The Ship of Hope

by Ralph Stock

THE SHIP OF
HOPE

By RALPH STOCK

HE was so obviously out of his element in those teeming regions of the Boreas, and tried so hard not to show it, that Strode was attracted to him from the first.

Challoner was the name inscribed on his belongings, and it seemed to fit, as names occasionally do. Tall, grey-haired, still slimly elegant, he was of an age that baffles any decision as to whether a man is prematurely old or uncommonly well-preserved. He merely gave the impression of being one or the other. Certainly he had lived, and the manner, if not the matter, of his past was stamped upon him as clearly as it is upon an actor or a pugilist. A natural aloofness from the herd, a well-disciplined tolerance when forced to mingle with it, the suggestion he conveyed in speech and bearing that whatever wrong he may have done had never been done wrongly, led one to the conclusion that he had had time and opportunity beyond the average to cultivate the art of being a gentleman.

Place such a man, together with his unmistakably newly-married daughter and her husband, in the steerage of a liner bound for the Land of Promise, mix for nine days, by means of Atlantic rollers, with as various an assemblage as you will find ashore or afloat, and the result is apt to be interesting. Strode found it so.

"Ah," was Challoner's comment at that first fateful meeting of cabin mates when total strangers survey each other with the awful knowledge that henceforth it will be a physical impossibility for them to live, move, and have their being more than three feet apart, "I think we can consider ourselves fortunate, gentlemen." And he said it as though he meant it, as though there were few more pleasant prospects for a middle-aged man than to share a propeller-shaken, cement-floored cubicle with three companions of unknown habit. "There are, I believe, such things as twenty-berth cabins."

The remark was evidently meant as a praiseworthy effort to put the best complexion on a trying situation, but there is no accounting for individual interpretation. The occupant of berth No. 3, a sharp-featured youth with an aggressive manner and a Western American accent that had a knack of reverting to Cockney in unguarded moments, looked up from his unpacking as though shot.

"You bet you," he snapped, "and out there you'll get 'undred-berth cabins. How will you like that?"

The ensuing silence appeared to precipitate further revelations.

"Bunk 'ouses they're called," he informed the assembled company, "full of red-blooded he-men with hair on, and you can't come any of your 'glass with care' stuff with them, I'm telling yer. If you ain't a good mixer, you might as well be meat."

"Really?" said Challoner in a tone of polite interest.

"Yep, re-ally," mimicked Berth No. 3. "It scares me stiff to think what some of this bunch 'll have to stand for before they get halter-broke, trailin' out to a white man's country the way they do with all their old back-numbered notions of how to do this and how not to do that, and takin' no advice from them as knows."

"It must be rather riling," admitted Challoner.

"Riling?" Words seemed to fail Berth No. 3, but only for the moment. "It's pitiful, that's what it is. It don't rile me none. Let 'em go to blazes their own way, I says."

"Quite," agreed Challoner. "Then I take it you've been out before."

"Out?" And it was evident that, whether by accident or design, a fresh irritant had been applied to the already inflamed condition of Berth No. 3. "What do you take me for, anyway?"

It was an awkward question, but Challoner was relieved of having to answer it by the clanging of a bell and a general stampede for the dining saloon, headed by Berth No. 3.

A few minutes of the free fight proceeding in the passage outside satisfied Strode that the first call for "tea" was not his. He returned to the cabin to find Challoner alone and in earnest contemplation of his neatly-shod feet.

Suddenly, and without any apparent cause, he laughed.

"Excuse me," he said, as though caught in some guilty act. "I thought I was alone. My son-in-law has gone to try and find his wife. They separate the sexes in these parts, you know. I was just thinking."

"Don't mention it," said Strode. "I only wish I could find something to laugh at."

"You will," Challoner assured him, "before you've done with us in this cabin, if I'm not mistaken. I've just received a severe reprimand. Does that amuse you?"

"Reprimand? Who from? Why?"

"My son-in-law, for offending our friend of berth Number Three," said Challoner, looking up from his seat on a cabin trunk to note the effect of the announcement.

Strode laughed shortly.

"Ah, it does amuse you," sighed Challoner. "Good. Then perhaps you'll allow me to go further. I should like an unbiased opinion. Did you notice anything of the sort?"

"I must say he seemed offended," Strode admitted, "though for the life of me I couldn't see what about. He struck me as a man looking for trouble."

"Exactly," beamed Challoner. "That was my contention. You've taken a weight off my mind, Mr.——"

"Strode. But you surely weren't going to let a thing like that worry you."

Challoner tugged nervously at the neck scarf that constituted his ineffectual disguise.

"For myself, no," he said reflectively, "but then you don't know my son-in-law. To him my behaviour is a matter of very grave concern." He checked himself as though turning off a tap. "But this is an infliction, and—and isn't that the second bell?"

It was. Strode found himself in the passage, sandwiched between Challoner and a resilient substance that proved to be an indignant matron.

"Who are you pushin'?" she demanded shrilly of those in her immediate wake. "One'd think you'd never had anythink to eat."

"All right, ma. You 'ave, anyway," came the inevitable retort, and amidst kindred pleasantries the queue, at least two hundred strong, swayed onward to the saloon.

Towering above the multitude, Challoner drifted with it, his face a mask of rigidly sup- pressed abhorrence. It occurred to Strode that probably in much the same fashion aristocrats of old had been borne to the guillotine.

"Courage, mon brave!" he exhorted.

Challoner's face relaxed into a grin of understanding. "Hush!" he said. "You mustn't say things like that, or you'll never make a good mixer."

In the neighbourhood of the saloon door the ordeal became intensified. By way of after-dinner entertainment, the brighter spirits of the "first sitting" had converted the main companion into a grand stand, from which they passed their successors in ribald review.

"Straight through to the dry 'ash!"

"The animals went in two by two," complete with chorus.

"Stay with it, ma; you'll win if you don't weaken," were a few gems from their repertoire. But at Challoner's appearance the fun waxed furious.

"Allow me!" boomed Berth No. 3 with a shout of joyful recognition. "Allow me to present Admiral Tickemoff, who don't hold with twenty-berth cabins, nor yet with four-berth, but who's forgot to buy the ship!"

Challoner coloured slightly, but never flinched.

The human stream flowed sluggishly as far as the saloon doors, but once inside them burst all bounds and flooded the place like a cataract. A few anæmic stewards tried to preserve order, but matters resolved themselves into a game of musical chairs without the music, a game at which Challoner was patently no good whatever. It was only by dint of strategy on Strode's part, and the kindly assistance of the indignant matron, who proved to be telescopic as well as resilient, that room was made for him at all.

Once seated, however, his table manners were as irreproachable as even his son-in-law—who chanced to sit not far distant, and kept him under constant observation—could have wished. He gazed unmoved on a delicate piece of knife play opposite, and beheld an envelope being used as a handkerchief without a visible qualm.

Such was the steerage of the Boreas, and such a man was J. B. Challoner.

As far as mutual understanding goes, five days under these conditions are equal to five months or five years under almost any other. That was how Challoner's tragic position—for it was tragic, in spite of his own whimiscal fashion of presenting it—became known to Strode.

By day, during the odd intervals when his daughter was not taking him for an enforced constitutional, inquiring after his health, or inveigling him into a game of écarté in an atmosphere of infants and banana skins, and his son-in-law was neither challenging him to quoits nor reading him extracts from Government booklets on the precise method of making a fortune by farming a "free grant," Challoner was in the habit of surreptitiously mounting a small iron ladder to the boat-deck, and lying there enveloped in rugs and comparative peace. Here Strode would join him, and in the shelter of lifeboat No. 17, their faces turned to the sky, they came to talk with the easy candour of old friends.

"I don't know how it strikes you," said Challoner on one of these occasions, "but up here I feel as if I'd died and gone to heaven."

"Bad as that below, eh?" commented Strode. "Well, when you come to think of it, what else could you expect?"

"Expect?" Challoner's elongated form stirred under the rugs. "That's the trouble. I expected all this, and yet went through with it. Thought I might live it down, adapt myself. But I can't. And now I see myself going through with it for the rest of my life." He shuddered .

"Oh, come," said Strode, "it's not as bad as that. We shall be at St. John in four days' time."

"Which is only the beginning," wailed Challoner. "You don't understand." He raised himself on an elbow. "I believe you think I'm complaining of the Boreas."

"Well, aren't you?"

"Certainly not; The Boreas is a wonder ship, a ship of hope if ever there was one. She's carrying a cargo of youth to its happy hunting grounds at fifteen pounds a head, which is something of a miracle these days. Oh, no, I'm all for the Boreas. I can even see possibilities in our friend of berth Number Three. We happened to see through each other rather too clearly, that's all."

"How do you mean?"

Challoner fixed his gaze on a wheeling albatross.

"It's rather hard to explain," he said slowly, "but it seems to me that most of us pretend in one way or another. From the painted lady to the funeral mute we try to give an appearance of being something that we're not, and when the other fellow sees through us we don't like it. I expect Berth Number Three went to quite a lot of trouble about his disguise as a born Westerner full of knowledge about the land of 'red-blooded he-men with hair on' that we poor fools are bound for. You meet his type all over the world, and it's quite harmless so long as you absorb all it wants to tell you, and say nothing yourself. But I've lost the knack. I'm getting loquacious. I saw him for the Cockney larrikin that he is—for a town-bred 'know-all' who once summoned the pluck to emigrate, but has never been further than the suburbs of Montreal or Toronto in his life. And very foolishly I let him know what I saw."

"I don't see how you did that," said Strode.

"Don't you?" Challoner rolled on to his side and regarded Strode with a whimsical twist of the lips. "But then I shouldn't take you for a 'know-all,' and, remember, he is. We're very sensitive about our dis- guises, you know. When Berth Number Three saw that I'd penetrated his, he naturally tried to do the same to mine. What he saw was probably one of the hated leisured class trying to look like an intending settler, and pretending that he didn't dislike his present company—including Berth Number Three. And in his own particular way—rather more effective than mine, I fancy—he let me know it. Can you blame him? I don't. A few years ago he and his like would have strung me up to a lamp-post for a parasite. I've been just that most of my life—much too long to change now. I've no business aboard a ship of hope. I haven't got any!"

Challoner ended on a note of defiant futility, and glared upward at the scudding cloud- wrack.

"Aren't you rather hard on yourself?" Strode suggested.

"Not a bit. I've only taken a look at myself rather late in life, and don't like the view."

A wave of memory surged upon Strode. "That's funny," he said. "I did much the same thing not long ago, and I don't think it's wise—too much of it, that is."

"You didn't like the view, either."

"It nearly drove me to suicide," said Strode.

There was a pause, during which Challoner still stared upward, but with a changed expression.

"That's interesting," he mused, "very interesting. And if you felt like that with your life before you, how do you suppose I feel with mine behind? Oh, you needn't trouble to say the usual thing. I've told you I took a good look at myself. I'm old, and the old see too far ahead. I can see plumb to the horizon—a road like a switch-back, covered with rocks and bog holes to the end. What business have I to set out over country like that at my time of life?"

"You can always turn back."

"Can I? That's just the point. I can't without taking others of far more importance with me." Challoner suddenly sat upright. "I'm a father-in-law," he announced. "Why don't you laugh? Mothers-in-law are a joke; why not fathers-in-law?" As suddenly as he had risen he relapsed. "You don't know, I don't know, no one knows."

He lay silent a while, blinking rapidly, then continued in a carefully restrained monotone.

"My daughter saw fit to marry an earnest young man. I know it's not usual to talk of one's relatives in this way, and forgive me if I bore you, but I know you better than either of them, and if I don't open up to someone, I shall become violent instead of just senile. As I said, my daughter married an earnest young man. Ever met one?"

"Plenty," said Strode.

"Well, perhaps you understand 'em. I don't. The only things I've been able to take in earnest myself are sailing, hunting, and bridge. Can you see me hitting it off with the average woman novelist's idea of the perfect male—iron jaws, cast-iron principles, and about as much sense of humour as boiled cod?"

Strode must have smiled.

"You're beginning to get it," railed Challoner, "the great father-in-law jest! Well, that's what's expected of me. They're educating me to it."

"But surely your daughter——"

"Gone clean over to the enemy!" snapped Challoner. "And quite right, too. If a wife doesn't share her husband's principles, she has no right to share anything else of his. I'm old-fashioned enough to see that." His tone became milder. "After the crash—about which the least said the better—farming in Canada was decided on. It sounds solid, and reads well in the leaflets. With five hundred pounds we're going to make a Government free grant blossom like the rose. I'm to be an honoured guest, if you please. During the few months we're not snowed under I shall totter about the place, watching them make as much out of farming in a year as I have out of bridge in an evening. But that's neither here nor there. Nothing can stop 'em because they have ' the will to win,' or something like that. And I honestly believe nothing would—if it wasn't for me. I shall be an eternal wet-blanket, a drag on them, and a curse to myself. You see, I know something of what they'll have to go through. I've been there."

"I had no idea of that."

"No, I don't mention it for several reasons, but in my gilded youth I was bitten with the pioneering fever, and ' went out ' with a few kindred spirits to found a sort of home from home. Well, by playing polo on Indian cayuses most of the day, poker most of the night, and losing every cent we were allowed at pretending to ranch, we founded Calgary—although that respectable little burg hates to admit it these days, I believe. However, that's beside the point. My contention is that I shall be nothing but an unmitigated nuisance."

"Then why go?"

"You may well ask that." Challoner pondered the matter with the expression of one about to take medicine. "And the answer is that they won't go without me. Oh, it's not that I'm as intrinsically precious to them as all that, but I happened to put up the five hundred. It represents the entire Challoner fortune at the moment, and it's against my son-in-law's principles to leave me behind, presumably to starve. The money couldn't possibly be looked upon as anything but a loan—oh, no! I hold a document to that effect, duly stamped, signed, sealed, and all the rest of it—unless I've lost it. Where my money goes I must go, apparently. And there you have it. If you see any way out, for the love of mike show it me. I'm beat."

Challoner undoubtedly was, and as though to emphasise the fact, it was at this juncture that the head and shoulders of his son-in-law appeared above the edge of the boat-deck.

"Ah," he exclaimed in tones of relief, "there you are!"

Challoner turned with a synthetic smile on his lips and murder in his eye.

"Yes," he said, "this is where I am."

The simple statement would have been enough for most people, but seemed to leave the son-in-law in some sort of doubt.

"But we're not allowed up here," he objected, staring at a notice to that effect.

"I believe not," said Challoner.

"And they wouldn't like it."

"Not if they knew about it," said Challoner.

This reduced the son-in-law to temporary silence.

"But supposing we all did this," he suggested with sudden inspiration.

"There wouldn't be room," said Challoner.

A shadow of perplexity crossed the son-in-law's face, and was gone.

"I'll take you on at quoits," he said brightly. "One side of the deck's almost clear."

"In a little while," said Challoner, and subsided into his rugs.

There seemed little more to be said, but the son-in-law produced a doubtful "Oh, all right!" before he reluctantly withdrew.

Challoner sighed.

And there was little time to do more before another head and shoulders appeared above the boat-deck.

"You cunning old thing!" exclaimed their owner. "But there are no railings round here," she added in alarm.

"That's one of the beauties of the place, my dear," said Challoner. "Unrestricted view and all that sort of thing."

"But isn't it frightfully dangerous?"

"Not that I've noticed," said Challoner. "And there are two of us, you see. If one tries to fling himself overboard, the other can hold him back, and get a medal."

"Besides, you'll die of cold up here," pursued the inexorable head and shoulders, "and Henry says——"

"Yes, he's just said it."

"And it's time for the constitutional."

"Impossible! " protested Challoner. "It can't be time for both constitutional and quoits."

But the head and shoulders carried the day, and incidentally Challoner fuming to the lower deck.

"You see what I mean," he told Strode at the next boat-deck session.

Strode nodded.

"Best of intentions, the very best, but just that and nothing but that to the end." Challoner buried his face in the rugs. "Why don't you laugh?" he muttered.

To tell the truth, Strode felt little inclination to laugh at the moment, and still less as time passed. It was evident that although Challoner seemed incapable of communicating his fears in any other than whimsical fashion, they were very real, and he felt them far more deeply than he ever allowed to appear. His depression increased. His silences lengthened. The boat-deck sessions resolved themselves into Strode reading a book while Challoner lay at the deck's edge staring stonily over the ship's wake.

Strode began to wonder how long such a state of things could last, and he was soon to know. The Boreas was two days from St. John when he happened to visit his cabin during the evening, and found Challoner seated on a bunk with a silver flask in his hand and an unaccustomed light in his eye.

"Good old Strode," he murmured softly, and with infinite precision, "the only sportsman aboard! Come and help me to celebrate."

"What?" Strode asked him.

"The solution of all things," said Challoner. With which cryptic remark he rose, passed into the passage, and up the main companion to the deck.

Strode had escaped from an interminable ship's concert, and was enjoying a quiet half -hour with a novel on his bunk, when a distraught figure appeared in the doorway, sprang forward at sight of him, and seized him by the arm. It was Challoner's son-in-law.

"Where's father—where's Mr. Challoner?" he demanded fiercely.

"How should I know?" said Strode.

"But—but you were always with him. We made sure you'd know. He's gone—vanished, I tell you. What's to be done?"

"Look for him," said Strode, scrambling from the bunk and into his shoes. "A man can't vanish off the Boreas."

But apparently he could, and had.

It was a ghastly business. The steerage, including even Berth No. 3, was quite shocked—until landing preparations drove all else from its mind.

As for Strode, his last hours aboard the "ship of hope" constituted a nightmare. The general impression seemed to prevail—especially with the bereaved relatives—that he was in some way responsible. Had he not lured Challoner on to the perilous boat-deck? And what could Strode reply? Nothing. Naturally the thing had been accepted as an accident. He let it go at that.

The entry in the ship's log read as follows—

March 15th.

This day at 8.15 p.m. steerage passenger J. B. Challoner, 58, settler, was reported missing. Search immediately instituted. Interviewed relatives who reported that on several occasions he had mounted to boat-deck aft in company with steerage passenger J. Strode, who corroborated this statement and admitted that notice-board forbidding access to boat-deck was in proper position and had been read by himself and Challoner. Reprimanded J. Strode.

March 15th.

Search for Challoner abandoned as hopeless this day at noon. Presumed accidentally drowned. Long. 55.20 W. Lat. 45.10 N.

Such was the epitaph of steerage passenger J. B. Challoner, 58, settler.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Strode met him by appointment at a small wooden hotel on the outskirts of St. John.

His name was now Brown. His beard was doing as well as might be expected for a four days' growth. He had found lifeboat No. 17, with its stout canvas cover, rather more comfortable than the cabin, and had got ashore with surprising ease during the unloading of cargo. He was eternally grateful for all Strode had suffered on his behalf, and was bound for his own particular Land of Promise by the next boat. In the meantime, how had the bereaved relatives taken it?

Strode was bound to admit that the last he saw of them was when they boarded a tourist car for the West, and that on that occasion they appeared rather perturbed over the loss of some hand baggage.

Brown had the grace to laugh as he raised his glass.

"And now," he said, "may we celebrate 'the solution of all things'?"