A High Wind in Jamaica

  They were all frightened, the sailors even more than the children, and hastened on board.

  In the small hours, Edward suddenly called Emily in his sleep. She woke up: “What is it?”

  “It’s rather cow-catching, isn’t it?” he asked anxiously, his eyes tight shut.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He did not answer, so she roused him—or thought she had.

  “I only wanted to see if you were a real Cow-catching Zomfanelia,” he explained in a kind voice: and was immediately deep asleep again.

  In the morning they might easily have thought the whole thing a dream—if John’s bed had not been so puzzlingly empty.

  Yet, as if by some mute flash of understanding, no one commented on his absence. No one questioned Margaret, and she offered no information. Neither then nor thereafter was his name ever mentioned by anybody: and if you had known the children intimately you would never have guessed from them that he had ever existed.

  III

  The children’s only enemy on board the schooner (which presently put to sea again, with them still on board) was the big white pig. (There was a little black fellow, too.)

  He was a pig with no decision of mind. He could never choose a place to lie for himself; but was so ready to follow any one else’s opinion, that whatever position you took up he immediately recognized as the best, the only site: and came and routed you out of it. Seeing how rare shady patches of deck are in a calm, or dry patches in a stiff breeze, this was a most infernal nuisance. One is so defenseless against big pigs when lying on one’s back.

  The little black one could be a nuisance also, it is true—but that was only from excess of friendliness. He hated to be left out of any party: nay more, he hated lying on inanimate matter if a living couch was to be found.

  On the north beach of Cape San Antonio it is possible to land a boat, if you pick your spot. About fifty yards through the bushes there are a couple of acres of open ground: cross this, and among some sharp coral rocks in the scrub on the far side are two wells, the northernmost the better of the two.

  So, being becalmed off the Mangrove Keys one morning, Jonsen sent a boat on shore to get water.

  The heat was extreme. The ropes hung like dead snakes, the sails as heavy as ill-sculptured drapery. The iron stanchion of the awning blistered any hand that touched it. Where the deck was unsheltered, the pitch boiled out of the seams. The children lay gasping together in the small shade, the little black pig squealing anxiously till he found a comfortable stomach to settle down on.

  The big white pig had not found them yet.

  From the silent shore came an occasional gunshot. The water-party were potting pigeons. The sea was like a smooth pampas of quicksilver: so steady you could not split shore from reflection, till the casual collision of a pelican broke the phantom. The crew were mending sails, under the awning, with infinite slowness: all except one negro, who straddled the bowsprit in his trousers, admiring his own grin in the mirror beneath. The sun lit an iridescent glimmer on his shoulders: in such a light even a negro could not be black.

  Emily was missing John badly: but the little black pig snuffled in supreme content, his snout buried amicably in her armpit.

  When the boatload returned, they had other game besides pigeons and gray land-crabs. They had stolen a goat from some lonely fisherman.

  It was just as they came up over the side that the big white pig discovered the party under the awning, and prepared for the attack. But the goat at that moment bounded nimbly from the bulwarks: and without even stopping to look round, swallowed his chin and charged. He caught the old pig full in the ribs, knocking his wind out completely.

  Then the battle began. The goat charged, the pig screamed and hustled. Each time the goat arrived at him the pig yelled as if he was killed; but each time the goat drew back the pig advanced towards him. The goat, his beard flying like a prophet’s, his eyes crimson and his scut as lively as a lamb’s at the teat, bounded in, bounded back into the bows for a fresh run: but at each charge his run grew shorter and shorter. The pig was hemming him in.

  Suddenly the pig gave a frightful squeal, chiefly in surprise at his own temerity, and pounced. He had got the goat cornered against the windlass: and for a few flashing seconds bit and trampled.

  It was a very chastened goat which was presently led off to his quarters: but the children were prepared to love him for ever, for the heroic bangs he had given the old tyrant.

  But he was not entirely inhuman, that pig. That same afternoon, he was lying on the hatch eating a banana. The ship’s monkey was swinging on a loose tail of rope; and spotting the prize, swung further and further till at last he was able to snatch it from between his very trotters. You would never have thought that the immobile mask of a pig could wear a look of such astonishment, such dismay, such piteous injury.

  5

  I

  When destiny knocks the first nail in the coffin of a tyrant, it is seldom long before she knocks the last.

  It was the very next morning that the schooner, in the lightest of airs, was sidling gently to leeward. The mate was at the wheel, shifting his weight from foot to foot with that rhythmic motion many steersmen affect, the better to get the feel of a finicky helm; and Edward was teaching the captain’s terrier to beg, on the cabin-top. The mate shouted to him to hang on to something.

  “Why?” said Edward.

  “ Hang on! ” cried the mate again, spinning the wheel over as fast as he could to bring her into the wind. The howling squall took her, through his promptness, almost straight in the nose; or it would have carried all away. Edward clung to the skylight. The terrier skidded about alarmedly all over the cabin-top, slipped off onto the deck, and was kicked by a dashing sailor clean through the galley door. But not so that poor big pig, who was taking an airing on deck at the time. Overboard he went, and vanished to windward, his snout (sometimes) sticking up manfully out of the water. God, Who had sent him the goat and the monkey for a sign, now required his soul of him. Overboard, too, went the coops of fowls, three new-washed shirts, and—of all strange things to get washed away—the grind-stone.

  Up out of his cabin appeared the captain’s shapeless brown head, cursing the mate as if it was he who had upset the apple-cart. He came up without his boots, in gray wool socks, and his braces hanging down his back.

  “Get below!” muttered the mate furiously. “I can manage her!”

  The captain did not, however: still in his socks, he came up on deck and took the wheel out of the mate’s hand. The latter went a dull brick-red: walked for’ard: then aft again: then went below and shut himself in his cabin.

  In a few moments the wind had combed up some quite hearty waves: then it blew their tops off, and so flattened the sea out again, a sea that was black except for little whipt-up fountains of iridescent foam.

  “Get my boots!” bellowed Jonsen at Edward.

  Edward dashed down the companion with alacrity. It is a great moment, one’s first order at sea; especially when it comes in an emergency. He reappeared with a boot in each hand, and a lurch flung him boots and all at the captain’s feet. “Never carry things in both hands,” said the captain, smiling pleasantly.

  “Why?” asked Edward.

  “Keep one hand to lay hold with.”

  There was a pause.

  “Some day I will teach you the three Sovereign Rules of Life.” He shook his head meditatively. “They are very wise. But not yet. You are too young.”

  “Why not?” asked Edward. “When shall I be old enough?”

  The captain considered, going over the Rules in his head.

  “When you know which is windward and which is leeward, then I will teach yo
u the first rule.”

  Edward made his way forward, determined to qualify as soon as he possibly could.

  When the worst of the squall was over they got the advantage of it, the schooner lying over lissomly and spinning along like a race-horse. The crew were in great spirits—chaffing the carpenter, who, they declared, had thrown his grind-stone overboard as a lifebuoy for the pig.

  The children were in good spirits also. Their shyness was all gone now. The schooner lying over as she did, her wet deck made a most admirable toboggan-slide; and for half an hour they tobogganed happily on their bottoms from windward to leeward, shrieking with joy, fetching up in the lee-scuppers, which were mostly awash, and then climbing from thing to thing to the windward bulwarks raised high in the air, and so all over again.

  Throughout that half hour, Jonsen at the wheel said not a single word. But at last his pent-up irritation broke out:

  “Hi! You! Stop that!”

  They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion. There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.

  Jonsen now had done it.

  But he was not content with that—he was still bursting with rage:

  “Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!”

  (They had already done so, of course.)

  The whole unreasonableness, the monstrousness of the imposition of these brats on his ship suddenly came over him, and summed itself up in a single symbol:

  “If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them?—Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To mend...your...drawers? ”

  There was a pause, while they all stood thunderstruck. But even now he had not finished:

  “Where do you think you’ll get new ones, eh?” he asked, in a voice explosive with rage. Then he added, with an insulting coarseness of tone: “And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?”

  Scarlet to the eyes with outrage they retreated to the bows. They could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips. They assumed an air of lightness, and talked together in studied loud voices: but their joy was dashed for the day.

  So it was that—small as a man’s hand—a specter began to show over their horizon: the suspicion at last that this was not all according to plan, that they might even not be wanted. For a while their actions showed the unhappy wariness of the uninvited guest.

  Later in the afternoon, Jonsen, who had not spoken again, but looked from time to time acutely miserable, was still at the wheel. The mate had shaved himself and put on shore clothes, as a parable: he now appeared on deck: pretended not to see the captain, but strolled like a passenger up to the children and entered into conversation with them.

  “If I’m not fit to steer in foul weather, I’m not fit to steer in fair!” he muttered, but without glancing at the captain. “He can take the helm all day and night, for all the help I’ll give him!”

  The captain appeared equally not to see the mate. He looked quite ready to take both watches till kingdom come.

  “If he’d been at the wheel when that squall struck us,” said the mate under his voice but with biting passion, “he’d have lost the ship! He’s no more eye for a squall coming than a sucker-fish! And he knows it, too: that’s what makes him go on this way!”

  The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grown-up, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there. He was totally unconscious of their discomfort, however: too selfoccupied to notice how they avoided catching his eye.

  “Look! There’s a steamship!” exclaimed Margaret, with much too bright a brightness.

  The mate glowered at it.

  “Aye, they’ll be the death of us, those steamers,” he said. “Every year there’s more of them. They’ll be using them for men-of-war next, and then where’ll we be? Times are bad enough without steamers.”

  But while he spoke he wore a preoccupied expression, as if he were more concerned with what was going on at the back of his mind than with what went on in the front.

  “Did you ever hear about what happened when the first steamer put to sea in the Gulf of Paria?” he asked, however.

  “No, what?” asked Margaret, with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.

  “She was built on the Clyde, and sailed over. (Nobody thought of using steam for a long ocean voyage in those days.) The Company thought they ought to make a todo—to popularize her, so to speak. So the first time she put to sea under her own power, they invited all the bigwigs on board: all the Members of Assembly in Trinidad, and the Governor and his Staff, and a Bishop. It was the Bishop what did the trick.”

  His story died out: he became completely absorbed in watching sidelong the effect of his bravado on the captain.

  “Did what?” asked Margaret.

  “Ran ’em aground.”

  “But what did they let him steer for?” asked Edward. “They might have known he couldn’t!”

  “Edward! How dare you talk about a Bishop in that rude way!” admonished Rachel.

  “It wasn’t the steamer he ran aground, sonny,” said the mate: “it was a poor innocent little devil of a pirate craft, that was just beating up for the Boca Grande in a northerly breeze.”

  “Good for him!” said Edward. “How did he do it?”

  “They were all sea-sick, being on a steamer for the first time: the way she rolls, not like a decent sailing-vessel. There wasn’t a man who could stay on deck—except the Bishop, and he just thrived on it. So when the poor little pirate cut under her bows, and seen her coming up in the eye of the wind, no sail set, with a cloud of smoke amidships and an old Bishop bung in the middle of the smoke, and her paddles making as much turmoil as a whale trying to scratch a flea in its ear, he just beached his vessel and took to the woods. Never went to sea again, he didn’t; started growing cocoa-nuts. But there was one poor fish was in such a hurry he broke his leg, and they came ashore and found him. When he saw the Bishop coming for him he started yelling out it was the Devil.”

  “O-oh!” gasped Rachel, horror-struck.

  “How silly of him,” said Edward.

  “I don’t know so much!” said the mate. “He wasn’t too far wrong! Ever since that, they’ve been the death of our profession, Steam and the Church...what with steaming, and what with preaching, and steaming and preaching.... Now that’s a funny thing,” he broke off, suddenly interested by what he was saying: “ Steam and the Church ! What have they got in common, eh? Nothing, you’d say: you’d think they’d fight each other cat-anddog: but no: they’re thick as two thieves...thick as thieves.—Not like in the days of Parson Audain.”

  “Who was he?” asked Margaret helpfully.

  “He was a right sort of a parson, he was, yn wyr iawn !

  He was Rector of Roseau—oh, a long time back.”

  “Here! Come and take this wheel while I have a spell!” grunted the captain.

  “I couldn’t well say how long back,” continued the mate in a loud, unnatural, and now slightly exultant voice: “forty years or more.”

  He began to tell the story of the famous Rector of Roseau: one of the finest pathetic preachers of his age, according to contemporaries; whose appe
arance was fine, gentle, and venerable, and who supplemented his stipend by owning a small privateer.

  “Here! Otto!” called Jonsen.

  But the mate had a long recital of the parson’s misfortunes before him: beginning with the capture of his schooner (while smuggling negroes to Guadaloupe) by another privateer, from Nevis; and how the parson went to Nevis, posted his rival’s name on the court-house door, and stood on guard there with loaded pistols for three days in the hope the man would come and challenge him.

  “What, to fight a duel ?” asked Harry.

  “But wasn’t he a clergyman, you said?” asked Emily.

  But duels, it appeared, did not come amiss to this priest. He fought thirteen altogether in his life, the mate told them: and on one occasion, while waiting for the seconds to reload, he went up to his opponent, suggested “just a little something to fill in time, good sir”—and knocked him flat with his fist.

  This time, however, his enemy lay low: so he fitted out a second schooner, and took command of her, week-days, himself. His first quarry was an apparently harmless Spanish merchantman: but she suddenly opened fourteen masked gun-ports and it was he who had to surrender. All his crew were massacred but himself and his carpenter, who hid behind a water-cask all night.

  “But I don’t understand,” said Margaret: “was he a pirate?”

  “Of course he was!” said Otto the mate.

  “Then why did you say he was a clergyman?” pursued Emily.

  The mate looked as puzzled as she did. “Well, he was Rector of Roseau, wasn’t he? And B.A., B.D.? Anyway, he was Rector until the new Governor listened to some cockand-bull story against him, and made him resign. He was the best preacher they ever had—he’d have been a Bishop one day, if some one hadn’t slandered him to the Governor!”

  “Otto!” called the captain in a conciliatory voice. “Come over here, I want to speak to you.”