Poison Island

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

  CHAPTER IV.

  CAPTAIN COFFIN STUDIES NAVIGATION.

  Events soon to be narrated made my sojourn in tutelage of Mr. Stimcoea brief one, and I will pass it lightly over.

  The school consisted of four boarders and six backward sons ofgentlemen resident in the town, and assembled daily in a largeouthouse furnished with desks of a peculiar pattern, known to us as"scobs." Mr. Stimcoe, who had received his education as a"querister" at Winchester (and afterwards as a "servitor" at PembrokeCollege, Oxford), habitually employed and taught us to employ theesoteric slang--or "notions," as he called it--of that great publicschool; so that in "preces," "morning lines," "book-chambers," andwhat-not we had the names if not the things, and a vague and quiteillusory sense of high connection, on the strength of which, and ofour freedom from what Mrs. Stimcoe called "the commercial taint," wemade bold to despise the more prosperous Rogerses up the hill.

  Upon commerce in the concrete--that is to say, upon the butchers,bakers, and other honest tradesmen of Falmouth--Mrs. Stimcoe waged apredatory war, and waged it without quarter. She had a genius foropening accounts, and something more than genius for keeping hercreditors at bay. She never wheedled nor begged them for time; shenever compromised nor parleyed, nor condescended to yield an inch totheir claims for decent human treatment. She relied simply uponbrowbeating and the efficacy of the straight-spoken lie. A moredauntless, unblushing, majestic liar never stood up in petticoats.

  She was a byword in Falmouth; yet, strange to say, her victims kept asneaking fondness for her, a soft spot In their hearts; while assporting onlookers we boys took something like a fearful pride in theWarrior, as we called her. It was not in her nature to encourage anysuch weakness, or to use it. She would not have thanked us for it.But we had this amount of excuse: that she fed us liberally when shecould browbeat the butcher; and if at times we went short, she sharedour privation. Also, there must have been some good in the woman, tostand so unflinchingly by Stimcoe. Stimcoe's books had gone intostorage at the pawnbroker's; but in his bare "study," where he heardour construing of Caesar and Homer, stood a screen, and behind it aneighteen-gallon cask. A green baize tablecloth covered the cask fromsight, and partially muffled the sound of its running tap whenStimcoe withdrew behind the screen, to consult (as he put it) hislexicon.

  His one assistant, who figured in the prospectus as "Teacher ofEnglish, the Mathematics, and Navigation," was a retiredpacket-captain, Branscome by name, but known among us as CaptainGamey, by reason of an injured leg. He had taken the hurt--asplintered hip-bone--while fighting his ship against a Frenchprivateer off Guadeloupe, and it had retired him from the service ofmy lords the Postmaster-General upon a very small pension, and with asword of honour subscribed for by the merchants of the City ofLondon, whose mails he had gallantly saved. These resources beingbarely sufficient to maintain him, still less to permit his helping awidowed sister whom he had partly maintained during his days ofservice, he eked them out by school mastering; and a dreadful tradehe must have found it. In person he was slight and wiry, of a clear,ruddy complexion, with grey hair, and a grave simplicity of manner.He wore a tightly buttoned, blue uniform coat, threadbare and frayed,but scrupulously brushed, noticeably clean linen, and white ducktrousers in all weathers. He walked with the support of a malaccacane, dragging his wounded leg after him; and had a trick of talkingto himself as he went.

  I need scarcely say that we mimicked him; but in school he kept farbetter discipline than Stimcoe, for, with all his oddity, we knew himto be a brave man. Such mathematics as we needed he taught capablyenough and very patiently. The "navigation," so far as we wereconcerned, was a mere flourish of the prospectus; and hisqualifications as a teacher of English began and ended with anenthusiasm for Dr. Johnson's "Rasselas."

  Such was Captain Branscome: and, such as he was, he kept the schoolrunning on days when Stimcoe was merely drunk and incapable. He evertreated Mrs. Stimcoe with the finest courtesy, and, alone among hercreditors, was rewarded with that lady's respect.

  I knew, to be sure--we all knew--that she must be in arrears withCaptain Branscome's pay; but we were unprepared for the morning when,on the stroke of the church clock--our Greenwich time--he walked upto the door, resolutely handed Mrs. Stimcoe a letter, and asresolutely walked away again. Stimcoe had been maudlin drunk for aweek and could not appear. His wife heroically stepped into thebreach, and gave us (as a geography lesson) some account of her unclethe admiral and his career--"distinguished, but wandering," as shesummarized it.

  I remember little of this lesson save that it dispensed--wisely, nodoubt--with the use of the terrestrial globe; that it included adescription of the admiral's country seat in Roscommon, and anaccount of a ball given by him to celebrate Mrs. Stimcoe's arrival ata marriageable age, with a list of the notabilities assembled; andthat it ended in her rapping Doggy Bates over the head with a ruler,for biting his nails. From that moment anarchy reigned.

  It reigned for a week. I have wondered since how our six day-boysmanaged to refrain from carrying home a tale which must have broughttheir parents down upon us _en masse_. Great is schoolboy honour--great, and more than a trifle quaint. In any case, the parents musthave been singularly unobservant or singularly slow to reason uponwhat they observed; for we sent their backward sons home to them eachnight in a mask of ink.

  Saturday came, and brought the usual half-holiday. We boarderscelebrated it by a raid upon the back yard of Rogerses--Bully Stokesbeing temporarily incapacitated by chicken-pox--and possessedourselves, after a gallant fight, of Rogerses' football. Superiornumbers drove us back to our own door, where--at the invocation ofall the householders along Delamere Terrace--the constableintervened; but we retained the spoil.

  At the shut of dusk, as we kicked the football in triumph about ourown back yard, Mrs. Stimcoe sought me out with a letter to beconveyed to Captain Branscome. I took it and ran.

  The lamplighter, going his rounds, met me at the corner of KilligrewStreet and directed me to the alley in which the captain's lodgingslay. The alley was dark, but a little within the entrance my eyescaught the glimmer of a highly polished brass door-knocker, and uponthis I rapped at a venture.

  Captain Branscome opened to me. The house had no passage. Its frontdoor opened directly upon a whitewashed room, with a round table inthe centre, covered with charts. On the table, too, stood a lamp,the light of which dazzled me for a moment. On the walls hung thecaptain's sword of honour (above the mantelpiece), a couple ofbookshelves, well stored, and a panel with a ship upon it--a brig infull sail--carved in high relief and painted. My eyes, however, werenot for these, but for a man who sat at the table, poring over thecharts, and lifted his head nervously to blink at me. It was CaptainCoffin.

  While I stared at him Captain Branscome took the letter from me.It contained some pieces of silver, as I knew from its weightand the feel of it--five shillings, as I judged, or perhapsseven-and-sixpence. As his hand weighed it I saw a sudden relief onhis face, and realized how grey and pinched it had been when heopened the door to me.

  He peised the envelope in his hand for a moment, then broke the sealvery deliberately, took out the coins, and, as if weighing them inhis palm, turned back to the table and laid Mrs. Stimcoe's letterclose under the lamp while he searched for his gold-rimmedspectacles. (There was a tradition at Stimcoe's, by the way, thatthe London merchants, finding a small surplus of subscriptions inhand after purchasing the sword of honour, had presented him withthese spectacles as a make-weight, and that he valued them no less.)

  "Brooks," said he, laying down the letter and pushing the spectacleshigh on his forehead while he gazed at me, "I want to ask you aquestion in confidence. Had Mrs. Stimcoe any difficulty in findingthis money?"

  "Well, sir," said I, "I oughtn't perhaps to know it, but she pawnedStim--Mr. Stimcoe's Cicero this morning, the six volumes with ashield on the covers, that he got as a prize at Oxford."

  "Good Lord!" said Captain Branscome, slowly. As if
in absence ofmind, he stepped to a side-cupboard and looked within. It was barebut for a plate and an apple. He took up the apple, and was about tooffer it to me, but set it back slowly on the plate, and locked thecupboard again. "Good Lord!" he repeated quietly, and, linking hishands under his coat-tails, strode twice backwards and forwardsacross the room.

  Captain Coffin looked up from his charts and stared at him, and I,too, stared, waiting in the semi-darkness beyond the lamp's circle.

  "Good Lord!" said Captain Branscome for the third time. "And it'sSaturday, too! You'll excuse me a moment."

  With that he caught up the letter, and made a dart up the woodenstaircase, which led straight from a corner of the room through asquare hole in the ceiling to his upper chamber.

  "Money again!" said Captain Coffin, turning his eyes upon me andblinking. "Nothing like money!"

  He picked up a pair of compasses, spread them out on the paper offigures before him, and looked up again with a sly, silly smile.

  "You won't guess what I'm doing?" he challenged.

  "No."

  "I'm studyin' navigation. Cap'n Branscome's larnin' it to me. Somepeople has luck an' some has heads; an' with a head on my shoulderssame as I had at your age, I'd be Prime Minister an' Lord Mayor ofLunnon rolled into one, by crum!" He reached across for CaptainBranscome's sextant, and held it between his shaking hands."_He_ can do it; hundreds o' men--thick-headed men in the ord'naryway--can do it; take a vessel out o' Falmouth here, as you might say,and hold her 'crost the Atlantic, as you might put it; whip her alongfor thirty days, we'll say; an' then, 'To-morrow, if the wind holds,an' about six in the mornin',' they'll say, 'there'll be an islandwith a two-three palm-trees on a hill an' a spit o' sand bearingnor'-by-west. Bring 'em in line,' they'll say, 'an' then you mayfetch my shaving-water'--and all the while no more'n ordinary men,same as you and me. Whereby I allow it must come in time, though myhead don't seem to get no grip on it."

  Captain Coffin stared for a moment at a sheet of paper on which hehad been scribbling figures, and passed it over to me, with a sigh.

  "There! What d'you make of it?"

  At a glance I saw that nothing could be made of it. The figurescrossed one another, and ran askew; here and there they trailed offinto mere illegibility. In the left-hand bottom corner I saw a 3 setunder a 10, and beneath it the result--17--underlined, which, as asum, left much to be desired, whether you took it in addition,subtraction, multiplication, or division.

  "And yet," he went on plaintively, "there's hundreds can do it--evenord'nary men."

  He reached out a hand and gripped me by the elbow; and again hisbrandy-laden breath sickened me as he drew me close.

  "S'pose, now, _you_ was to do this for me? You _could_, you know.And there's money in it--lashin's o' money!"

  He winked at me, glanced around the room, and with an indescribableair of slyness dived a hand into his breast-pocket.

  "It's here," he nodded, drawing out a small parcel wrapped about inwhat at first glance appeared to me an oilskin bag, tied about theneck with a tarry string. "Here. And enough to set you an' me upfor life." His fingers fumbled with the string for two or threeseconds, but presently faltered. "You come to me to-morrow," he wenton, with another mysterious wink, "and I'll show you something.Up the hill, past Market Strand, till you come to a signboard,'G. Goodfellow. Funerals Furnished'--first turning to the right downthe court, and knock three times."

  Here he whipped the parcel back into his pocket, picked up hiscompasses, and made transparent pretence to be occupied in measuringdistances as Captain Branscome came down the stairs from the garret.

  Captain Branscome gave no sign of observing his confusion, butsignalled to me to step outside with him into the alley, where hepressed an envelope into my hand. By the weight of it, I knew on theinstant that he was returning Mrs. Stimcoe's money,

  "And tell her," said he, "that I will come on Monday morning at nineo'clock as usual."

  "Yes, sir."

  I turned to go. I could not see his face in the gloom of the alley,but I had caught one glimpse of it by the lamplight within, and knewwhat had detained him upstairs. Honest man, he was starving, and hadbeen praying up there to be delivered from temptation.

  "Brooks," said he, as I turned, "they tell me your father was once amajor in the Army. Is he, by chance, the same Major Brooks--MajorJames Brooks, of the King's Own--I had the honour to bring home inthe _Londonderry_, after Corunna?"

  "That must have been my father, sir."

  "A good man and a brave one. I am glad to hear he is recovered."

  I told him in a word or two of my father's health and of hisblindness.

  "And he lives not far from here?" I remembered afterwards that hisvoice shook upon the question.

  I described Minden Cottage and its position on the road towardsPlymouth. He cut me short hurriedly, and remarked, with a nervouslaugh, that he must be getting back to his pupil. Whereat I, too,laughed.

  "Do you think it wrong of me, boy?" he asked abruptly.

  "Wrong, sir?"

  "He insists upon coming; and he pays me. He will never learnanything. By the way, Brooks, I have been inhospitable. An apple,for instance?"

  I declared untruthfully that I never ate apples; and perhaps the liewas pardonable, since by it I escaped eating Captain Branscome'sSunday dinner.