Michael, Brother of Jerry

Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck. The withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of gold. On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five rings – not men’s rings, nor women’s, but foppish rings – “that would fetch a price,” Daughtry adjudged. On the left hand were no rings, for there were no fingers to wear them. Only was there a thumb; and, for that matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.

The Ancient Mariner’s washed eyes seemed to bore right through Daughtry (or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so uncomfortable as to make him casually step to the side for the matter of a yard. This was possible, because, a servant seeking a servant’s billet, he was expected to stand and face the four seated ones as if they were judges on the bench and he the felon in the dock. Nevertheless, the gaze of the ancient one pursued him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that it did not reach to him at all. He got the impression that those washed pale eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the thing, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the dream-films and no farther.

“How much would you expect?” the captain was asking, – a most unsealike captain, in Daughtry’s opinion; rather, a spick-and-span, brisk little business-man or floor-walker just out of a bandbox.

“He shall not share,” spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned, middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.

“Plenty for all,” the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling shrilly. “Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand.”

“Share —what, sir?” Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the other steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San Francisco on a blind lay instead of straight wages. “Not that it matters, sir,” he hastened to add. “I spent a whalin’ voyage once, three years of it, an’ paid off with a dollar. Wages for mine, an’ sixty gold a month, seein’ there’s only four of you.”

“And a mate,” the captain added.

“And a mate,” Daughtry repeated. “Very good, sir. An’ no share.”

“But yourself?” spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-bodied, greasy-seeming grossness of flesh – the Armenian Jew and San Francisco pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry about. “Have you papers – letters of recommendation, the documents you receive when you are paid off before the shipping commissioners?”

“I might ask, sir,” Dag Daughtry brazened it, “for your own papers. This ain’t no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier, no more than you gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners, with regular offices, doin’ business in a regular way. How do I know if you own the ship even, or that the charter ain’t busted long ago, or that you’re being libelled ashore right now, or that you won’t dump me on any old beach anywheres without a soo-markee of what’s comin’ to me? Howsoever” – he anticipated by a bluff of his own the show of wrath from the Jew that he knew would be wind and bluff – “howsoever, here’s my papers.. ”

With a swift dip of his hand into his inside coat-pocket he scattered out in a wealth of profusion on the cabin table all the papers, sealed and stamped, that he had collected in forty-five years of voyaging, the latest date of which was five years back.

“I don’t ask your papers,” he went on. “What I ask is, cash payment in full the first of each month, sixty dollars a month gold – ”

“Oodles and oodles of it, gold and gold and better than gold, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand,” the Ancient Mariner assured him in beneficent cackles. “Kings, principalities and powers! – all of us, the least of us. And plenty more, my gentlemen, plenty more. The latitude and longitude are mine, and the bearings from the oak ribs on the shoal to Lion’s Head, and the cross-bearings from the points unnamable, I only know. I only still live of all that brave, mad, scallywag ship’s company.. ”

“Will you sign the articles to that?” the Jew demanded, cutting in on the ancient’s maunderings.

“What port do you wind up the cruise in?” Daughtry asked.

“San Francisco.”

“I’ll sign the articles that I’m to sign off in San Francisco then.”

The Jew, the captain, and the farmer nodded.

“But there’s several other things to be agreed upon,” Daughtry continued. “In the first place, I want my six quarts a day. I’m used to it, and I’m too old a stager to change my habits.”

“Of spirits, I suppose?” the Jew asked sarcastically.

“No; of beer, good English beer. It must be understood beforehand, no matter what long stretches we may be at sea, that a sufficient supply is taken along.”

“Anything else?” the captain queried.

“Yes, sir,” Daughtry answered. “I got a dog that must come along.”

“Anything else? – a wife or family maybe?” the farmer asked.

“No wife or family, sir. But I got a nigger, a perfectly good nigger, that’s got to come along. He can sign on for ten dollars a month if he works for the ship all his time. But if he works for me all the time, I’ll let him sign on for two an’ a half a month.”

“Eighteen days in the longboat,” the Ancient Mariner shrilled, to Daughtry’s startlement. “Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days of scorching hell.”

“My word,” quoth Daughtry, “the old gentleman’d give one the jumps. There’ll sure have to be plenty of beer.”

“Sea stewards put on some style, I must say,” commented the wheat-farmer, oblivious to the Ancient Mariner, who still declaimed of the heat of the longboat.

“Suppose we don’t see our way to signing on a steward who travels in such style?” the Jew asked, mopping the inside of his collar-band with a coloured silk handkerchief.

“Then you’ll never know what a good steward you’ve missed, sir,” Daughtry responded airily.

“I guess there’s plenty more stewards on Sydney beach,” the captain said briskly. “And I guess I haven’t forgotten old days, when I hired them like so much dirt, yes, by Jinks, so much dirt, there were so many of them.”

“Thank you, Mr. Steward, for looking us up,” the Jew took up the idea with insulting oiliness. “We very much regret our inability to meet your wishes in the matter – ”

“And I saw it go under the sand, a fathom under the sand, on cross-bearings unnamable, where the mangroves fade away, and the coconuts grow, and the rise of land lifts from the beach to the Lion’s Head.”

“Hold your horses,” the wheat-farmer said, with a flare of irritation, directed, not at the Ancient Mariner, but at the captain and the Jew. “Who’s putting up for this expedition? Don’t I get no say so? Ain’t my opinion ever to be asked? I like this steward. Strikes me he’s the real goods. I notice he’s as polite as all get-out, and I can see he can take an order without arguing. And he ain’t no fool by a long shot.”

“That’s the very point, Grimshaw,” the Jew answered soothingly. “Considering the unusualness of our.. of the expedition, we’d be better served by a steward who is more of a fool. Another point, which I’d esteem a real favour from you, is not to forget that you haven’t put a red copper more into this trip than I have – ”

“And where’d either of you be, if it wasn’t for me with my knowledge of the sea?” the captain demanded aggrievedly. “To say nothing of the mortgage on my house and on the nicest little best paying flat building in San Francisco since the earthquake.”

“But who’s still putting up? – all of you, I ask you.” The wheat-farmer leaned forward, resting the heels of his hands on his knees so that the fingers hung down his long shins, in Daughtry’s appraisal, half-way to his feet. “You, Captain Doane, can’t raise another penny on your properties. My land still grows the wheat that brings the ready. You, Simon Nishikanta, won’t put up another penny – yet your loan-shark offices are doing business at the same old stands at God knows what per cent. to drunken sailors. And you hang the expedition up here in this hole-in-the-wall waiting for my agent to cable more wheat-money. Well, I guess we’ll just sign on this steward at sixty a month and all he asks, or I’ll just naturally quit you cold on the next fast steamer to San Francisco.”

He stood up abruptly, towering to such height that Daughtry looked to see the crown of his head collide with the deck above.

“I’m sick and tired of you all, yes, I am,” he continued. “Get busy! Well, let’s get busy. My money’s coming. It’ll be here by to-morrow. Let’s be ready to start by hiring a steward that is a steward. I don’t care if he brings two families along.”

“I guess you’re right, Grimshaw,” Simon Nishikanta said appeasingly. “The trip is beginning to get on all our nerves. Forget it if I fly off the handle. Of course we’ll take this steward if you want him. I thought he was too stylish for you.”

He turned to Daughtry.

“Naturally, the least said ashore about us the better.”

“That’s all right, sir. I can keep my mouth shut, though I might as well tell you there’s some pretty tales about you drifting around the beach right now.”

“The object of our expedition?” the Jew queried quickly.

Daughtry nodded.

“Is that why you want to come?” was demanded equally quickly.

Daughtry shook his head.

“As long as you give me my beer each day, sir, I ain’t goin’ to be interested in your treasure-huntin’. It ain’t no new tale to me. The South Seas is populous with treasure-hunters – ” Almost could Daughtry have sworn that he had seen a flash of anxiety break through the dream-films that bleared the Ancient Mariner’s eyes. “And I must say, sir,” he went on easily, though saying what he would not have said had it not been for what he was almost certain he sensed of the ancient’s anxiousness, “that the South Seas is just naturally lousy with buried treasure. There’s Keeling-Cocos, millions ’n’ millions of it, pounds sterling, I mean, waiting for the lucky one with the right steer.”

This time Daughtry could have sworn to having sensed a change toward relief in the Ancient Mariner, whose eyes were again filmy with dreams.

“But I ain’t interested in treasure, sir,” Daughtry concluded. “It’s beer I’m interested in. You can chase your treasure, an’ I don’t care how long, just as long as I’ve got six quarts to open each day. But I give you fair warning, sir, before I sign on: if the beer dries up, I’m goin’ to get interested in what you’re after. Fair play is my motto.”

“Do you expect us to pay for your beer in addition?” Simon Nishikanta demanded.

To Daughtry it was too good to be true. Here, with the Jew healing the breach with the wheat-farmer whose agents still cabled money, was the time to take advantage.

“Sure, it’s one of our agreements, sir. What time would it suit you, sir, to-morrow afternoon, for me to sign on at the shipping commissioner’s?”

“Casks and chests of it, casks and chests of it, oodles and oodles, a fathom under the sand,” chattered the Ancient Mariner.

“You’re all touched up under the roof,” Daughtry grinned. “Which ain’t got nothing to do with me as long as you furnish the beer, pay me due an’ proper what’s comin’ to me the first of each an’ every month, an’ pay me off final in San Francisco. As long as you keep up your end, I’ll sail with you to the Pit ’n’ back an’ watch you sweatin’ the casks ’n’ chests out of the sand. What I want is to sail with you if you want me to sail with you enough to satisfy me.”

Simon Nishikanta glanced about. Grimshaw and Captain Doane nodded.

“At three o’clock to-morrow afternoon, at the shipping commissioner’s,” the Jew agreed. “When will you report for duty?”

“When will you sail, sir?” Daughtry countered.

“Bright and early next morning.”

“Then I’ll be on board and on duty some time to-morrow night, sir.”

And as he went up the cabin companion, he could hear the Ancient Mariner maundering: “Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days of scorching hell.. ”

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 that received him. It had been quick work, and daring, in the dark of early evening. From the boat-deck, with a bowline under Kwaque’s arms and a turn of the rope around a pin, Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous servitor 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 with us.”

“Yes, sir,” the steward agreed. “An’ I’m keepin’ him tight in my room to make safe. Want to see him, sir?”

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

“Yes, indeed I’d like to say how-do-you-do to him,” Captain Duncan answered.

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

When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later and paused for a gossip with the customs officer and a quartermaster at the head of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little dreamed that his casual glance was resting on his steward for the last time. He watched him go down the gang-plank empty-handed, with no dog at his heels, and stroll off 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 with joy under his breath that he was with all that was precious to him in the world, felt once again in the side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make sure that his beloved jews’ harp had not been left behind.

Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well. Among other things, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages from Burns Philp. The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and this was the very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had decided he could realize from the sale of Michael. He had stolen him to sell. He was paying 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 the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as the launch chug-chugged across the quiet harbour under the southern stars, Dag Daughtry would have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in a battle to continue to have and to hold the dog he had originally conceived of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.

* * * * *

The Mary Turner, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after daybreak, and Daughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for ever on Sydney Harbour.

“Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven,” the Ancient Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help but notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked their ears to listen and glanced each to the other with scant eyes. “It was in ’52, in 1852, on such a day as this, all drinking and singing along the decks, we cleared from Sydney in the Wide Awake. A pretty craft, oh sirs, a most clever and pretty craft. A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all of us, fore and aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew. The captain was an elderly 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 the palm trees of the isle unnamable while the brown maidens wept about him and fanned the air to his parching lungs.”

Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his new routine of duty. But while he made up bunks with fresh linen and directed Kwaque’s efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he shook his head to himself and muttered, “He’s a keen ’un. He’s a keen ’un. All ain’t fools that look it.”

The fine lines of the Mary Turner were explained by the fact that she had been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on board of her was room and to spare. The forecastle with bunk-space for twelve, bedded but eight Scandinavian seamen. The five staterooms of the cabin accommodated the three treasure-hunters, the Ancient Mariner, and the mate – the latter a large-bodied, gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr. Jackson through inability of his shipmates to pronounce the name he had signed on the ship’s articles.

Remained the steerage, just for’ard of the cabin, separated from it by a stout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main deck. On this deck, between the break of the poop and the steerage companion, stood the galley. In the steerage itself, which possessed a far larger living-space than the cabin, were six capacious bunks, each double the width of the forecastle bunks, and each curtained and with no bunk above it.

“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 elderly Japanese wrestler. “Eh, Kwaque! What you fella think?”

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

“You likee this piecee bunk?” the cook, a little old Chinaman, asked the steward with eager humility, inviting the white man’s acceptance of his own bunk with a wave of arm.

Daughtry shook his head. He had early learned that it was wise to get along well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously given to going suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their shipmates with butcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest remembered provocation. Besides, there was an equally good bunk all the way across the width of the steerage from the Chinaman’s. The bunk next on the port side to the cook’s and abaft of it Daughtry allotted to Kwaque. Thus he retained for himself and Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks. The next one abaft of his own he named “Killeny Boy’s,” and called on Kwaque and the cook to take notice. Daughtry had a sense that the cook, whose name had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not entirely satisfied with the arrangement; but it affected him no more than a momentary curiosity about a Chinaman who drew the line at a dog taking a bunk in the same apartment with him.

Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to the steerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer, Daughtry observed that Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings across the steerage to the third bunk on the starboard side. This had put him with Daughtry and Michael and left Kwaque with half the steerage to himself. Daughtry’s curiosity 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? My word! 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 my bunk, I move ’m along that fella Chink’s bunk.”

This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied the starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he went on deck and aft to his duties. On his next return he found Ah Moy had transferred 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 the opposite side from Kwaque.

“I changee,” the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to please and placate, in response to Daughtry’s direct question. “All the time like that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?”

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

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

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

For there were other things to occupy the steward’s mind. Getting acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to one another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the Mary Turner across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire to know 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 of New Zealand,” Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glances into the binnacle. But that was all the information concerning the ship’s navigation he could steal; for Captain Doane took the observations and worked them out, to the exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane always methodically locked up his chart and log. That there were heated discussions in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he could not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the one place for him never to be, at such times of council, was the cabin. Also, he could not but conclude that these councils were real battles wherein Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw screamed at each other and pounded the table at each other, when they were not patiently and most politely interrogating 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, Daughtry got from him, and nothing else did he get save maunderings and ravings about the heat of the longboat and the treasure a fathom deep under the sand.

“There’s some of us plays games, an’ some of us as looks on an’ admires the games they see,” the steward made his bid one day. “And I’m sure these days lookin’ on at a pretty game. The more I see it the more I got to admire.”