Michael, Brother of Jerry

by Jack London

  CHAPTER X

  Michael left the _Makambo_ as he had come on board, through a port-hole.Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was Kwaque's hands thatreceived him. It had been quick work, and daring, in the dark of earlyevening. From the boat-deck, with a bowline under Kwaque's arms and aturn of the rope around a pin, Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprousservitor into the waiting launch.

  On his way below, he encountered Captain Duncan, who saw fit to warn him:

  "No shannigan with Killeny Boy, Steward. He must go back to Tulagi withus."

  "Yes, sir," the steward agreed. "An' I'm keepin' him tight in my room tomake safe. Want to see him, sir?"

  The very frankness of the invitation made the captain suspicious, and thethought flashed through his mind that perhaps Killeny Boy was alreadyhidden ashore somewhere by the dog-stealing steward.

  "Yes, indeed I'd like to say how-do-you-do to him," Captain Duncananswered.

  And his was genuine surprise, on entering the steward's room, to beholdMichael just rousing from his curled-up sleep on the floor. But when heleft, his surprise would have been shocking could he have seen throughthe closed door what immediately began to take place. Out through theopen port-hole, in a steady stream, Daughtry was passing the contents ofthe room. Everything went that belonged to him, including the turtle-shell and the photographs and calendars on the wall. Michael, with thecommand of silence laid upon him, went last. Remained only a sea-chestand two suit-cases, themselves too large for the port-hole but bare ofcontents.

  When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later andpaused for a gossip with the customs officer and a quartermaster at thehead of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little dreamed that his casualglance was resting on his steward for the last time. He watched him godown the gang-plank empty-handed, with no dog at his heels, and strolloff along the wharf under the electric lights.

  Ten minutes after Captain Duncan saw the last of his broad back,Daughtry, in the launch with his belongings and heading for Jackson Bay,was hunched over Michael and caressing him, while Kwaque, crooning withjoy under his breath that he was with all that was precious to him in theworld, felt once again in the side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make surethat his beloved jews' harp had not been left behind.

  Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well. Among otherthings, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages fromBurns Philp. The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and this wasthe very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had decided he couldrealize from the sale of Michael. He had stolen him to sell. He waspaying for him the sales price that had tempted him.

  For, as one has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles the noble.Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a price had been theabasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out ofsheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had beenthe ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as thelaunch chug-chugged across the quiet harbour under the southern stars,Dag Daughtry would have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in abattle to continue to have and to hold the dog he had originallyconceived of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.

  * * * * *

  The _Mary Turner_, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after daybreak, andDaughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for ever on SydneyHarbour.

  "Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven," the AncientMariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help butnotice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked their ears tolisten and glanced each to the other with scant eyes. "It was in '52, in1852, on such a day as this, all drinking and singing along the decks, wecleared from Sydney in the _Wide Awake_. A pretty craft, oh sirs, a mostclever and pretty craft. A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all ofus, fore and aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew. The captain was anelderly gentleman of twenty-eight, the third officer another of eighteen,the down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet on his cheek. He,too, died in the longboat. And the captain gasped out his last under thepalm trees of the isle unnamable while the brown maidens wept about himand fanned the air to his parching lungs."

  Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his newroutine of duty. But while he made up bunks with fresh linen anddirected Kwaque's efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he shook hishead to himself and muttered, "He's a keen 'un. He's a keen 'un. Allain't fools that look it."

  The fine lines of the _Mary Turner_ were explained by the fact that shehad been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on board of herwas room and to spare. The forecastle with bunk-space for twelve, beddedbut eight Scandinavian seamen. The five staterooms of the cabinaccommodated the three treasure-hunters, the Ancient Mariner, and themate--the latter a large-bodied, gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr.Jackson through inability of his shipmates to pronounce the name he hadsigned on the ship's articles.

  Remained the steerage, just for'ard of the cabin, separated from it by astout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main deck. On thisdeck, between the break of the poop and the steerage companion, stood thegalley. In the steerage itself, which possessed a far largerliving-space than the cabin, were six capacious bunks, each double thewidth of the forecastle bunks, and each curtained and with no bunk aboveit.

  "Some fella glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?" Daughtry told his seventeen-years-old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a centenarian,the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached torso of an elderlyJapanese wrestler. "Eh, Kwaque! What you fella think?"

  And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently rolled hiseyes in agreement.

  "You likee this piecee bunk?" the cook, a little old Chinaman, asked thesteward with eager humility, inviting the white man's acceptance of hisown bunk with a wave of arm.

  Daughtry shook his head. He had early learned that it was wise to getalong well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously given togoing suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their shipmates withbutcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest remembered provocation.Besides, there was an equally good bunk all the way across the width ofthe steerage from the Chinaman's. The bunk next on the port side to thecook's and abaft of it Daughtry allotted to Kwaque. Thus he retained forhimself and Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks. Thenext one abaft of his own he named "Killeny Boy's," and called on Kwaqueand the cook to take notice. Daughtry had a sense that the cook, whosename had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not entirely satisfiedwith the arrangement; but it affected him no more than a momentarycuriosity about a Chinaman who drew the line at a dog taking a bunk inthe same apartment with him.

  Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to thesteerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer, Daughtry observedthat Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings across the steerage tothe third bunk on the starboard side. This had put him with Daughtry andMichael and left Kwaque with half the steerage to himself. Daughtry'scuriosity recrudesced.

  "What name along that fella Chink?" he demanded of Kwaque. "He no like'm you fella boy stop 'm along same fella side along him. What for? Myword! What name? That fella Chink make 'm me cross along him too much!"

  "Suppose 'm that fella Chink maybe he think 'm me kai-kai along him,"Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.

  "All right," the steward concluded. "We find out. You move 'm along mybunk, I move 'm along that fella Chink's bunk."

  This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied thestarboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he went ondeck and aft to his duties. On his next return he found Ah Moy hadtransferred back to the port side, but this time into the last bunk aft.

  "Seems the beggar's taken a fancy to me," the steward smiled to himself.

  Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy's reason for bunking always on theopposite s
ide from Kwaque.

  "I changee," the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to pleaseand placate, in response to Daughtry's direct question. "All the timelike that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?"

  Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy's slant eyesbetrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily gazed onKwaque's two permanently bent fingers of the left hand and on Kwaque'sforehead, between the eyes, where the skin appeared a shade darker, atrifle thicker, and was marked by the first beginning of three shortvertical lines or creases that were already giving him the lion-likeappearance, the leonine face so named by the experts and technicians ofthe fell disease.

  As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he haddrunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque's bunksabout. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to noticethat he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied. Nor did henotice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupiedall the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended itfrom the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space andunmolested.

  Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thingin keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind. He didnotice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley.Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was: "That'sthe all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've ever clapped my lamps on. Clean ingalley, clean in steerage, clean in everything. He's always washing thedishes in boiling water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes orbedding. My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"

  For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind. Gettingacquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the wholesituation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and toone another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the _MaryTurner_ across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire toknow the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.

  "We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere northard ofNew Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glancesinto the binnacle. But that was all the information concerning theship's navigation he could steal; for Captain Doane took the observationsand worked them out, to the exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doanealways methodically locked up his chart and log. That there were heateddiscussions in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude werebandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he couldnot know, because it was early impressed upon him that the one place forhim never to be, at such times of council, was the cabin. Also, he couldnot but conclude that these councils were real battles wherein Messrs.Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw screamed at each other and pounded thetable at each other, when they were not patiently and most politelyinterrogating the Ancient Mariner.

  "He's got their goat," the steward early concluded to himself; but,thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient Mariner's goat.

  Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner's name. This, Daughtrygot from him, and nothing else did he get save maunderings and ravingsabout the heat of the longboat and the treasure a fathom deep under thesand.

  "There's some of us plays games, an' some of us as looks on an' admiresthe games they see," the steward made his bid one day. "And I'm surethese days lookin' on at a pretty game. The more I see it the more I gotto admire."

  The Ancient Mariner dreamed back into the steward's eyes with a blank,unseeing gaze.

  "On the _Wide Awake_ all the stewards were young, mere boys," hemurmured.

  "Yes, sir," Daughtry agreed pleasantly. "From all you say, the _WideAwake_, with all its youngsters, was sure some craft. Not like the crowdof old 'uns on this here hooker. But I doubt, sir, that them youngstersever played as clever games as is being played aboard us right now. Ijust got to admire the fine way it's being done, sir."

  "I'll tell you something," the Ancient Mariner replied, with suchconfidential air that almost Daughtry leaned to hear. "No steward on the_Wide Awake_ could mix a highball in just the way I like, as well as you.We didn't know cocktails in those days, but we had sherry and bitters. Agood appetizer, too, a most excellent appetizer."

  "I'll tell you something more," he continued, just as it seemed he hadfinished, and just in time to interrupt Daughtry away from his thirdattempt to ferret out the true inwardness of the situation on the _MaryTurner_ and of the Ancient Mariner's part in it. "It is mighty nigh fivebells, and I should be very pleased to have one of your deliciouscocktails ere I go down to dine."

  More suspicious than ever of him was Daughtry after this episode. But,as the days went by, he came more and more to the conclusion that CharlesStough Greenleaf was a senile old man who sincerely believed in theabiding of a buried treasure somewhere in the South Seas.

  Once, polishing the brass-work on the hand-rails of the cabincompanionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his terriblescar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian Jew. The pair ofthem had plied him with extra drinks in the hope of getting more out ofhim by way of his loosened tongue.

  "It was in the longboat," the aged voice cackled up the companion. "Onthe eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke. We in the sternsheetsstood together against them. It was all a madness. We were starvedsore, but we were mad for water. It was over the water it began. For,see you, it was our custom to lick the dew from the oar-blades, thegunwales, the thwarts, and the inside planking. And each man of us haddeveloped property in the dew-collecting surfaces. Thus, the tiller andthe rudder-head and half of the plank of the starboard stern-sheet hadbecome the property of the second officer. No one of us lacked thehonour to respect his property. The third officer was a lad, onlyeighteen, a brave and charming boy. He shared with the second officerthe starboard stern-sheet plank. They drew a line to mark the division,and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during the night-hours,ever dreamed of trespassing across the line. They were too honourable.

  "But the sailors--no. They squabbled amongst themselves over the dew-surfaces, and only the night before one of them was knifed because he sostole. But on this night, waiting for the dew, a little of it, to becomemore, on the surfaces that were mine, I heard the noises of a dew-lappermoving aft along the port-gunwale--which was my property aft of thestroke-thwart clear to the stern. I emerged from a nightmare dream ofcrystal springs and swollen rivers to listen to this night-drinker that Ifeared might encroach upon what was mine.

  "Nearer he came to the line of my property, and I could hear him makinglittle moaning, whimpering noises as he licked the damp wood. It waslike listening to an animal grazing pasture-grass at night and evergrazing nearer.

  "It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand--to catch whatlittle dew might fall upon it. I did not know who it was, but when helapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he licked up myprecious drops of dew, I struck out. The boat-stretcher caught himfairly on the nose--it was the bo's'n--and the mutiny began. It was thebo's'n's knife that sliced down my face and sliced away my fingers. Thethird officer, the eighteen-year-old lad, fought well beside me, andsaved me, so that, just before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove thebo's'n's carcass overside."

  A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabinplunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the timeforgotten. And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself under hisbreath: "The old party's sure been through the mill. Such things justgot to happen."

  "No," the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in replyto a query. "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint. It was theexertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so little moisturewas there in my system that I didn't bleed much. And the amazing thing,under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed. Thesecond officer sewed me up next day with a needle he'd made out of anivory toothpick and with twi
ne he twisted out of the threads from afrayed tarpaulin."

  "Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on thefingers that were cut off?" Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta ask.

  "Yes, and one beauty. I found it afterward in the boat bottom andpresented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me. It was a largediamond. I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an Englishsailor in the Barbadoes. He'd stolen it, and of course it was worthmore. It was a beautiful gem. The sandalwood man did not merely save mylife for it. In addition, he spent fully a hundred pounds in outfittingme and buying me a passage from Thursday Island to Shanghai."

  * * * * *

  "There's no getting away from them rings he wears," Daughtry overheardSimon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the dark on the weatherpoop. "You don't see that kind nowadays. They're old, real old. They'renot men's rings so much as what you'd call, in the old-fashioned days,gentlemen's rings. Real gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore ringslike them. I wish collateral like them came into my loan offices thesedays. They're worth big money."

  * * * * *

  "I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I'll be wishin' beforethe voyage is over that I'd gone on a lay of the treasure instead ofstraight wages," Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that night at turning-in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he paused midway in thedraining of his sixth bottle. "Take it from me, Killeny, that oldgentleman knows what he's talkin' about, an' has been some hummer in hisdays. Men don't lose the fingers off their hands and get their faceschopped open just for nothing--nor sport rings that makes a Jewpawnbroker's mouth water."