VIII
The “Maid of Athens” discharged her cargo of cement at Vancouver, and went over to the Puget Sound wharf at Victoria to load lumber for Chile.
She was there for nearly a month before she left her berth on a fine October afternoon, and anchored in the Royal Roads, where the pilot would board her next morning to take her down to Flattery.
Broughton went ashore in the evening for the last time, and walked up to his agent’s offices in Wharf Street. He was burningly anxious to be at sea again. The old restlessness was strong upon him that he had felt before leaving London River, and a number of small vexatious delays had whetted his impatience to the breaking point.
“Letter for you, Cap’n,” the clerk hailed him. “I thought maybe you’d be around, or I’d have sent it over to you.”
Broughton turned the letter in his hands for a minute or two before opening it. He recognized the prim, clerkly hand at once. It was from Jenkinson. A cold wave of apprehension flooded over him. Some mysterious kind of telepathy told him that it contained unwelcome tidings.
He slit the envelope at last, unfolded the sheet, and read it through. Then he read it again, and still again—uncomprehendingly, as if it were something in a foreign and unknown language:
“ ...Sorry to say the old ship has now been sold ... firm at Gibraltar ... understand she is to be converted into a coal hulk....”
Broughton crumpled the sheet in his hand with a fierce gesture, staring out with unseeing eyes into a world aglow with the glory of sunset. It was the worst—the very worst—he had ever dreamed of! Why hadn’t he let her go, he wondered, that night in the North Atlantic? Why had he dragged her back from a decent death for a fate like this? He could have stuck it if she had gone to the shipbreakers. It would have hurt like hell, but he could have stuck it. But this; it made him think, somehow, of those old pitiful horses you saw being shipped across to Belgium with their bones sticking through their skins. People used to have their old horses shot when they were past work. They were different now. It was all money—money—money! They thought nothing of fidelity, of loyalty, of long service. They cared no more for their ships than for so many slop pails....
Wasn’t it the old Vikings that used to take their old ships out to sea and burn them? There was a fine end for a ship now—a fine, clean, splendid death for a ship that had been a great ship in her day! He remembered once, years ago, watching a ship burn to the water’s edge in the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t much more than a nipper at the time, but he had never forgotten it. The calm night, and the stars, and the ship flaring up to heaven like a torch. He didn’t think he would have minded, somehow, seeing his old ship go like that. But this—oh, he had got to find a way out of it somehow....