VI.
A SUPPER PARTY
“But here comes Glorius, that will plague them both.”
John Donne.
“I’ll make ’em dance,
And caper, too, before they get their liberty.
Unmannerly rude puppies.”
Wit Without Money.
After dinner, Captain Cammock took tobacco on the poop alone. He liked to be alone after dinner; because his mind was then very peaceful, so that he could “shift his tides,” as he said, walking up and down, remembering old days at sea. He had had an adventurous life, had Captain Cammock. Like most men who had lived hard, he lived very much in his past, thinking that such a thing, done long ago, was fine, and that such a man, shot long since, outside some Spanish breastwork, was a great man, better than the men of these days, braver, kindlier. So he walked the deck, sucking his clay, blowing out blue smoke in little quick whiffs, thinking of old times. One thing he was always proud of: he had sailed with Morgan. He had memories of Morgan on the green savannah, riding on a little Spanish horse, slunk forward in his saddle somehow, “a bit swag-bellied, Sir Henry,” with his cigar-end burning his moustache. And all of those men crowded round him, surging in on him, plastered with mud, gory with their raw-meat meal; they were scattered pretty well; they would never come in on the one field again. On the Keys, it had been fine, too; all of that blue water had been fine. A sea like blue flame, and islands everywhere, and the sun over all, making bright, and boles of cedar among the jungle like the blood-streaks in porphyry. And graceful, modest Indian women, glistening with oil, crowned with dwarf-roses. And then one or two nights by the camp-fires, with old Delander standing sentry, and Eddie Collier singing; it was none of it like this; this was responsible work; this turned the hair grey. He felt this the more strongly, because the Broken Heart was not a happy ship; she was wearing him down. Stukeley made him grit his teeth. He had to sit at table with him, conscious of the man’s mean malice at every moment. There would be some slight sound, an intake of the breath, some muttered exclamation, a request to repeat the offending phrase, when he, a rough seaman, made some mispronunciation, or slip in grammar. And to stand that, till one’s veins nearly burst, knowing that the man was a cast criminal, flying for his life. And to have to pretend that he was a guest, an honoured guest, a fit mate for the woman there. And to have to defend him, if need be, in Virginia. It made him check his walk sometimes to shake a belaying-pin in the fife-rail, till the passion passed. It was lucky for Stukeley that he was a man with a pretty tight hold on himself. A lesser man, a man not trained in the wars, would have laid Stukeley dead, or taken it out of the hands. He was too just a man to work it off on his hands. At this point he checked himself, sharply, putting all evil thoughts aside, remembering how a shipmate, Balsam Dick, the Scholerd, who ladled out soft-polly of a Sunday, old Balsam Dick it was, had told him that was the thing to do. “Let it go or make it go,” that was how to work a passion. There was no sense, only misery, in keeping it by one, poisoning oneself. Besides, he was glad he’d come this cruise. He had been for six weeks shut up in a ship with Olivia. He would never be thankful enough for that. She was so beautiful, so pure, so gentle and kind, so delicate a lovely thing, he could hardly bear to think of her. When he thought of Olivia, he would lean over the taffrail, somewhere above her cabin, wondering at the powers which had made him what he was, a resolute, rough seaman, beaten into clumsy toughness. And yet those powers had shaped her, too, making her very beautiful, very wonderful. And now the powers had shoved her into a ship with him; and he would never be quite the same towards women, whatever happened. But, then, there was Stukeley, that intolerable, mean bully, worrying all of them in the same ways, day after day, with a maddening monotony of insult. Perrin, who was half Welsh, had once hit off Stukeley in an epigram upon the English. “Dull,” he had said, goaded by some school-bully boorishness, repeated for the hundredth time. “The English dull? Of course they are dull. They’re so dull that they can’t be inventive even in their cruelty.” Cammock would repeat this phrase, reading “Stukeley” for “English” so many times daily that “he tokened his pasture.”
While Cammock walked the deck, thinking and smoking, Olivia sat in her state-room writing letters, feeling sure that she would be able to send them home from Virginia in one of the tobacco-ships, and anxious to be ready in case they should speak one at sea. Margaret and Perrin sat in Captain Cammock’s cabin together, working out the sights, and talking in a low voice of Stukeley. The cabin door was open, so that they could look across the alleyway to the closed door of Mrs. Inigo’s state-room, once the sail-locker. They noticed that Mrs. Inigo came to her door every now and then, to glance down the alleyway, with an anxious face. They supposed that she was waiting for Olivia to call her. Once, indeed, she asked them if Mrs. Stukeley had called.
“Well, Charles,” said Perrin. “I told you how it would be. You see now what you’ve done.”
“Yes,” said Margaret. “I admit I was wrong. I made a great mistake.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Perrin. “But what are you going to do when we land?”
“Call him out.”
“No, sir. I’m going to call him out.”
“Aren’t we both talking nonsense? How can either of us call him out, with Olivia on board? And then they’re my guests.”