* * *
—
Aren was interested in everything. While Kay sat reading in the morning, sitting on the roof of the Aft cabin, Aren poked about the ship and asked what? what? how? wanting to know how the ship was steered, how the pulleys worked, how the scuppers drained, how the holystone ground the boards to that clean white finish. He was quiet, but infinitely alert. Timid and brave by turns, very loving to Kay, whom he had adopted as his partner. For a time he would sit with her at the work table, printing his own letters at Thea’s direction; then he would race around the deck, laughing with the boys. He could swarm up the ropes faster than any, but Francis had commanded him to stay out of the way when orders had been given, and he obeyed. He was fond of Francis, which surprised Kay a little—she thought he might have been shy of him, as she sometimes had been herself at first. His affection was quiet, a matter of a hand trustingly laid on Francis’s arm, or of standing side-by-each at the chart desk, in undemonstrative harmony.
But he was sad, too. From time to time it seemed that the weight of learning things was too much for him, and tears would well into his eyes. Then, tired of new knowledge, he would go and knock on the hull of the starboard lifeboat and be taken up by Seaton for a rest.
One afternoon Arthur Wetmore called Kay and Aren to come quick, come to the side. “Sharks!” he said, not so loudly as to alarm them. Looking over the rail, they found shapes milling in the dark-green waters—long, thin, grey, muscled in their movements. Liu Jiacheng had just dumped a basket of scraps, and the great fish had come to feed. Six upright fins, circling, looking for more. The thick grey skin had a rough look of badly moulded clay.
Aren stared out over the water. “I wish for my taod.”
“What is that?” she asked.
He made a strong motion. “I stick the—wood—stick in fish. Stick, stick…” He lifted his arm and slashed it down, again and again.
In his own place, he would have been a fisherman, Kay thought. What would he become now, in this place?
16
The Horn
Off the western side of the Horn at 6 p.m., the wind was blowing hard when the starboard watch came on deck to haul up the mainsail. All hands went aloft to make it fast—an operation that Kay always watched if she could, because it was so terrifying: twelve men at intervals along the mainsail, hauling, and six below, sweating the ropes even harder, to make the wet canvas compact into a long roll fit for tying up. She stood in her oilskin coat, tucked into the shelter of the House, staring upward into the clouded twilight overhead. They had furled the sail, all but the clews, and now came the tricksy part.
Arthur Wetmore was the outside man, way out at the end of the cross yard, sitting on the footrope ready to pass a turn of the gasket around the clew—when somehow he lost his balance, slipping forward of the footrope, and came down.
He held on to the gasket, but it was a small rope, not two inches across, and it slid through his hands so that he fell into the sea. It must have hurt his bare hands terribly—it made Kay’s hands hurt as she watched.
They all saw him fall. Francis rushed aft, and as he ran, he was calling to the man at the wheel—it was Mr. Best, for the starboard watch—“Put the wheel hard down!”
Kay felt the instant change in their course, the ship responding even in this turbulent sea. Francis had already grabbed the lifebuoy. He threw it to Arthur, and it landed not ten feet from him—his arm reached out and clutched at the log line, but that too slipped through his fingers. When he came to the log, he held it for a moment, but that towed him under and he had to let go—but then Kay saw him take the few strokes, swimming hard, and he caught at the lifebuoy. Her heart was clamouring in her chest. Suddenly everything was awful. But he had the buoy.
Francis shouted, “Let go, t’gallant halyards! Let go, topsail halyards! Jacky, you there! Up aloft to watch for Arthur…”
Jacky swarmed up, faster than Kay had ever seen him go, and clung fast to watch.
The other men were working their way inward from the mainsail to safer positions and then all scrambling down, knowing what must be done. There was no time to take in more sail—Francis tore the covers off the gig, Seaton leaping from his station in the lifeboat and helping to unfasten the mooring, and six or seven of the men carried the boat over the deck to the lee side and threw her over the rail with a single line in each end. The gig was longer and stronger than the lifeboat, it would fare better on these bad seas.
Mr. Best and four of the strongest men, Douglas, Anderson, Lynch and Thomas, started out from the ship. Francis gave Thomas a tin of oil as he went over the side, for the sea was very heavy and now breaking badly.
Kay watched in terror, seeing the boat almost standing on end. She was still standing there, fists tight-clenched about the rail, when Francis spotted her and sent her down below. She did not protest, but went as she was bid.
In the saloon, Thea sat reading to Aren, as if nothing at all was happening. Kay told them, words clogging in her throat, and they waited together for a very long time, not wanting or daring to intrude up above. Then Thea stood and said she must—they could at least—ready things for the men returning.
She went to find Jiacheng, and they together made up the fires in the narrow forward saloon, while Kay and Aren fetched extra blankets from the lazaret and set them round the stoves to warm.
“Hot water too, please,” Thea said, and Kay and Aren fell to as Jiacheng’s bucket brigade. They were glad to be busy down below, while Thea went up—Francis had sent word down that they’d lost sight of the gig boat.
She came down shortly, saying the sea was dreadful, that she had seen nothing like it since the hurricane. But she did not pack Kay and Aren off to bed, perhaps realizing that Kay would not go, and thinking it best to keep Aren with them anyhow. Or perhaps even wanting their company, Kay thought. Kay sat beside her at one of the mess tables for a little while, holding her cold hand and kissing it to make it warm.
It seemed a very long time until they heard glad shouting and noise up on deck—then Thea sent them back to Aft quickly, to make room for the chilled men coming down, saying she would soon follow. Kay tucked Aren under one quilt with her on the banquette at the end of the saloon, far from the lamp, and he had fallen into a doze before Thea came.
In a little while Francis too came to the saloon and told them all that had happened. At least, he told Thea, not seeming to be aware of Kay and Aren in the shadows behind him. Even Thea had forgotten them.
“After half an hour the dark had come down so that we lost sight of the boat. I wore ship at once. We had clewed the topgallant sails up and the upper fore topsail down—” He caught himself up. “But that is for my report. Find me my inkwell, will you, Thea?”
She hastened for it, and some sheets of rough paper, and he sat at the table to tell the rest, scribbling a note now and again as he went through the tale.
“She was in a dead drift, as I wished to keep the boat to windward to give them a square run before the sea coming back. The rain squall had set in, blowing hard. The risk was terrible, and I set the ensign to recall the boat, but for—oh God—for an hour and a quarter, I tell you, we saw no sign of her. I gave her up.”
He stared across at Thea, his hand stilling on the page, silent for a moment. “One must go through the experience to realize how horrible is that feeling. Jacky Judge was in the main crosstrees all this time, trying to sight the boat—I sent him down for warming too, poor lad—and at last I saw her, right to windward, as the squall cleared, steering for the ship, running as much as ten feet of herself out of the water in those seas! They got under the lee of the ship and pulled alongside, the boat half-full of water, but no Arthur. He’s gone, poor fellow.”
Francis stopped again. Kay thought he was going to weep, and she was afraid to watch. He sat silent, his thumb twisting around his finger, over and over, and then continued, still dry-ey
ed. “Best says that, twice, the water was up to the thwarts as the sea broke over them—had she filled, they all of them would be gone. He says the oil saved them, smoothing the water around them and keeping the sea from breaking.”
Thea did not speak, but touched his hand where the thumb was coursing, coursing, tightening and releasing. The skin had gone white under the lamplight.
“One man—it was Douglas, I think—saw an empty lifebuoy on the top of the sea. They went on, on, until they lost sight of the ship in the squall, and then started back. Poor Best, he said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, to come back without him—and he did not think it possible then that they could save even themselves.”
Francis bent his head so Kay could hardly see him in the shadow. He breathed slow, through his mouth, and then went on. “I must make a note. The last Jacky Judge saw him, Arthur was on the weather quarter. He did have the lifebuoy around him, but several seas had broken over him. He could not have lasted long, the water is ice-cold…”
Francis wiped his face, which was all over wet with sudden tears Kay had not seen him shed. Thea knelt beside his chair, taking his wet hand in hers.
“The men are exhausted, they were out there two hours. I will never risk a boat’s crew again in such a sea—only Providence saved them. We waited till nine thirty, in no occasion of hope, you know, but through my inability to form the order, and then wore ship.”
Thea was weeping now. Kay did not know why she did not cry herself. Aren moved slightly in his sleep, and she tightened her arm about him.
“I do not see how some people can call sailors dogs,” Thea said. “The sea those brave men started out into, to try to save Arthur—if they could see them starting out in that gig boat, I am sure they never would call them so again.”
Francis nodded, and stood, and said, “I must go and make sure—I’ll write it up tomorrow, and we’ll put into Montevideo to report.”
He mopped his face once more, and touched a hand to Thea’s shoulder where she still crouched, and started back up the companionway. “You will have to cable to poor Arthur’s mother,” Thea said after him, but he made no reply.
Kay took Aren’s hand to wake him gently, and led him to his bed. As she tucked him into his blue blanket, he said, “A dolphin must come up out of the sea and carry him now, Kay,” and she nodded and kissed his cheek. His arm tightened around her neck and then it slackened, and he was asleep. He was very young still.
So was Arthur young. Arthur, who had gone into the sea.
Kay went to her own bed, expecting to dream of looking overboard into the grey scalloping waves, but did not dream at all.
* * *
—
In the morning, Francis wrote it up in his logbook. Sitting beside him at the table in the saloon, her own books disregarded, Kay read the account:
1 bag, 1 quilt, 1 pillow, 1 pannikin, 1 cup, 3 shirts, 3 prs. socks, 4 prs. dungarees, 2 pr. trousers, 1 coat, 1 pr. shoes, 1 suit oil clothes, 1 cap. In addition to personal belongings, Arthur was owed $56.47 in wages.
Francis dusted the page with sand and closed the logbook. It was not much, to be all that was left of Arthur, who had showed her how to ballantine a rope.
17
Corcovado
On Thursday they saw a raft with a man fishing; later in the day they could see detail on the coastline of Argentina. Three steamers passed by, going south, their engines untroubled by wind or tide. But Kay thought the passengers must feel the heavy seas, at any rate, even if the captains were not worried. A man standing by the rail of the third lifted his arm to Kay and Aren, and Kay felt a squashing fright that he might be washed overboard next, and how would a steamer stop in time? But the man stayed tight to the rail, and as he passed them, he turned and went inside. Safe for now.
The Morning Light anchored at Montevideo to report the loss of Arthur Wetmore—the first port where Francis could send a cable to Arthur’s poor mother, a task he said took a sad toll on him “but would exact a sadder on the recipient”—and their departure was held up for a week by protocol concerning the death.
It seemed to Thea that their voyage was cursed now. Two days after leaving Montevideo, they collided with a large sperm whale, a jarring bump that rattled the windowpanes and threw the books onto the floor in the saloon—and an hour later the duty man came up to report a stern leak. There was no word as to how the whale had fared in the encounter, and Kay mourned it in an excessive way until Thea almost boxed her ears for her.
Francis went down to inspect and came up with brows like thunder, not willing to be coaxed out of his ill temper for a moment. He took his evening meal in the wheelhouse and did not come down to sleep at all, that Thea was aware of. The leak occupied every instant of his attention, and caused a great deal of extra work for the men, who were put in rotation at the pump.
Then they had headwinds most of the week, and a storm on Friday—the cold wind the Brazilians call the pampero. “They do not last long,” Francis promised Thea, some of his equilibrium recovered by the exhilaration of dealing with the weather. “But the wind blows very hard, with thunder and lightning.”
It was very rough. Aren loved it. He made a game in the saloon, sitting against one wall and sliding down the sudden slope of carpetless floor to the other wall. Thea laughed and caught him up before he banged into the baseboard with his boots, and he wriggled around in her arms and hid his face for a moment—perhaps he had been frightened after all?—before raising his head again to cough. His cough was back.
She kept his hand and went along for the medicine chest, and called down to Jiacheng for some of his soothing tea.
On Saturday, one of the sailors caught a big albacore, weighing about eighty pounds, and they all had an excellent dinner of it, Aft and sailors alike. Francis said it was all that kept the men from mutiny over the constant operation of the pump.
The Morning Light entered the mouth of Rio harbour on Sunday morning, past the beautiful promenade, which would have been a delightful sight had not the weary crew been on their last legs, and had Francis yet been able to throw off his sorrow and anger over Arthur Wetmore. Here would be a cable waiting him from Arthur’s mother, and Thea knew how much he dreaded reading that.
He came back from the cable office and down into the saloon with a grave face, which Thea at first attributed to grief—but it was not that, or not only that.
“There’s yellow fever here,” he said. “Captains with families are being advised to send them to Corcovado, a resort high on the mountain. Gomes in the shipping office recommends that we comply, says he’s never seen an outbreak like it, even after all their attempts at greater sanitation in the city. I dislike sending you, but we cannot chance it with the fever. I met Hilton, from the Abyssinia, you’ll remember him from old Yarmouth days—he’s sent his wife and daughter up ahead, so they’ll be company for you, and there are one or two other women you may count on. Gomes has arranged a trap to come in an hour to convey you up to the railway.”
Thea took his hand. “We’ll go,” she said. “What might it be—two weeks?—before you’ve finished the repairs? Too long to take the risk.” She was thinking of Aren’s cough.
“They are taking it very seriously, these fellows. Their own wives and children are already gone from the city.”
She’d meant to find Aren shoes, and he had gone right through his other pair of trousers; all that could wait. Thea turned to her cabin, calling for Kay and Aren to come at once and help her pack.
After three or four hours by pony trap over a bone-rattling road, they transferred to a cable car to get up to the mountain refuge. Kay had never been on one before, and of course Aren had never even heard of such a thing as a cog-and-wheel railway. He sat against the red leather bench with a hand on Thea’s knee for safety, eyes intent on everything around them. His ears almost moved, straining to catch the inflections of Portuguese.
What an interesting life he was having, Kay thought. He would have liked the train around the beach at Piha, and she could hardly wait to show him the escalators at Filene’s in Boston! She was having a curious life, too, of course—full of sights and sounds one could not have imagined, in Blade Lake.
They were comfortably settled in a long rear seat, with the window open onto the passing greenery, when partway up the cars suddenly stopped and ground their gears. Pilot’s head tensed under Kay’s hand, but he did not move or bark.
A group of nuns, black, voluminous birds on their way to the monastery, fell noisily to their knees and prayed in unison, with astonishing vigour, until after a few moments the train shuddered into motion again. Not speaking or understanding Portuguese, Kay assumed they were passing some religious shrine, until they arrived and were met by Mrs. Hilton, the Yarmouth captain’s wife, who told them that a few weeks earlier a train had crashed down the mountainside when the brakes failed to hold. Kay was glad not to have known that before the trip.
Outside the little station, signs in Portuguese (tantalizingly almost translatable, from its kinship to Latin) directed visitors to the zoo and a botanical gardens. Above the station, higher up the mountain, stood a large church and the small monastery, to which the line of nuns hurried in a straggling queue.
Mrs. Hilton and her daughter had been at the retreat for a week already, and had learned the ropes. She took firm charge of Thea and the luggage, steering her into the reception area of the pousada to find the manageress, explaining the protocol and meals and so on. She spoke a little Portuguese, Captain Hilton having been many months in Rio over the years, and helped translate room rates and other details for Thea. She introduced her daughter Marion, saying, “She’s just your Kay’s age, and will look after her all right. You go explore the summit, girls, and see you’re back in time for supper.”
The Difference Page 21
