Captain Caution (17 page)

Argandeau growled faintly in his throat. "Lookl" he said. "Look how she is old and sick, I think with leprosy, and so squats there in anger, wishing never to move againl It is a sight to make a seaman weep! They are cruel to everything, even to their ships, these Englishmen l"

Pale vapors oozed from the countless pipes that were thrust from the sides of the soiled and dreary hulks, vapors that coiled and drifted downward like a mournful fog, so that the tender moved along the melancholy fleet through an acrid veil of smoke.

She drew close to a hulk near the middle of the line; and to the crew of the Olive Branch, silently staring from behind the boarding nettings that had been raised between them and any possibility of escape, came the shrill babble of unnumbered voices. A platform encircled the hulk three feet above the water; and on the platform two sentries rattled their muskets and challenged sharply.

"Tender Primrose, of Sheerness," bawled a hoarse voice from the tender's stern, "wiv twenty-four Amairikins, cut out of Morlaix by schooner Sparrowl Consigned to Crown Prince hulk by orders of the Transport Officel"

High up in the lofty stern of this miserable vessel a window swung open, and from it peered a face with a babyish look to it a look as though the person to whom it belonged had lived long, but never grown up. The features seemed pinched together, as though the eyes and nose and mouth, in infancy, had been seized in a ruthless hand and compressed until they had become fixed.

"Are they washed?" this face called down angrily. "Have they had a bath?"

"Yes, sirl" shouted the hoarse voice from the Primrose.

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"Send them upl" called the angry voice. "But if they hadn't been, back they'd have gone to Sheernessl See you remember it, my maul You bring any more dirty Yankees to this hulk, and either you'll take 'em back to be washed, or wash 'em on your own deckl"

The Primrose swung against the landing stage, whence a long, canvas-sided companionway ran up to the high bulwarks of the Croum Prince. The boarding nettings were lowered, and the captain of the tender motioned the prisoners toward the hulk.

"You heard what he saidl" he growled. "If you don't aim to be soused in the Medway with a rope round your middle, stick to it you been washed!"

They mounted the companionway, and the tall Marvin, coming over the top of the bulwarks at the head of the line of seamen, found himself looking down into an oblong space that seemed to him the size of the floor of a fair-sized barn. Beyond a loop-holed wall at one end rose a drab and dreary forecastle, from which smokepipes protruded like pins from a pincushion. Armed sentries stood behind the wall, and marines moved about on the forecastle itself, so that Marvin knew the forecastle belonged to those who guarded the prisoners. Beyond a similar wall at the other end rose the structure that had been the quarter-deck; and in his quick glance at it, Marvin saw it was still sacred to the ship's officers; for the pinch-faced man, dressed in a uniform too tight for him, stood silently at the break in the deck to watch the prisoners come aboard.

The space between the quarter-deck and the forecastle was a-swarm with men more than Marvin had ever before seen packed into such a space and from these men there rose an odor so strong and penetrating that it caught at Marvin's nostrils and his throat and sickened him.

The garments of these men were shredded and tattered. Through wisps of cloth showed skinny ribs: pipestem arms: bony shins and thighs. Such was the emaciation and pallor of this sorry crew that they had the look of skeletons who, by some devil's dispensation, had risen from the dead in rotted grave clothes for a reunion in this purgatory of the sea.

Yet there was nothing skeleton-like about their actions; for they posed and pirouetted when Marvin came down among them. They capered insanely before him, flinging their arms about, moving their shoulders, screaming unceasingly in shrill and womanish French. A thousand hands, it seemed to Marvin, were stretched forward to pat his back; to touch his arms: his shoulders. "Les AmericainsI" he

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heard them cry. "Les braves Ame'ricainsl General Madison brave hommel George Vasington brave hommef'

There came into his head the thought that war made strange bedfellows, and that a common cause could unite men of widely different races. In that moment he felt a movement against his thigh, and as his glance dropped toward it, he thought he saw the flicker of fingers drawn back with the speed of light. He clapped his hand to his pocket; then turned quickly to the men from the Olive Branch "Keep tight hold of your moneyl" he told them. "They got miner"

Argandeau came close up beside him and spoke in French to the jostling throng around them. What he said was said softly, and took not long in the saying, but the words had the hiss of a whiplash. The ragged Frenchmen fell away before Marvin, so that a lane was opened through them. Suddenly silent, they stared at one another and at the Americans with eyebrows raised, and with hands and shoulders that protested their innocence more clearly than any words. Yet in their eyes Marvin seemed to see amusement, and even something of malicious mockery.

He scanned their faces sharply. Rage filled him at his loss, but in addition to the rage there was almost a sickness at the knowledge of his pennilessness; for without money, he knew, a corpse would have less trouble in rising from its coffin than he would have in escaping from this hulk to go in search of Corunna and of Slade.

An irate voice put an end to his attempt to find, among those pallid countenances, the face of the man who might have robbed him. "Herel" the voice shouted. "Here! Where do you think you are? Get back here where you belongI" It was the voice of the pinch-faced lieutenant; and, Marvin, recognising a dangerous childish fury in the sound of the words, hastened through the jostling Frenchmen to stand close under the high poop on which the angry lieutenant stood.

He was, Marvin saw, a man approaching fifty, a plump man whose arms and legs were oversnug in an ornate uniform which had the air of having been made for a woman. His hands, resting on the carved rail before him, were smooth and white, and heavy with rings.

"Good Godl" he shouted, stamping his foot angrily. "Twenty-four more! Over three hundred of you damned contrary Yankees aboard this ship already, and now twenty-four more of you wretched contentious creatures! You there you tall man! What was it you stopped for? You spoke to someone! You've brought a letter to one of these prisoners! I won't have ill I'll put you in the black hotel I'll cut off your rational I'll - "

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"I've done nothing!" Marvin interrupted. "Nothing but try to find the man that picked my pocket."

The lieutenant, slack of lip, stared dully at him; then burst abruptly into laughter. "Listen to that, Sugdenl'7 he cried, turning to a small man who stood humbly beside him, his eyes downcast and a long book beneath his arm. "There never was an Amairikin in this world that wasn't always talking about money or claiming he was badly treated! Pocket picked! 'Pon my word, Sugden, that's positively convulsing! Tomorrow he'll have something to say about the food. Tough meat, or weevily bread, most likelyI"

Sugden laughed, a raven's croak, and looked, grinning, at Marvin. "Most likely," he agreed.

"I warn you now," the lieutenant told Marvin disdainfully. "There's no sympathy on this ship for whiners! Whine and escaper Whine and escape! You ought to have that motto on your flag along with the bars you've already put on it. One of you's worse than a thousand Frenchmenl I'll remind you now that those who try escaping from this hulk get the black hole! Don't forget it, Give your names to Sugden; then get over with the rest of your brave Amairikins and let them find room for you on the lower deck, if they can. If they can't, it's not my faultl" He turned and minced away.

Sugden set down Marvin's name, vessel and other matters in his long book. Another clerk tossed down to him a limp hammock, a bag of chopped rags and a blanket that had the feel of being woven from string. Behind him the Frenchmen were dragging hammocks from an airing-stage and disappearing beneath the hatches. He heard Argandeau supplying Sugden with astounding information name, Lucien Argandeau; nationality, American; residence, Boston; wife, one wife; children, no children.

Before he could protest, he felt a touch on his arm and whirled to see a man no taller than a cabin boy a spare young man with a face of extreme gravity and crinkly side whiskers the color of cornsilk after a frost. He wore an overcoat so long that it was near to dragging on the deck.

"Newton," he said, holding out his hand to Marvin. "Matthew Newton of Salem. Matt to some and Newt to others, but answer to both. Pressed aboard the Poictiers 74. Got put in here for not fighting. Enemy, I am. Dangerous enemy! Bad and dangerous! Now I'm President of the Lower Deck for a month. Come on forward." He nodded his head toward the bow. "We got a law no Americans allowed aft of the main hatch when there's other Americans coming aboard."

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"So you won't be robbed?" Marvin asked doubtfully.

"Oh dear, not" Newton exclaimed. "We haven't anything to steall It's so none of us'll lose his head and tell that fat snake Osmore what we think of him. If that should ever happen, he'd starve us to death, innocent and guilty alike."

He turned briskly and led them forward to the Americans.

XVII

THREE hundred and twenty-seven Americans, Newton told them, were already quartered in the lower battery of the Crown Prince, and now there would be three hundred and fifty-one to pack in with their hammocks, like herring into a barrel. Above them, in the upper battery, he said, there were three hundred and nine Frenchmen, privateer officers for the most part; while below them, on the orlop deck, slept another two hundred and sixteen of the Frenchmen, known as Raf~a7~s and Manteaux Imperious men wholly lost and abandoned, who sold their very food and rags for money with which to gamble, and so went naked, except for single cloths which swarmed with insects, even as the imperial mantle of Napoleon swarmed with bees.

"So here we arel" Newton said. "We can't spread down onto the orlop deck, because no decent men could live within sight or sound or smell of the Raiales; and we can't spread up with the officers and the bourgeois, because no American can get along with 'cm." He eyed Argandeau and grinned. "No offecse," he said. "Maybe somewhere there are better Frenchmen than those we've got aboard this hulk, but here there isn't one we can trust: not even the captains. They're mean, all of 'em, in small ways."

"No offence, to me," Argandeau said quietly. "I am a little tired of the French equality that is no equality at all, and the French liberty that gives Frenchmen no liberty except that of remaining in English prisons all their lives. For a time I shall try being an American Lucien Argandeau, of Boston. These French, they are what you say because they believe that all is fair in love and war, and they can prove to you that life is nothing else war and love. It is of course true that the French are, as they say, the most logical of all people on earth; but recently I have come to think that the simple truth is preferable to French logic."

Newton stared at him doubtfully, shrugged his shoulders and led them to the main hatchway. They descended its single ladder to the upper battery deck, where dim distances were filled with the upBung arms of Frenchmen, hanging their hammocks; then went down another ladder to the lower battery deck, where the Americans,

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crouching beneath the massive planking of the deck above, crawled about with upturned faces, seeking the numbers chalked beside their hammock-hooks.

"It's too late for shifting hooks," Newton told them. "You'll have to sleep on the deck, between two lines of hammocks. You get a powerful lot of fleas down there, and it might be you'll be stepped on a few times, but you'll have better air. Tomorrow we'll squeeze these folks together, and you can sling your hammock amidships."

Marvin, close on Newton's heels, dragged his hammock as best he could through the shifting, jostling, noisy mass of men. Newton's hooks, he saw, were in a corner, near a barred porthole and a latrine; and even as Newton made fast his hammock-rope of spun yarn to the ceiling, a chain rattled loudly beside him. The port fell shut with an echoing thud. An angry roar of protest rose from the men around them.

"Drat'eml" Newton cried. "You'd think they were afraid we'd chop ourselves in pieces and squeeze through the bars of the ports if they were left open after duskl"

One by one the other ports along the lower battery slammed shut with a rattle of chains, and on that crowded mass of prisoners there descended a blackness that seemed to Marvin to thrust itself into his ears and press against his eyelids.

"Bring a light herel" Newton shouted. "There's twenty-four men got to sleep on the deck between No. 1 and No. 2 rows in the northwest quarter." A sulphur spunk dickered into blue flame near Marvin, then yellowed as a candlewick took fire.

"Get your hammocks in place," Newton urged the men from the Olive Branch. "Anybody caught with a light gets three days black hole on half rations, so all candles are doused if we have word from above that anybody's coming."

The hammocks, Marvin saw, formed a continuous layer of canvas between deck and ceiling, the edges of each hammock touching those on either side. Here and there, in this gigantic slit of a room, the dim light of a candle glowed palely. Stowed in their hammocks or squatting beneath them, the prisoners gabbled and shouted, the chorus of their voices striking on Marvin's ear like the muffled outcry of innumerable sea gulls.

"'Tisn't anything you can't stand," Newton told him, thrusting his head over the end of his hammock to look down at him. "When I was pressed onto the Poictiers, me being supercargo of one of my father's brigs and fresh out of Harvard College, I thought I'd die in a week, what with the terrible food, and the slave drivers they called

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officers, and the workhouse mongrels in the crew. But my goodness alivel I got fat on it! I'd have got fat on it even if the captain hadn't made me his secretary. Give a man fresh air and a little work and enough food to fill his stomach, no matter what the food is, and he'll get along."