CHAPTER VIII
GOSSIP AND BLASPHEMY
THE Heraldr was squattingly built, broad of beam. She sailed like a turnip. She had been purchased by Gorvhalsen and fitted out for the treasure-hunt.
He had called her the Heraldr largely because he called himself a Black Dane; and he enjoyed the talk of how his great-bodied forebears in serpent ships with bucklered bulwarks and broadswords wide as their oar-blades had crept along Europe's coast, threading even Gibraltar Straits; and there had fallen upon cities, plundered monasteries, carried away the real treasures of convents.
McGuire, his ears ever a-tilt when at the Heraldr's wheel, one night listened to him torturing young Corydon with viking boasts:
“There's a trickle of that blood in you, boy. Think of it! You are nothing but what your ancestors were, the fruit of the tree. Ergo, my boy, you've been a convent-raider in your prenatal past. And Bobert, Bobert, don't hang your head in shame. Think, boy, doesn't it give you a warm eager flush to remember beating with a broadsword's hilt on those heavy bronze-studded doors—a windy starlit night—the flare of torches red as the blood on your sword, falling over the horn-headed helmets behind you—the startled cries and rustlings of the frightened dovecote?”
The boy, with tears that would not be kept back on his cheeks, fled.
Gorvhalsen laughed, his hands to sagging hips, his knees bent. He was drunk.
The afternoon that McGuire had first taken the wheel, Eve came up to him with a hand extended friendlily. Her pale little face was frankly aglow. She had seen him among the men, those terribly rough fellows, and her innocently romantic heart had beat a little faster.
No one could have made her understand how far from the forecastle the cabin is or ought to be on a ship like the Heraldr; and it would not have been easy, had she tried, to keep McGuire from among the remembrances of the most unforgetable hours of her colorless brief life. A child who has seen but one magician never forgets that one.
So she came up to him happily, too guileless not to be pleased; and she was far less aware of what was in her heart than McGuire, to whom the devil had given much the same sort of wisdom that is in the snake that draws the fluttering bird. But wise men are not evil, and even hungerless snakes do not destroy fledglings.
Swanson, the second mate, and Matt Ward too, were on the deck.
McGuire had crooked an arm about a spoke and was listening to her, but with the corners of his eyes on the look-out. He was a born wheelman.
In about five seconds Matt Ward blew up:
“You let that helmsman soldier on your watch, Swanson!”
Swanson jumped across the deck and demanded: “What's your course?”
“By the wind, sir.”
“Watch it then.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
With a word, a gesture of his head and a glance, McGuire apologized to her. She did not understand why she should not be permitted to talk with him just because he happened to be on watch, and the rebuke to him made her face red. She did not like the ship or officers anyway.
She returned to her chair, and McGuire furtively watched her. The tropic sun had scarcely yet laid a tinting caress on her face, bleached of all color by a life spent among shadows; but her cheeks had been flushed by the touch of anger. She wore a soft wide-rimmed straw hat with a high band of light blue ribbon. The hat drooped shelteringly. Blonde vagrant curls coiled inquiringly down along her soft neck. It would take but very little change to make her beautiful.
During his watches at the wheel, McGuire saw everything that was seeable; and one evening he sat down beside Brundage to talk over things he had been thinking, observing, hearing, guessing and imagining.
“This ship's a great little home, ain't it, Jake? Lots o' nice boys around here. An' girls. That Vaughn woman—she's got red hair. That's why I'm sympathetic. Family feelin'. Us red-heads are heart-breakers, Jake. An' know it.”
Brundage, without taking pipe from mouth, turned his lean wrinkled face and looked with immobile scrutiny at McGuire's tangled thatch of dirty brick-dust hair.
The sun was sliding down the afternoon sky like a whirling wheel lost from some celestially remote fire-chariot; and the ocean, covered with a shimmering silver flame-mosaic, disappeared in the vagueness of a blinding westward haze.
Men idled indifferently at odd jobs. The crew was growing more lazy and careless of what happened. The galley food was more and more as if it had rotted in China.
“All women belong in hell,” said Brundage dispassionately.
Old age had left its ownership on him. His blood and temper were cold and, as with many a man who has been canonized, he had acquired a sort of asceticism through the death of youth. Nothing moved him to the least emotion: no sunset, no storm, no flame-women; nothing but McGuire's premeditated blasphemy ever stirred his nerves.
“In hell, huh? Yes, I suppose so. Most of 'em travel that way—with men alongside of 'em, showin' the way. Take that child back there—out of a nunnery. But she's got the name Eve, same as the mother of 'em all had. An', Jake, I'd make a bet that she would throw her little heart to the worst dog on this heller if she got half a chance.”
Brundage gave no sign of listening.
“An' that woman, Jake—Gorvhalsen's wife. She loves him. Strange, the men that women love.”
Mrs. Gorvhalsen, a tall straight woman, would sit alone for a long time, motionless, shoulders erect, her straight thin hands folded on her lap and be as severely quiet and poised as if taking a passive part in a public ceremony; but when spoken to she was instantly gracious. Gorvhalsen's big hairy hands were always falling about her shoulder, reaching out gropingly at her as though absent-mindedly reassuring himself that she was near.
“An', Jake, the mates are both in love with the red woman. The devil sure celebrates Jeanne Vaughn's birthday. She flashes her eyes at every man that goes to the wheel. Maybe that's why I stand other fellows' watches. I say maybe that's why I go so much. Why don't you say something?”
“You're looking for a chance to steal gin—a square-face. That's why you go.”
“A woman's eyes can make you drunk as gin. 'Dams staggers, Swanson reels. I relieved Clobb yesterday at the wheel. He was tremblin', Jake. 'What a woman!' he says to me. 'What's the course? I asked him. 'She stood right by me—perfume all over her,' he whispered as though he had a bone in his throat. 'What's the course?' I repeats. 'God!' he says. 'Not much. This hooker's headed for hell,' I told him.
“That brought him around for a minute an he gave me the course, but he went forward, shakin' like a man in a gale. That's what a woman's eyes can do to you.”
Brundage smoked in peace.
“Jake, if you put that woman in a graveyard, walled her in an' locked the gate so she couldn't get out, an' just left her there—Jake, she'd tear open the mounds with her fingers to get the male corpses out where they could look at her!”
Brundage growled uneasily.
“Ur-r-r-r,” McGuire mimicked. “Wouldn't like to have your old bones rattled by a woman's fingers, would you? Guess you think when a man dies he's entitled to a little rest. But think o' Williams, Jake. Think o' the Hurricane. The woman that had him hanged 'll be right there on the other side with 'er white arms out an her black eyes all full o' tears, askin him to forgive 'er—an trust her again down there in hell!”
“He'll never go there,” said Brundage with unexpected emphasis. “Not Williams,” he repeated with a slow assertive shake of his graying head.
“How'd you know? He b'longs there, doesn't he? Hanged him for murder, didn't they?”
No answer.
“Rich brilliant young man. Had his head full o' books. His own yacht. Met a woman—then they hanged him, 'cause she happened to be married. That's the way the story goes, isn't it? Her husband died. Woman that kills her husband ought to know who to blame, oughtn't she? Anyway they hanged him. From a prominent family too, so they say. English family, full of bishops, soldiers an' things. Could have had the world at his feet—an' took a woman!! Now he's a white cannibal, pirate, cutthroat, an' this ship o' head-hunters is out for him!”
McGuire kept his eyes watchfully on Brundage:
“Jake, they say the prison doctor was in too much hurry to get to supper or breakfast. Which was it?”
Brundage did not stir.
“Anyway, they cut him down before he was really dead. That's how the story goes. Convicts buried a dummy—was it a dummy, Jake?”
Brundage smoked on, saying nothing, showing nothing on his face as wrinkled as crushed leather. Perhaps he was conning the past, maybe scanning the future. He gave no sign.
Williams, so the story ran, after his miraculous escape from the felon graveyard, got to the Solomon Islands and turned native, living among cannibals in an obscure coast village. A blackbird schooner came along and haggled fruitlessly for recruits; so, as blackbirders often did in those days, the schooner ran down a boat-load of natives a mile off-shore and expected to fish them out of the water and slam them down into the hold for plantations in Queensland. A white man, naked, browned, unnoticed before he had scrambled right over the freeboard, came up out of the water from among the capsized natives, and in about twenty minutes he was skipper of the schooner, and had started on his stormy career.
“Young Corydon's been at me again, Jake. He gives me the shivers with his blasted uneasiness. That gorilla keeps him scared—makes that lad shake like a jellyfish that's met a shark. But I sort o' like that overgrown gorilla. Young Corydon thinks he is Jonah—he'd choke any whale.”