To the lights — A Closer Reading

s sincere convictions. As she had once warned a meddlesome but well-intentioned and well-shocked visiting curate, there was an unrecognized line of division between Captain Joshua’s faith, reverence and devoutness, and his use of words when in mental or physical action.

“His grandsons, my boys,” she stoutly asserted, “says bad things sometimes. Their gran-f’ur may be careless in front of them sometimes; but he have put great arms over they two lads shoulders at night when they all knelt, and taught them proper respect for God Almighty. That be enough! Thou could’st do no more by they lads than he--Captain Joshua! I think it’s better that ’ee go, now, and--please don’t ’ee ever come back, lest the good Lord knows thou wastest time! Such men as Captain Joshua be a lot better, I do reckon, than be you.”

That the well-meaning curate came no more did not perturb her. They say he never did.

Captain Joshua trudged down the steep and devious ways of the Overgang, with a bundle under his arm. To him the quaint roofs, the narrow street, the occasional stretches of gray stone wall were of no interest. He rolled past a wandering artist who, with easel and paints, was enraptured with a view, and under his breath grunted a derisive: “Humph! Loafin’ lout! If I could get him aboard the _I’ll Try_ for a month, I’d make a useful man out of nothing. Playing with pretty things, he be. No use!”

He could not resist the temptation to stand in front of a ship-chandler’s show-window and stare therein at a compact steam winch scarcely larger than a sewing machine, and the brass-bound boiler beside it.

“Wish to the Lord I’d a bought you instead of that blamed motor-engine,” he thought. “The _I’ll Try_ be one of the last ships left that has to hoist trawls by hand-winch and--great dollops, it do be hard work!”

A long, troubled sigh slipped out before he could check it, and he had turned to hasten away lest the sin of envy creep through his mind, when the voice of the chandler stopped him.

“Morning, Captain Josh. See you looking at that winch. I had expected you’d be in to buy that lot for the _I’ll Try_. You should have it. It does more work than two men aboard. Wouldn’t you like it?”

“I’d like it, all right, John,” said the skipper, “but what with bad catches and bad markets, and that fool experiment with motors, I haven’t the money, and--”

The ship-chandler laughed as if immensely amused.

“Since when has any man in Brixham town asked anything more than the word of Captain Josh? Why, you can have my shop on your word!”

“Nope,” said the veteran. “I’ll never buy anything more I can’t pay for. I’m too old now to take any chance on debts. When my time comes, those up there on the hill--you know,”--and he jerked a heavy thumb over his shoulder in the direction of his home,--“they’ll have no debts of mine to meet. Not one! Not a damned farthing!”

“I’ll risk your living to be a hundred, unless, of course, the sea gets you,” insisted the dealer; but the old mariner smiled and shook his head.

“Of course, John, it aint got me yet; but I dare say that some time it and me’ll have a tussle when I’ll come off second best. But I’ll not have the steam winch till I can pay cash for it.”

“All right! Go it, you stubborn old shell-back!” laughed the chandler; and then as Captain Josh continued his rolling, clumping way down the narrow street, smiled at his obstinacy, and discovering that his new assistant, who had but recently arrived from Bristol, was at his side said garrulously: “There he goes, white of head and clean of heart. Unbending! And I can remember, as a boy, when he was six feet two tall, and the broadest-shouldered man in all the port. Admiral of the fleet, for more than twenty years. As good a sailorman as ever cleared from Brixham. Fight as well as he can pray. One time, about twenty years ago, when he was nigh on to fifty-five, there was a free-for-all ruction down on the quay. He tried to be a peacemaker and quoted the Bible at ’em; but when that didn’t work, he sailed in; and Lord, love me, boy! He gave ’em more fight than they’d ever seen in all their lives! He made ’em sick of fightin’ in about three minutes. When he got through, they was layin’ about like dog-fish, gaspin’ and wrigglin’ like mad. All the fight was gone out of ’em; but they do say that the language he used while things was hot indicated that for the time being he’d forgotten all the scripture ever he knew. You’re from Bristol, young fellow, but take a look at that old feller, so’s you’ll know him again, because, I tell you, you’re lookin’ at a man!”

And the new assistant, to please his employer, looked, and--smothered a derisive grin!

The ships in the harbor rocked and swayed, lifted and fell in the rhythmic upheave and downfall of the swell that pushed in and out of Torbay. They seemed a part of that splendid beauty of gray or red cliffs that reared themselves about it, a part of the sea that in lazy mood merely rippled its shores, or in sou’easterly tempests tore in fury inward as if to rip the red and gray cliffs from their foundations and obliterate the encircling earth. But the red and gray cliffs invariably won.

The ships in the harbor, ketch-rigged, red-sailed, able to live in seas where huge liners perished, were eager to be liberated from their moorings. Their crews, clumsy, awkward, inept on land, but dexterous, apt and graceful on sea-washed decks, breathed deeply, freely, once they stepped aboard the dinghies that they must row from the placidity of the inner harbor out into the surge. The battered, ugly hands, torn perpetually by the gash of rope and trawl, tarred to blackness, thick-fingered, huge-knuckled, that ashore swung aimlessly and ungainly, seemed now to be endowed with power, decision and skill. The feet that, incased in the high leather boots, stumbled over the cobbles of the village streets, now deftly adapted themselves to the roll of the sea.

The land was not their element. It was foreign. It was sometimes distasteful. It was too hard. It did not yield and sway and give. It had no life in itself. It was a dead thing that never moved and never met their tread, and when it lay inert beneath them, they sustained a subconscious distrust of its solidity. To these men who throughout all their years had been habituated to the great, comforting roll of the sea, or the petulant unrest of it when like an angry child it had stormed as if at restraint, the land was stagnant, uncomfortable, unnatural, a sullen thing without soul or spirit of its own.

The dinghies rocked and rolled and tossed when they left the pier; but in each one man sat and pulled at a heavy oar that was of feather’s weight in his time-trained hands, while another stood, faced the bow and pushed, ever keeping an eye on destination. And ever he balanced as delicately and as surely as a Circus-rider on the bare back of a horse, yielding, taking, but adroitly maintaining his mastery. The men in the boats passed comments that might sound strange to the ears of the land-accustomed. They shouted their comments. And always the interchanges were relative to the sea, for to them it was paramount.

As if each boat had mastered a puzzle of action, each came eventually to the side of a ship, and its men climbed aboard. Always, when they felt the familiar deck beneath their feet, they glanced around, their eyes sweeping over the homely objects in scrutiny of which most of their lives were passed--here the winch, there the end of the warp, here the trawl-beam with its iron heads, there the rigging that swept upward in a maze of tarred ropes and shrouds to stay the high and swaying masts. And always the final look was at the vane, that tiny thing at the peak of the mainmast, from forty to sixty feet overhead, where fluttered the gay emblem showing whether the wind was fair or foul. That was invariably the immediate solicitude, for it told the tale of toil--whether they must beat against head-winds, handling and hauling sail, straining muscles to gain way, or lounging in luxurious idleness and content when, with a fair breeze, the ship put out to sea.

Captain Joshua stood longest of all, thinking of the change. He sniffed the air, and thought he still detected the smell of gasoline.

“I can smell that damn’d stuff yet, Bill,” he growled to his mate or “second hand,” who was nearly as white-headed and sea-scarred as himself.

“It hangs on worsen gin to an old woman’s breath,” growled that worthy, who was a vociferous teetotaler and never lost an opportunity for comparison. “They aint nothin’ smells wuss’n that peetrul, unless it’s one o’ they polecats what lives around with farmers because they don’t know no better. I tell ’ee, Skipper, the Lord gives us the wind, and it bean’t natural for either men or ships to try to run on alcohol.”

“Alkerhol? Hell! They bean’t no alkerhol in that peetrol,” insisted Bob Noon, the only member of the crew who ever imbibed, and was the constant source of solicitude for the mate, who strove persistently to reform him. “It looks like gin, and it smells strong, but it aint the same at all. I knows. I tried it.”

“’Course you would! You be an unreginerate soul! Oh, I know all about you,” roared the mate. “Di’n’t I hear tell how when you was at say in them windjammers what went Hawaiian-wise, you’m got drunk on cologne-water? And aint I told ’ee, scores an scores o’ times, that you’m a--”

“S’pose us stows the gab and gets to sea,” Captain Joshua interrupted, as he had done hundreds of times before when argument threatened.

The _I’ll Try_ cast loose her mooring. Her big mains’l crawled up, traveler hoops a-creak, block and tackle singing a shrill song. She took on way and edged out into Torbay like a maiden pretending shy modesty. Her running bowsprit was loosened, slid outward, and from it sprouted more red sails. Her mizzen spread red canvas, and above it climbed another sheet. Her trim, sharp bow lifted and fell, carelessly ripping and imperiously dividing the rash waves. But the waves joined again, and were undismayed. They chuckled when they reunited at the stern, and fell together in the boiling wake. They conspired mischievously; for in that Channel, the greatest maritime artery on the whole globe, are perhaps the moodiest of waters. Fickle as the affections of a jungle-bred lioness, playful as a lioness can be and--dangerous and savage as the lioness when crossed. On that Channel a single hour of time may change the sea from the placidity of a lake to the ferocity of a tempest.

But two days had passed since the _I’ll Try_ sailed from Brixham in the sunshine, with the Channel all aglow with turquoise lights, and over waves that seemed playfully dancing with gladness and good will; but now she lay beaten and distracted under the shortest possible canvas, cringing as if from oft-repeated blows upon her oaken ribs. On her wet, slippery and heavily rolling and bounding deck, with tarpaulins and sou’westers dripping with driven rain and spray, every man of her crew, from skipper to cabin-boy, fought doggedly, desperately at the hand-winch. For seven hours thev had labored thus, unceasingly, until now they were too wearied and spent for speech. They laid breasts, hands or shoulders to the long bars, bent their backs, planted their feet, lowered their heads like bulls in a charge and tried again to make the weary treadmill round in the hope of hoisting the trawl. The great net, held open by a forty-foot beam and towed along the bottom of the sea floor upon “trawl-heads” that were like huge steel sled-runners, had caught what the men of the _I’ll Try_ surmised must be a sunken wreck. A trawl, one of the most expensive pieces of gear known to the craft, could not be abandoned until all hope was gone. Time and again had the thick warp been worked in and out, by sheer stubbornness of toil and strength; time and again as the ship swung off and lurched, the tired men hopefully thought they had felt the trawl, scores of fathoms down, yield; but time and again that hope had proved fallacious. And always, as they worked, they blinked the sweat from their eyes and lifted their anxious regard to the steadily increasing storm. A heavier blast smote the ship until she lay so far over that her lea bulwark met the water, and waves swept the length of her scuppers.

“’Vast heaving!” rumbled Captain Josh, holding an end of a long winch-bar in his hand, and the others fell heavily over the ones upon which they had been exerting themselves, to catch breath. “It’s no use,” panted the beaten old skipper. “Storm’s got so high it’s dangerous to hold on any longer. Us must bend a line on the warp, rig a buoy, cut loose, and hope to find our gear another day.”

“Aye! And they be one chance in a million for that,” growled Scruggs, the “ancient” of the ship, who having never married, having no kinfolk, living forever alone, was regarded by his fellows as a pitiable old pessimist.

“It do be the devil’s own luck!” asserted the second hand.

“Aye! And if us had to--” The third member of the crew started a sentence that he was never to finish. The unexpected, unusual, rare accident was upon them. It came with the swiftness of a stroke of forked lightning. The winch-dogs, which worked against cogs, snapped with the vicious sharpness of a high explosive. The whole weight of the warp, the surging ship and the storm was instantly released. The long bars of the winch spun like a huge, malevolent top. The _I’ll Try_ seemed to slip sidewise for a few fathoms and then again to lay over so far that she was in danger of going on her beam ends. She righted herself partially, jerking madly, as if in terror. For a moment there was no sound but the shrilling of the winds through her rigging and the hammering of the billows.

Captain Josh, stunned, dazed, confused, lifted himself from the heap into which he had been thrown against the weather bulwarks, wondered why a red blanket blurred his vision, tried to wipe it away with his left hand and could not for a moment understand why that numbed arm would not respond. It hung limp and broken by his side. His right hand came up and swept away the blood that trickled warmly downward over his eyes and face. And then his senses returned, swift as light through clouds. Horror came with sight.

“My God! My God!” A whimpering voice caught his ears, and he saw the cabin-boy crawling up the slope of the deck toward the companionway, clutching with outspread fingers at the wet planks, while one leg dragged helplessly behind him. Down in the scuppers, with the waters submerging them as they swept the ship’s length, lay two sodden shapes.

But the fighting spirit, the unquenchable bravery of the broken man by the weather bulwarks, tore upward to action. Instantly he caught the rail with his big, uninjured arm, lifted himself to his feet, and lurched and slithered downward to the nearest man, the mate of the _I’ll Try_, who lay unconscious and half-drowned. He seized the inert form and dragged it back until he could rest it against a hatch from where it could not again roll downward into the wash and make death certain by drowning.

“Stand by, lad! Stand by! Hang on to something for a moment. Us has got to be men now!” he cried to the whimpering boy, and slipped and sprawled downward to seize the body of the ancient one, and laboriously drag it to safety.

“Bob! Get Bob!” screamed the boy. “He went over the port side! I saw hjm go! Thrown, he was--all in the air-- thrown like a dead fish--by they winchbars!”

Captain Josh lunged to the port side, clung to the rail and stared outward, releasing his hold only to brush away the trickle of blood that again troublesomely obscured his vision. He could see nothing. He seized the nearest shrouds and dragged himself upward until he perched on the rail; where he stood swaying and peering; but even from that vantage of height he could discern nothing living--only the tearing uplift of the sea, the spume-thrown crests of waves, the murderous swing of the waters. No man could live in that for many minutes, be he sound and strong rather than broken and inert. To seek was useless. And--there was no time to pause if those aboard the _I’ll Try_, and the ship herself, were to survive. The boy was still wailing and screaming. Captain Josh dropped heavily to the deck, and as he lunged past the boy, shouted: “No use, lad. Poor Bob’s gone. God rest him! Steady now! Steady! Us must be steady if us would live.” And hurriedly he sought an ax.

He returned and with his uninjured and still powerful arm fell to hacking the warp whose drag threatened momentarily to end the _I’ll Try_. The severed ends whipped like giant lashes into the air, and he narrowly escaped a second blow as the ship-end whistled through the air. The wind from its tarred and spraying strands lashed within an inch of his eyes as he instinctively jerked his head backward. The _I’ll Try_ leaped upward, leaned over, sprang free and seemed to fly outward like a tortured wild bird released from captivity. The water on her decks swept in a torrent across to the other side in great sheets. It carried with it loosened objects, and rope-ends that trailed as if eager to follow. The heavy ax with which Captain Josh had cut the imperiling warp was lifted, despite its weight, and vanished overboard in a smother of green. An iron handspike seemed to bound toward freedom, and brought up against the bulwark. The _I’ll Try_ lay far over now, and disregarding the wheel that swung idly to and fro, swept aimlessly before the storm. And even as she disregarded the wheel, Captain Josh disregarded her struggles. He jerked a sodden handkerchief from beneath his sodden jersey, tried to tie it about his bare head with one hand, realized that it was impossible, and hurried to the cabin boy. “Lad,” he said, more quietly and in a voice pitched barely high enough to surmount the tempest’s roar, “’ee have two hands. Help me to bind this up and belay it to my head. I can’t see with all they blood in my eye. Come, be brave, lad. Bind it fast and hard.”

The boy forgot his pain under the influence of that steady old voice, and obeyed. His young fingers trembled at their task; struggled with a simple knot.

“Now,” said Captain Josh, “us must work fast if us are to make port again. I know it’s hard, for ’ee has a hurt foot, I take it; but if us can make port, it’ll heal. Brace up, for if ’ee doan’t, us’ll never again see they harbor lights. All right now?”

“Aye, sir,” the boy asserted with a bravery that his voice belied.

“Then get down the companion and do best ’ee can when I lower away they other two. Hang on with one hand to they steps at the bottom and try to ease they down. You see us cain’t leave they on deck, lest they drown. Can do it?”

“Aye, sir, I can try,” the boy asserted, striving valiantly to meet such brave example.

“Then down ’ee goes. Here, I'll give a hand,” said Captain Josh, and did his best to assist the boy down the narrow opening and the steep steps. “Now stand by to help,” he called as he disappeared from the boy’s uplifted and encouraged eyes.