Wide Courses — Text and Context

There was but little damage to the yacht's bottom--a small matter to find that out--though the skipper he carried was no master of craft. So many of them like that, too. To face the sea like men is not what they're after, not to take winter or summer as it comes, rough or smooth--no--but always the smooth water and soft winds. But he did not sail for the West Indies that day, nor that week, nor winter--something'd gone wrong with the machinery. No concern of mine that. There were those who said later--but that was when my head begun to trouble me--as it does now sometimes, as I said. There was a time, when Sarah was alive, before we had even the old ship's cabin on the end of the old dock by way of an office, when I carried my business in a wallet in my breast pocket--that is, what we didn't carry in our heads--but the mother of those two lads, she was with me then. That's long ago.

A most interestin' man he was. As I say, he made no West India cruise that winter--the machinery kept gettin' out of order--but he made a few trips with me--wreckin' trips--for I still looked after the big jobs myself. There were those who used to say that if I'd only learned to stand by and look on long enough to train a good man to take my place in the deep divin', that I'd be goin' yet. Maybe so, but maybe, too, they didn't know it all. I'd yet to meet a man who would do my work half as well as I could myself--never but one, and she was a woman and could do her part better--Sarah, my first wife, and her kind aren't livin' now.

He was not so soft, this yacht man, as I used to think. He stood the rough winter trips with me well. I learned to like him--rarely. I could talk to him about the work, and he'd try to understand--as so few of his kind would. He understood better after he'd been some trips with me, and I came to love him--almost. When I was away on those trips, my wife would be at home--until the time her aunt took sick. I recollect her speakin' of her aunt--or did I? No matter. She lived out West somewhere, and didn't want her to marry me--or so I made out. I didn't go too deep into it. When she hinted that she hadn't told me of her aunt before for fear of hurtin' my feelin's, it was enough. Women feel things more than men, and no use to rake 'em over. I knew I was a rough man, not the kind many women folks might take to--I never quite got over Her likin' me--nor did a whole lot of people--and 'twas natural a woman of the kind her aunt must be, didn't like her marryin' a man like me. But no matter; her aunt was bein' reconciled, she used to write me, and when your wife is makin' up to her only livin' relative, and she dyin', it's no time to be exactin'. So she stayed on in the West. I've forgotten where--Chicago maybe?--too far, anyway, for me to go to her, because I had to stand ready in my business to leave at a minute's notice. A gale c'd rise in an hour, the coast be cluttered with wrecks in one day. And there were so many big people, steamboat people and big shippin' firms, who counted on me, would 'a' been disappointed, you see, if I wasn't on deck when needed. It's something, after all, to be honest in your work all your life, not leave it to careless helpers.

He lost his interest in the wreckin' after a while, and natural, too. He hadn't to build up his family's name or provide a livin' for anybody by it. And her aunt still lingered, she wrote. And then I wrote that I would give up the business if she said so, and go out there. I could begin again--there was great shippin' on the lakes--better sell out a hundred wreckin' plants than be so much apart, for it's terrible to be comin' from the sea and never find the woman afore ye. But she telegraphed to wait, she would be home soon, and she wanted to see me, too, about something partic'lar. That was the night before the Portland breeze--in the year o' the war with Spain--yes, '98 that would be, the year the _Portland_ went down on Middle Bank with all on board. A foolish loss that, and nobody ever went to jail for it; but it's mostly that way, nobody sufferin' for it--but the families o' the lost ones--when passenger ships go down at sea.

There was half a dozen steamboat firms telegraphin' and telephonin' the morning after that storm, and I had to leave without waitin' till she got home. There was a wreck off Cape Cod, and that kept me away a week, and I was hurryin' back by way of Boston. And I saw him--me hurryin' up Atlantic Avenue to take the train and him headed for the docks. I hailed him. There was a rumor--'twas in the papers--that I'd gone down with the wreck I'd been workin' on off Cape Cod--Chatham way--but of course no one who knew me well believed it. But he must've believed it, for--"What, you!" he says--not even puttin' in the "Captain" that he never before forgot. I missed that little word from him--and he didn't look at me the same--him that had always such a friendly way with me. He seemed to be in a great hurry, and so I left him without more talk. He did not even tell me that the _Rameses_ was in the harbor and he leavin' on her, but the thought of that came later.

I had to stop off at Newport, to get things started for another wreck there, and that took me the rest of that day and the next, and then I was all ready to take the night boat for New York, but my oldest boy came hurryin' down the dock to me, and an old lady--no--not so old, but lookin' old--with him. And they told me how the _Rameses_, that had left Boston the morning before, 'd been wrecked off Gay Head durin' the night and sunk; and this was his mother, and she wanted me to go to the wreck right away and see if I could find and bring up his body.

I wanted to go home--a week of days and nights--and I was tired, too, and not easy to tire me in those days, but I thought of him and the trust he had in the skipper that didn't know his business, and I looks at my boy and at his mother, and Sarah's face came to me; and who's to gainsay a woman whose son lies drowned? So my boy and me we put out that night and was there next morning in our big wreckin'-tug.

'Twas a cold day, but clear, only there was a big sea runnin', makin' it dangerous, everybody said, to be lyin' alongside her. And, I suppose because o' that, my boy wanted to do the divin', but 'twas me that went down and fastened the chains so she wouldn't slip off into the deep water; and then I came up to rest, and it was while I was up restin' that the chains slipped and she slid off and on to a ledge twenty fathoms down. Twenty fathoms is deep water for divin'--but one or two 'd been that deep before, and what one man has done another can do--and I'd promised the mother to bring her son home to her.

I went down and made fast the chains again, and then I went inside her to make one job of it, though I'd told the lad I'd come up after I'd made fast the chains. I needed no pilot--I'd been on her often enough--though I did find use for the patent electric hand-light I'd carried. Down the big staircase I went, through the big saloon, and toward his quarters I felt my way--through the fine cabin and the marble bath-room and his own room--all as rich and comfortable as in his own home ashore.

It was deep down, as I said--maybe too deep to be stayin' so long--but I'd never known what it was to give up on a job, and I kept on.

I found him ... and he wasn't alone.

And hard enough it was on me, for never a hint had I of it. 'Twas my boy hauled me up that day. No signal o' mine, but I was gone so long he feared I'd come to harm below.

When I found myself better I made ready to go down again, for once you've promised to do a thing there's nothin' but to do it. But just as they were about to slip my helmet on, me with my foot on the ladder, the chain that was holding her slipped again, and into two hundred fathoms she went--too deep for any diver in this world ever to raise her.

I thought of his mother and I grieved for her, and it was the first job, too, that ever I'd messed.

"Never mind," says my son. "Twas me, not you. Nobody that knows you, father, will blame you." A great lad that, and his brother, too--off their mother's model--both of 'em. Sarah said I'd never have to worry about them, and I haven't, but I wish she'd lived to have the joy of them.

I don't remember much more of that, but when I got back to the office there was a letter from her. But I never read it. Nothing it could tell me then that I hadn't already guessed.

'Isn't often now it comes so to me, things being' generally dim in my mind, as I say, slipping away and drawing nigh, like ships in a lifting fog-but to-day--like that day--a winter's day and sunny and cold--with the seas running like white-maned ponies before the gale in the bay below there--as it is now--always on a day like this it comes clearer to me.

LAYING THE HOSE-PIPE GHOST

Sometimes, for one reason or another, or perhaps without reason at all, it just happens. So, say a handful of gossiping yeomen find themselves together, and when that comes about, from some member (if the session stretches to any length at all) is sure to come a story of particular interest to the guild; and perhaps it ought to be explained that a yeoman's story is never mistaken in the Navy for a stoker's, a gunner's, a quartermaster's; never for anybody's but a yeoman's.

One night, a pleasant-enough night topside, but an even pleasanter night below, at least in our part of the ship below. A few of us were gathered in the flag office, where Dalton, the flag yeoman, sometimes allowed us to call when his admiral was ashore. Getting on toward middle-age was Dalton, with a head of gray-flecked hair and an old-time school-master's face. A great fellow for books.

In the flag office store-room, which to get into he had only to lift a hatch in the deck under his revolving chair and let himself drop, he had a young library, which after-hours he, used to delve into for anybody's or everybody's benefit. He was particularly strong on folk-lore, and could dig up a few fat volumes any time on the folk-lore of any nation we had ever heard of. He liked to lie flat on the coffer-dam to read, with a row of tin letter-files under his head for a rest, the electric bulb and its shade so adjusted as to throw all the light on the page of his book. He had done a lot of reading and writing in his time, and his eyes were getting a little watery. If he had had his way he would have been an author. In the hours of many a night-watch he had tried his hand at little sketches; but somehow or other he could not catch on, he said. Perhaps if he had tried to write as he talked, tell the things just as they popped into his mind, he would have been luckier; but that wasn't literature, he said, and so most of his written things read like one of Daniel Webster's speeches. We could listen to him talking all night long; but when he brought out one of his manuscripts, it was good-night and hammocks for all hands.

Taps had gone this night, and so it should have been lights out and everybody below turned in; but this, as I said, was the admiral's office, and only separated from the admiral's cabin by a bulkhead; and even the busiest of Jimmy-Legs don't come prowling into the cabin country of a flagship after taps. And the flag lieutenant and the flag secretary were pretty savvy officers who never by any accident came bumping in on Dalton's parties at the wrong time.

There came a knock at the door, and following the knock came the captain's yeoman. Nothing wrong with the captain's yeoman, except that his bow name was Reginald and he was rather fat for a sailor. Also he had ambitions, which was all right too, only we knew that privately he looked on the rest of us as a lot of loafers who would never rise to our opportunities. He'd been wearing his first-class rating badge a month now, and before his enlistment was out he intended to be a chief petty officer; which was why he was working after-hours. But the captain's yeoman, this particular captain's yeoman, has nothing to do with the story, except that his errand set Dalton off on a new tack.

The captain's yeoman had come for a little advice. He always was after advice--or information. A department document had come into the office that day with seventeen endorsements on it, and it had him bluffed. We all laughed at the face he drew. "But," said Dalton, turning on us, "so would most of you be bluffed if one of those winged-out documents came at you for the first time. But you're foolish, son Reginald, to be worrying over any little thing like that. Seventeen endorsements! What's seventeen endorsements? I wonder what you'd think if you'd--Sit down there and listen to me, and perhaps it'll be time well spent. If you don't learn enough from it to get that C.P.O. you're after, then--Well, I won't call you any names here now. Listen."

Now this story of Dalton's is a classic among yeoman, and only a yeoman should tell it; but not even a yeoman, no matter how gifted he may be with letter file or typewriter, has a rating to tell a story--no, no more than anybody else aboard ship. Some of us had heard the story before, and it had always been mangled in the telling, through the teller not knowing all the facts, or having perhaps never met any of the principal characters in it. But Dalton not only knew the tale from beginning to end; he was, though he would never admit it in a crowd, himself concerned in it. And now when he began to relate the history of the famous length of hose-pipe, we knew that he would have it right.

"I was in--well, call her the cruiser _Savannah_--this time--"

"Were you a yeoman, Dallie?"

"Yes, a yeoman, bright Reggie boy; what else d' y' think I'd be--a signal-girl? A good old ship, the _Savannah_, and were tied up to the dock at the Navy Yard."

"Boston yard, was it, Dallie?"

"Never mind what yard it was, son. And I'll name no names, either, and then by no accident will there be a general court-martial coming to me some day. There were three of four other ships fitting out at the same time, and after a while these other three ships got their stores aboard and proceeded to sea, leaving a lot of old gear behind them on the dock.

"We were making ready to pipe water into our ship, when Mr. Kiley, our boson, always a forehanded chap, thought it all a pity to have to use our bran-new hose for that kind of work. You all know how hose gets lying chafing around with people stepping on it, carts and wagons running over it, coal-dust grinding into it, and so on. A pity, our boson thought, to subject our nice new hose to that kind of abuse, when in the condemned heap on the dock there was a length of hose that would do the work, and he put it up to Mr. Renner, the officer of the deck at the time.

"Now Mr. Renner was a new-made ensign, and we all of us here been long enough in the service to know how it is about a middy that's just got his commission. We all know how it is with ourselves when we first get our C.P.O.--except you, Reggie, and you'll get yours some day. Am I right? Sure I am. If there's one thing on earth we're going to do then, it's to live up to regulations.

"No, we'll never again remember so much about rules and regulations as we do then. No catching us in anything irregular; no sir. And so with Mr. Renner, the new-made ensign. He brings out the blue-book and shows the boson. 'Look,' he says. 'Paragraph fourteen thousand four hundred and forty-two,' or whatever it was. 'Hose,' he goes on to read, 'is expendible property, to be surveyed and wiped off the property-books by condemning to the scrap-heap and sold in the open market to the highest bidder. There,' says our new-made ensign to our boson, 'what it says. And according to that, the admiral himself couldn't take that hose from that scrap-heap without authority. No, not if it was no more than an old shoe-lace, he couldn't.'

"'But that won't fill our water-tanks, and I'd like to use that hose, sir,' says the boson.

"'M-m!' says Mr. Renner. 'M-m! now if Mr. Shinn was aboard--' Mr. Shinn was our executive. 'But Mr. Shinn is ashore. However, I'll tell you what; I will speak to the captain about it,' and he steps inside the bulkhead and writes a message to the skipper.

"Now our skipper was a good old soul, and thought a lot of his boson, and wanted to do everything he could to help him out, but also, like a good many other good old captains in the service, he'd forgotten a lot of this stuff about regulations. Ordinarily--say, if 'twas anything to be done out to sea--he'd have said, 'Why, of course, Kiley; go ahead and do it,' But this was in a navy yard, ashore, and when he gets a note with something about regulations in it, he begins to haul to.

"And many a good sea-going old skipper is bluffed the same way about anything that spells regulations, you betcher. So now our good old skipper begins to tumble his hair and pull his moustache and look again at Mr. Renner's note. At last he tells the messenger to say to Mr. Renner that he will look into it and let him know.

"Another hour of studying, and the captain calls in his new yeoman that--"

"Was that you, Dallie?"

"Never mind--and cut out the personal questions, Reggie son. And remember you don't rate any more questions than anybody else here. I'm telling you the story, and I'll tell all that's good for you and just the way it happened.

"Now if this yeoman had been better acquainted with his skipper, he'd have been of some use just then. He might have suggested, in a way any of us can at times without interfering, or jarring an officer, even as topsided as a captain, how the thing could be fixed up without any correspondence game. But this new yeoman hadn't yet learned what his captain's steaming radius was. And the captain, having regulations on his brain and not getting the hint at the psychological time, he dictates a regulation communication to the commandant of the yard, which the new yeoman frames up just as he was told. It was a letter inquiring of the commandant the status of the condemned hose in question, and could it not be loaned for temporary use, to be returned in due season--say, next day? and so forth.