Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (78 page)

“I wonder your nervous system isn’t completely wrecked,” said Mrs. Cheyne.

“What for, Mama? I worked like a horse and I ate like a hog and I slept like a dead man.”

That was too much for Mrs. Cheyne, who began to think of her visions of a corpse rocking on the salty seas. She went to her stateroom, and Harvey curled up beside his father, explaining his indebtedness.

“You can depend upon me to do everything I can for the crowd, Harve. They seem to be good men on your showing.”

“Best in the Fleet, sir. Ask at Gloucester,” said Harvey. “But Disko believes still he’s cured me of being crazy. Dan’s the only one I’ve let on to about you, and our private cars and all the rest of it, and I’m not quite sure Dan believes. I want to paralyze ‘em to-morrow. Say, can’t they run the ‘Constance’ over to Gloucester? Mama don’t look fit to be moved, anyway, and we’re bound to finish cleaning out by tomorrow. Wouverman takes our fish. You see, we’re the first off the Banks this season, and it’s four twenty-five a quintal. We held out till he paid it. They want it quick.”

“You mean you’ll have to work to-morrow, then?”

“I told Troop I would. I’m on the scales. I’ve brought the tallies with me.” He looked at the greasy notebook with an air of importance that made his father choke. “There isn’t but three — no — two ninety-four or five quintal more by my reckoning.”

“Hire a substitute,” suggested Cheyne, to see what Harvey would say.

“Can’t, sir. I’m tally-man for the schooner. Troop says I’ve a better head for figures than Dan. Troop’s a mighty just man.”

“Well, suppose I don’t move the ‘Constance’ to-night, how’ll you fix it?”

Harvey looked at the clock, which marked twenty past eleven.

“Then I’ll sleep here till three and catch the four o’clock freight. They let us men from the Fleet ride free as a rule.”

“That’s a notion. But I think we can get the ‘Constance’ around about as soon as your men’s freight. Better go to bed now.”

Harvey spread himself on the sofa, kicked off his boots, and was asleep before his father could shade the electrics. Cheyne sat watching the young face under the shadow of the arm thrown over the forehead, and among many things that occurred to him was the notion that he might perhaps have been neglectful as a father.

“One never knows when one’s taking one’s biggest risks,” he said. “It might have been worse than drowning; but I don’t think it has — I don’t think it has. If it hasn’t, I haven’t enough to pay Troop, that’s all; and I don’t think it has.”

Morning brought a fresh sea breeze through the windows, the “Constance” was side-tracked among freight-cars at Gloucester, and Harvey had gone to his business.

“Then he’ll fall overboard again and be drowned,” the mother said bitterly.

“We’ll go and look, ready to throw him a rope in case. You’ve never seen him working for his bread,” said the father.

“What nonsense! As if any one expected — ”

“Well, the man that hired him did. He’s about right, too.”

They went down between the stores full of fishermen’s oilskins to Wouverman’s wharf where the
We’re Here
rode high, her Bank flag still flying, all hands busy as beavers in the glorious morning light. Disko stood by the main hatch superintending Manuel, Penn, and Uncle Salters at the tackle. Dan was swinging the loaded baskets inboard as Long Jack and Tom Platt filled them, and Harvey, with a notebook, represented the skipper’s interests before the clerk of the scales on the salt-sprinkled wharf-edge.

“Ready!” cried the voices below. “Haul!” cried Disko. “Hi!” said Manuel. “Here!” said Dan, swinging the basket. Then they heard Harvey’s voice, clear and fresh, checking the weights.

The last of the fish had been whipped out, and Harvey leaped from the string-piece six feet to a ratline, as the shortest way to hand Disko the tally, shouting, “Two ninety-seven, and an empty hold!”

“What’s the total, Harve?” said Disko.

“Eight sixty-five. Three thousand six hundred and seventy-six dollars and a quarter. ‘Wish I’d share as well as wage.”

“Well, I won’t go so far as to say you hevn’t deserved it, Harve. Don’t you want to slip up to Wouverman’s office and take him our tallies?”

“Who’s that boy?” said Cheyne to Dan, well used to all manner of questions from those idle imbeciles called summer boarders.

“Well, he’s kind o’ supercargo,” was the answer. “We picked him up struck adrift on the Banks. Fell overboard from a liner, he sez. He was a passenger. He’s by way o’ hem’ a fisherman now.”

“Is he worth his keep?”

“Ye-ep. Dad, this man wants to know ef Harve’s worth his keep. Say, would you like to go aboard? We’ll fix up a ladder for her.”

“I should very much, indeed. ‘Twon’t hurt you, Mama, and you’ll be able to see for yourself.”

The woman who could not lift her head a week ago scrambled down the ladder, and stood aghast amid the mess and tangle aft.

“Be you anyways interested in Harve?” said Disko.

“Well, ye-es.”

“He’s a good boy, an’ ketches right hold jest as he’s bid. You’ve heard haow we found him? He was sufferin’ from nervous prostration, I guess, ‘r else his head had hit somethin’, when we hauled him aboard. He’s all over that naow. Yes, this is the cabin. ‘Tain’t in order, but you’re quite welcome to look araound. Those are his figures on the stove-pipe, where we keep the reckonin’ mostly.”

“Did he sleep here?” said Mrs. Cheyne, sitting on a yellow locker and surveying the disorderly bunks.

“No. He berthed forward, madam, an’ only fer him an’ my boy hookin’ fried pies an muggin’ up when they ought to ha’ been asleep, I dunno as I’ve any special fault to find with him.”

“There weren’t nothin’ wrong with Harve,” said Uncle Salters, descending the steps. “He hung my boots on the main-truck, and he ain’t over an’ above respectful to such as knows more’n he do, specially about farmin’; but he were mostly misled by Dan.”

Dan in the meantime, profiting by dark hints from Harvey early that morning, was executing a war-dance on deck. “Tom, Tom!” he whispered down the hatch. “His folks has come, an’ Dad hain’t caught on yet, an’ they’re pow-wowin’ in the cabin. She’s a daisy, an’ he’s all Harve claimed he was, by the looks of him.”

“Howly Smoke!” said Long Jack, climbing out covered with salt and fish-skin. “D’ye belave his tale av the kid an’ the little four-horse rig was thrue?”

“I knew it all along,” said Dan. “Come an’ see Dad mistook in his judgments.”

They came delightedly, just in time to hear Cheyne say: “I’m glad he has a good character, because — he’s my son.”

Disko’s jaw fell, — Long Jack always vowed that he heard the click of it, — and he stared alternately at the man and the woman.

“I got his telegram in San Diego four days ago, and we came over.”

“In a private car?” said Dan. “He said ye might.”

“In a private car, of course.”

Dan looked at his father with a hurricane of irreverent winks.

“There was a tale he told us av drivin’ four little ponies in a rig av his own,” said Long Jack. “Was that thrue now?”

“Very likely,” said Cheyne. “Was it, Mama?”

“He had a little drag when we were in Toledo, I think,” said the mother.

Long Jack whistled. “Oh, Disko!” said he, and that was all.

“I wuz — I am mistook in my jedgments — worse’n the men o’ Marblehead,” said Disko, as though the words were being windlassed out of him. “I don’t mind ownin’ to you, Mr. Cheyne, as I mistrusted the boy to be crazy. He talked kinder odd about money.”

“So he told me.”

“Did he tell ye anything else? ‘Cause I pounded him once.” This with a somewhat anxious glance at Mrs. Cheyne.

“Oh, yes,” Cheyne replied. “I should say it probably did him more good than anything else in the world.”

“I jedged ‘twuz necessary, er I wouldn’t ha’ done it. I don’t want you to think we abuse our boys any on this packet.”

“I don’t think you do, Mr. Troop.”

Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces — Disko’s ivory-yellow, hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters’s, with its rim of agricultural hair; Penn’s bewildered simplicity; Manuel’s quiet smile; Long Jack’s grin of delight, and Tom Platt’s scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother’s wits in her eyes, and she rose with out-stretched hands.

“Oh, tell me, which is who?” said she, half sobbing. “I want to thank you and bless you — all of you.”

“Faith, that pays me a hunder time,” said Long Jack.

Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel’s arms when she understood that he had first found Harvey.

“But how shall I leave him dreeft?” said poor Manuel. “What do you yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at? We are in one good boy, and I am ever so pleased he come to be your son.”

“And he told me Dan was his partner!” she cried. Dan was already sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to show her the foc’sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down to see Harvey’s identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook cleaning up the stove, and he nodded as though she were some one he had expected to meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the boat’s daily life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved hands on the greasy table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with dancing eyes.

“And who’s ever to use the
We’re Here
after this?” said Long Jack to Tom Platt. “I feel as if she’d made a cathedral av ut all.”

“Cathedral!” sneered Tom Platt. “Oh, if it had bin even the Fish C’mmission boat instid of this bally-hoo o’ blazes. If we only hed some decency an’ order an’ side-boys when she goes over! She’ll have to climb that ladder like a hen, an’ we — we ought to be mannin’ the yards!”

“Then Harvey was not mad,” said Penn, slowly, to Cheyne.

“No, indeed — thank God,” the big millionaire replied, stooping down tenderly.

“It must be terrible to be mad. Except to lose your child, I do not know anything more terrible. But your child has come back? Let us thank God for that.”

“Hello!” cried Harvey, looking down upon them benignly from the wharf.

“I wuz mistook, Harve. I wuz mistook,” said Disko, swiftly, holding up a hand. “I wuz mistook in my jedgments. Ye needn’t rub in any more.”

“Guess I’ll take care o’ that,” said Dan, under his breath.

“You’ll be goin’ off naow, won’t ye?”

“Well, not without the balance of my wages, ‘less you want to have the
We’re Here
attached.”

“Thet’s so; I’d clean forgot”; and he counted out the remaining dollars. “You done all you contracted to do, Harve; and you done it ‘baout’s well as if you’d been brought up — ” Here Disko brought himself up. He did not quite see where the sentence was going to end.

“Outside of a private car?” suggested Dan, wickedly.

“Come on, and I’ll show her to you,” said Harvey.

Cheyne stayed to talk with Disko, but the others made a procession to the depot, with Mrs. Cheyne at the head. The French maid shrieked at the invasion; and Harvey laid the glories of the “Constance” before them without a word. They took them in in equal silence — stamped leather, silver door-handles and rails, cut velvet, plate-glass, nickel, bronze, hammered iron, and the rare woods of the continent inlaid.

“I told you,” said Harvey; “I told you.” This was his crowning revenge, and a most ample one.

Mrs. Cheyne decreed a meal, and that nothing might be lacking to the tale Long Jack told afterwards in his boarding-house, she waited on them herself. Men who are accustomed to eat at tiny tables in howling gales have curiously neat and finished manners; but Mrs. Cheyne, who did not know this, was surprised. She longed to have Manuel for a butler; so silently and easily did he comport himself among the frail glassware and dainty silver. Tom Platt remembered the great days on the Ohio and the manners of foreign potentates who dined with the officers; and Long Jack, being Irish, supplied the small talk till all were at their ease.

In the
We’re Here’s
cabin the fathers took stock of each other behind their cigars. Cheyne knew well enough when he dealt with a man to whom he could not offer money; equally well he knew that no money could pay for what Disko had done. He kept his own counsel and waited for an opening.

“I hevn’t done anything to your boy or fer your boy excep’ make him work a piece an’ learn him how to handle the hog-yoke,” said Disko. “He has twice my boy’s head for figgers.”

“By the way,” Cheyne answered casually, “what d’you calculate to make of your boy?”

Disko removed his cigar and waved it comprehensively round the cabin. “Dan’s jest plain boy, an’ he don’t allow me to do any of his thinkin’. He’ll hev this able little packet when I’m laid by. He ain’t noways anxious to quit the business. I know that.”

“Mmm! ‘Ever been West, Mr. Troop?”

“‘Bin’s fer ez Noo York once in a boat. I’ve no use for railroads. No more hez Dan. Salt water’s good enough fer the Troops. I’ve been ‘most everywhere — in the nat’ral way, o’ course.”

“I can give him all the salt water he’s likely to need — till he’s a skipper.”

“Haow’s that? I thought you wuz a kinder railroad king. Harve told me so when — I was mistook in my jedgments.”

“We’re all apt to be mistaken. I fancied perhaps you might know I own a line of tea-clippers — San Francisco to Yokohama — six of ‘em — iron-built, about seventeen hundred and eighty tons apiece.

“Blame that boy! He never told. I’d ha’ listened to that, instid o’ his truck abaout railroads an’ pony-carriages.”

“He didn’t know.”

“‘Little thing like that slipped his mind, I guess.”

“No, I only capt — took hold of the ‘Blue M.’ freighters — Morgan and McQuade’s old line — this summer.” Disko collapsed where he sat, beside the stove.

“Great Caesar Almighty! I mistrust I’ve been fooled from one end to the other. Why, Phil Airheart he went from this very town six year back — no, seven — an’ he’s mate on the San Jose — now — twenty-six days was her time out. His sister she’s livin’ here yet, an’ she reads his letters to my woman. An’ you own the ‘Blue M.’ freighters?”