She lay there as still as if she were at anchor. Her sails drooped against the masts with no more movement than banners slowly dropping to silent dust in the nave of some great cathedral. Their shadows on the white deck were clearly defined as shapes cut out of black paper. There was no sound aloft, not so much as the churring of a rope stirring in its sheave: only a faint creak by whiles, as the ship lifted imperceptibly on the long, low swing of the ocean.
A light haze hung over the outlines of the islands and over the horizon beyond, so that it was impossible to define where sea ended and sky began. A couple of fruit schooners about half a mile distant hovered above their own motionless reflections, like butterflies poised above flowers. So complete was the calm that even they could not catch a breath sufficient to keep them moving. They looked almost as if they were suspended in some new element, neither water nor air, yet partaking of the character of both.
Old “Sails” sat on the forehatch, spectacles on nose, stitching busily away at the bolt-rope of a royal which had come out second best from an argument with the stormy westerlies. A tall, thin, old man, he looked as he sat there with his shanks folded under him like one of those long-legged crabs the Cornish folk call “Gramfer Jenkins.” He had a short, white beard stained with chewing tobacco, and as he worked his jaws moved rhythmically in time with the movements of his active needle.
A boat had pulled out from the nearest island with baskets of fruit, and its owner, a swarthy negroid Portuguese with a bright handkerchief bound pirate-wise about his frizzy hair, was driving bargains with the men of the watch below amid much rough banter and chaff. The men laughed, called, shouted to one another, threw the fruit from hand to hand, eager as children.
From the main deck came the steady slish-scrape of holystones; the mate had taken advantage of the opportunity the calm offered of bringing the “Parisina’s” already bone-white planking nearer to that unattainable perfection of immaculate cleanliness which only exists in the dreams of New England housewives and particular-minded mates of sailing vessels. Mr. Billing, the mate, was an insignificant little man with sandy hair and a peculiar habit of sniffing to himself like a beetle-hunting hedgehog. He sniffed now as he hovered with a perpetual fussy watchfulness among the humped figures of his watch, squatting over their task like worshipping bronzes. Mr. Billing was of the housewifely type of mate. A man secretly of little courage and no initiative, he disliked the “Parisina’s” paces intensely. He was nervous of ships as some lifelong horsemen are nervous of horses. Calms, on the other hand, with the consequent time they afforded for ritual scouring and painting of wood and metal, he delighted in much as a house-proud woman of the suburbs delights in spring cleaning.
The men growled among themselves, sailor fashion, as they worked. “Gimme ol’ Stiff afore this ’ere bloody scrubbin’,” said one. “Same ’ere,” said another. “Why can’t it blow up ag’in, I says? A year an’ a ’arf’s bloomin’ pay I’ve got comin’ to me at Green’s ’Ome, an’ if it wasn’t for this ’ere blessed calm I’d be six ’undred mile nearer spendin’ of it by now.” “Sailorizin’s all right,” grumbled a third. “It’s this ’ere darned ’ouse-maidin’ as gets my goat.”
Up in the “Parisina’s” tiny chart-room Captain Fareweather—he was known through all the ports of the Southern Hemisphere, for good and sufficient reasons, as “Old Foul-weather”—carefully wetted his finger, and with a furrowed brow turned a leaf and prepared to make a fresh entry in the “Parisina’s” log-book.
Old Foul-weather was not fond of his pen, a fact to which the crabbed and painful handwriting which filled the preceding pages bore eloquent testimony. Spelling was an anguish to him; and indeed it is doubtful whether the hours of endurance and anxiety which the entries in the book represented were one half as irksome to him as the labour of recording them. But there were on this occasion other reasons for his look of depression.
Captain Fareweather detested calms as much as his mate liked them. It might be said of him that he had one absorbing passion in his life. He lived that the “Parisina” might make good passages; especially, perhaps, that she might beat her rival, the “Alcazar.” If she did, life was worth living, if she didn’t, it was not. Certainly it was not for those unfortunate beings who happened to be his shipmates for the time being.
“’Tain’t good reading,” said Old Foul-weather to himself, as he carefully blotted the new entry—it consisted of one word, “Same”—and replaced ink and pen.