Strange Yesterday (6 page)

“Soon?—I wouldn't say that.”

“Where are we bound for?”

“Liverpool—then Venice.”

“What—” He was dulled; he shook his head. “You mean—?”

“I'd be getting on deck if I were you. The old man likes his crew on the alert.”

“But I am not the crew! I have been drugged, robbed, starved, beaten when I was too weak to lift a hand to defend myself. But I am not a part of this rotten hulk!—” The seaman was no longer listening to him. Still forms lay in the bunks about him, like, cadavers on the shelves of a mausoleum. Outside, there was a gray mist in the air. He went up the few steps and onto the deck.

To the east, the sun was rising. It was the first time John Preswick had ever seen a sunrise at sea. It threw its rays before it, so that the sky became pink and then vermilion behind the tracery of clouds, before even the edge of the disc showed itself. A violet color was striking in from somewhere, dappling the upper reaches of the heavens. Then the globe itself crept out of the horizon, slyly, and then flamboyantly, a haphazard clump of fire, dripping with the long blue flesh of the ocean. It crept up; and, transfixed, John Preswick watched it.

A hand fell upon his shoulder, and he was spun about. It was the genial Mr. Mitchell of the black mustache and the dark eyes; he stood with his thumbs hooked into his belt, his legs widespread and solid. “Lovely, eh?” he remarked, nodding at the sun.

Like a tiger prepared to spring, John Preswick glared at him, his broken lips narrowed, his eyes bits of sullen blue. Mr. Mitchell shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I shouldn't. It really doesn't pay. One is here, and here one must remain. Now go aft! You'll find Mr. Cortlandt in the lee of the poop.”

Unmovingly, John Preswick stood, tensing his fists, his arms. He felt that his strength was back; he sensed it flowing with the throb of blood to his temples.

“Go aft!” Mr. Mitchell snapped.

Shrugging his shoulders, John Preswick smiled. But he made no move to go; he said: “I have been told that I am one of the crew. You'll discover differently. America is not England. You cannot impress a free man and a citizen.”

Then Mr. Mitchell struck out, his arm the lash of a whip; and though John Preswick dodged, the blow glanced off his cheekbone, sending him reeling back against the rail. As he sprang forward, mad with the desire to have the other's throat in his fingers, Mr. Mitchell drew the wooden pin from his belt and laid it across John Preswick's head. He went down all in a heap, crouched silent for a moment, and then attempted to draw himself erect. Unsteadily he came to his feet, facing Mr. Mitchell, who said in the same even tone of voice: “Go aft.”

It came to John Preswick that he was pitted against odds too great for him, that he was being beaten systematically, and as unemotionally as a caged animal, and that if he persisted, they would pound the very heart out of him. His anger faded, giving way to a sensation of indignation, of hurt. He wondered, in a puzzled way, just what he had done to merit all of this. To Mr. Mitchell, he said: “Yes.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

Then he plodded aft, to where the taller and leaner figure of Mr. Cortlandt stood in the shadow of the poop. As he walked, he noted two squat carronades, roped to the deck, and, glancing behind him to the bow of the vessel, he saw a long, slim gun, mounted upon a swivel. He was almost upon Mr. Cortlandt now, and he found that the man was following his eyes. There was something curiously mild about Mr. Cortlandt, perhaps his pale, almost colorless eyes and his curling side whiskers.

“Good morning,” Mr. Cortlandt said to him, good-naturedly.

Taken aback, he nodded.

“I see that you were looking over our little vessel. Are you by any chance familiar with—ships?”

“No—sir.”

Wagging his head, Mr. Cortlandt smiled. “You will do,” he decided. “Only a fool or an animal fights when he is beaten. But I like a fighter.”

John Preswick stared at him, turquoise into watery blue. He said nothing.

“Let us have the matter straight,” Mr. Cortlandt suggested. “You were impressed while in a state of unconsciousness. Of that we know nothing. You were brought on board by Mr. Kwalkee, whom we have always known as an honorable man. He said that you would appreciate a trip upon the sea, and he gave me some small sum of money to assure himself that you would not again return to Charleston. But I am not a murderer. And now, several days out to sea, we discover, to our surprise, that you had no intentions of pursuing the sea as a career. Have you any money!”

Involuntarily, John Preswick's fingers slid to his waist. Then he smiled, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and shrugged. “I had three thousand dollars—for which Mr. Kwalkee will some day pay with his life. You know damn' well that I have nothing now!”

“Softly—softly. Three thousand dollars. Well, that is a sum, though I should not have thought it of Kwalkee. And now you have nothing.”

“Nothing.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

Sympathetically, Mr. Cortlandt shook his head. “That only leaves two alternatives: work, or go over the side, and I shouldn't advise the latter; land is some hundreds of miles away.”

“I'll work.” John Preswick had come to that decision rather suddenly. Yet it was not only the obvious, but the only, thing for him to do.

“You have never been to sea?”

“No—sir.”

“Farmer?”

“Innkeeper.”

“What is your name?”

“John—”

“John what—?”

“John—John Ridge.”

“I see. But that does not matter. Can you shoot?”

“With a rifle?”

“Yes.”

“I can.”

“Sir,” Mr. Cortlandt interposed smoothly. “Can you split a silver dollar at fifty paces?”

“Yes—sir.”

“That is good.” For a moment, Mr. Cortlandt paused; then he said:

“I am the-master. Mr. Mitchell is the first mate. Mr. Kent is second mate. Mr. Brooker is third mate. You will address each of them properly, regard them with due respect. They have divine right; I am God. Now I saw you looking at the guns.”

“I was wondering—?”

“There are six. Two carronades, two long nines for stern chasers, and a long twelve swivel mounted both at bow and poop. As the seas are in a state of war, we must protect ourselves.” Again he paused, finally saying:

“We are in English and Italian trade. England is at war with France. Dutch ships are not amiable to the British. Spanish ships are prone to be intolerant. And then, there are the pirates off the north of Africa. We must always protect ourselves, even should it prove profitable. And fear not but that it will. Do you understand?”

“I think I do,” John Preswick said slowly.

“You will receive thirty dollars a month and a change of clothes. And with each prize there is a liberal bonus. Now go to your quarters.”

The sun was bloated with the full heat of morning as John Preswick turned and walked back to the forecastle….

5

J
UST
one year later, off the coast of Sardinia, Mr. Kent, the second mate, was shot through the heart while Mr. Cortlandt was defending his vessel from a French sloop of three six-pound guns. Subsequently, the mast of the French ship gone, its hull riddled, its deck a tangled mass of wreckage, it was boarded, and the four seamen remaining alive cut down. Still defending his vessel, Mr. Cortlandt had the Frenchman ransacked, and then put to the torch. His loss was a second mate; two of his seamen were wounded slightly, one of them John Preswick, who, cutlass in hand, had run out along the bowsprit, hung from the jib boom, and, as it crossed the low deck of the Frenchman, leaped down in the face of a pistol (already discharged) and three muskets (already discharged), and drove the edge of his blade through one of the Frenchman's collar-bones.

The following day, Mr. Brooker was promoted into the position of second mate, and the crew was searched for a third officer. It was not with a great deal of surprise that the twenty-nine men saw Captain Cortlandt choose John Preswick, who, in term of service, was out-ranked by twenty-two of them. Upon more than one occasion, John Preswick had distinguished himself, not only for a willingness to carry out orders, matter not what they might be, but for a ruthlessness remarkable even in that crew. And he had had opportunity enough to prove his mettle. In twelve months they had taken nineteen prizes. Not only the master and the mates, but the crew itself were wealthy beyond all expectation. Later, they rounded the Cape St. Vincent and trimmed sail for Liverpool. After that, John Preswick as third officer, they beat across to Boston. From there they swung back to Naples; then Venice; then Lisbon…. It was in the year eighteen eleven that the brig
Angel
sailed into the Narrows, and beat up the upper bay to the Battery. And for the first time John Preswick, standing upon the poop-deck, the genial and dark Mr. Mitchell at his side, saw New York.

Summer was over, but the air was warm and good, and the sky was wide and blue above. A breeze slunk over the bay, to stir the solid house-tops of the little city. At the Battery, a flag spilled to the wind, drooping now, now long and rippling. The flag was no longer bizarre. One was used to the weird conglomeration of design and color.

As it set itself to the anchor lines, the brig
Angel
flew that flag gayly.

Mr. Mitchell, a corner of his eye upon the wheel, said: “New York, Mr. Ridge.” He said it to John Preswick, who was no longer John Preswick, in that cataloguing manner of his, as though he were laying it away for future reference. He was tall, and bland, and solid, and dark as ever, was Mr. Mitchell, his long black mustache more handsome than ever. “Ever been here before, Mr. Ridge?”

John Preswick shook his head. He was inclined towards taciturnity, becoming closer to himself as the years went by. His whole face had hardened; his mouth was narrower; and his shock of yellow hair had been clipped to his ears. To a dark, even shade of brown, the sun had burnt him; it had hardened him; he stood upon the shifting deck with unconcern, ease. His white shirt was open above his jacket; his neck was a bulging column of linked flesh. You would have known that it was over two years. Perhaps he had himself forgotten that he was one John Preswick, and not John Ridge. If he thought of himself, it was as John Ridge; of late he had come to forget what had been in the few days after he awoke in the vermin-ridden hold of the
Angel.
In a way he was content—except for those not frequent intervals when, leaving the ship at some port, he let himself into the curiously ever-welcoming arms of a harlot, he was not happy. If he was happy then. Sometimes, he wondered.

But he was not unhappy. He had no friends, nor did he desire any. (There was the sea at dawn, and there had been any number of dawns, and there would be more. There was the whimpering hum of the wind through rigging. There was the brute in the storm, and the struggle for the prizes they took….) Some day the brig
Angel
would dock at Charleston, and then a certain desire implanted deep in his heart would be satisfied; but for the moment he was content to wait. Things might take their own course, for all of him. He had gone far, and he had learnt much; he would go further. The
Angel
was a vessel of a few guns; with a ship of a dozen or two dozen guns a veritable fortune would wait him. That was by no means impossible, for the raising of the embargo had not marked the end of things. A day would come when America would join in the dogfight of nations, and then the old letters of marque would be revived, and the privateer—call it pirate, if you would have things out in the flesh—would come into its right. He was content to wait and to watch.

Well they treated him, and respectfully, Cortlandt and Mitchell and Brooker; they realized his worth; nor did he any longer hold it against them that they had starved and beaten him into submission. His, for a person so solid, was a remarkable ability to acclimatize.

He was older, harder, and if no less of a fool, a more bitter one, as he stood, an officer, upon the deck of the
Angel
in New York bay. To Mr. Mitchell's question, he shook his head briefly.

Mr. Mitchell was in a reflective mood. “A fine city,” he mused, “a growing city, a city of progress. A fine location. A fine harbor. Mark that barque port side.”

John Preswick said nothing; he was gazing at the banner where it flew over the fort. His lips were drawn; his pale eyes gleamed; his light, straw-colored hair lifted and fell against the tops of his ears.

“Been here before, in seven, and before that in ninety-nine. Progress. Not like your southern cities.”

“Yes,” John Preswick agreed mechanically.

A boat had been lowered, and they saw Mr. Cortlandt step into it and slide away across the narrow stretch of water that separated them from the ship-lined shore. A while after that, Mr. Mitchell left the poop to John Preswick, who stood alone by the wheel, moving himself to the easy surges of the vessel against its anchors. One hand he rested upon the spokes; the other hung at his side; he looked across to the city, and he did not stir. Even his hair was still, as the wind dropped. Then he glanced up to where they were furling the sails closer and neater. Slightly he shrugged his shoulders.

For more than an hour he stood there, and he was there when Captain Cortlandt returned, a tall, well-dressed stranger in a beaver hat and a dark coat sitting by his side. Together they boarded the ship and went into the captain's cabin.

Some time later, a seaman approached him and told him that the captain desired his presence in the cabin. There he found a stranger seated across the table from Mr. Cortlandt, a bottle of rum between them. Mr. Cortlandt waved him to a chair. “Sit down,” he said.

Pouring a glass of rum, he set it before John Preswick. “Mr. Lennox,” he explained, nodding at the stranger. “And this is Mr. Ridge, my third officer, the man for you, if there is one.”