JACK THE SKIPPER
“Will you favour me by looking at it, young gentleman?” said the petitioner.
It was a most curious little model, which the petitioner had taken reverently out of a handbag. He was a hungry, eager-looking man, in a battered bowler, shabby frockcoat, and a primordial “comforter” which might have been made for Job.
Mr. Edward Cantle, busy at his desk, paid no attention.
“It turns, sir, literally, on a question of fresh butter,” said the petitioner. “Who gets it nowadays, or realizes how, between churn and table, every pat becomes a dumping-ground for bacilli? Here, you will observe, the whole difficulty is resolved. We lead the cow into the cart itself, milk her into a separator, turn her out, drive off, and the revolution of the wheels completes the process. See? No chance for any freebooting germ! The result is simplicity itself—the customer’s butter made actually on the way to his door.”
Mr. Cantle put his pen in his mouth, blotted what he had been at work on, examined it cursorily but surely, rose, walked to the counter, and presented a form to the petitioner, all something with the air of a passionless police-inspector. He was a tall young man, loose-limbed, and with all his hardness, like a melancholy Punch’s show character, in his head. Much converse with cranks had engendered in him an air of perpetual unspoken protest, of exasperated resignation. For he was a trusted clerk in the office of the Commissioners of Patents for Inventions.
“Exactly,” he mumbled over the goose-quill. “Thats a matter for your provisional specification. Good morning.”
“It’s the most wonderful——”
“Of course—they all are. Good morning.”
“It will revolutionize——”
“Naturally. You will make your petition and declaration in the proper forms. Good morning.”
The inventor essayed another effort or two, met with no response, quavered out a sigh, packed up his treasure and vanished. The sound of his exit neither relaxed nor deepened a wrinkle on the brow of the neatly groomed Government official. He simply went on with his work.
At half-past one o’clock, it being Saturday, he—we were going to say “knocked off,” but the expression would be a libel on his methodical refinement. He took a hansom—selecting a personably horsed one—to his chambers in Adelphi Terrace; lunched off four pâté de foie gras sandwiches, already awaiting him under a silver cover, and a glass of chablis; changed his dress for a river suit of sober-tinted flannel and a Panama hat; charged himself with a morocco handbag, also ready prepared; drove to Waterloo, and took a first-class ticket, and the train—he favoured the South-Western because it was the quieter line of two in this connexion—to Windsor. Arrived there, he was hailed and joined by a friend on the platform.
“Glad you’re come, Ned. I’m off colour a bit. You never are.”
It was hardly an attractive reception. Mr. Cantle glanced interrogatively at his companion, the Honourable Ivo Monk, son of Lord Prior.
“No?” he said. “What’s disturbing you, Monk?”
“O, the devil, I think!” said the young man peevishly. “Come along, do, out of this.”
Together they walked down to the river in almost absolute silence. Mr. Cantle had agreed to join his friend for an agreeable week-end on the water. It looked promising. He thought a little, and came to a characteristically uncompromising decision.
“Is it anything to do with Miss Varley?”
“Yes, it is.”
“She—they have a houseboat here, haven’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Close by?”
“More or less. Just above Datchet.”
“Then, I think, perhaps I’d better——”
“Then, I think, perhaps, you’d not. You don’t know anything about it. It’s not what you suppose.”
“O!”
A punt, in luxurious keeping with the tastes of its owner, awaited them at the steps. It was equipped with a number of little lockers for wine and food, a wealth of the downiest cushions, and an adjustable tilt with brass hoops for “roughing it” at nights on the water. For the Honourable Ivo was at the moment an aquatic gipsy, wandering at large and at whim, and scorning the effeminate pillow.
They loitered through Romney lock, talking commonplaces, and below relinquished their poles and sat and drifted until the reeds held them up. It was a fair, sweet afternoon, full of life and merriment, and, in view of the crowding craft, the remotest from ghostliness.
“Would you like to see her?” said Mr. Monk suddenly and unexpectedly.
Cantle was never to be taken off his guard.
“If it will please you, it will please me,” he said.
They resumed the poles and made forward. To their left a little sludgy creek went up among the osiers; and, anchored at its mouth, rocked the vulgarest little apology for a houseboat. It seemed just one cuddy, mounted on a craft like a bomb-ketch, which it filled from stem to stern; and what with its implied restrictedness, and dingy appearance, and stump of a chimney, one could not have imagined a less inviting prison in which to make out a holiday. Yet there was a lord to this squalid baby galliot, and to all appearance a very contented one, as he sat smoking a pipe, with his legs dangling over the side. Monk nodded to him, and the man nodded back with a grin.
“Who’s that?” asked Mr. Cantle, when out of earshot.
“O, a crank! You should recognize the breed better than I do.”
Mr. Cantle, thoughtfully nursing his jaw, with a frown on his face, had left off punting.
“Don’t you know him?” he said suddenly.
“We exchange civilities,” answered the other; “the freemasonry of the river, you understand. There’s the Varleys’ boat.”
Forging under the Victoria Bridge, they had come in view of a long line of houseboats moored under the left bank against a withy bed, opposite the Home Park. At one of these, hight the “Mermaid,” very large and handsome, they came to, and fastening on, stepped aboard. A sound of murmuring ceased with their arrival, and Cantle had hardly become aware of two figures seated in the saloon, before he was being introduced to one of them.
Miss Varley was certainly “interesting”—tall and “English,” but with an exhausted air, and her eyes superhumanly large. She greeted the stranger sweetly, and her fiancé with a rather full, pathetic look.
“Mamma’s resting a little,” she said, in a bodiless voice, “and Nanna’s been reading to me. Papa comes down by the seven o’clock train.”
“And what’s Nanna been reading?” asked the young man.
The old nurse held up the volume. It was the Holy Book. Monk ground his teeth.
“Hush, Master Ivo!” whispered the woman. “You only distress her.”
“I’d rather see her reading a yellow-back on a July day on the river.”
The girl put a hand on his arm. “When the call has come? When my days are numbered, Ivo?” she said.
He almost burst out in an oath.
“I’d rather, if I were you, be recognized and called by my own name and nature,” he said bitterly. “But it’s all nonsense, Netta. Do, for God’s sake, believe it!”
He was so obviously overwrought, the situation was so painful, that his friend persuaded him, on personal grounds, to leave. They punted across, dropped down a distance, and brought up under the bank in a quiet spot.
“Very well,” said Cantle. “You’ll tell me, perhaps, what’s the matter?”
“Can’t you see? She’s dying.”
He dropped his face into his hands, with a groan of impotent suffering.
“There’s some mystery here,” said his friend quietly.
Monk looked up, and burst out in a sudden lost fury—
“There is, by God! Jack the Skipper!”
Cantle was rolling a cigarette imperturbably.
“Who’s—Jack the Skipper?” he drawled.
“I wish you could tell me,” cried the other. “I wish you could show these the way to his throat!” He held out his hands. “They’d fasten!” he whispered.
He came all of a sudden, quite quietly, and sat by his friend. “Its been going on for three weeks now,” he said rapidly. “They call him that about here—a sort of skit on the other—the other beast, you know. He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster, black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good. It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being left alone after dark. He frightened the little Cunningham child into a fit, and it’s not expected to recover. Mrs. Bancock died of an apoplexy after seeing it. And the worst of it is, a deadly superstition’s seized the place. Its visit’s got to be supposed to presage death, and——” He seized Cantle’s hand convulsively.
“Damn it! It’s unnatural, Ned! The river’s haunted—here, in Cockney Datchet—in the twentieth century! You don’t believe in such things—tell me you don’t! But Netta——”
His head sank on his breast. Cantle blew out a placid whiff of smoke.
“But—Miss Varley?” he said.
“You know—you’ve heard, at least,” said the other, “what she was. The thing suddenly stood before her, when she was alone, one night. Well—you see what she is now.”
“I don’t see, nevertheless, why she don’t——”
“Pack and run? No more do I. Put it to her if you like. I’ve said my say. But she’s in the grip—thinks she’s had her call—and there’s no moving her. Cantle, she’s just dying where she stands.”
Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river. He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.
“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some fools I’ve come across in my time?”
He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased, concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.
Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.
“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”
“Ned!”
“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit forward.”
The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment like a porpoise, and disappeared.
“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.
“Keep down!” whispered his friend.
“Cantle! Did you see it? Cantle! It was he!”
“Keep down!”
They paddled on, past the last of the boats, through the bridge, on as far as the squat little bomb-ketch bulking black and menacing at the mouth of the creek.
“Hold on!” whispered Cantle. “Run her out of sight into the reeds. We must wade on board there.”
“There? That fellow Spindler’s boat?”
“Of course, now. That was his name.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll soon know.”
They accomplished the feat, though near mud-foundered by the way, and scrambled, dripping, on board. The door of the cuddy yielded to their touch. Monk was beginning to gather dim light.
“Don’t let me,” he whispered, almost sobbing. “Keep my hands off him.”
“Leave him to me,” said Cantle gravely.
Not a sound of life greeted them. They stole into the cabin and closed the door, almost, upon themselves.
“We must yield him to-night for the sake of to-morrow,” murmured Cantle.
“Ned! If he goes again——”
“Hush! It’s not probable he’d risk a second visit, knowing her watched.”
The crack brightened as the moon rose: glowed into a ribbon of light. Suddenly Cantle gripped the other’s wrist.
A stealthy puddling, sucking sound close by reached their ears. Over the side came swarming a great shapeless fishy creature, which settled with a sludgy wallop on the little triangle of foredeck almost at their feet. Monk gave a soft, awful gasp, and, with the sound, Cantle had dashed open the door and flung himself upon the monster.
“Quick!” he cried; “you’ve got matches! Light a candle—lamp—anything! Lie still, Mr. Spindler. It’s all up. I know you and your Marine Secret Service suit! A knife now, Monk! Out he comes.”
He was merciless with the blade when he got it, slashing and cutting at the oilskin suit, splitting it from top to toe. Mr. Spindler’s red beard and extravagant face came out of it like a death’s-head out of its chrysalis.
“There goes the proud monument of a lifetime,” said the madman. He had made no effort to resist. The first blow at this darling of his invention had seemed to hamstring him, morally and materially.
For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe; but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days in an asylum.
On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.