“Should think ’twas time some of them light sails were coming off her.”
And the other, an older man, uttered grumpily:
“No fear! not while the chief mate’s on deck. He’s that deaf he can’t tell how much wind there is.”
And, indeed, poor P⸺, quite young, and a smart seaman, was very hard of hearing. At the same time, he had the name of being the very devil of a fellow for carrying on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully clever at concealing his deafness, and, as to carrying on heavily, though he was a fearless man, I don’t think that he ever meant to take undue risks. I can never forget his naive sort of astonishment when remonstrated with for what appeared a most daredevil performance. The only person, of course, that could remonstrate with telling effect was our captain, himself a man of daredevil tradition; and really, for me, who knew under whom I was serving, those were impressive scenes. Captain S⸺ had a great name for sailor-like qualities—the sort of name that compelled my youthful admiration. To this day I preserve his memory, for, indeed, it was he in a sense who completed my training. It was often a stormy process, but let that pass. I am sure he meant well, and I am certain that never, not even at the time, could I bear him malice for his extraordinary gift of incisive criticism. And to hear him make a fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed one of those incredible experiences that take place only in one’s dreams.
It generally happened in this way: Night clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an immense white sheet of foam level with the lee rail. Mr. P⸺, in charge of the deck, hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked on somewhere to windward of the slanting poop, in a state of the utmost preparedness to jump at the very first hint of some sort of order, but otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state of mind. Suddenly, out of the companion would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded, with a short white beard of a perpendicular cut, very visible in the dark—Captain S⸺, disturbed in his reading down below by the frightful bounding and lurching of the ship. Leaning very much against the precipitous incline of the deck, he would take a turn or two, perfectly silent, hang on by the compass for a while, take another couple of turns, and suddenly burst out:
“What are you trying to do with the ship?”
And Mr. P⸺, who was not good at catching what was shouted in the wind, would say interrogatively:
“Yes, sir?”
Then in the increasing gale of the sea there would be a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence.
“By Heavens, Mr. P-! I used to carry on sail in my time, but—”
And the rest would be lost to me in a stormy gust of wind.
Then, in a lull, P⸺’s protesting innocence would become audible:
“She seems to stand it very well.”
And then another burst of an indignant voice:
“Any fool can carry sail on a ship—”
And so on and so on, the ship meanwhile rushing on her way with a heavier list, a noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to leeward. For the best of it was that Captain S⸺ seemed constitutionally incapable of giving his officers a definite order to shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily vague row would go on till at last it dawned upon them both, in some particularly alarming gust, that it was time to do something. There is nothing like the fearful inclination of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to bring a deaf man and an angry one to their senses.
XII
So sail did get shortened more or less in time even in that ship, and her tall spars never went overboard while I served in her. However, all the time I was with them, Captain S⸺ and Mr. P⸺ did not get on very well together. If P⸺ carried on “like the very devil” because he was too deaf to know how much wind there was, Captain S⸺(who, as I have said, seemed constitutionally incapable of ordering one of his officers to shorten sail) resented the necessity forced upon him by Mr. P⸺’s desperate goings on. It was in Captain S⸺’s tradition rather to reprove his officers for not carrying on quite enough—in his phrase “for not taking every ounce of advantage of a fair wind.” But there was also a psychological motive that made him extremely difficult to deal with on board that iron clipper. He had just come out of the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard, heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. In the middle sixties she had beaten by a day and a half the steam mail-boat from Hong Kong to Singapore. There was something peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the placing of her masts—who knows? Officers of men-of-war used to come on board to take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan. Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or the finger of good fortune in the fashioning of her lines at bow
