He indicated a small box in the corner in which a gently palpitating mass of kittenhood explained how Ginger had been spending her time. The prodigal in the meantime was parading proudly round the steward’s legs, thrumming to the end of her thin tail with the cat’s ever-recurring surprise and delight over the miracle of maternity.
“Artful, ain’t she?” said the steward. “Right down in the lazareet, she was! Must ’ave poked ’erself down there w’en I was gettin’ up some stores las’ week. That’s ’cos I drahned ’er last lot—see? Wot, drahn these ’ere! No blinkin’ fear! W’y, they’re black ’uns—ketch me drahnin’ a black cat!”
Whether the advent of the black kittens had anything to do with it or not, it certainly seemed for a time as if the luck had turned. Day after day the ship reeled the knots off behind her at a steady fifteen. Every one’s spirits rose. “Wot price the hunlucky ‘Altisidora’ now?” said Bill Green to the man next him on the yard. They were tarring down, their tar-pots slung round their necks as they worked. “There you go, you ruddy fool, askin’ for trouble!” replied Mike, the ancient shellback, wise in the lore of the sea. “Didn’t I tell ye now?” Bill’s tar-pot had given an unexpected tilt and spread its contents impartially over Bill’s person and the deck below. “If you was in the Downeaster ‘Elias K. Slocum’ wot I sailed in once, you’d git a dose o’ belayin’ pin soup for supper over that, my son, as’d learn you to play tricks with luck.”
The luck didn’t last long. Possibly a hatful of blind black kittens had not the efficacy as mascots of a full-grown black Tom. Ginger’s progeny undeniably looked very small, helpless, squirming morsels to contend successfully against the Dark Gods.
The ship was by now getting into the high latitudes, and sail had to be gradually shortened until she was running down the Easting under lower topsails and foresail. Anderton had been keeping the middle watch, and had gone below, tired out, after a night of “All hands on deck.” It seemed to him that his eyes were no sooner closed than once again the familiar summons beat upon the doors of his consciousness, and he stumbled on deck, still only half roused from sleep, to find a scene of the wildest confusion.
A sudden shift of wind had caught the ship aback. Both the foremast and mainmast were hanging over the side in a raffle of rigging, only the mizen, with the rags of the lower topsail still clinging to the yard, being left standing. The helmsman had been swept overboard, to be seen no more, and the ship lay wallowing helplessly in the trough of the sea, under the grey light of the dreary dawn—a sight to daunt the stoutest heart.
It was then that the mate, Mr. Rumbold, revealed a new and hitherto unsuspected side of his character. Anderton had first known him as a drunken and shameless sot; next, he had found in him an entertaining companion and a man of the world whose wide experience of life in its more sordid aspects compelled the unwilling admiration of youth. But now he recognized in him a fine and resourceful seaman and a determined and indomitable leader of men in the face of instant danger. The suddenness and completeness of the disaster which might well have induced the numbness of despair, only seemed to arouse in him a spirit in proportion to the needs of the moment. During the long hours while the ship fought for her life—during the whole of the next day, when the pumps were kept going incessantly to free her from the volume of water that had flooded her hold—when all hands laboured to rig jury-masts and bend sufficient sail to keep her going before the wind—he it was who continually urged, encouraged, cajoled, and drove another ounce of effort out of men who thought they had no more fight left in their bodies. He it was who worked hardest of all, and who, when things seemed at their worst and blackest, brought a grin to haggard, worn-out faces with a shanty stave of an irresistible humour and—be it added—a devastating unprintableness.
The ship managed to hobble into Cape Town under her jury rig, where Mr. Rumbold promptly vanished into his customary haunts, to reappear just before the ship sailed after her refit, the same sprawling and disreputable wreck he had been when Anderton first saw him. He never again showed that side of himself that had come to the surface on the night of disaster; but Anderton never quite forgot it, and because of the memory of it he spent many a patient hour in port tracking the mate to his favourite unsavoury resorts, and dragging him, maudlin, riotous, or quarrelsome, back again to the ship.
The “Altisidora” arrived in Sydney a hundred and forty days out. Her fame had gone before her, and she attracted quite an amount of attention in the capacity of a nautical curiosity. Moreover, the legend grew apace, as is the way of legends the world over, and has been since the beginning of time. Citizens taking the air on the water-front pointed her out to one another. “That’s the hoodoo ship. Good looker, too, ain’t she? Drowns half her crew every voyage. Wonder is anyone’ll sign in her!”
And so it went on. She wandered from port to port, leaving bits of herself, like an absent-minded dowager, all over the seven seas. She lost spars—she lost sails—she lost hencoops, harness casks, Lord knows what! She scraped bits off wharves; she lost her sheer in open roadsteads and barged into other ships. She ran short of food and had to supplicate passing ships for help. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do she even tried to run down her own tug. And yet in spite of it all—perhaps, for sailormen are queer beings, because of it all—her men liked her. They cursed her, they chid her, kindly, without rancour, as one might chide a charming but erring woman; but they stuck by her all the same. The old sailmaker, a West Country man who had lost all his teeth on hard tack, had been with her for years. “You don’t mind sailing in an unlucky ship, then, Sails,” said Anderton to him one day, when he was helping him to cut a new upper topsail to replace one of the ship’s casual losses.