CHAPTER II
THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP
The hot days drifted by in easy sociability, dividing themselves into a pliant routine. The morning was devoted to golf on the canvas covered deck over a nine-hole course chalked around ventilators, chicken-coops and deck-houses. Crook-handled canes furnished the clubs and three sets of checkers were lost overboard before we reached the Guayas River, the little round men skidding flatly over the deck with a pleasing accuracy only at the end to rise up maliciously on one ear and roll, plop, into the sea. In the white-hot afternoon, when the scant breeze would quite as likely drift with us, the hours were sacred to the siesta, and the evenings were devoted to standardizing an international, polyglot poker.
A rope stretched across the after-deck marked off the steerage. There was no second class as a thrifty French tailor, a fine young man, and his soft-voiced Mediterranean bride found out. They had bought second class through to Lima and at the Boca were flung in aft among the half-breeds, a squabbling lot of steerage scum, together with a gang of Chinamen. A line of piled baggage ran lengthwise, on one side of which were supposed to be the bachelors’ quarters, though somewhere between decks were hutches where, if one really insisted on privacy, the tropical night could be passed in a fetid broil.
Through a surreptitious connivance this couple were allowed quarters forward and evening after evening the little bride would bring her guitar out and play—and such playing! She had been on the stage, it seemed, and from opera to opera she drifted and then off into odd, unheard folk songs, or the vibrant German or Russian songs. Never before or since have I heard such playing of a guitar or felt its possibilities. For us the guitar is an instrument lazily plunked by the end man against two mandolins. Yet there was a time when Paganini deemed it worthy of mastery.
She was playing late one afternoon and we were all gathered around in the dining hall. There came a rush of feet overhead and a shrill, excited chattering. We broke for the deck, expecting a mutiny among the Chinamen at the very least, and there in full view, not five hundred yards away, was a battle between a whale and three thrasher sharks. In a great circle the sea was churned to a foam, boiling with the stroke of fin and fluke as the sharks outflanked and harried the whale.
In a steady succession the sharks would shoot high out of the water in a graceful, deadly curve and, as they fell back, suddenly stiffen in a whip-lash bend that instantly straightened at the moment of impact, sending a flying mass of spray like that when a solid shot ricochets in gun practice. A few such blows and even a bulky, blubber-coated whale would feel it. Sometimes a shark would strike fair, though more often he would waste his energy on the empty water as the whale dove.
But the steadiness of the battering attack, sometimes all three sharks in the air as though by a signal, sometimes a steady procession pouring up from the sea in a wicked arc as regular as a clock’s ticking, and sometimes the frantic whirling of the whale showed the submarine strategists at work, while only a single shark shot up in a well-aimed, whip-lash stroke. In desperation the whale would stand on its head and beat the air in terrific blows with its flukes while the sharks would merely wait till the flurry was over and then renew their steady, wearing, pounding battle.
Off at one side of the circle of beaten foam was a little dark patch that paddled nervously about and that we had overlooked—a whale-calf. And now it was apparent why the fight was fought in the diameter of a ship’s length; always the bulk of the grim old mother was between the attack and her clumsy baby; there was the reason why she did not make a running fight of it that would have given her a more even break—for the speed of a squadron is that of its slowest ship. All the advantage lay with the sharks; it was easy to see they were wearing the whale down. Less often she stood on her head to batter the foam hopefully with her ponderous flukes; the sharks redoubled their efforts until they curved in a steady, leaping line.
Along the rail of the Mapocho the passengers, deck and cabin, cheered the battle as their tense sympathies dictated or drew whistling breaths as some crashing whip-lash went home. The deep sapphire of the sea rippling under the brisk evening breeze, the turquoise heaven that swept down to the horizon softly shifting against the sapphire contrast to a mystery of fragile green, the field of battle boiling and eddying in the mellow orange glow of the long rays of the setting sun and bursting into masses of iridescent spray made a noble setting worthy of the cause, and in it eighty tons of mother-love and devotion measuring itself in horse-power and foot-tons was slowly drooping under the hail from a slim, glittering, iridescent arc.
Smaller grew the fight in the distance—a mile—a mile and a half—then two-thirds of the whale’s bulk shot clear of the surface and she fell back heavily. Once more the head went down and the flukes raised themselves, lashing the air in frantic desperation. The curving, confident line of sharks shot upward in a graceful curve, but this time, overconfident, they had miscalculated. The great tail caught one shark and he hurtled through the flying spray with a broken back; the flukes crashed down on a second as he struck the water. Once only the surviving shark leaped and missed. Alone he could do no more; the whale in one lucky stroke had won. Through the glasses we could make out its low mass slowly swimming off, every now and then spouting a feather of spray from her blow-hole as though saluting her own victorious progress with a steam-whistle.