Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

There is a proverb bandied about amongst the sons of men which states that the unknown has always its charm, and harassed shipmasters often wonder why it is not publicly contradicted in Norie's Epitome of Navigation. Carter either forgot or never realized this, and furthermore made the fatal blunder of going up onto the sacred upper bridge without direct invitation.

For half an hour he had stood there silent, and unspoken to, listening to Captain Image's tirade against the creeks that led to Mokki, and then catching for a moment the mariner's eye, ventured on an observation. He suggested that at any rate Captain Image would have the amusement of feeling that he was an explorer; and there was the opportunity the peppery Welshman really needed.

He had not been able to say what he wished to Miss Kate O'Neill, for many reasons; but here was her whipping-boy; and on him Captain Image turned loose one of the most powerful vocabularies that has ever been carried up and down the West African seaboard. He neglected both quartermaster and third mate—and these two experts, being only too glad of the breathing space, kept the M'poso accurately out of the mangroves, whilst their commander gave an undivided attention to the very highly qualified passenger who had dared to sully the unblemished deck plants of the upper bridge.

Now, under ordinary conditions, Carter would have recognized the circumstances, and have remembered his service, and swallowed the dose with a smile and a shrug. But things had gone woefully awry with him during the last score of hours. The strain of the fight, the discovery that the man K. O'Neill of the letters was Miss Kate in the flesh, the uncertain future of two Coast factories, the way in which everybody received his engagement to Laura Slade; all these things piled up on one another had set his usually steady nerves jangling in a way to which he was unaccustomed, and he felt himself forced by a rather insane impulse to do something startling. He had successive inclinations to throw up his berth altogether and go home; to marry Laura Slade out of hand by the kind assistance of Captain Image and the M'poso's log-book, which occurred to him as the local equivalent of Gretna Green; to violently abuse Miss Kate O'Neill for being herself. Finally, when the premonitory symptoms of a well-earned dose of fever gripped him with a stab and a shudder, he had the usual malarial depression, which put the usual question as to whether life were really worth living.

Over and above all these things, since the first moment of seeing Kate, it had been borne in upon him that he had made a mistake over his engagement. He did not for a moment think of getting free; he was doggedly determined to see it through, or in other words to marry Laura, whatever the cost and result might be. But from that date onward he began to ask himself inconvenient questions. He demanded of his inner conscience a definition of that impalpable thing, love. He wished to be informed (from the same source and at the shortest notice) if he was exactly in love with Miss Slade at that particular moment, and when the phenomenon commenced, and how long it was likely to endure. And when Laura, who saw into a good deal more of all this than he expected, offered to release him from his promise, he abused her for the suggestion, and protested his affection for her with such warmth that he feared very much after the interview that he had hopelessly overdone it.

As a consequence, when Captain Image explained in a two-minute speech that Mr. Flame-tipped Carter was violating the etiquette of nations in daring to pollute that upper bridge with his undesirable feet, without direct invitation, he rather welcomed the opportunity and retorted in kind.

Now, Captain Image, as has been hinted, had made the most of the years he had spent sea-going in the matter of picking up a vocabulary; he has to this day brothers in Wales who are local preachers and revivalist leaders, and there is no doubt that he was the inheritor of some ancestral strain of burning eloquence. Carter, on the other hand, though not as a rule a man of much speech, had not lived with Swizzle-Stick Smith all those long months without taking lessons in the art of vituperation, and though he was not conscious of it at the time, the education soaked in, and when the moment of stress arrived his memory served him faithfully.

Miss Kate O'Neill heard the discussion and retired to her room below. Stewards popped their heads round doorways and listened appreciatively; deck hands took cover round the angle of the houses and strained their ears, and the second engineer, who was bred on Tyneside and openly claimed to be a connoisseur, came out brazenly onto the top of the fiddley three yards from the speakers and did nothing to an unoffending ventilator cowl with a three-quarter inch spanner.

From the present writer's point of view the remarks on both sides had the fatal drawback that their point lay far more in artistic delivery than in their subject matter, and so to report them here verbatim would give a totally unjust idea of their weight and influence. But it must be understood that Captain Image, who never till now had met a foeman so worthy of his tongue, surpassed himself; and Carter, who now for the first time used these winged words in hard vicious earnest, felt all a sportsman's pride in seeing his verbal missiles land and rankle.

It is hard to award the victory; and, in plain truth, each orator was so warmed with the effort of his own tongue that in another second the British blood would have reached fisticuff temperature, and they would have clinched. But luckily an interruption arrived to break the tension. The third mate, that terribly abused young man who was gaining a breathing space whilst Carter stood up against Captain Image's tongue, at first conned the M'poso up the winding channel with a sigh of relief, and was ably seconded by the quartermaster at the wheel, who had also been suffering. But by degrees their sporting instincts drew them from the matter immediately in hand, and made them interested spectators of the duel. In fact their interest absorbed them, and, well, the steamer got the smallest bit out of hand.