Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures

by William Hope Hodgson

  An hour later, the two of them were safely aboard; and Pibby was stowing away into his sea-chest, with infinite satisfaction, a full hundred and fifty gold pieces, out of the knotted neckerchief that he had hidden in his shirt. Then, a sudden, unusual twinge of conscience troubled him; for he remembered how Captain Jat had carried him. He thought awhile, and presently reached down to the stored gold. After which, he went into the cabin and told Captain Jat that he believed they had discovered the position of the treasure, after all.

  In support of his statement, he planked down, upon the cabin table, one of the gold pieces, and explained how he had discovered it, whislt rooting among the sand in the hole.

  “Boy,” said Captain Jat solemnly, over the top of his fourth pewter of rum-toddy, “We’ll ashore again yon next v’yage an’ find yon treasure; aye! if so there’s ten thousand of them damned Iils. But it won’t be no manner of use now; for the whole place’ll be riotin’ for a month to come.”

  “Aye, Aye, Cap’n,” agreed Pibby, and boldly ventured his cup into the toddy, a second time; for the Captain had invited him to bring his cup and join him, whilst he told his yarn. But, for his pains, Captain Jat caught him by the scruff, and poured the good liquor down his back, inside his shirt.

  Which, after all, proved a very effective salve to Pibby Tawles’ suddenly troublesome conscience; for Pibby went back into his cabin, and without bothering to change his shirt, turned-in and slept with the utmost vigour and satisfaction. You will remember that he had omitted all mention of the hundred and forty nine remaining pieces of gold, which lay so snug in the bottom of his sea-chest!

  As I have remarked before, Pibby Tawles was undoubtedly a youth with a sound eye to the main chance.

  D. C .O. Cargunka

  The Bells of the “Laughing Sally”

  Ah!” said Cargunka to his reflection in the broken looking-glass under his office desk, “cleanliness may be next to Godliness; but I reckon good cooking is Godliness…. Leastaways, there’s precious little Godliness in a man wiv indisgestion!”

  He was sitting on a tea-chest in his office at the back of the dirty but important marine stores which fill half one side of Gallows Lane, in the town of Appledaulf, on the South coast. The marine stores belonged to him, as did the Red Lyon, public-house, next door.

  He sat on the tea-chest at this particular hour every morning, and peeled potatoes; for cooking was his hobby, almost his passion. The tea-chest had been hacked down to make a low seat, and he chose it, because—as he said—it “gave to his bones”; also, though of this he said nothing, the height of it brought his face below the level of his office desk, where reposed the broken mirror that I have already mentioned, and in which, from time to time, he looked at himself with infinite satisfaction, pushing back his hair from over his shaven temples, and taking great care not to damp the hair with his wet hand; for the curls were not Nature’s, but the curls of Hinde’s curlers, which he wore secretly every night.

  He finished peeling the last of his potatoes, and wiped his hands thoroughly on his apron. Then, he closed and pocketed the diminutive copy of Byron’s Poems which had been propped up on the chair, at the back of the basin into which he had put the peeled potatoes. He turned to a phonograph, which stood on the top of a Tate’s sugar box, and changed the wax cylinder. He wound the machine leisurely, and set it going. It was a new record, and he listened expectantly. There came a short prelude on a piano, and there burst out a splendid, rich contralto, so fine and good, that even the whir of the machine failed completely to destroy its essential humanity, which marked its quality.

  Cargunka leaned back contentedly.

  “My word!” he said; “that’s good! That’s fine!”

  “Eight bells!

  And the Laughing Sally sailed away,

  And the sound of the bells came back to me

  Across the sea

  Across the sea

  The sound of the bells came back to me

  As the Laughing Sally sailed that day

  Away and away with thee,

  My Man,

  Away with thee.”

  The deep contralto silenced, and there came the brief tinkle of the piano, as the phonograph ground away.

  “That’s sure the song they made up about old Cap’n Barstow’s ship,” muttered Cargunka, reflectively. “She never come back, an’ that’s three year, last Christmas as ever was… as ever was! Aye, they sure sail away. Like as I shall do someday, maybe…. They do say as he carried a sight of brass wiv him…. He never would trust no banks; I do know that….”

  The voice broke out again:—

  “And I stood on the shore and cried to thee

  That day Love sailed away from me….”

  And so to the end of the second stanza, which found Cargunka furtively rubbing one eye in sentimental fashion, with the corner of his dirty apron.

  “Aye!” he said, “an’ the bells of the Laughin’ Sally ring across the sea… I guess that’s how it’ll be wiv me.”

  He pulled out a notebook, and jotted down the rhyme; then blew his nose. He was thinking of the two brigs that he owned, and of the periodic trips he made in them, between Appledaulf and far off San Francisco, where he owned the Dot-And-Carry-One Saloon, on the Water Front. Someday, he felt, there would be a song about one of his ships, when she went missing. As he conned over possible rhymes, the phonograph gave out the beginning of the third stanza:—

  “The Laughing Sally sailed away

  Into the Evermore that day,

  And the sound of her bells came back to me

  Across the deep in the evening grey….”

  Cargunka wiped his eyes soberly, and made shift to jot down two fresh rhymes that had just occurred to him.

  “My word!” he muttered; “that’s first chop! That’s mag-ni-ficent:—

  “The Happy Return, she sailed away

  And her bell ting-tinged the livelong day….”

  he wrote down, labouriously. He was obviously thinking of one of his own brigs.

  The phonograph began the fourth stanza of the “Fate of the Laughing Sally,” and Cargunka lay back to enjoy it, with his eyes closed. He was interrupted in his æsthetic pleasures in an almost incomprehensible fashion; for Jensag, his quietly superior barman, ordinarily intensely silent and grave, had dashed suddenly in through the doorway that opened out of the back of the bar into Cargunka’s office.

  “Stop it!” shouted Jensag, in a voice of extraordinary energy. “Stop it!”

  “And the bells of the Laughing Sally ring,

  And die away forever….”

  sang the phonograph.

  “Stop it!” roared Jensag. “Stop it!” He barged crashing over the bucket of dirty water and peelings; then rose and kicked the bucket across the office. “Stop it!” he shouted, once more.

  Cargunka rose to his full height of five feet, two, and turned upon the big, clean-shaven, white-faced, strangely tensed-up barman.

  “Get—out—of—here!” he said, slowly; gritting out the words at spaced intervals.

  “And the bells grow faint and lost,”

  sang the phonograph.

  “Stop it!” roared Jensag. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Get out!” said Cargunka, still in a slow voice.

  “I’ll stop it myself!” said the bartender, in a voice that was suddenly quiet and quivering with an extraordinary, fierce suppression.

  He made one swift step towards the machine, swung up a quick foot, and the phonograph flew across the office, wailing the one word:— “Bells,” and fell with a crash into a ruin of broken woodwork, tin and disrupted clockwork.

  “My Oath!” said Cargunka, still in that slow, quiet voice. “My old man used ter reckon we was a saved family an’ he brought us up peaceful; but he always said as the Lord had no sort of use for worms….” He began to take off his coat, with a curious cheerful look shining in the back of his well-shaped, dark blue eyes.

  He stepped past the still quivering
barman, and thrust his head through the open doorway into the back of the bar.

  “M’ria!” he shouted, “come an’ take the bar!”

  Then he walked back into his office, closed the door quietly after him, and spoke to the big bartender:—

  “Come along out into the big room, my lad,” he said, “an’ take your coat off. You can come in wiv the explanations after.”

  The bartender said something in a queer voice, that might have been a protest; then, as if realising the futility of anything that he might say, at this tense stage of affairs, he took off his coat, and followed the halting, “dot-and-carry” step of his master.

  In the big room, Cargunka wheeled round smartly:—

  “Put your hands up, my lad,” he said, quietly. “We’ll see if you’s as good at fightin’ as you is at bustin’ up good property.”

  The big barman, at this point, made an ineffectual effort to say something; but Cargunka headed him off. “Fight!” he said. “Talk afterwards! My Oath! I’ve not had a do for a month of Sundays!”

  Then they fought.

  ***

  “I’m never friends to no man!” said Cargunka, five minutes later, as he pillowed the big barman’s head in the crook of his arm, and poured some very good brandy down his throat; “not till I’ve knocked the ’ell out of ’im.”

  He thrust one long, enormously muscular arm under the big man’s thighs, and lifted him easily to an old cabin settee, that stood against one wall of the big room.

  Chapter II

  “Now, my lad, we’ll talk,” said Cargunka, when the big barman came round from his knock-out. “What was wiv you, to come into my office like you did, bustin’ up things? You just talk to me as if I was your old man. I guess a bit of it, an’ you needn’t fear to tell it all straight out. Was it the lady in the phonygraft, or was she singin’ your donah’s song, that’s dead an’ gone this while back?”

  With further persuasion, of a rough but kindly sort, the big barman told the whole brief tale.

  “That was Stella Bavanga singing,” he said, in a strange voice. “That was her stage name. ‘The Fate of the Laughing Sally’ was her big song. It was written five years ago, when the four-masted schooner, Laughing Sally, was given up for lost. About a year and a half later, Stella got a fit of bad health, and the doctor said she’d have to go a sea voyage. She went for a trip in a barque of the same name as the schooner that was lost. A man named Barstow was the Captain; a queer sort of man. I hated her to go. Yes, I was the husband of Stella Bavangal and I was superstitious about the name… after the song, you know. My God! I heard the bell ring, as she went down the river. You know the rest; she never came back; and I lost all interest in life. I’ve come down now to bartending! She made that record. She did a lot of that work….”

  Dot-and-Carry-One Cargunka’s eyes shone, as the sympathy and sentiment rose in him:—

  “My Oath!” he muttered, gently. “My Oath! I’m glad you broke the bloomin’ phonygraft! I’d a broke the old bloomin’ shop up, if I’d been in your cloes!”

  Chapter III

  “Strike me pink!” said a burly-looking man to D.C.O. Cargunka, some weeks later. “I tell youse, old Dot-an’-Carry, I made no blame error. It was the barque herself. I recernised ’er by the skullwork round the ’house. We blew past, not twenty fathoms outside the reef. I thought we’d sure have our bottom scratched right off’n us, I did that, we was that close in. She was right in over the reef; close up agin the cliff face, as snug as a wop in a rug. However she come there, the Lord, He knows, I don’t.

  “No one else recernised ’er, but me; an’ I kep’ it to tell you. I knowed you’d play fair, an’ give me the worf of the news, or a share; I don’t mind so which way it comes to me. Ole Barstow carried his brass wiv him, an’ there should be a pile; he didn’t trust no banks; same’s he didn’t trust no wimmin. I’ve heard him say so many a time, when I sailed wiv him. Once, when it was blame calm, I heard money chinkin’ down below, an’ I went an’ peeped down the cabin skylight; and there was the Ole Man wiv it in a bucket. Strike me! but I’m speakin’ trewth. The ole devil had it in a wooden poop-bucket, all sovrins, an’ he was runnin’ ’is hands through it, like as you might run your fists through a bucket of peas. I guess he was just dotty on that oof of his. An’ it’ll be in her right this moment, if no blame thief han’t got to her first; an’ I doubt they’d find the cash; for she was middlin’ up to her rails; so I guess she’s full up wiv sea-water, an’ you’ll need to take a pump an’ a divin’ outfit. Now then, ole Dot-an’-Carry, what’s it going to be?”

  “Where’s the island?” asked Dot-and-Carry-One Cargunka. “Give it a name, my lad.”

  “Not much, old D.C.O.! Not much! You fix up what it’s worf to me first!” said the man.

  “A quarter of all we get,” said Cargunka, after thinking a minute. “That’s if I decide to ’ave a go at it.”

  “ ’Arf!” said the man. “Make it ’arf, D.C.O.?”

  “No,” said Cargunka. “You’ll get your quarter clear. I’ve got to stan’ all the expense. Turn up the name, or I’ll drop out!”

  “It’s yon Three Finger Island, out to the West of the Vardee Islands,” said the man. “You sign me on as the bo’sun, Dot-an’-Carry. They told me down to the wharf, as you was takin’ a run out to ’Frisco, ’s soon as the Happy Return was ready. She ain’t no bo’sun; an’ it won’t be much off our course to run in to them Vardee Islands, an’ lift the stuff. There should be a matter of thousands, by my reckoning.”

  And so it was settled.

  Chapter IV

  Cargunka stood on the lee side of the poop of the Happy Return, and stared away to leeward. They were a hundred and four days out from England, and had sighted Three Finger Island at daybreak.

  Through the telescope, Cargunka could now see the wreck of the Laughing Sally, inside the reef of the island, and close in-shore. She was almost submerged; yet Cargunka had recognised her at once, by a number of details, one of which was the quaint, white-painted skull-beading round the top of her poop-deck house.

  Suddenly, D.C.O. Cargunka walked away aft, and knocked three times on the deck with his heel. Immediately, as though he had been waiting only for the signal, there sprang up through the after scuttle, Jensag, Cargunka’s one-time barman at the Red Lyon. Cargunka had brought him with him on this trip, for the man had heard something of the truth from Durrit, the one who had brought the news; and he had begged so hard to be allowed to come, that Cargunka had at last signed him on as steward; felling that it might be kinder for the poor fellow to realise, by an actual sight of the wreck, that it was utterly useless to begin hoping any vague hopes concerning his long-dead wife.

  “Now, my lad,” said Cargunka, handing his own telescope to the shaking man, “you get a hold of yourself. I told you not to get hopin’. Take a look, an’ you’ll see she’s deep in the water. There’s no more than ’er deck house and fo’cas’le-’ead deck above. It’s three year since she must have struck there; and there’s just no chance at all as you’ll find a soul. Leastways, not humanly speakin’, lad. Though the Almighty, He can do wonderful things, like. But, for all sakes! don’t get hopin’ anything at all. There’s a dozen things that tells me already as there’s no any livin’ human ashore yon.”

  The steward said nothing in reply. He was busy, trying to hold the glass steady; but at last had to give up the attempt, because he shook so that he could not bring it to bear on any one point for more than a fraction of time.

  It was late in the afternoon, when the Happy Return let go her anchor within the shelter of the reef, not more than a hundred fathoms away from the place where the wreck of the Laughing Sally lay with only her deck house top and masts in view above the water.

  “You can let the men go ashore for a run, Mister,” said Cargunka to the Skipper, “as soon as you’ve got all snug and tidied up. Tell the steward to give ’em some grub, an’ they can take one of the boilers and kettle out of my galley. I’ll run
ashore presently an’ cook them up somethin’ for their picnic. Let the steward go wiv ’em. I guess he’ll be easier if we let him search round a bit, poor devil.”

  The men put on a spurt to make all snug, when they heard from the Skipper that they were to be allowed ashore; and meanwhile, Cargunka had the little shore-punt put over the side; for he meant to make a visit to the wreck, and see how she lay. He climbed down into the punt, and sculled her over to the Laughing Sally. Yet he could distinguish little under the water; for the light of the sun lay now across the sea, and made it impossible to see to any depth. He could make out vaguely, however, the outline of the submerged fo’cas’le-head; and, rising from it, the dome and framework of the ship’s brass bell, showing a vague green shape of verdigris, just below the surface; for the whole of the vessel was covered, as I have said, except the top of the poop-deck house and the three stumps of the masts.

  Cargunka realised that he could discover nothing further that evening. The tide was at its highest, and he knew the wreck would be partially uncovered at low water, as it had been when he saw it first though the telescope, earlier in the day. Meanwhile, as he could do nothing, he put the punt round and sculled ashore to where the men were making a fire on the beach.

  Presently, he was indulging in his hobby of cooking, which was so strong a need in him, that he never signed on a cook when he took a voyage in one of his brigs; but did all the cooking himself, occupying strictly the position of cook (or “Doctor” in sea-parlance); but claiming his rights as Owner, as soon as the second dog-watch came along each evening; when he would shed his long apron, and ascend to the poop; there to occupy the Captain’s deck-chair, the while that he smoked and yarned.