“So the question of overlordship lies between us three, and I am unwilling that it should await settlement. I claim the leadership, and am prepared here and now to maintain my right.”
This bold assertion had its effect upon the two hearers, who, after a long pause, replied—
“We accept, O king, fully and freely, until the next battle-day arrives, when the succession must be maintained by thee in ancient form.”
So the matter was settled, and proudly the young monarch set off to rejoin the waiting school. Into their midst he glided with an air of conscious majesty, pausing in the centre to receive the homage and affectionate caresses of the harem. No questions were asked as to the whereabouts of the deposed sovereign, nor as to what had become of the missing member of the brotherhood. These are things that do not disturb the whale-people, who in truth have a sufficiency of other matters to occupy their thoughts besides those inevitable changes that belong to the settled order of things. The recognition complete, the new leader glided out from the midst of his people, and pointing his massive front to the westward moved off at a stately pace, on a straight course for the coast of Japan.
Long, long lay the defeated one, motionless and alone. His exertions had been so tremendous that every vast muscle band seemed strained beyond recovery, while the torrent of his blood, befouled by his long enforced stay beneath the sea, did not readily regain its normally healthful flow. But on the second day he roused himself, and raising his mighty head swept the unbroken circle of the horizon to satisfy himself that he was indeed at last a lone whale. Ending his earnest scrutiny he milled round to the southward and with set purpose and steady fluke-beat started for the Aucklands. On his journey he passed many a school or smaller “pod” of his kind, but in some mysterious manner the seal of his loneliness was set upon him, so that he was shunned by all. In ten days he reached his objective, ten days of fasting, and impelled by fierce hunger ventured in closely to the cliffs, where great shoals of fish, many seals, with an occasional porpoise, came gaily careering down the wide-gaping white tunnel of his throat into the inner darkness of dissolution. It was good to be here, pleasant to feel once more that unquestioned superiority over all things, and swiftly the remembrance of his fall faded from the monster’s mind. By day he wandered lazily, enjoying the constant easy procession of living food down his ever-open gullet; by night he wallowed sleepily in the surf-torn margin of those jagged reefs. And thus he came to enjoy the new phase of existence, until one day he rose slowly from a favourite reef-patch to feel a sharp pang shoot through his wide flank. Startled into sudden, violent activity, he plunged madly around in the confined area of the cove wherein he lay in the vain endeavour to rid himself of the smart. But he had been taken at a disadvantage, for in such shallow waters there was no room to manœuvre his vast bulk, and his wary assailants felt that in spite of his undoubted vigour and ferocity he would be an easy prey. But suddenly he headed instinctively for the open sea at such tremendous speed that the two boats attached to him were but as chips behind him. He reached the harbour’s mouth, and bending, swiftly sought the depths. Unfortunately for him a huge pinnacle of rock rose sheer from the sea bed some hundred fathoms below, and upon this he hurled himself headlong with such fearful force that his massive neck was broken. And next day a weary company of men were toiling painfully to strip from his body its great accumulation of valuable oil, and his long career was ended.
THE CHUMS
What a depth of mystery is concealed in the phenomena of likes and dislikes! Why, at first sight, we are attracted by one person and repelled by another, independently, to all outward seeming, of personal appearance or habits of observation. This is, of course, a common experience of most people, but one of the strangest instances I have ever known was in my own affection for Jack Stadey and all that grew out of it.
Stadey was a Russian Finn, one of a race that on board ship has always had the reputation of being a bit wizard-like, credited with the possession of dread powers, such as the ability to raise or still a storm, become invisible, and so on. The bare truth about the seafaring Finns, however, is that they make probably the finest all-round mariners in the world. No other sea-folk combine so completely all the qualities that go to make up the perfect seaman. Many of them may be met with who can build a vessel, make her spars, her sails, and her rigging, do the blacksmith work and all the manifold varieties of odd workmanship that go to complete a ship’s equipment, take her to sea, and navigate her on soundest mathematical principles, and do all these strange acts and deeds with the poorest, most primitive tools, and under the most miserable, poverty-stricken conditions. But, as a rule, they are not smart; they must be allowed to do their work in their own way, at their own pace, and with no close scrutiny into anything except results. Now, Jack Stadey was a typical Finn, as far as his slow ungainly movements went, but none of that ability and adaptiveness which is characteristic of his countrymen was manifest in him. To the ordinary observer he was just a heavy, awkward “Dutchman,” who couldn’t jump to save his life, and who would necessarily be put upon all the heaviest, dirtiest jobs, while the sailorizing was being done by smarter men. With a long, square head, faded blue eyes, and straggling flaxen moustache, round shoulders, and dangling, crooked arms, he seemed born to be the butt of his more favoured shipmates. Yet when I first became acquainted with him in the fo’c’sle of the old Dartmouth, outward bound to Hong Kong, something about him appealed to me, and we became chums. The rest of the crew, with one notable exception, were not bad fellows, and Jack shuffled along serenely through the voyage, quite undisturbed by the fact that no work of any seamanlike nature ever came to his share. I came in for a good deal of not ill-natured chaff from the rest for my close intimacy with him, but it only had the effect of knitting us closer together, for there is just that strain of obstinacy about me that opposition only stiffens. And as I studied that simple, childlike man, I found that he had a heart of gold, a nature that had no taint of selfishness, and was sublimely unconscious of its own worth.
We made the round voyage together, and on our return to London I persuaded him to quit the gloomy environment of sailor-town to come and take lodgings with me in a turning out of Oxford Street, whence we could sally forth and find ourselves at once in the midst of clean, interesting life, free from the filthy importunities of the denizens of Shadwell that prey upon the sailor. My experiences of London life were turned to good account in those pleasant days, all too short. Together we did all the sights, and it would be hard to say which of us enjoyed ourselves most. At last, our funds having dwindled to the last five pounds, we must needs go and look for a ship. I had “passed” for second mate, but did not try very hard to get the berth that my certificate entitled me to take, and finally we both succeeded in getting berths before the mast in a barque called the Magellan, bound for New Zealand. To crown the common-sense programme we had been following out, we did a thing I have never seen deep-water sailors do before or since—we took a goodly supply of such delicacies on board with us as would, had we husbanded them, have kept us from hunger until we crossed the line. But sailor Jack, with all his faults, is not mean, and so all hands shared in the good things until they were gone, which was in about three days. To our great disgust, Jack and I were picked for separate watches, so that our chats were limited to the second dog-watch, that pleasant time between six and eight p.m. when both watches can fraternize at their ease, and discuss all the queer questions that appeal to the sailor mind.