Here, at the base of the chart-room stairway, I gained the hall that led aft.  By this time my own situation seemed so serious that, careless of any collision, I went aft in long leaps.

Margaret’s door was open.  I plunged into her room.  The moment I drew the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a modicum of what Bert Rhine must have suffered.  Oh, the intolerable bite of the sulphur in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain!  No light burned in the room.  I could only strangle and stumble for’ard to Margaret’s bed, upon which I collapsed.

She was not there.  I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her body had left in the under-sheet.  Even in my agony and helplessness the intimacy of that warmth her body had left was very dear to me.  Between the lack of oxygen in my lungs (due to the blankets), the pain of the sulphur, and the mortal dizziness in my brain, I felt that I might well cease there where the linen warmed my hand.

Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing from along the hall.  It was new life to me.  I fell from bed to floor and managed to get upright until I gained the hall, where again I fell.  Thereafter I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the stairway.  By means of the newel-post I drew myself upright and listened.  Near me something moved and strangled.  I fell upon it and found in my arms all the softness of Margaret.

How describe that battle up the stairway?  It was a crucifixion of struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony.  Time after time, as my consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort and let myself blur down into the ultimate dark.  I fought my way step by step.  Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her body step by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell with it, and back with it, and lost much that had been so hardly gained.  And yet out of it all this I remember: that warm soft body of hers was the dearest thing in the world—vastly more dear than the pleasant land I remotely remembered, than all the books and all the humans I had ever known, than the deck above, with its sweet pure air softly blowing under the cool starry sky.

As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of leaving her there and saving myself never crossed my mind.  The one place for me was where she was.

Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not absurd during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway.  One must taste death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive sanction for purple passages.

And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed that upward way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out upon the poop might not be shut.  Life and death lay right there in that one point of the issue.  Was there any creature of my creatures aft with common sense and anticipation sufficient to make him think to open those doors?  How I yearned for one man, for one proved henchman, such as Mr. Pike, to be on the poop!  As it was, with the sole exception of Tom Spink and Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.

I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my feet.  Nor could I rise upright on my knees.  I crawled like any four-legged animal—nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the deck.  It was a matter of several feet to the doorway.  I died a score of times in those several feet; but ever I endured the agony of resurrection and dragged Margaret with me.  Sometimes the full strength I could exert did not move her, and I lay with her and coughed and strangled my way through to another resurrection.

And the door was open.  The doors to starboard and to port were both open; and as the Elsinore rolled a draught through the chart-house hall my lungs filled with pure, cool air.  As I drew myself across the high threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I heard the cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver.  And, ere I fainted into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone so beyond endurance that it had achieved its own anжsthesia, I glimpsed, dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail, dark forms that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-mast brightly lighted by our illuminators.

* * * * *

Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop.  My five Asiatics and two white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay unconscious side by side.

The whole affair was very simple.  Modern maritime quarantine demands that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers.  In the donkey-engine section of the for’ard house is a complete fumigating apparatus.  The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump.  Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the strangling sulphur fumes.  We in the high place had been smoked out by our rascals like so many rats.

It was Wada who had opened one of the doors.  The old steward had opened the other.  Together they had attempted the descent of the stairway and been driven back by the fumes.  Then they had engaged in the struggle to repel the rush from for’ard.

Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves the lungs sore.  Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we draw breath in anything that resembles comfort.  But still my lungs were not so sore as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she meant to me.  And yet she is only a woman—I tell her so; I tell her that there are at least seven hundred and fifty millions of two-legged, long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like her on the planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity of numbers of her sex and kind.  But I tell her something more.  I tell her that of all of them she is the only one.  And, better yet, to myself and for myself, I believe it.  I know it.  The last least part of me and all of me proclaims it.

Love is wonderful.  It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement.  Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and calculating and classifying love.  It is a profound foolishness, a cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher—yes, and of the futurist.  But when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover, then all he may do, and which is what he cannot help doing, is to yield to the compulsions of being and throw both his arms around love and hold it closer to him than is his own heart close to him.  This is the summit of his life, and of man’s life.  Higher than this no man may rise.  The philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks far below.  He who has not loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of living.  I know.  I love Margaret, a woman.  She is desirable.

CHAPTER L

In the past twenty-four hours many things have happened.  To begin with, we nearly lost the steward in the second dog-watch last evening.  Through the slits in the ventilator some man thrust a knife into the sacks of flour and cut them wide open from top to bottom.  In the dark the flour poured to the deck unobserved.

Of course, the man behind could not see through the screen of empty sacks, but he took a blind pot-shot at point-blank range when the steward went by, slip-sloppily dragging the heels of his slippers.  Fortunately it was a miss, but so close a miss was it that his cheek and neck were burned with powder grains.

At six bells in the first watch came another surprise.  Tom Spink came to me where I stood guard at the