THE MAN FROM BUFFALO
The patrol boats had been buffeting their way all night against wind and weather, and before daybreak the long line had lost its order. It was broken up now into little wandering loops and sections, busily comparing notes by Morse flashes and wireless. Last evening the Morning Glory, a converted yacht of American ownership, had been working with forty British trawlers; and her owner, Matthew Hudson, who had obtained permission to go out with her on this trip, had watched with admiration the way in which they strung themselves over twenty miles of confused sea, keeping their exact distances till nightfall. This morning, as he lurched in gleaming oilskins up and down the monkey house—irreverent name for his canvas-screened bridge—he could see only three of his companions—the Dusty Miller, the Christmas Day and the Betsey Barton.
They were all having a lively time. They swooped like herring gulls into the broad troughs of the swell, where the black water looked like liquid marble with white veins of foam in it. Morning-colored rainbows dripped from their bows as they rose again through the green sunlit crests. But the Morning Glory was the brightest and the liveliest of them all. The seas had been washing her decks all night. Little pools of color shone in the wet, crumpled oilskins of the crew, and the tarpaulin that covered the gun in her bow gleamed like a cloak dropped there by the Angel of the Dawn.
When like the morning mist in early day
Rose from the foam the daughter of the sea——
Matthew Hudson quoted to himself. He was full of poetry this morning while he waited for his breakfast; and the radiant aspect of the weapon in the bow reminded him of something else—if the smell of the frying bacon would not blow his way and distract his mind—something about "celestial armories." Was it Tennyson or Milton who had written it? There was a passage about guns in "Paradise Lost." He must look it up.
Like many Americans, Matthew Hudson was quicker to perceive the true romance of the Old Country than many of its own inhabitants. He had been particularly interested in the names of the British trawlers. "It's like seeing Shakespeare's Sonnets or Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry going out to fight," he had written to his son, who had just left Princeton to join the Mosquito Fleet; and the youngster had replied with a sonnet of his own.
Matthew Hudson had carried it about with him and read it to English statesmen, greatly to their embarrassment—most of them looked as if they were receiving a proposal of marriage—and he had found a huge secret joy in their embarrassment, which, as he said, "tickled him to death." But he murmured the verses to himself now, with paternal pride, thinking that the boy had really gone to the heart of the matter:
Out of Old England's inmost heart they go,
A little fleet of ships, whose every name—
Daffodil, Sea Lark, Rose, and Surf, and Snow—
Burns in this blackness like an altar flame.
Out of her past they sail, three thousand strong—
The people's fleet, that never knew its worth;
And every name is a broken phrase of song
To some remembered loveliness on earth.
There's Barbara Cowie, Comely Bank and May,
Christened at home, in worlds of dawn and dew.
There's Ruth, and Kindly Light, and Robin Gray,
With Mizpah. May that simple prayer come true!
Out of Old England's inmost heart they sail,
A fleet of memories that can never fail.
At this moment the Morning Glory ran into a bank of white mist, which left him nothing to see from the bridge. The engines were slowed down and he decided that it was time for breakfast.
The cabin where he breakfasted with the skipper was very little changed, except that it seemed by contrast a little more palatial than in peace time. There had been many changes on the exterior of the ship. Her white and gold had been washed over with service gray, and many beautiful fittings had been removed to make way for grimmer work. But within there were still some corners of the yacht that shone like gems in a setting of lead.
The Morning Glory had been a very beautiful boat. She had been built for summer cruising among the pine-clad islands off the coast of Maine, or to carry her master down to the palms of his own little island off the coast of Florida, where he basked for a month or so among the ripening oranges, the semitropical blossoms and the cardinal birds, while Buffalo cleared the worst of the snow from her streets. For Matthew Hudson was a man of many millions, which he had made in almost the only country where millions can be made honestly and directly out of its enormous natural resources.
His own method had been a very simple one, though it required great organizing ability and a keen eye and brain at the outset. All he had done was to harness a river at the right place and make it drive a light-and-power plant. But he had done it on a scale that enabled him, from this one central station, to drive all the electric trolleys and light all the lamps in more than a hundred cities. He could supply all the light and all the power they wanted to cities a hundred miles away from his plant, and he talked of sending it three hundred miles farther.
Now that the system was established, it worked as easily as the river flowed; and his power house was a compact little miracle of efficiency. All that the casual visitor could see was a long, quiet room, in which it seemed that a dozen clocks were slumbrously ticking. These were the indicators, from the dials of which the amount of power distributed over a district as big as England could be read by the two leisurely men on duty. In the meantime, night and day, the river poured power of another kind into the treasury of Matthew Hudson.
But his life was as unlike that of the millionaires of fiction as could be imagined. It reminded one of the room with the slumbrous clocks.
He was, indeed, as his own men described it, preeminently the "man behind the gun." When the Morning Glory had been accepted by the naval authorities he had obtained permission to equip her for her own work in European waters at his own cost, and to make certain experiments in the equipment.
The Admiralty had not looked with favor on some of his ideas, which were by no means suitable for general use in the patrol fleet. But Matthew Hudson had too many weapons at work against Germany for them to deny him a sentimental pleasure in his own yacht. He seemed to have some particular purpose of his own in carrying out his ideas; and so it came about that the Morning Glory was regarded among her companions as a mystery-ship.
The two men breakfasted in silence. They were both drowsy, for there had been a U-boat alarm during the night, which had kept them very much awake; but Hudson was roused from his reverie over the second rasher by a loud report, followed by a confused shouting above and the stoppage of the engines.
"That's not a submarine!" said the skipper. "What the devil is it?" And the two men rushed on deck.
The mist had lifted a little; and, looming out of it, a few hundred yards away, there was something that looked, at first glance, like a great gray reef. For a fraction of a moment Hudson thought they had run into Heligoland in the mist. At the second glance he knew that the gray, mist-wreathed monster before him was an armored ship, and the skipper enlightened him further by saying, in a matter-of-fact voice:
"That settles it—enemy cruiser! We're stopped, broadside on. They've got a couple of guns trained on us and they're sending a boat. What's the next move?"
Matthew Hudson's face was a curious study at this moment. It suggested a leopard endowed with a sense of humor. His mouth twitched at the corners and his amazingly clear eyes were lit with an almost boyish jubilation. It was a somewhat fierce jubilation; but it undoubtedly twinkled with the humor of the New World. Then he asked the skipper a mysterious question:
"Is it impossible?"
"Impossible! We're in the wrong position; and if we try to get right they'll blow us to bits. Besides, they'll be aboard in half a minute. We're drifting a little in the right direction; but it will be too late. They'll search the ship."
"How long will it take us to drift into the right position?"
"If we go on like this, about four minutes. But it will be all over by then."
"Look here, Davis; I'll try and detain them on deck. You know Americans have a reputation for oratory. You'd better go through my room. And—look here—I'll be the skipper for the time being. I'm afraid they'll want to take Matthew Hudson prisoner; so I'll be the kind of American they'll recognize—Commander Jefferson B. Thrash, out of the best British fiction. You don't happen to have a lasso in your pocket, do you? I lent mine to ex-President Eliot of Harvard, and he hasn't returned it. Tell the men there. That's right! I don't want to be playing the fool in Ruhleben for the next three years."
A few moments later, a step at a time, Davis disappeared into Hudson's cabin, which lay in the fore part of the ship. Two other men prepared to slip after him by lounging casually in the companionway, while the men in front moved a little closer to screen them.
They seized their chance as the German boat stopped, twenty yards away from the Morning Glory, and the officer in command announced through a megaphone, in very good English, that he was in a great hurry. They were friends, he said; and there was no need for alarm, so long as the Morning Glory carried out all instructions. All they wanted was the confidential chart of the British mine fields, which the Morning Glory, of course, possessed, and all other confidential papers of a similar kind. If the Morning Glory did not carry out his instructions in every detail the guns of the cruiser would sink her. He was now coming aboard to secure the papers.
"I guess that's all right, captain!" bawled Matthew Hudson in an entirely new voice and the accent that Europe accepts as American, with about as much reason as America would have for accepting the Lancashire, Yorkshire and Glasgow dialects, all rolled into one, as English.
The quiet member of the Century Club had disappeared, and the golden, remote Wild Westerner, almost unknown in America itself, had risen. In half a minute more the German officer and half a dozen armed sailors were standing on the deck of the Morning Glory.
"So you see England does not completely rule the waves," was the opening remark of the officer, who had not yet received the full benefit of Hudson's adopted accent.
"Been finding it stormy in the canal, cap?" drawled Hudson. "Don't blame it on me, anyway. I'm a good Amurrican—Jefferson B. Thrash, of Buffalo."
"Is this an American ship? I much regret to find an American ship fighting her best friends."
"Well, cap, I confess I haven't much use for the British, myself; not since their press talked about my picture-postcard smile—an ill-considered phrase, by which they unconsciously meant that, among the effete aristocracies of Europe, they were not used to seeing good teeth. They lack humor, sir. To regard good teeth as abnormal shows a lack of humor on the part of the British press.
"However, as George Bernard Shaw says, President Wilson has put it up to the German people in this way: 'Become a republic and we'll let up on you. Go on Kaisering and we'll smash you!'"
"I am in a great hurry," the German officer replied. "I must ask you at once for your confidential papers."
"That's all right, admiral!" said Hudson. "I've sent a man down below to get them out of my steamer trunk. They'll be here right away."
He looked reflectively at the guns of the destroyer and added ingratiatingly:
"Of course I disapprove of George Bernard Shaw's vulgarizing the language of diplomacy in that way. I would rather interpret President Wilson's message as saying to the German people, in courteous phrase: 'Emerge from twelfth-century despotism into twentieth-century democracy. Send the imperial liar who misrules you to join Nick Romanoff on his ranch. Give the furniture-stealing Crown Prince a long term in any Sing Sing you like to choose; and we will again buy dyestuffs and toys of you, and sell you our beans and bacon.'"
"Are you aware that you endanger your life by this language? Do you see those guns?"
Matthew Hudson looked at the guns and spat over the side of the ship meditatively. Then he looked the questioner squarely in the eye. He had taken the measure of his man and he only needed three and a half minutes more. Any question that could be raised was clear gain; and the cruiser would probably not use her guns while members of the German crew were aboard the Morning Glory.
"Yes," he said; "and you'd better not use your guns till you get those confidential papers, for there's not a chance that you'll find them without my help. They're worth having, and I've no objection to handing them over, though I don't lay much store by your promise not to shoot afterward. When you've got them, how am I to know that you won't shoot, anyway, and—what's the latest language of your diplomacy?—'leave no traces'? By cripes, there's no mushy sentiment about your officials! No, sir! Leave no traces!—and they said it about neutrals, remember! Leave no traces! That's virile! That's red-blooded stuff! The effete humanitarianism of our democracy, sir, would call that murder. In England they would call it bloody murder! I don't agree. I think that war is war. Of course it's awkward for non-combatants—"
"With regard to the crews, it has been announced in Germany that they would be saved and kept prisoners in the submarines. Your man is taking too long to find your papers. I can allow you only one minute more."
"He'll be right back, captain, with all the confidential goods you want. But, say, between one sailorman and another, that story about planning to hide crews and passengers aboard the submarines must have been meant for our Middle West. Last time I was on a submarine I had to sleep behind the cookstove; and then the commander had to sit up all night. It's the right stuff for the prairies, though. Ever hear of our senator, cap, who wanted to know why the women and kids on the Lusitania weren't put into the water-tight compartments? They cussed the Cunard Company from hell to breakfast out Kalamazoo way for that scandalous oversight. Wonder what's keeping that son of a gun!"
At this moment the son of a gun announced from the companionway that he was unable to find the confidential papers.
"I can wait no longer. The ship must be searched by my own men," said the German peremptorily. "Are the papers in your cabin?"
"Sure! But I can save you a lot of time, captain. I'll lead you right to them."
The Morning Glory had drifted round till her nose was now pointing towards that of the cruiser. In a minute or two more she would be pointing directly amidships if the drifting continued. Matthew Hudson took a long, affectionate look at the guns and the guns' crews that kept watch over his behavior from the gray monster ahead; then he led the way below to his cabin.
The Hamburg-Amerika Line had many a less imposing room than this, the only part of the yacht that retained all its old aspect. It ran the whole breadth of the ship and had two portholes on each side. There was a brass bedstead, with a telephone beside it and an electric reading lamp. There were half a dozen other electric bulbs overhead.
"I don't sleep very well, cap; so I decided to keep this bit of sinful splendor for my own use. Bathroom, you see." He opened a tiny door near the bed and showed the compact room, with its white bath-tub let into the floor. This was too much for the German officer.
"Where do you keep your confidential papers?" he bellowed, leveling a revolver at the maddeningly complacent American, while three of his men closed up behind him, ready for action.
"Better not shoot, admiral, for you won't find them without my help; and I'm going to hand you the goods in half a minute. I can't quite remember where I put them. There's some confidential stuff in here, I think."
He unlocked a drawer and pulled out a bundle of papers. A small white object dropped from the bundle and lay on the floor between him and the German. It was a baby's shoe. Hudson nodded at it as he looked through the papers.
"Got any kids, cap? That came from Queenstown. Ah, this looks like your chart. No. Came from Queenstown, I say. It was a little girl belonging to a friend of mine in the City of Brotherly Love. Lots of 'em on the Lusitania, you know. We collect souvenirs in America, and I asked him for this as a keepsake when I came on this gunning expedition. He kept the other for himself. She was a pretty little thing. Only six! Used to call me Uncle Jack."
He stole a look through the porthole and drew another document from the drawer.
"Ah! Now I remember. Here's the stuff you want—some of it, anyhow. Tied round with yaller ribbon. Take it, cap. I wish I hadn't seen that little shoe; but you've got the drop on me this time and I suppose it's my duty to save the lives of the men. There's a good bit of information there about the mine fields."
The German hurriedly examined the papers, while Hudson hummed to himself as he stared through the porthole:
Around her little neck she wore a yaller ribbon;
She wore it in December and the merry month of May.
And when, oh, when they asked her why in hell she wore it,
She said she loved a sailor, a sailor, a sailor;
But he was wrecked and drownded in Mississippi Bay.
"This is very good," said the German, "and very useful. I think we shall not require more of you; though it will be necessary to destroy your ship and make you prisoners."
"Why, certainly! I didn't suppose you could keep your contract in war-time. You can't leave traces of a deal like this. But while you're about it, you may as well have all the confidential stuff."
"Good! Good!" said the German, strutting toward him. "So there's more to come! I am glad you see the advantage in being too proud to fight, my friend, eh?"
Matthew Hudson's eye twinkled. His slouch began to slip away from him like a loose coat, leaving once more the quiet upstanding member of the Century Club.
"Of course," he said, "you would make that mistake. The British made it. They forgot that it was said about Mexico, at a time when you wanted us to be kept busy down there. There are times, also, when for diplomatic reasons it is necessary to talk." He had resumed his natural voice. "When you are getting ready, for instance. This is where we keep the real stuff."
He crossed the cabin; and the German watched him closely with a puzzled expression, covering him with his revolver.
"No treachery!" he said. "What does this mean? You are not the man you were pretending to be."
Hudson laughed, and tossed him a little scrap of bunting, which he had been holding crumpled up in his hand.
"Ever seen that flag before?" he said.
The German stared at it, his eyes growing round with amazement.
"The Kaiser's flag has flown on this yacht at the Kiel Regatta many a time," said Hudson. "His Majesty used to come and lunch with me. I don't advise you to shoot me. He might remember some of my cigars. He gave me that flag himself. Of course I shan't use it again—not till it's been sprinkled with holy water. But I thought you might like a brief exhibition of shirt-sleeve navalism, as I suppose you'd call it.
"Most Europeans like us to live up to their ideas of us. The British do. Ever hear of Senator Martin? Whenever he's in London and goes to see his friends in the House of Commons, he wears a sombrero and a red cowboy shirt. He says they expect it and like it. He wouldn't care to do it in New York. As a fact, you know, we invented the electric telegraph and the submarine, and a lot of little things that you fellows have been stealing from us. Do you hear that?"
There were two sharp clicks in the bows, followed by a faint sound like the whirring of an electric fan under water; and Hudson pulled open the door that led into the fore part of the ship.
"Gott! Gott!" cried the German, and his men echoed it inarticulately; for there, in the semidarkness of the bows of the Morning Glory, they saw the dim shapes of seamen crouching beside two gleaming torpedo tubes. The torpedoes had just been discharged.
"You're too late to save your ship," said Matthew Hudson. "If you want to save your own skins you'd better keep still and listen for a moment."
Then came a concussion that rocked the Morning Glory like a child's cradle and sent her German visitors lurching and sprawling round the brass bedstead. When they recovered they found a dozen revolvers gleaming in front of their noses.
"Before we say anything more about this," said Hudson, "let's go on deck and look.
"Do you mind giving me that little shoe at your feet there?"
The officer turned a shade whiter than the shoe.
Then, stooping, he picked it up and handed it to Hudson, who thrust it into his breast pocket.
"Thank you!" he said. "Now if you will all leave your guns on this bed we'll go on deck and see the traces."
When they reached the deck there was something that looked like an enormous drowning cockroach trying to crawl out of the water four hundred yards away. Round it there seemed to be a mass of drowning flies.
"It's not a pleasant sight, is it?" said Hudson. "But it's good to know they were all fighting men, ready to kill or be killed. No women and children among them! The Lusitania must have looked much worse."
"My brother is on board! Are you not trying to save them?" gasped the officer.
Hudson took out the little shoe again and looked at it. Then he turned to the German boat's crew, where they huddled, sick with fear, amidships.
"Take your boat and pick up as many as you can," he said.
"It is not safe—not till she sinks," a guttural voice replied.
Almost on the word the cruiser went down with a rush. The sleek waters and the white mists closed above her, while the Morning Glory rocked again like a child's cradle.
"That is true," said Matthew Hudson to the shivering figure beside him. "And we've got as many as we can handle on the ship. If we took more of you aboard, according to the laws laid down in your text-books, you'd cut our throats and call us idiotic Yankees for trusting you.
"Please don't weep. We sent out a call a minute ago for the Betsey Barton and the Dusty Miller and the Christmas Day. I'm not an effete humanitarian myself; but the men on these trawlers aren't bad sorts. I hope they'll pick up your brother."
V
THE LUSITANIA WAITS
On a stormy winter's night three skippers—averaging three score years and five—were discussing the news, around a roaring fire, in the parlor of the White Horse Inn. Five years ago they had retired, each on a snug nest-egg. They were looking forward to a mellow old age in port and a long succession of evenings at the White Horse, where they gathered to debate the politics of their district. The war had given them new topics; but Captain John Kendrick—who had become a parish councilor and sometimes carried bulky blue documents in his breast-pocket, displaying the edges with careful pride—still kept the local pot a-boiling. He was mainly successful on Saturday nights, when the Gazette, their weekly newspaper, appeared. It was edited by a Scot named Macpherson, who had learned his job on the Arbroath Free Press.
"Macpherson will never be on the council now," said Captain Kendrick. "There's a rumor that he's a freethinker. He says that Christianity has been proved a failure by the war."
"Well, these chaps of ours now," said Captain Davidson, "out at sea on a night like this, trying to kill Germans. It's necessary, I know, because the Germans would kill our own folks if we gave 'em a chance. But don't it prove that there's no use for Christianity? In modern civilization, I mean."
"Macpherson's no freethinker," said Captain Morgan, who was a friend of the editor, and inclined on the strength of it to occupy the intellectual chair at the White Horse. "Macpherson says we'll have to try again after the war, or it will be blood and iron all round."
"He's upset by the war," said Captain Davidson, "and he's taken to writing poytry in his paper. He'd best be careful or he'll lose his circulation."
"Ah!" said Kendrick. "That's what 'ull finish him for the council. What we want is practical men. Poytry would destroy any man's reputation. There was a great deal of talk caused by his last one, about our trawler chaps. 'Fishers of Men,' he called it; and I'm not sure that it wouldn't be considered blasphemious by a good many."
Captain Morgan shook his head. "Every Sunday evening," he said, "my missus asks me to read her Macpherson's pome in the Gazette, and I've come to enjoy them myself. Now, what does he say in 'Fishers of Men'?"
"Read it," said Kendrick, picking the Gazette from the litter of newspapers on the table and handing it to Morgan. "If you know how to read poytry, read it aloud, the way you do to your missus. I can't make head or tail of poytry myself; but it looks blasphemious to me."
Captain Morgan wiped his big spectacles while the other two settled themselves to listen critically. Then he began in his best Sunday voice, very slowly, but by no means unimpressively:
Long, long ago He said,
He who could wake the dead,
And walk upon the sea—
"Come, follow Me.
"Leave your brown nets and bring
Only your hearts to sing,
Only your souls to pray,
Rise, come away.
"Shake out your spirit-sails,
And brave those wilder gales,
And I will make you then
Fishers of men."
Was this, then, what He meant?
Was this His high intent,
After two thousand years
Of blood and tears?
God help us, if we fight
For right and not for might.
God help us if we seek
To shield the weak.
Then, though His heaven be far
From this blind welter of war,
He'll bless us on the sea
From Calvary.
"It seems to rhyme all right," said Kendrick. "It's not so bad for Macpherson."
"Have you heard," said Davidson reflectively, "they're wanting more trawler skippers down at the base?"
"I've been fifty years, man and boy, at sea," said Captain Morgan; "that's half a century, mind you."
"Ah, it's hard on the women, too," said Davidson. "We're never sure what boats have been lost till we see the women crying. I don't know how they get the men to do it."
Captain John Kendrick stabbed viciously with his forefinger at a picture in an illustrated paper.
"Here's a wicked thing now," he said. "Here's a medal they've struck in Germany to commemorate the sinking of the Lusitania. Here's a photograph of both sides of it. On one side, you see the great ship sinking, loaded up with munitions which wasn't there; but not a sign of the women and children that was there. On the other side you see the passengers taking their tickets from Death in the New York booking office. Now that's a fearful thing. I can understand 'em making a mistake, but I can't understand 'em wanting to strike a medal for it."
"Not much mistake about the Lusitania," growled Captain Davidson.
"No, indeed. That was only my argyment," replied the councilor. "They're a treacherous lot. It was a fearful thing to do a deed like that. My son's in the Cunard; and, man alive, he tells me it's like sinking a big London hotel. There was ladies in evening dress, and dancing in the big saloons every night; and lifts to take you from one deck to another; and shops with plate-glass windows, and smoking-rooms; and glass around the promenade deck, so that the little children could play there in bad weather, and the ladies lay in their deck-chairs and sun themselves like peaches. There wasn't a soldier aboard, and some of the women was bringing their babies to see their Canadian daddies in England for the first time. Why, man, it was like sinking a nursing home!"
"Do you suppose, Captain Kendrick, that they ever caught that submarine?" asked Captain Morgan. They were old friends, but always punctilious about their titles.
"Ah, now I'll tell you something! Hear that?"
The three old men listened. Through the gusts of wind that battered the White Horse they heard the sound of heavy floundering footsteps passing down the cobbled street, and a hoarse broken voice bellowing, with uncanny abandonment, a fragment of a hymn:
"While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground."
"That's poor old Jim Hunt," said Captain Morgan. He rose and drew the thick red curtains from the window to peer out into the blackness.
"Turn the lamp down," said the councilor, "or we'll be arrested under the anti-aircraft laws."
Davidson turned the lamp down and they all looked out of the window. They saw the figure of a man, black against the glimmering water of the harbor below. He walked with a curious floundering gait that might be mistaken for the effects of drink. He waved his arms over his head like a windmill and bellowed his hymn as he went, though the words were now indistinguishable from the tumult of wind and sea.
Captain Morgan drew the curtains, and the three sat down again by the fire without turning up the lamp. The firelight played on the furrowed and bronzed old faces and revealed them as worthy models for a Rembrandt.
"Poor old Jimmy Hunt!" said Captain Kendrick. "You never know how craziness is going to take people. Jimmy was a terror for women and the drink, till he was taken off the Albatross by that German submarine. They cracked him over the head with an iron bolt, down at the bottom of the sea, because he wouldn't answer no questions. He hasn't touched a drop since. All he does is to walk about in bad weather, singing hymns against the wind. But there's more in it than that."
Captain Kendrick lighted his pipe thoughtfully. The wind rattled the windows. Outside, the sign-board creaked and whined as it swung.
"A man like Jim Hunt doesn't go crazy," he continued, "through spending a night in a 'U' boat, and then floating about for a bit. Jimmy won't talk about it now; won't do nothing but sing that blasted hymn; but this is what he said to me when they first brought him ashore. They said he was raving mad, on account of his experiences. But that don't explain what his experiences were. Follow me? And this is what he said. 'I been down,' he says, half singing like. 'I been down, down, in the bloody submarine that sank the Lusitania. And what's more,' he says,'I seen 'em!'
"'Seen what?' I says, humoring him like, and I gave him a cigarette. We were sitting close together in his mother's kitchen. 'Ah!' he says, calming down a little, and speaking right into my ear, as if it was a secret. 'It was Christmas Eve the time they took me down. We could hear 'em singing carols on shore; and the captain didn't like it, so he blew a whistle, and the Germans jumped to close the hatchways; and we went down, down, down, to the bottom of the sea.
"'I saw the whole ship,' he says; and he described it to me, so that I knew he wasn't raving then. 'There was only just room to stand upright,' he says, 'and overhead there was a track for the torpedo carrier. The crew slept in hammocks and berths along the wall; but there wasn't room for more than half to sleep at the same time. They took me through a little foot-hole, with an air-tight door, into a cabin.
"'The captain seemed kind of excited and showed me the medal he got for sinking the Lusitania; and I asked him if the Kaiser gave it to him for a Christmas present. That was when he and another officer seemed to go mad; and the officer gave me a blow on the head with a piece of iron.
"'They say I'm crazy,' he says, 'but it was the men on the "U" boat that went crazy. I was lying where I fell, with the blood running down my face, but I was watching them,' he says, 'and I saw them start and listen like trapped weasels. At first I thought the trawlers had got 'em in a net. Then I heard a funny little tapping sound all round the hull of the submarine, like little soft hands it was, tapping, tapping, tapping.
"'The captain went white as a ghost, and shouted out something in German, like as if he was calling "Who's there?" and the mate clapped his hand over his mouth, and they both stood staring at one another.
"'Then there was a sound like a thin little voice, outside the ship, mark you, and sixty fathom deep, saying, "Christmas Eve, the Waits, sir!" The captain tore the mate's hand away and shouted again, like he was asking "Who's there!" and wild to get an answer, too. Then, very thin and clear, the little voice came a second time, "The Waits, sir. The Lusitania, ladies!" And at that the captain struck the mate in the face with his clenched fist. He had the medal in it still between his fingers, using it like a knuckle-duster. Then he called to the men like a madman, all in German, but I knew he was telling 'em to rise to the surface, by the way they were trying to obey him.
"'The submarine never budged for all that they could do; and while they were running up and down and squealing out to one another, there was a kind of low sweet sound all round the hull, like a thousand voices all singing together in the sea:
"Fear not, said he, for mighty dread
Had seized their troubled mind.
Glad tidings of great joy I bring
To you and all mankind."
"'Then the tapping began again, but it was much louder now; and it seemed as if hundreds of drowned hands were feeling the hull and loosening bolts and pulling at hatchways; and—all at once—a trickle of water came splashing down into the cabin. The captain dropped his medal. It rolled up to my hand and I saw there was blood on it. He screamed at the men, and they pulled out their life-saving apparatus, a kind of air-tank which they strapped on their backs, with tubes to rubber masks for clapping over their mouths and noses. I watched 'em doing it, and managed to do the same. They were too busy to take any notice of me. Then they pulled a lever and tumbled out through a hole, and I followed 'em blindly. Something grabbed me when I got outside and held me for a minute. Then I saw 'em, Captain Kendrick, I saw 'em, hundreds and hundreds of 'em, in a shiny light, and sixty fathom down under the dark sea—they were all waiting there, men and women and poor little babies with hair like sunshine....
"'And the men were smiling at the Germans in a friendly way, and unstrapping the air-tanks from their backs, and saying, "Won't you come and join us? It's Christmas Eve, you know."
"'Then whatever it was that held me let me go, and I shot up and knew nothing till I found myself in Jack Simmonds's drifter, and they told me I was crazy.'"
Captain Kendrick filled his pipe. A great gust struck the old inn again and again till all the timbers trembled. The floundering step passed once more, and the hoarse voice bellowed away in the darkness against the bellowing sea:
A Savior which is Christ the Lord,
And this shall be the sign.
Captain Davidson was the first to speak.
"Poor old Jim Hunt!" he said. "There's not much Christ about any of this war."
"I'm not so sure of that neither," said Captain Morgan. "Macpherson said a striking thing to me the other day. 'Seems to me,' he says, 'there's a good many nowadays that are touching the iron nails.'"
He rose and drew the curtains from the window again.
"The sea's rattling hollow," he said; "there'll be rain before morning."
"Well, I must be going," said Captain Davidson. "I want to see the naval secretary down at the base."
"About what?"
"Why, I'm not too old for a trawler, am I?"
"My missus won't like it, but I'll come with you," said Captain Morgan; and they went through the door together, lowering their heads against the wind.
"Hold on! I'm coming, too," said Captain Kendrick; and he followed them, buttoning up his coat.
VI
THE LOG OF THE EVENING STAR
We were sitting in the porch of a low white bungalow with masses of purple bougainvillea embowering its eaves. A ruby-throated humming-bird, with green wings, flickered around it. The tall palms and the sea were whispering together. Over the water, the West was beginning to fill with that Californian sunset which is the most mysterious in the world, for one is conscious that it is the fringe of what Europeans call the East, and that, looking westward across the Pacific, our faces are turned towards the dusky myriads of Asia. All along the Californian coast there is a tang of incense in the air, as befits that silent orchard of the gods where dawn and sunset meet and intermingle; and, though it is probably caused by some gardener, burning the dead leaves of the eucalyptus trees, one might well believe that one breathed the scent of the joss-sticks, wafted across the Pacific, from the land of paper lanterns.
A Japanese servant, in a white duck suit, marched like a ghostly little soldier across the lawn. The great hills behind us quietly turned to amethysts. The lights of Los Angeles ten miles away to the north began to spring out like stars in that amazing air beloved of the astronomer; and the evening star itself, over the huge slow breakers crumbling into lilac-colored foam, looked bright enough to be a companion of the city lights.
"I should like to show you the log of the Evening Star," said my visitor, who was none other than Moreton Fitch, president of the insurance company of San Francisco. "I think it may interest you as evidence that our business is not without its touches of romance. I don't mean what you mean," he added cheerfully, as I looked up smiling. "The Evening Star was a schooner running between San Francisco and Tahiti and various other places in the South Seas. She was insured in our company. One April, she was reported overdue. After a search had been made, she was posted as lost in the maritime exchanges. There was no clue to what had happened, and we paid the insurance money, believing that she had foundered with all hands.
"Two months later, we got word from Tahiti that the Evening Star had been found drifting about in a dead calm, with all sails set, but not a soul aboard. Everything was in perfect order, except that the ship's cat was lying dead in the bows, baked to a bit of sea-weed by the sun. Otherwise, there wasn't the slightest trace of any trouble. The tables below were laid for a meal and there was plenty of water aboard."
"Were any of the boats missing?"
"No. She carried only three boats and all were there. When she was discovered, two of the boats were on deck as usual; and the third was towing astern. None of the men has been heard of from that day to this. The amazing part of it was not only the absence of anything that would account for the disappearance of the crew, but the clear evidence that they had been intending to stay, in the fact that the tables were laid for a meal, and then abandoned. Besides, where had they gone, and how? There are no magic carpets, even in the South Seas.
"The best brains of our Company puzzled over the mystery for a year and more; but at the end of the time nothing had turned up and we had to come out by the same door wherein we went. No theory, even, seemed to fit the case at all; and, in most mysteries, there is room for a hundred theories. There were twelve persons aboard, and we investigated the history of them all. There were three American seamen, all of the domesticated kind, with respectable old mothers in gold-rimmed spectacles at home. There were five Kanakas of the mildest type, as easy to handle as an infant school. There was a Japanese cook, who was something of an artist. He used to spend his spare time in painting things to palm off on the unsuspecting connoisseur as the work of an obscure pupil of Hokusai, which I suppose he might have been in a way. I am told he was scrupulously careful never to tell a direct lie about it.
"Then there was Harper, the mate, rather an interesting young fellow, with the wanderlust. He had been pretty well educated. I believe he had spent a year or two at one of the Californian colleges. Altogether, about the most harmless kind of a ship's family that you could pick up anywhere between the Golden Gate and the Baltic. Then there was Captain Burgess, who was the most domesticated of them all, for he had his wife with him on this voyage. They had been married only about three months. She was the widow of the former captain of the Evening Star, a fellow named Dayrell; and she had often been on the ship before. In fact, they were all old friends of the ship. Except one or two of the Kanakas, all the men had sailed on the Evening Star for something like two years under Captain Dayrell. Burgess himself had been his mate. Dayrell had been dead only about six months; and the only criticism we ever heard against anybody aboard was made by some of Dayrell's relatives, who thought the widow might have waited more than three months before marrying the newly promoted Burgess. They suggested, of course, that there must have been something between them before Dayrell was out of the way. But I hardly believed it. In any case, it threw no light on the mystery."
"What sort of a man was Burgess?"
"Big burly fellow with a fat white face and curious little eyes, like huckleberries in a lump of dough. He was very silent and inclined to be religious. He used to read Emerson and Carlyle, quite an unusual sort of sea-captain. There was a Sartor Resartus in the cabin with a lot of the queerest passages marked in pencil. What can you make of it?"
"Nothing at all, except that there was a woman aboard. What was she like?"
"She was one of our special Californian mixtures, touch of Italian, touch of Irish, touch of American, but Italian predominated, I think. She was a good deal younger than Burgess; and one of the clerks in our office who had seen her described her as a 'peach,' which, as you know, means a pretty woman, or if you prefer the description of her own lady friends, 'vurry attractive.'"
"She had the dusky Italian beauty, black hair and eyes like black diamonds, but her face was very pale, the kind of pallor that makes you think of magnolia blossoms at dusk. She was obviously fond of bright colors, tawny reds and yellows, but they suited her. If I had to give you my impression of her in a single word, I should say that she looked like a gipsy. You know the song, 'Down the World with Marna,' don't you? Well, I could imagine a romantic vagabond singing it about her. By the by, she had rather a fine voice herself. Used to sing sentimental songs to Dayrell and his friends in 'Frisco, 'Love's Old Sweet Song' and that sort of stuff. Apparently, they took it very seriously. Several of them told me that if she had been trained—well, you know the old story—every prima donna would have had to retire from business. I fancy they were all a little in love with her. The curious thing was that after Dayrell's death she gave up her singing altogether. Now, I think I have told you all the facts about the ship's company."
"Didn't you say there was a log you wanted to show me?"
"There were no ship's papers of any kind, and no log was found on the derelict; but, a week or two ago, we had a visit from the brother of the Japanese cook, who made us all feel like fifteen cents before the wisdom of the East. I have to go over and see him to-morrow afternoon. He is a fisherman, lives on the coast, not far from here. I'd like you to see what I call the log of the Evening Star. I won't say any more about it now. It isn't quite worked out yet; but it looks as if it's going to be interesting. Will you come—to-morrow afternoon? I'll call for you at a quarter after two. It won't take us long in the automobile. This is where he lives, see?"
I switched on the electric light in the porch while Fitch spread out a road map, and pointed to our destination of the morrow. The Californian night comes quickly, and the tree-toads that make it musical were chirruping and purring all around us as we walked through the palms and the red-tasseled pepper trees to his car. Somewhere among the funereal clouds and poplarlike spires of the eucalyptus, a mocking-bird began to whistle one of his many parts, and a delicious whiff of orange blossom blew on the cool night wind across a ranch of a thousand acres, mostly in fruit, but with a few trees yet in blossom, on the road to the Sunset Inn.
I watched his red rear lamp dwindling down that well-oiled road, and let the Evening Star go with it until the morrow, for I could make little of his yarn, except that Fitch was not a man to get excited over trifles.