“Fine seaman!” breathed Mr. Billing bitterly. “You wait till he shakes the sticks out of her one fine night. That’s all.”
Old Foul-weather stood leaning on the poop railing, looking out across the still expanse of the waters with eyes which did not see the haze-dimmed islands or the motionless schooners poised above their reflected selves. Strange—something had stirred in its sleep a little while since at the sight of those very schooners—something had turned in its sleep and sighed at the sight of the young apprentice in his sunburned youth. And just now, with the scent of the oranges, it had stirred, turned again, sighed again, awakened—the memory of Conchita!
. . . . .
Conchita—why, he hadn’t thought of her for years. He wouldn’t like to say how many years. He had had plenty of other things to occupy his mind. Work, for one thing. And ships. Plenty of other women had come into his life and gone out of it, too, since then. Queer, how things came back to you; so that they seemed all of a sudden to have happened no longer ago than yesterday....
He was in just such a schooner as one of those yonder at the time. The “John and Jane” her name was—a pretty little thing, sailed like a witch, too. Lost, he had heard, a year or two ago on a voyage over to Newfoundland with a cargo of salt. It had been his first voyage South. He had been in nothing but billyboys and Geordie brigs until then. He had run his last ship in London. The skipper was a hard-mouthed old ruffian, the mate a trifle worse. Between them the boy Jim had a tough time of it. Then one day the captain caught him in the act of purloining the leg of a duck destined for his own dinner; and, pursuing him with a short length of rope with the amiable intention of flaying hell out of him, fell head foremost on the top of his own ballast and lay for dead. He wasn’t dead: far from it. But young Jim thought he was. So he pulled himself ashore in the dinghy and set off along Wapping High Street with only the vaguest idea where he was going.
He stuck to the water-side as a hunted fox sticks to cover. The Tower he passed quickly by: it looked too much like a lock-up, he thought. Presently he came to a church, and a big clock sticking out over the roadway; and close by a wharf where schooners were loading, and among them the “John and Jane.”
He liked the looks of her. She was clean and fresh and sweet-smelling. And the mate, who was superintending the lowering of some cases into the hold, had a red, jolly face that took his fancy.
The boy Jim peered down into the hold. It was full almost to the hatch-coamings. She must be going to sail soon.
The red-faced mate had given his last order, and was coming down the gangway with the virtuous and anticipatory look of one at ease with his own conscience after a spell of arduous toil, and about to reward himself for the same with liquid refreshment.