Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

Allen fell silent again, stroking his cheroot between thumb and forefinger—the habit the correspondents had characterized as a sign of modesty. "I hope you won't insist on my telling any more about the voyage than I have to in connection with Bell's death," he said at last. "I hate to speak of it at all. The thing is almost as much of a nightmare in memory as it was in fact. You saw how things were on the schooner when we got away. Well, just picture them getting worse and worse day by day for—how long was it?—something over a week, I believe, but it seemed a lifetime. The whisky I kept bracing up with made it a lot easier for me to stand—kept me from going crazy and jumping overboard, as so many of the niggers did. But Bell—he didn't have the whisky—wouldn't have it. Yes, he kept up that mad joke of his about being a 'soba skippa' to the end. That was what killed him—just that, and nothing else. It was beyond a being of flesh and blood to do what he set himself out to do—and live. He tried to (my God, how he tried!)—and died.

"I never felt such pity for any living thing, unless it was old Recoil, my first steeplechaser, when he lived for twenty-four hours after staving in his chest against a stone wall. I was hardly more than a kid then. I lay in the straw of his box all that time with his battered, bleeding frame, and swore I'd kill the first man that tried to shoot him. Then I pulled myself together and did the humane job myself. But I couldn't shoot Bell, and he wouldn't shoot himself. That would have been the easy way out (since he had steeled his will against taking another drink), but he wouldn't follow that short-cut either. Said he was—how did he put it?—'goin' to ride the wata wagon all the way to po't, an' then fall off good and plenty.' Some Yankee expression about keeping strict teetotal, wasn't it?

"It got to me worse than the crazy niggers—watching the agony of his mind and body contorting the muscles of his face, as he tried to hide what he was going through. The girl was a good deal of help to him for the first day or two, and he admitted that he was glad she had decided to join his 'li'l' pa'ty at the last minnit.' But even she failed to create a diversion as his cravings for whisky became more and more intense, and he seemed to try to avoid her as much as he could toward the last—probably because he couldn't hide his suffering from her. I saw that it was killing him—that he would never last out the voyage on the course he was heading,—and tried hard to make him see that it was only reasonable to allow himself at least enough whisky to ease off the tension on his breaking nerves. But he wouldn't listen to it.

"'I gave it out official,' he said, 'that I was goin' to keep soba on my next ship, if I eva got one. An' soba's the wo'd.' To put an end to the matter, he turned his back on me and went for'ard among the niggers.

"After that I tried to explain to Rona (I had managed to get on speaking terms with her as soon as she became satisfied that Bell had not been poisoned) how things stood, in the hope that she would fall in with a plan I had for giving him small doses of whisky with the coffee he had taken to drinking with increasing frequency as the craving for liquor grew on him. She flew into a temper at once, however. Said that, far from helping me to give him whisky on the quiet, she would taste every cup of coffee after it was poured for him in the galley, and then take it to him herself. She ended by saying that if I tried that trick she would knife me with her own hands: in fact, rather regretted that she hadn't done it when she had a chance at Kai. I couldn't for the life of me see why the girl should take that attitude, when it was so plain that whisky was the only thing that would pull Bell through; but take it she did, and that was the end of it, at least as far as co-operation from her was concerned, I mean. That simply left it up to me to watch my chances and do the best I could on my own.

"Bell had insisted on standing watch-and-watch with me from the first, usually, in his own watch, taking the wheel himself, probably because it gave him something to occupy his mind—and his hands. (He was beginning to tear the skin of the palms of his hands from clenching and unclenching his fingers.) What broke him finally was discovering that he was no longer fit for a trick at the wheel. His eyes went bad rapidly under the strain, and it was not long before he could not distinguish the readings on the compass card. He told me about it at once, but was confident he could manage to hold a course by the stars. This went on all right as long as it was clear. But one night, when it was squally and overcast, he lost the 'Cross' (which had been giving him a shifting but fairly approximate bearing), and fell back on trying to keep her a couple of points off the wind. This would have done all right if the Trade had held from the southeast. But it hauled up to east in a squall, and Bell, following it around by the 'feel' of it on his face, had the schooner all but onto the Baluka Reef and shoal at daybreak. I let him extricate himself to save his feelings; but he knew that both the Bo'sun and I had twigged what had happened, and why, and it must have been the realization of the fact that he had become quite useless in navigating the ship that hastened the final collapse.

"He came on the following night for his watch—the 'graveyard,' from midnight to four in the morning,—but made no objection when I stuck on at the helm. We were closing the tangle of the Barrier Reef by then, you see, and it wouldn't have done to trust the wheel to a nigger. In fact, when I went on at eight the previous evening, it was practically the beginning of the thirty-six-hour trick at the wheel that ended when we anchored off Townsville.

"When Bell let me stay on at the wheel at midnight, he showed the first voluntary signs of giving in, not in the matter of closing his lips to whisky—nothing could affect his decision on that score,—but to the other alternative. I mean that he gave up hope of holding on till he had brought his ship to port—gave up hope of living to the end of the voyage. Up to that time he had always tried to pass the whole thing off as a sort of a joke, running on with patter like that about the 'wata wagon.' But he dropped all that from the moment I refused to give way to him at the wheel.

"'Youah quite right, Allen,' he said in a weary sort of voice, and went over and sat down on the rail of the cockpit. His voice was hollower still when he spoke again, maybe ten minutes later. 'Allen,' he croaked, 'I've got a hunch I'm not up to pullin' my weight in this heah schoona any longa. I'm all in—no mo'n so much ballast. Just a dead drag.'

"I didn't reply to that. I was too much awed—yes, awed—even to urge him again to take the drink I knew would be the saving of his mind—perhaps his life. He didn't speak again till after I roused him to prevent the main boom giving him a crack on the head as I put her about. (We were working through a nasty patch of broken coral—the outskirts of the Barrier—but scant seaway and fluky airs.) As he settled back on the weather rail of the cockpit he said, speaking very slow as though hard put to control his voice: 'Allen, I make it about two hundred miles to Townsville by youah noon position. Say thirty-six to forty hours' sailin', with the wind holdin' up. Do you reckon you an' Ranga—good man, Ranga—do you reckon you an' he ah up to pullin' it off alone? I'm—damn it all, I'm seem' hell-west-an'-crooked just as we hit the dirty navigatin' Allen, take my wud fo' it, this soba skippa stunt ain't all it's cracked up to be—not by a long shot. I'd rather ha' had the plague by a damn sight, Allen.'