It wasn’t long before she began to live up to her reputation. She started in quite a small way by fouling her anchor off Gravesend, and giving every one a peck of trouble clearing it. Incidentally, it was Mr. Mate’s morning-after head that was responsible for the mess. But that didn’t matter: it went down to the ship’s account all the same. Her next exploit was to cut a hay barge in two in the estuary. It was foggy at the time, the barge’s skipper was drunk, and the “crew”—a boy of sixteen or so—lost his head when the ship loomed suddenly up right on top of him, and put his helm up instead of down. But what of that? She was the Unlucky “Altisidora,” or very likely the barge wouldn’t have been there at all. Down went another black mark against her name.
The captain, in the meantime, had apparently gone into retreat like an Anglican parson. He had dived below as soon as he came on board, and there he remained, to all intents and purposes as remote and inaccessible as the Grand Lama of Tibet, until the ship was well to westward of the Lizard. This, Anderton learned, was his invariable custom when nearing or leaving land. Mr. Rumbold, the mate, defined his malady briefly and scornfully as “soundings-itis.” “No nerve—that’s what’s the matter with him: as much use as the ship’s figurehead and a damn sight less ornamental!”
Not that it seemed to make much difference whether he was there or not. He was a singularly colourless little man, whose very features were so curiously indeterminate that his face made no more impression on the mind than if it had been a sheet of blank paper. It seemed to be a positive agony to him to give an order. Even in ordinary conversation he was never quite sure which word to put first. He never finished a sentence or even a phrase straight ahead, but dropped it and made a fresh start, only to change his mind a second time and run back to pick up what he had discarded. And this same painful uncertainty was evident in all he did. His fingers were constantly busy—fiddling with his beard, smoothing his tie, twiddling the buttons of his coat. Even his eyes were irresolute—wandering hither and thither as if they couldn’t decide to look at the same thing two minutes together. He had the look of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so, in point of fact, he was. He had jockeyed himself somehow into the command of the “Altisidora,” through family influence or something of the kind, and had lived ever since in momentary dread of his unfitness for his position being discovered.
Anderton, for his part, owed to the skipper’s invisibility one of the most unforgettable moments of his whole life. The pilot had just gone ashore. The mate was below. To all intent Anderton had the ship to himself.
A glorious moment—a magnificent moment! He was nineteen—not six months out of his time—and he was in sole charge of a ship—and such a ship. The veriest cockboat might well have gained a borrowed splendour in the circumstances; but here was no need for the rose-coloured spectacles of idealizing youth. Tier on tier, her canvas rose rounding and dimpling against the blue of the sky. She curtseyed, bowed, dipped, and rose on the long lift of the seas. Her hull quivered like a thing alive. Oh, she was beautiful! beautiful! Whatever life might yet hold for him of happiness or success, it could bring again no moment quite so splendid as this.
Mr. Rumbold, after a few days of the most appalling moroseness while the drink was working out of his system, developed, rather to Anderton’s surprise, into a quite entertaining companion, possessed of the relics of a good education, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of unprintable stories, and a pretty if slightly bitter wit. He was perfectly conscious of the failing that had made a mess of his career. Anderton guessed from a hint he let drop one day that he had once had a command and had lost it, probably through over-indulgence in the good old English pastime known as “lifting the elbow.” “A sailor’s life would be all right if it was all like this,” he broke out one day—it was one of those glorious exhilarating days in the Trades when the whole world seems full of rejoicing—“it’s the damned seaports that play hell with a fellow, Anderton, you take my word for it! Drink, my boy, that’s what does it—drink and little dirty sluts of women—that’s what we risk our lives every day earning money for! It’s all a big joke—a big bloody joke, my son—and the only thing to do is to laugh at it!” And off he went again on one of his Rabelaisian stories.
The ship fought her way to the southward against a succession of baffling airs and head winds where the Trades should have been, and a few degrees north of the Line ran into a belt of flat calm which bade fair to keep her there until the crack of doom. It wasn’t a case of the usual unreliable, irritating Doldrum weather. It was a dead flat calm in which day after day came and went while the sails drooped lifeless against the masts, and men’s nerves got more and more on edge, and Anderton began to have visions of the months and the years passing by, and the weed growing long and green on the “Altisidora’s” hull like the whiskers of some marine deity, and himself returning, one day, old and white-haired and toothless, to a world which had forgotten his existence. To crown all, the melancholy steward at this time suffered a sad bereavement. His cat was missing—a ginger-and-white specimen, gaunt, dingy, and singularly unlovely after the manner of most ship’s cats, but a great favourite with her proud owner, as well as with all the fo’c’sle. The steward wandered about like a disconsolate ghost, making sibilant noises of a persuasive nature in all sorts of unexpected places, which the mate appeared to find peculiarly irritating. The steward had only to murmur “P’sss—p’sss—p’sss!” under his breath, and out would come Mr. Rumbold’s head from his cabin with an accompanying roar of “Damn you—shishing that infernal cat again! If I hear any more of it I’ll wring your neck!”
But good and bad times and all times pass over—and there came at last a day when the “Altisidora’s” idle sails once more filled to a heartening breeze, and the seas slipped bubbling under her keel, and she sped rejoicing on her way as if no dark star brooded over her.
The steward poked his head out of his pantry that morning as Anderton passed, with a smile that was like a convulsion of nature.
“Ol’ Ginger’s turned up again, sir!... What do you think of ’er?”