Selected Stories (58 page)

‘I live, having killed many.'

‘Even so. I die, and I would – I would die by thee, Little Brother.'

Mowgli took the terrible scarred head on his knees, and put his arms round the torn neck.

‘It is long since the old days of Shere Khan and a man-cub that rolled naked in the dust,' coughed Akela.

‘Nay, nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the Free People,' Mowgli cried. ‘It is no will of mine that I am a man.'

‘Thou art a man, Little Brother, wolfling of my watching. Thou art all a man, or else the Pack had fled before the dhole. My life I owe to thee, and today thou hast saved the Pack even as once I saved thee. Hast thou forgotten? All debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I tell thee again, eye of my eye, this hunting is ended. Go to thine own people.'

‘I will never go. I will hunt alone in the Jungle. I have said it.'

‘After the summer come the rains, and after the rains comes the spring. Go back before thou art driven.'

‘Who will drive me?'

‘Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to man.'

‘When Mowgli drives Mowgli I will go,' Mowgli answered.

‘There is no more for thee,' said Akela. ‘Now I would speak to my kind. Little Brother, canst thou raise me to my feet? I also am a leader of the Free People.'

Very carefully and gently Mowgli raised Akela to his feet, both arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a deep breath and began the Death Song that a leader of the Pack should sing when he dies. It gathered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting and ringing far across the river, till it came to the last ‘Good hunting!' and Akela shook himself clear of Mowgli for an instant, and leaping into the air, fell backwards dead upon his last and most terrible kill.

Mowgli sat with his head on his knees, careless of anything else, while the last of the dying dholes were being overtaken and run down by the merciless lahinis. Little by little the cries died away, and the wolves came back limping as their wounds stiffened to take stock of the dead. Fifteen of the pack, as well as half a dozen lahinis, were dead by the river, and of the others not one was unmarked. Mowgli sat through it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao's wet red muzzle was dropped in his hand, and Mowgli drew back to show the gaunt body of Akela.

‘Good hunting!' said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and then over his bitten shoulder to the others: ‘Howl, dogs! A wolf has died tonight!'

But of all the pack of two hundred fighting dholes, Red Dogs of the Dekkan, whose boast is that no living thing in the Jungle dare stand before them, not one returned to the Dekkan to carry that news.

The Ship that Found Herself
¹

It was her first voyage, and though she was but a cargo-steamer of twenty-five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery; and her designers and owner thought as much of her as though she had been the
Lucania
. Anyone can make a floating hotel that will pay expenses, if he puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo-boat must be built for cheapness, great hold-capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was, perhaps, two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners – they were a very well known Scotch firm – came round with her from the north, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass work, and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of champagne when she named the steamer the
Dimbula
. It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness – she was painted lead-colour with a red funnel – looked very fine indeed. Her house-flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the High and Narrow Seas and wished to make her welcome.

‘And now,' said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, ‘she's a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the order for her, and now – and now – isn't she a beauty!' The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.

‘Oh, she's no so bad,' the skipper replied cautiously. ‘But I'm sayin' that it takes more than christenin' to mak' a ship. In the nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet.'

‘I thought father said she was exceptionally well found.'

‘So she is,' said the skipper, with a laugh. ‘But it's this way wi' ships,
Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parrts of her have not learned to work together yet. They've had no chance.'

‘The engines are working beautifully. I can hear them.'

‘Yes, indeed. But there's more than engines to a ship. Every inch of her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up and made to work wi' its neighbour – sweetenin' her, we call it, technically.'

‘And how will you do it?' the girl asked.

‘We can no more than drive and steer her, and so forth; but if we have rough weather this trip – it's likely – she'll learn the rest by heart! For a ship, ye'll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body closed at both ends. She's a highly complex structure o' various an' conflictin' strains, wi' tissues that must give an' tak' accordin' to her personal modulus of elasteecity.'
²
Mr Buchanan, the chief engineer, was coming towards them. ‘I'm sayin' to Miss Frazier, here, that our little
Dimbula
has to be sweetened yet, and nothin' but a gale will do it. How's all wi' your engines, Buck?'

‘Well enough – true by plumb an' rule, o' course; but there's no spontaneeity yet.' He turned to the girl. ‘Take my word, Miss Frazier, and maybe ye'll comprehend later; even after a pretty girl's christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a ship under the men that work her.'

‘I was sayin' the very same, Mr Buchanan,' the skipper interrupted.

‘That's more metaphysical than I can follow,' said Miss Frazier, laughing.

‘Why so? Ye're good Scotch, an' – I knew your mother's father, he was fra' Dumfries – ye've a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier, just as ye have in the
Dimbula
,' the engineer said.

‘Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an' earn Miss Frazier her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?' said the skipper. ‘We'll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth – all for your sake.'

In the next few days they stowed some four thousand tons' dead weight into the
Dimbula
, and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she met the lift of the open water, she naturally began to talk. If you lay your ear to the side of the cabin the next time you are in a steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder-storm. Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The
Dimbula
was very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or number, or both, to
describe it; and every piece had been hammered, or forged, or rolled, or punched by man, and had lived in the roar and rattle of the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it. Cast-iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and wrought-iron, and ribs and beams that have been much bent and welded and riveted, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not half as wise as our human talk, because they are all, though they do not know it, bound down one to the other in a black darkness, where they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what will overtake them next.

As soon as she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen, grey-headed old wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat down on her steam-capstan used for hauling up the anchor. Now the capstan and the engine that drive it had been newly painted red and green; besides which, nobody likes being ducked.

‘Don't you do that again,' the capstan sputtered through the teeth of his cogs. ‘Hi! Where's the fellow gone?'

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but ‘Plenty more where he came from,' said a brother-wave, and went through and over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron deck-beams below.

‘Can't you keep still up there?' said the deck-beams. ‘What's the matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to, and the next you don't!'

‘It isn't my fault,' said the capstan. ‘There's a green brute outside that comes and hits me on the head.'

‘Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position for months and you've never wriggled like this before. If you aren't careful you'll strain
us
.'

‘Talking of strain,' said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, ‘are any of you fellows – you deck-beams, we mean – aware that those exceedingly ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure –
ours?
'

‘Who might you be?' the deck-beams inquired.

‘Oh, nobody in particular,' was the answer. ‘We're only the port and starboard upper-deck stringers; and if you persist in heaving and hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps.'

Now the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends of the deck-beams, which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers always consider themselves most important, because they are so long.

‘You will take steps – will you?' This was a long echoing rumble. It came from the frames – scores and scores of them, each one about eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four places. ‘We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in
that
'; and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything together whispered: ‘You will. You will! Stop quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches! What's that?'

Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow, and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a kind of soda-water – half sea and half air – going much faster than was proper, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank again, the engines – and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in a row – snorted through all their three pistons. ‘Was that a joke, you fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work if you fly off the handle that way?'

‘I didn't fly off the handle,' said the screw, twirling huskily at the end of the screw-shaft. ‘If I had, you'd have been scrap-iron by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on to. That's all.'

‘That's all, d'you call it?' said the thrust-block, whose business it is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it back it would crawl right into the engine-room. (It is the holding back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) ‘I know I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All I ask for is bare justice. Why can't you push steadily and evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig, and making me hot under all my collars.' The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and he did not wish to get them heated.