The Grey Lady

by Henry Seton Merriman

The Croonah Indian liner is pounding into it all, with white decks and whistling shrouds. The passengers are below in their berths. Some of them--and not only the ladies--are sending up little shamefaced supplications to One who watches over the traveller in all places and at all times.

And on the bridge of the Croonah a man all eyes and stern resolve and maritime instinct. A man clad in his thickest clothes, and over all of them his black oilskins. A man with three hundred lives depending upon his keen eyes, his knowledge, and his judgment. A man whose name is Luke FitzHenry.

The captain has gone below for a few minutes to thaw, leaving the ship to FitzHenry. He does it with an easy conscience--as easy, that is, as the maritime conscience can well be in a gale of wind, with the Foreland lights ahead and infinite possibilities all around. The captain drinks his whisky and hot water with a certain slow appreciation of the merits of that reprehensible solution, and glances at the aneroid barometer on the bulkhead of his cabin.

Overhead, on the spidery bridge, far up in the howling night, Luke FitzHenry, returning from the enervating tropics, stares sternly into the night, heedless of the elemental warfare. For Luke FitzHenry has a grudge against the world, and people who have that take a certain pleasure in evil weather.

“The finest sailor that ever stepped,” reflects the captain of his second officer--and he no mean mariner himself.

The Croonah had groped her way up Channel through a snowstorm of three days’ duration, and the brunt of it had fallen by right of seniority on the captain and his second officer. Luke FitzHenry was indefatigable, and, better still, he was without enthusiasm. Here was the steady, unflinching combativeness which alone can master the elements. Here was the true genius of the sea.

With his craft at his fingers’ ends, Luke had that instinct of navigation by which some men seem to find their way upon the trackless waters. There are sailors who are no navigators just as there are hunting men who cannot ride. There are navigators who will steer you from London to Petersburg without taking a sight, from the Thames to the Suez Canal without looking at their sextant. Such a sailor as this was Luke FitzHenry. Perfectly trained, he assimilated each item of experience with an insatiable greed for knowledge--and it was all maritime knowledge. He was a sailor and nothing else. But it is already something--as they say in France--to be a good sailor.

Luke FitzHenry was a man of middle height, sturdy, with broad shoulders and a slow step. His clean-shaven face was a long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes--eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face--a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke’s lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who worked with him feared him, and in so doing learnt the habit of his ways. The steersman, with one eye on the binnacle, knew always where to find him with the other; for Luke hardly moved during his entire watch on deck. He took his station at the starboard end of the narrow bridge when he came on duty, and from that spot he rarely moved. These little things betray a man, if one only has the patience to piece them together.

Those who go down to the sea in ships, and even those who take their pleasure on the great water, know the relative merits of the man who goes to his post and stays there, and of him who is all over the ship and restless.

Luke was standing now like a statue--black and gleaming amid the universal grey of the winter night, and his deep eyes, cat-like, pierced the surrounding gloom.