# The Saturday Evening Post/Piracy in Reverse

Extracted from The Saturday Evening Post, 18 Feb 1922, pp. 15–17, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
PIRACY IN REVERSE
By George Kibbe Turner
ILLUSTRATED BY ANTON OTTO FISCHER
YOU'D sit there all day,” said the wireless man, “stewed alive, and all your night watch, too, hearing them jabbering that heathen stuff—Chinese or Japanese or Dutch. Or if it was English, it would go, 'Report at Singapore. Clear twenty-fifth for Surabaya.'
“Or maybe some English kid would break loose and tell the sunset how fed up he was sitting straddling the equator on some other God-forsaken steamer. And along after midnight the captain would come in with his white ducks and his little dyed English military mustache and a fine healthy grouch, and talk about money and women, the two things he didn't have and couldn't get along without.”
According to him the whole world was shot to pieces.
That was the last of the summer of 1920, when things had got sliding good in the shipping line.
“About this time,” he claimed, “you'll be seeing quite a bit of {barratry.”
“Barratry!” I said. “What's barratry?”
“You'll start hearing about all these missing ships at sea.”
“Oh, that”s it, huh?” I said, and he went on to explain it to me.
It seemed it was casting away ships on a desert island for the insurance, or stuff like that; any dirty trick you could play with a ship or its cargo. “Kind of piracy in reverse,” I said.
“What does that mean?” he asked, giving me the hard-boiled English stare.”
“Instead of wanting to take a ship you want to lose it. Is that it?”
“And high time, too, with most of these skyrocketing companies in the stripping trade,” he said without a flinch in his bright-blue stare. “How much do you fancy this poor old thing we're on is dropping off in value every month now?”
“How much?”
“If it's one, it's fifty thousand dollars a month.”
“Is that all?” I said.
“Not less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars below what she cost and she's insured for, no doubt.”
“She'd be worth quite a lot under water, wouldn't she,” I said, “to somebody?”
“And here's the spot—the old immemorial graveyard for ships,” he said, going on as he did night after night, speculating on ways and means of getting away with a chunk of money by some crooked trick or other—“this filthy coast of Java and all these islands to the east. In the old days there's many a good man has hove her ashore and gone and sat down and taken his ease with half a dozen good husky tan-colored wives and filled up the place with his halfbreeds.”
And from there he got onto the woman question. Take it from him, he had been a bear with the ladies, both wild and tame, especially in those last few years when he had a transatlantic English ship—that time just before he decided to take a slight vacation for his health and come into the American merchant service in the middle of 1914. There might have been something in it at that. He must have been a big, fine-looking beast back there a ways, before he had to carry so much make-up to stay in the woman game. And you could say for him that he held nothing back to prove his case. He went into all the details.
“Listen!” I said, stopping him all at once when he was on the subject of that big blonde in the summer of 1913. “Wait! Here's my call!”
And I took it—surprised naturally every time I got anything out there—and he got up, looking over my shoulder while I set it down.
Illustration: She Wasn't Gone More Than Half a Minute When We Heard it Through the Drumming Rain—the Sound of Glass and a Man Swearing
“Van Cuyp,” he said, nodding, and waited for the message, though strictly speaking he had no right to see it.
“Forty-eight,” it came.
“What's this?” I heard him whispering over my shoulder, and I motioned him to be still till I got the rest. But that was all there was.
“You know who it's for,” he said.
Naturally I would, when he and his daughter were the only passengers we had.
“The old Dutchman that got on board at Surabaya last night,” I said—“that's coming over to New York with his Java sugar to take a look at America, or so they told me.”
“Right-o,” he answered.
“Forty-eight,” I said, reading it again.
“Figures on his sugar, no doubt,” said the captain, and told me about the four thousand tons the old man had on board—practically all the cargo.
“How much would it figure at present prices?”
“We'll say a million and a quarter dollars.”
“That's all, huh?” I said. “Too bad, and prices on sugar slipping the way they are now.”
“Ah, yes! But what's that to him, if he should lose the last of it—which he won't, not a farthing, the way they sell the stuff in advance,” he told me. And then went on to tell what he'd heard about this man—his export business and the plantations he owned and what they said he was worth—and finally, of course, got onto the subject of the daughter.
“Did you see her,” he said, sitting up and straightening his tie, “when she came aboard? Was she a little bit of all right, or was she not? I'll just give her my personal attention this voyage.”
“Good Lord,” I said, “she's nothing but a kid!”
“I fancy them young,” he said. “We all do—if the truth is told. You watch me!” he said, warming up to the idea. “Speaking of barratry and piracy and tampering with the cargo,” he told me, with a big, slow-firing English wink, “how would it be, eh, to pick up on a voyage a nice little Dutch hausfrau that's sole heiress to nobody knows how many miliion guilders?”
“She looks about as Dutch as you do,” I told him.
“She does, perfectly!” he said. “That's it! You watch me!”
And he got up and pulled his necktie and white coat down, and walked off to his cabin with another woman on the brain.
I saw her again the next morning—the Van Cuyp kid—near to. She came in with her father to get his message. He read it and put it away, and started talking with me about something else, making conversation—not such a bad old duck, considering all the money they said he had; very plain and simple, and quite a lot foreign But odd looking—short and thick and kind of copper-colored, the way they get out there.
“You work here then,” he said, getting playful,“at the new world speech?”
I looked at him.
“The new speech of the air—all over—universal!” he said, talking English like a pocket dictionary, the way those foreigners do.
And then he introduced me to his girl, a nice, merry-looking kid, but kind of shy. And dresses? You'd be surprised! All this bright, gay-looking batik-dyed stuff they make out around there; and little bangles and green earrings, in gold, and all Eastern stuff like that. She looked like an escaped butterfly.
“My Sophie,” said the old man, and she gave me a little foreign kind of bow, and the old man asked me would I let her listen in on the new world speech.
“Sure thing!” I said, jumping and fixing the receiver for her.
And she stared ahead, listening the way a kid does, with a kind of scared, doubtful look on her eyes and her little nose.
“You hear them, dear one?” the old man asked her in his dictionary talk. “Languages with languages. They strive in the air. All the nations in commerce, as I have said to you.”
And she nodded, staring ahead, her lips parted and a little wondering frown between her eyes. You'd smile to see her. You'd think she was listening to the Archangel Gabriel at least.
And all at once she snatched the thing off unexpectedly and put it on her father's head. A quick, impulsive-acting kid, you could see right off.
“You listen!” she said to him, and he took it for a while, and then handed it back to me.
“Who is it?” he asked me. “What nation do we listen to now?”
“Japs,” I said.
“You hear them with frequency then?”
“I'll say so,” I said. “They're always butting in—jamming everything—over here.”
And he nodded. I could see, I thought, he didn't go very strong on the Japs. They don't over there
“But always the English—the Anglo-Saxon, here, there, everywhere? Always the Anglo-Saxon speaking through the air?”
“I guess that's right,” I told him. “There's few places left, I guess, where you wouldn't get it sometime during the day.”
“A great tongue, a great people, dear one,” he said to the girl, getting playful again. “They now inherit the earth. Your mother was of that race. No doubt we shall have to marry you to one of them.”
“No, no! Nor yet to anyone! Not for many, many years!” she said, laughing and getting red and darting suddenly out the door. She ran into the captain there, and looked up and laughed, and went away with him when he stopped and wanted to show her the ship, bowing and smiling and starting in on her right off.
The old man stayed and talked to me a while longer. It seemed he had a great opinion of the Anglo-Saxon—the English—but now even more of the Americans. That was why he was coming on with his shipload of sugar to look us over.
“A great race—the Anglo-Saxon!” he said in that stiff talk of his. “They arrive now at the greatest height of all peoples who have yet lived on earth—if they do not stumble!”
“Stumble!” I said after him.
“Yes,” he answered me. “Now, at the end of war. They may give the world what in the end it must have—one universal law, one universal contract of commerce, enforceable all over; one universal language, also, at the last.”
“How would they do all that?” I asked, watching him, trying to get the idea.
“By this,” he said, pointing to my wireless outfit. “In commerce; through the air.”
And then he got up—I still watching him, wondering what it was all about, and would I talk stuff like that when I got his age—and went out, looking for his girl. “Look,” I said, picking up a hand bag and a little handkerchief I'd had my eye on. “Here's something your daughter forgot, I guess.”
“Youth is careless always—overeager,” said the old man, taking them and plodding along.
II
“WHAT was he jawing you about?” asked the captain, coming in after he was gone. “Anything about that message—that forty-eight?”
“Not a word,” I told him.
“Without question it's figures on his sugar. But you get it out of him if you can,” he said, “and I'll get it out of the girl, if she knows.”
He had her around with him from that time on, amusing her, showing her the ship, giving her a regular course in navigation. But if she knew she wasn't telling him, exactly, or it looked that way to me. He might have been a masked marvel with the lovely ladies on the transatlantic liner, in those good old days before the war came on him so suddenly in 1914, but he was reaching out of his age limit with this one. She didn't even know what it was all about. She used to tell me about him and giggle. It would have been news to him if he'd heard her.
“Are they not so funny,” she asked me, “those old men like that—always smiling on you in that way they have, always telling you what they've done? He is just precisely like an uncle that I have—the brother of my late mother,” she said, showing me she'd taken in all the improvements and renovations. “With his funny little dyed mustache and everything! But yet I should not be telling you this,” she'd say. “You will be going back to tell him.”
“I'd be likely to, that big stiff!” I told her. For he made me sore already, the way he was camping out, working on that innocent kid—not over eighteen, and looking even younger—that old dyed wreck, more than old enough to be her father.
“Stiff?” she'd say, laughing that young-kid's laugh of hers. “What is a stiff?”
She talked book English just as well as you or I do. But every piece of slang I'd have to stop and go over with her. The fact was I was out of her class, and I knew it. I didn't claim to be in with the millionaires. But just the same I saw more of her and her father than the captain or anybody else, on account of the wireless, probably, and the old man's bug for the talking nations in the air.
“How wonderful, is it not,” Sophie would ask me, repeating her father's ideas, the way kids do—“all these languages, these nations striving in the air, in this new air speech? There's nothing more wonderful here to me—in all this ship but one other thing alone.”
“What's that?”
“The compass; always there; always watching for you day and night, like a little fish, swimming up the stream—in something.”
We used to hold arguments over it, I standing out for the wireless, naturally, and she for the compass.
“Why, consider! You couldn't operate the ship,” she'd say, “without one compass; but years and years they ran ships without the least wireless.”
“I don't know how,” I said, “judging from this one. They wouldn't know where it was without my wireless compass every night, with that thing they're steering by now,” I said, bringing in that business about the compasses on the ship.
They'd just had an accident the week before on their compasses, A big, heavy fixture they had in the chart room had swung loose some way and come down on the compass they had in there—their standard compass they call it—and left only the one steering compass to operate by.
“And I'll say that's a pretty poor thing,” I said, “if I didn't check it up every night with my wireless.”
“But you know very well,” she'd go on arguing—“you've admitted so—that you couldn't run the ship without one compass, and not the least when it was dark and foggy. And so I think and I know, in spite of you, that the compass is greatly the more wonderful.”
Illustration: The Old Man Took the Messsage in His Hands and Folded it Up—That Slow, Kind of Deliberate Way He Had
“Well, your father and I don't think so, anyhow; and we know. We're old and have had the experience,” ! told her, treating her like what she was, nothing but a kid just out of boarding school.
And then she'd laugh and we'd go on talking, I telling her about Michigan, where I was brought up; about the great fresh lakes, and how the automobiles ran down their runways to be assembled; and she telling me about Java and the winged foxes and the trees with flowers like soup plates, and the brown men with their calico wrappers on, and her father's plantation and his old export business at Surabaya.
“For seventy-five years it has now been in our family—the business,” she said, looking more sober and serious when she talked about it. “We were merchants—export merchants always—my father, his father and his father also. That is why he will be always speaking to you about the advance which comes now after war in commerce, in civilization, through the wireless—the binding of all the world together in business.”
“His big three,” I said—“those world improvements he's always talking about—world law, world contracts, world language.”
“But most of all, contracts—in trade. For the laws are made by countries, nations, and the languages also in a way. But the trade contract is made and kept or broken by people—just single people, like you and me—all over,” she said, waving her hand, trying to explain to me, and not quite sure she did. “And so, you see, also, in this way they will express their real goodness, their daily honesty, each one, yet all together.”
“Sure!” I said. “I get you! You mean they show—when you get way down under—whether the folks that make up a nation are crooks or not.”
And then I boosted for America some, and our own folks—too much so, probably, I thought afterwards.
“Yes, yes!” she said, her eyes getting bigger and more excited as she talked upon the subject. “My father says that will be true of your America. also. And we—we also believe the same, coming, as I tell you, from a long race of merchants, of buyers and of sellers over the seas. 'A contract is a contract the world over,'” she said, repeating some of her father's mottoes to me. “'A merchant's word needs no forfeit bond.'
“Or else,” she said, explaining along to me, “there would be no merchants, no business. For so much by them must be done through mere word of mouth, or even gestures. And so you see what it means to him—my father—and to me. For seventy-five years we have been merchants, my people, and not yet one contract broken—or one single word. Nor by me, though I am not a man, will there be one, either.”
“You don't have to look so fierce about it. I'll take your word for it,” I told her, for her eyes stared off like the queen of tragedy taking her oath.
And then she laughed and came out of it, and from that I got her to tell me about the figures that came for her father every night—that had started with that forty-eight and were working down.
“Quotations on sugar—that is what that is,” she told me.
“Quotations!” I said. “How?”
“On piculs.”
“Pickles!” I said. “I thought you just said it was on sugar.”
“No, no! Piculs of sugar,” she told me, laughing.
“Is that right?” I asked, watching her to see if she was joshing me. “Sugar pickles?”
And then when she could stop laughing she explained this to me. It seemed a picul is a weight which would be about one hundred thirty-six pounds with us, and the quotations were in Dutch guilders—that is, about forty cents, and a little over.
“Oh!” I said. “Well, pickles are going down—since you started. But I hope,” I said, thinking that might sound a little raw maybe if they happened to be losing all that money—“I hope it isn't hitting you and your father.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We have it all sold now on good contracts—good American contracts.”
And about that time she got restless and ran off somewhere, probably over to see the captain and get another lesson on navigation and the compass. It made me sore, looking at it, the way he was chasing her; and she was around without an idea of it—nothing but a quick, merry kid just out of boarding school, starting around the world with two men laying themselves out to amuse her.
I sat down when she was gone and figured out the piculs-guilders business in dollars and cents.
“Four thousand tons,” I said, talking with the captain when he brought it up again—always poking around getting posted on the old man's affairs—“at thirty-five,” I said, for it had slipped down there already from forty-eight, “and every time that figure goes down a point bang goes twenty-five thousand dollars right on board here—for somebody!”
“That's about right,” he said, nodding.
“Making a sum total of over a half million loss by now—on the ship and cargo—since we left Java.”
“Nearer three-quarters, no doubt,” he told me.
“And insured for full value on the basis of when we started, according to you.”
“No doubt it would be,” he said, with his big round eyes still giving me the glassy stare.
“She'd show somebody quite a profit under water—in that barratry of yours,” I told him, giving him his stare back. He made me sick, the cheap crook. “It's too bad you can't dope out some way of getting a piece of it.”
“There might be other ways—safer and pleasanter,” he told me, looking back hard and wise, “of getting even bigger money, without taking quite so much risk.”
“What's that?” I said.
“Oh, never mind what!” he told me.
And I left it there, thinking he was just throwing another bluff, and went on to clear up that question that was on my mind and I never got the straight of.
“Say, look!'” I said. “Who does lose all this on the sugar, if you say it isn't the old man?”
“Not him, no. He has already sold it, as I told you,” he said, and went on then explaining to me about how they sold the stuff in advance on contract—cargo, insurance and freight laid down for whoever buys it in New York.
“Delivered on a certain date?” I asked him.
“No, except the ship has to clear by a certain time on the other end.”
“In Java?”
“Right!”
“And we've done that—all right?”
“We have, yes.”
“And then what?”
“He gets his money,” he told me, “on one of these confirmed letters of credit—payment guaranteed by a New York bank—on the arrival of the proper papers there. He sends them over by faster steamer—two or three sets—duplicates of what we've got on board here—to make sure they get there in time.”
“In time?” I said.
“Before the letters of credit expire.”
“But if they didn't get there?” I asked him.
“They will—they always do. That's what they send the duplicates ahead for.”
“So the old man,” I said, “gets out of it; gets all his money at top prices—three or four hundred thousand dollars more than the stuff's worth now.”
“You're jolly right he does!” he told me, with his well-satisfied smile. “And a good thing, too—for me!”
“For you!” I said, looking him over.
“Yes, for me. You've seen how chummy I've been of late with her.”
“With her?”
“With the daughter; that nice soft little Dutch darling. And you know what she is, no doubt. She's the heir. She gets it all when he's gone, and he won't be hanging around so much longer. You can tell that by looking at him. He'll go pop some day sudden, like those little copper-colored ones do.
“You speak of barratry—of money out of this voyage,” he said, tipping me the slow wise wink again, never able to keep his goings on with women to himself. “There's a pot goes there—with that little sweetness—that will make everything on this craft look like tuppence-ha'penny. So what's wrong with my marrying her and stepping into the old man's shoes, and settling down and raising a nice little family of tea and sugar exporters in Java?”
And he went on and made some dirty crack about marriage in general, and marrying her in particular. He always saw everything about women one way.
“Oh, for God's sake,” I said finally, “keep out of the infant class!”
He didn't know first whether to take it for a trouble maker or a compliment, but he finally decided it was a compliment.
“You watch me!” he said.
I went off with a fine, angry, dull-red grouch on after listening to him.
“What are you?” I said to myself, working myself out of it—trying to. “Jealous?
“Or maybe you think you're working yourself up into the millionaire class.”
But just after that I had to laugh. It wasn't more than three or four days before the story was going around the ship that she'd turned him down.
And they looked it—both of them—though naturally not a word out of them; he going around ugly, chewing glass, and she quiet and a little scared looking, and keeping always out of his way.
But I didn't get the details—not then. For right after that the news of that failure came in.
III
IT HAD been calm weather most of the time. We were shushing along through the ocean off the end of Africa somewhere, and the daily figures by now had run down to under thirty—and a loss of easy five hundred thousand dollars, and probably more, under what the old man had sold his sugar for. I was sure by this time that somebody else was taking that loss, and not he, or he would be more excited.
He was sitting there that night as usual, waiting for his usual figures on the piculs; listening to his battling languages in the air; sitting looking very quiet, almost sleepy, except for his little sharp, shining eyes; always watching; reminding me always of a young pet crow we had once when I was a boy in Michigan, only all in white, linen color, instead of black.
“They've changed a lot—your languages,” I told him, “from what they were when we started.”
They had, of course. We were leaving the East behind—the Chinese and the Dutch, and that crazy secret Japanese code, always butting in everywhere, regardless.
“But still, more and more now, the Anglo-Saxon,” he said without moving anything except his little eyes.
“Yes, thank God!” I said.
I was glad, naturally, to be heading back into God's country—God's air, you might say, according to him. And then he asked me, I remember, how many languages I thought I'd heard altogether, listening in the air.
“Oh, a dozen or two!” I said, making a wild stab at it.
“And by and by,” he chimed in again, nodding, “in the end, no doubt, one only!”
“Say, listen!” I said finally, for I'd got quite well acquainted with him by this time, sitting there together so much. “Do you really mean that sometime there might be just one language on the earth?”
“In the air first,” he told me.
“Well, in the air, and then on the earth—is that it?”
“Why should there be more? Not now, but in the end, you understand.”
“I understand,” I told him. “But what about the other ones? What will become of them?”
“They die,” he told me, “do they not? Exactly as do men.”
“That's a brand-new thought to me,” I told him, and then finally he mapped out for me the whole idea as it hit him.
“You have not been before there in our East—in the islands,” he told me, “where the languages still lie as they first grew, and stay yet so many centuries as at their beginning. I, on the other hand,” he went on telling me, “have traveled much here as a merchant—thirty, forty years. I observe myself how the language of men has started at the first, in the islands, in the valleys of the hills; cries of men, like birds; animals calling to their mates, their families, their tribes. The island makes them each one different—and the mountain. Beyond the sea, the mountain, they were not understood—in those days of no traveling.”
“I get you,” I told him.
“Now they die—there in our islands—their languages, as well as do the men, the tribes; and so it has been over this whole world from the beginning. Thousands, tens of thousands of dead languages are gone from the earth like ghosts, and leave not one sound behind, except perhaps, as I heard once myself, words in the mouth of a parrot.”
“A parrot!” I said after him.
“A pet parrot which alone remained.”
“Look!” I asked him, getting his idea. “They die, we'll say! What kills them?”
“Other languages, traveling, conquering.”
And I asked him how—by war?
Illustration: We Were Clear by the End of Africa Now, Coming Out Into That Open Hole in the Sea Between There and South America, Waddling Home All by Our Lonesome
“No, not by war for many centuries now do the conquering languages come. The Latin, the great war-nation language,” he said, “now many years is dead, is it not?”
“What then?”
“What has spread the conquering languages now the last three hundred years—the Spanish first, the Portuguese, the Dutch, my language; and now the Anglo-Saxon?” he asked me. “What alone will?” And I looked at him.
“By sea—ship first, and now at last by this new speech of the air—of yours here.”
“Oh,” I said, beginning to get him.
“Commerce, is it not?” he went on.
“I get you,” I broke in. “And now——”
“Now,” he said, going on, “we rise in speech from the islands and the valleys into the air. Men call with grunts and cries no longer to one another in their small clearings in the woods, by dozens or by hundreds, but over all, to all in the atmosphere above.”
“And so then in the end you claim,” I said, watching him and touching the wireless, “we all get just one language out of this?”
“Why not—at last?” he answered “Why more? Though who knows when?”
“And it will all come about through commerce, so you claim?”
“Or so it seems to me, an old merchant,” he told me.
And I sat and thought it over for a minute, all his battling languages in the air fighting for the world. It was quite a theory at that.
“They fight now after war,” he was telling me, “a greater fight than they fought then—the great dozen languages you speak of that have lived and become strong enough to call through the sky.”
“And you claim,” I asked him, “that the Anglo-Saxon is winning out?”
“No,” he said, stopping me. “No; the Anglo-Saxon has only, I say, the great chance now, if it will prove worthy, as had the Spanish or the Portuguese or the Dutch long ago and—and lost.”
“Then you don't claim to know?”
“We know one thing only,” he answered me, a little slowly, “of which we can be sure. The language of the air, in the end, when it comes, will not be the language of liars or cheats, of contract breakers, of those that other men do not trust.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will come by commerce,” he told me, “and in commerce men will not buy for the long period of other men, or of nations, who may not be trusted. Why should they? Who can make them?”
“And so the crooked nation's language will not travel and win out, you claim?”
“How could it?” he wanted to know.
“There might be something in that,” I said, and stopped. “There might be, too just common honesty!” I said to myself, thinking it over, but not for long. For then I got my call and the good news of that failure—sent through from Java.
The old man took the message in his hands and folded it up—that slow, kind of deliberate way he had.
“They fail,” he said, “It is too bad—the world over—in sugar, silk, cocoa, wool. Even in America now!”
And just then the captain came in.
“Who fails?” he asked him.
“The firm—the American company who has bought my sugar.”
And then all at once the voice of Sophie came from in behind the two of them. I hadn't seen her coming in.
“What is it?” she asked in a quick voice, excited the way women always get over any fear about business. “Is it trouble for us? Do we lose—in the selling of our sugar?”
“Not we, dear one,” her father said, smiling an easy, comforting smile. “We are protected by our confirmed letters of credit on a bank—an American bank. The money may be already in our own bank account from the necessary papers, which go, forward ahead of us by swifter steamers.”
“The papers!” said Sophie, and we all three looked up at the funny tone there was in her voice.
“But you should know,” the old man told her, reminded evidently of something. “They were the same which I gave you to carry back to Kadje. Kadje, the book-keeper,” he repeated, staring at her the way we were all doing now—“at the office, with the other things for him. And to tell him that he, after all, should put them through, as I became now so much pressed for time. Why?” he asked, stopping suddenly, looking at her as she stood there, her eyes open, her cheeks red, her breath coming quick. “What now?” the old man asked louder, standing up from his seat.
But without speaking she jumped out of the wireless room and down below into her cabin while we waited, all standing, and in a few seconds she was back again, breathing hard.
“I—I did not give them! I did not give them to him!” she said, talking foreign in her excitement. “All the rest I gave, but not these two! At the bottom of the bag they were!”
“What is this?” her father asked, standing like a little petrified man.
“I—I stopped,” she said, stammering. “I bought that little scarf I so desired and you permitted that I should buy, and when I bought it I put it also in the bag; and so they, the letters, were underneath it; and so——”
“So then you may have lost me—the others—a great fortune by your whim, your unheedfulness, your foolish light desire for woman's dress,” the old man told her—no longer soft and slow, standing hard and still as a little man of copper.
“I—I——” said Sophie, all the color gone from her face now, still breathing hard.
“Silence then!” said the old man.
He was breathing hard himself now, I noticed; harder than she was for all her hurrying. You could hear him in the stillness which came over us all. His face now was growing kind of purple.
“This gentleman, the captain,” he said, turning “must say now whether we lose or gain all.” And I could almost see the captain jump when the idea got to him.
“Perhaps yet we will be safe. No doubt we ourselves in this ship shall bring our bills of lading there on time,” the old man said, and stared at him, waiting.
“What time must they be in there at the bank—these papers?” the captain asked him, looking back. I could see then something was coming. I could hear it in his voice.
“By the thirtieth of September—at the last!” said the old man, and I noticed then that his tongue was just a little thick.
I got the glance in the captain's eye as he looked first at the old man and then by him at Sophie. He waited before he spoke, taking a good long think first. He was framing something, that was sure.
“I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt it.”
He was throwing the hooks into the old man; scaring him, I always thought; getting ready to make him a proposition later about getting the papers there on time. And he wouldn't feel bad exactly, on the side, at getting back at Sophie for refusing him, by giving her a good strong scare.
But if it was doing business with the old man he was after he missed his way, for just then, with a kind of cough and groan, the old man tottered and went over. He'd had a little touch of apoplexy. And though we got him up and got him to bed, and he seemed to be going to come out of it, yet he was out of the active life from that time on. And the captain, if he was looking for a piece of money by barratry or piracy or marriage or blackmail during this voyage, would have to cook up some other scheme or find some other party to get it from.
IV
I SAT and thought it over when it was all done and we'd got the old man to bed.
“A half a million dollars—and more!” I said, whistling to myself. “All gone for a scarf to wind around her neck! You wouldn't believe it!”
I didn't believe it—not yet! We were out of the East, I knew that. About all you'd hear were the English ships talking to South Africa. We'd turned the corner around Capetown and were headed for home, and we had nearly five weeks yet. And though you might say she was the slowest thing on earth, and her bottom was covered over with that grass that comes on them in those warm waters like a swampy meadow, yet I knew as well as I needed to that ship could get there with those bills of lading to New York—if there was just one person in the world that wanted her to.
“You talk about your barratry,” I said to myself, watching him walking on the bridge, thinking on the same subject I was—“your big safe crooked piece of money! He's king here. All he's got to do is burn a few less tons of coal—slow her up a knot or so an hour, or run her off her course a little row and then and lay it to that poor old excuse of a steering compass, or do a half dozen things I wouldn't know about. And we'd never be there—and somebody in New York would be in a half million dollars for not having to pay the money on that sugar.”
But how was he going to collect his share from anybody at that distance—in advance, as he'd have to—for slowing up? And on the other hand, how could he collect on this end for speeding her up—or pretending to—if the old man stayed down and out? There was the question, and I could see from the grouch he had on and the way he kept off by himself, doping, that the captain hadn't got the answer yet.
The old man was out of sight then for several days, while we went wallowing along northwest about ten knots an hour as usual—and Sophie, his girl, always with him.
I got a chance to speak to her finally, after several days. You wouldn't believe how she'd changed—grown up in just that short time. It was like a child had gone out of a room and a woman had come back in. Her eyes especially. They were the eyes of a grown woman that had been standing open nights, staring into the dark.
“How is he to-day?” I asked her.
Instead of answering she stopped short and sort of hesitated.
“May I come in,” she asked me then, “for one moment with you?”
We were standing in front of the door to my wireless.
“What is it?” I asked her when I had taken her in and given her a seat. “Isn't he so well to-day?”
“He is not well any day,” she said, shivering a little and then catching herself before she began to cry. “He is so anxious, restless! Some change to him must come—or he shall die.”
“Change?” I asked her. “What change?”
“He must cease to worry. He must in some way be told—solaced—convinced—that we shall arrive in New York in time. Or otherwise he will wear himself to death even before we get there. And if indeed we did not reach there in time, and make this loss for himself and for others, whose sugar this in our charge in part also is—then he would surely die!” she said, and stopped, opening and shutting her hands. And I, like a fool, sat and watched her.
“And I—I then will have done it! I will kill him myself—all for a scarf of silk!” she said, talking louder; and her shoulders began to shake—kid's shoulders under the trouble of a woman—and more!
“Steady! Steady there!” I said, putting my hand on her arm, not knowing too well just what to do. “It'll come out all right probably.” And after a minute she got hold of herself.
“I would now ask you one thing,” she said then. “Do you believe truly that we shall be in New York with our papers on time?”
“There's just one man will know that for certain!” I said, watching her, starting to hint.
“The captain?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at her, going slow—not ready naturally to come out flat out with what suspicion I might have about him. “The captain's a regular king on these ships; the absolute monarch. What he says goes. But it's my opinion that we'll get there in time—if he wants to.”
“If he wants to!” she said with a funny little catch in her voice. “Oh!”
And I locked at her, wondering whether I ought to have opened it up.
“You do not know,” she said then, getting flushed up and excited. “But he has not been so very friendly of late toward me for—for a certain reason; something occurring between us: by which he was much offended. It could not be for—for lack of friendliness to me that he would delay—that I should be responsible for this also!”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not that—anyway! He's too practical!”
But she got up on her feet.
“It is not—it seems not possible—no! Yet to make sure I shall go to him,” she said—“appeal to him; tell him how he must surely take us there. And if there is anything I can now do or undo I must—I must do it!” she said, and broke off, staring for a minute, twisting her fingers and looking at me.
And I didn't answer her, like a fool, or tell her to keep away from him!
“I have come to you,” she said after waiting a minute. “You alone I can trust. I trust you. You are so—so American, as you say they are—free, independent, honest!” And I didn't think what to say then either.
“But never to no one shall you ever speak of this!” she said then, holding out her hand to shake on it. And I shook it, still without the sense to warn her, and she went away.
That very next day, I think it was—that next evening—the captain was in, feeling fine. I noticed the change in him the minute he came in.
“You know that thing you were talking about once,” he said, giving me the deep, mysterious wink, “about my being too old—for them!” And I gave a grunt, watching him.
“They come around,” he said, smiling a proud, radiant smile. “They come around in the end.”
“Who come around?” I said. “What?”
“I'm going to marry her.”
“Who? ”
“The little darling from Java.”
“You are like——” I said. I looked in his face then, and I could see that what he said was true, and I stopped short, getting the idea. That poor, excited, frightened kid had gone to him, trying to help to keep her father alive, scared that she would kill him, and he had done the rest.
“This is very much between us, you understand,” he told me—sorry probably he'd let it loose in his excitement—“for the present. We aren't telling anybody yet, not even the old man, so keep it to yourself.”
“Oh, very well,” I told him.
“But he'll never marry her,” I said to myself. “Not while I'm alive and roaming loose. I'd feel good, wouldn't I, standing by, an innocent bystander, and letting this thing go on, especially after all the talk I'd been giving her and she'd taken about Americans being white men!”
As it was, I could have bitten myself to death for not talking—not warning her in advance about him, and what he was, even though I had nothing to prove anything by exactly.
But the thing was done now, and everything showed it.
He was with her whenever he could be, and she kept away from me. I didn't see her at all. And that next day we were off! You could hear the engines speeding up. And I had my orders to get the wireless compass with great frequency, helping out that steering compass—to take no chances of wandering a few miles out of our way. And it wasn't but a day or two more when they had the old man up in my room again, smiling and listening in to his nations in the air, cured of his worries, satisfied by the captain's own mouth, no doubt, that he would hit New York on time.
V
THEY brought him up then, those next ten days, and left him there with me as a kind of a day nurse, while the captain was leading Sophie around. For nothing would satisfy him but he must have her all day, teaching her navigation and steering and the use of the instruments; and meanwhile the old man smiled and listened in and talked to me about his battling nations in the air. And it wasn't too long before I began to see he was different since that attack, just a little touched in the head on that language question, though otherwise both his brain and body seemed to be pulling through all right.
We were clear by the end of Africa now, coming out into that open hole in the sea between there and South America, waddling gayly home all by our lonesome.
“The Atlantic! The open Atlantic!” he said, his eye lighting up. “We at length plunge freely into it. The sea where the great sea nations were born—the Anglo-Saxon especially.”
He talked big, excited, on the loose, like a child, saying the things that came into his head as they struck him.
“Soon we shall hear the commerce of the world,” he said, “on the North Atlantic.”
And once—when the conditions got just right and the static lifted—we did get a touch of it, which, of course, I let him listen to.
“You hear it?” I asked.
“The commerce of the world, like distant bees,” he said, nodding, all excited. “Upon the North Atlantic!'
And when the static shut down he talked all the morning in that kind of childlike way he had now, about the Atlantic, the cradle of the young sea nations and the vikings and the Spaniards and the Armada and the English ships of war, and now the wireless and the Anglo-Saxon.
The Anglo-Saxons were the boys, by land and sea and air! Still more so since this new thing—since the captain was dragging him and his bills of lading into New York on time.
“Your captain now,” he told me—“there is an example of the Anglo-Saxon race; so just, so strong, with so much of honor. It is difficult for me to relate my thanks to him since that mistake of my little Sophie; the fear of the nonarrival of my needed papers in New York on time. Since then he works day and night for us. He speeds the ship, and now he shows—yes, demonstrates to me—that without doubt we shall reach New York in ample time.”
“How? How does he prove it to you?” I asked, interested to see. For I didn't see so much of the captain as I once did. He wasn't so very chummy now—nor I either. And I thought it might be a good thing for me to know just what he said—for reference. And then the old man told me just what he had told him.
“That proves it, I'll say—out of his own mouth!” I said. For that's just what it did.
“With no doubt possible,” he said after me. “A noble man, a fine upstanding Anglo-Saxon,” he said, talking free again. “And I will say to you in confidence that there are others who will see this also—my daughter, for example. Look!” he said. “There they come again together. I prophesy to you we shall hear now soon from that quarter!” he said, and tipped me a long, wise, crafty wink.
I looked at them coming, sorer and sorer every time I noticed them together, and me still the innocent bystander, doing nothing! But yet they didn't look to me overpleased with each other at that. She looked tireder than ever to me, and more changed, and the captain's face older and more set and more doctored up than ever.
I took a chance finally of butting in. It wasn't my business. She was distinctly out of my class. But it looked to me as if a little help might come in handy, and finally I got a word in with her at the other side of the room, while her father was busy listening to his nations.
“What made you do it?” I asked her.
“What?” she whispered back.
“That thing you've done,” I said, and she looked at me, and she knew I knew!
“He is better, happier, no longer worried, is he not?” she asked back, looking at her father. “He will live. I have done what I could—to reparate. I should be glad of that, should I not?” she said with a smile—not that of a kid any longer, but a tired, regretful-looking woman.
“You can't do it!” I said. “You can't stand for that man!” And I broke loose and told her what I knew about that captain; how he had planned to marry her from the first, and what kind of a thing he was. We talked along low, but as near as possible in our natural voices, for her father paid no attention.
“He won't hear you,” I said. “He's listening to his nations”; and she said no, he wouldn't.
“You should not have spoken to me about this,” she said in a dull, level kind of voice when I was through. “But since now you have, I will say to you that it was our difference between us when you saw us to-day—that I asked of him that perhaps, for reasons, he would give me back my word, or I so suggested.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Oh, not much. His manner—in a way, I should say—to me.”
“And what did he say?”
“He did not wish to give it back—release me. He said it would be foolish. I was too young—impulsive. It would be not wise for either of us, nor also for my father. For he could not so press his ship—take the chances of lasting damage to her—if he should lose his hope of then having me, which so drove him day and night.”
“Having you?” I said, thinking murder.
“Of our marriage—if we arrive in New York in time—for so I still promise him.”
“Sophie—Miss Sophie,” I said, getting hoarse, “you don't know what you're doing! You're nothing but a kid!”
“I'm eighteen,” she said, drawing herself up. “Nearly nineteen, and now I feel sometimes that I am a hundred.”
“You can't! It can't be done!” I said.
“What would you not do first,” she asked me in that foreign talk she had when she was excited, rather than to become the mur-der-ess of your father?” she asked me.
“Besides, he's fooling you—playing with you. The crook!” I kept on. “He can get you there on time easy. He can't help it now—everybody on board knows that.”
“That I do not believe,” she said flat.
“So then you think you'll go on with this?”
“What otherwise can I do?”
“Well, anyhow,” I said, “when you get on shore, and you find he's been tricking you, you can always throw him—refuse to marry him.
“And break my given word? The word of a Van Cuyp? Never!”
And I swore under my breath, knowing full well by this time that she meant it.
“Besides,” she said, “you are wrong. You should not say these things. Captain Strong in age is not exactly suitable to me. Yet he is an honorable man, an American.”
“He's no American!” I said.
“Or an Englishman, rather.”
“He's neither the one nor the other!” I got more and more excited. “He's red-letter man who ducked out of the English service to take a ship in the American service when England went to war.”
“That I do not believe either,” she said, flushing up. “Nor does my father. My father is well pleased with him, and he knows. And from now on I shall ask you not again to speak to me of this.”
“All right,” I said. “It's none of my business, I know, so I won't say any more. But remember this always: If you want any help at any time you'll find me here most of my waking hours.” And then she went away with her father.
“An American, huh! A regular Anglo-Saxon!” I said to myself.
That made me sorer than anything else almost, especially after the way I had been boosting the Americans from time to time myself.
“Well, here's another one! And before he pulls off this thing on those two innocent foreigners, this little girl, I'll plug him myself!”
I sat there for several days then listening to the old man go on about the Anglo-Saxons and this one that was saving him so fine and free, getting sorer and sorer. It would have been a scream if it wasn't so serious.
“We'll have to prove there's one honest one,” I said to myself, “if I have to go to jail to do it.”
And that very evening I ran across Sophie in the passageway before the wireless, looking white as a sheet, and beyond her the captain, who must have been just leaving her, disappearing into the chart room. And then she saw me.
“I must—I must speak with you!” she said, breathing hard, catching my arm. “You alone I can trust!”
She was about all in.
“Come in here,” I said, “into the wireless room. He won't be in here. He keeps clear of me now as much as he can.” And she sat down by my table.
“I can't! I can't!” she said, throwing her head down on her arms, then finally raising it again. “But I must!” she said.
“Must what?” I asked her.
“Must marry him! He has me—in this vise!”
“But you knew that,” I said. “You knew that you must marry him.”
“But not—at once,” she said. “I did not think of it except as something far, far off. But not as now! Right away now—before we reach New York!”
“Before you reach New York?” I said after her. “How can you before that?”
“There is some island of which he speaks—I do not know; I did not even listen to the name. There we can stop, but a few hours only.”
“But why?”
“He will not wait. He says he cannot for—for love of me. Though I know now otherwise.”
“What do you mean?”
“He has admitted otherwise, practically, when he became angry, when he threatened.”
“Admitted?”
“That he wished it—must have it—our marriage, so there would be no doubt.”
“No doubt of what?”
“That I should marry him; that I should keep my word with him after the ship has once arrived in New York.”
“Ah-hah!” I said. “Well, he would doubt it naturally, when he knew the whole thing was a trick on you which you might find out any time.”
“I might, yes,” she said. “Really he admitted that he could do as he wished in this—when he began to threaten me.”
“Threaten!” I said to her. “How did he threaten you?”
“He became very angry when I would not consent; more and more so,” she said.
And I nodded, for I had seen him more than once myself let go of himself.
“He has said—he has threatened practically at last—that otherwise, if I did not marry him, my father might easily be told all by him. That even, he said at last, the ship might not reach New York on time. That we might be losing all this money—my father dead—except for him, what he would or would not do. And I myself become a murderess,” she said, breaking down again, “of my father!”
“Don't! Don't, Miss Sophie!” I said to her. “He's bluffing you! He wouldn't dare!”
“I have so much fear—so much fear of him always!” she cried, shuddering. “From the first! He could do anything! This alone is not all—the worst! Always, when we are alone, I fear him. He is so—so insulting! I cannot bear even to have him touch me, and yet—yet I must marry him.”
And I looked at her, and just as I did that idea came to me.
“No,” I said, “you won't have to marry him.”
“Why not? I must! I must not be a murderess—of my father!”
“You won't be,” I said. “Don't fret. I'll see you don't.”
And I made her tell me all the details, the threats he had made when he tried forcing her to marry him, working on her, scaring her about her father, after she had gone to him that first time like a frightened child and promised she would marry him—and then tried to get away.
“That will be enough to hold him,” I said finally—“what he told you, with what I know.”
“But what is it,” she asked, “that you are going to do?”
“Never mind,” I said—“not yet! You won't marry him, and he won't force you to. Not till after I've shot him, anyhow.”
“Shot him!” she said, getting excited right away.
“And that won't be necessary, I don't believe. In fact, I can about promise you it won't. But I won't give you the exact idea until later,” I said. I don't want you to be mixed up in it—not now.”
And she left finally without knowing, and my promising I wasn't going to hurt him.
“Well,” I said to myself, “here's where you go to jail probably. But it will be worth it.”
And I went back to the receiver, listening for what I could pick up.
VI
I LISTENED day by day as we came crawling up the map out of that blind, empty hole in the South Atlantic, not expecting yet, of course, to get what I was listening for. The talk came in gradually more from the ships and coasts around South America, Spanish and Portuguese, and every now and then an English or American liner. And up to the north, whenever that rotten static under the equator lifted up a bit, you'd hear more and more the old man's commerce of the North Atlantic buzz like very distant bees—the old man's Anglo-Saxons—always honest, always on the job, giving the world a square deal like this one; this fine example that was helping us home on his own peculiar terms.
It got to me, waiting, listening always for my ship, to hear the old man continually at it, harping on that one string, the Anglo-Saxons, and this game all the time being played on him and his daughter.
“Well, I'll say this,” I said to myself: “You don't find so many of them like this crook. And when it comes down to that there's another Anglo-Saxon—if I do say so—that may fool him yet.”
And I'd stop and listen again for what I'd got to get—a faster ship coming up behind us, passing us, bound for New York. We were working more now into where there was a chance, in toward the regular South American route. We sighted more ships. My idea seemed more probable, and then finally I got the one I was after, one I could talk to—an American liner, one of the new ones, coming up behind us, going two knots to our one.
“Well, I won't have to shoot him now, anyhow,” I said to myself. I was pleased, naturally, that it was breaking right.
“Where are you bound?” I asked the operator on board her.
“To New York.”
“When are you due?”
“The twenty-first.”
She was only two days behind us, coming running. I got everything ready for her. And the second night when she was only about fifteen miles away I called in Sophie and told her the scheme in general.
“But—but you said once,” she told me, “that that was always against the law!”
“It is,” I said, grinning. “But what's law in this business? We're past the law now.”
“But—but they will put you in prison, for—for us; for me. I won't——”
“Forget it!” I said to her. “If they do, you and your father can come around and call on me—at my residence.”
“But you can't do it! I won't let you!” she said, her eyes shining.
“Listen!” I said. “Don't be foolish! I'd do a lot more than that for you, Sophie—Miss Sophie. And anyhow, you can't help yourself.”
And I sent out the SOS.
“What is that?” she wanted to know. “Did you send it out then?”
“Wait,” I said, for I knew he would be answering me right away, getting my position.
He did, and I gave it to him as close as I knew how.
We figured back and forth that we were about fifteen miles apart, just as I had thought. And he asked me what was the matter, and I told him the steering gear was on the bum, practically gone.
“Sophie!” I called to her between messages.
“Yes.”
“Run out and call him in here,” I said—“the captain!”
“Yes, dear,” said Sophie, forgetting herself in the excitement. It gave me a jump when I heard it, but she ran on out, not knowing she ever said it. She'll tell you now she never did. And I looked out after her then, and saw for the first time what I'd sent her out into.
We were up off the Caribbean somewhere, in that tropical-rain belt. Oh, how it came down every afternoon and evening, beginning all of a sudden! It had started since she came in, and I'd sent her out into it. I sat there myself and held the liner and kept her coming, and in a minute or two they both blew in out of the rain.
“What now? What's this?” the captain asked me.
And I told him in a few well-chosen words.
“There's a ship coming just behind us, an American liner. She's due in New York on the twenty-first.”
“Well?” he said, giving me the stony eye.
“I've given her the SOS.”
“The SOS!” he said, his mouth coming open.
“Yes,” I said. “And when she comes we're going to send on those papers you've been playing your cross between barratry and piracy and blackmail with—your safe crooked little game you've been playing with this little girl here. We're going to send them on ahead, with or without your say-so.”
And he recovered enough now to begin to swear, and Sophie crept over beside me, and he watched us, getting red.
“Now I've told them,” I said, putting my arm around her, and with my eyes still on his, “that our steering gear is on the bum, so you're going to stop this ship for us and let them on—and tell them the same.”
And all at once he let out a great horse-laugh, his face still red as fire.
“Haw!” he said, looking at me and then at Sophie, where she stood beside me, dripping wet. “So that's it! So that's the pretty game—with the wireless operator!” he added on for her benefit.
“Yes,” I said. “And you're coming through like a little man!” And he laughed again.
“Do you think so? How? How'll you get them aboard—if I say not? I'm master here!”
“Oh, that'll be ail right,” I said to him. “They'll be coming now in all directions, and they'll want to know all the details. And you've got to remember, if you are master here—I'm the only wireless operator here also! You have your say-so here on board. But what I say goes—with the outside world, anyhow! I can tell them what I want to about this thing; and what I'll tell them about this ship will make their teeth chatter—and about you, for that matter. I've got it all fixed up now—the story,” I said, putting it strong and steady, “They won't rest till they get aboard to investigate. You nor anybody else won't keep them.”
“And then what?” he said, giving me the scornful stare.
“And when they're once on here there won't be any trouble,” I told him. “You can do one of two things: You can bear me out on that steering-gear thing somehow—if you have to go down yourself and smash something. Or you can let us tell them the real story; how you've been scaring this poor kid here, forcing her to marry you; scaring her to death to make her marry you, with your lies and hints and threats, with the idea that otherwise she'd kill her father. You old painted, pickled wreck!”
And that seemed to get to him—that and the other compliments I passed him.
“So that's it!” he said, looking first at her face and then at mine, and back to hers again, getting redder all the time.
“What's it?” I said.
“So you've got it all nicely fixed up between you, you and your wireless boy,” he said, staring at her now exclusively, losing his head altogether, seeing her there beside me, hit no doubt in the one place he couldn't stand, his self-approval. “But suppose I admit it,” he said to Sophie. “Suppose you take your poor rotter of a telegrapher, since you like that kind, and we'll go back on a strictly business basis. Suppose I tell you flat that I never saw anything much in you but what came with you, and suppose we let it go that way; that we'll have a settlement in dollars and cents, or you and your poor crazy father and your papers never will reach New York on time!”
“Rave on!” I said to myself, letting him go the limit. “Rave on! if we didn't have it on you before, we're getting enough now to hang you, out of your own mouth.”
“Suppose,” he said, staring at me now, getting redder and redder, “that I shut you off now—from this thing—and keep going right on in a new course. How would they find us in this weather? What could you do? What will you do,” he said, his face burning up apparently, “when I tell you you'll not send another word by that thing—as I do now? I'm master here,” he said, “aboard this ship, and what I say is pretty apt to be done. And I say ——” he yelled starting toward me.
“Wait a minute!” I said, holding him back, beginning to see something redder than his face before me. “Before you start anything, remember this: There's always this to be thought of. We've got more than enough time to get this ship into New York. You've just admitted it yourself,” I said, beginning to see red streamers where his face was, now I let myself loose and talked about the thing. “And the mate is an honest man—not a crook. Now I'll tell you something: I'm going to be a prophet,” I said, standing still, but the bright red streamers fluttering more and more. “This ship is going to be in New York on or before the thirtieth of this month—that's settled now already. But it's right up to you now whether you will be or not!”
“Me!” he said, choking up, but still standing there, not moving any.
“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice down, but with the bright cherry streamers before my eyes, fluttering faster than ever. “If I get those extra papers on the other ship, and you let me, you'll come in fine and healthy with all the rest. If I don't, and you start mixing it up now, and getting in my way in this, the ship will get in all right—only you won't be on it! You'll be still at sea,” I said, pointing down. “The first mate will bring her in, and we'll tell the story at the trial,” I said, bringing out finally what I'd had pointed at him from my pocket.
“What is this—mutiny?” he said, edging around sidewise.
“Maybe,” I told him, the scarlet streamers starting up once more. “But you stay where you are for now, or one of my favorite dreams is just about going to come true!”
And all at once Sophie jumped out from under my arm, holding us back.
“Wait!” she called. “Wait!”
“He'll wait,” I said. “Don't fret! Just where he is—till I tell him to move on.”
And she looked at us, and saw it was true, and darted out again into the storm that quick way she had.
“Don't move! Don't shoot,” she called, “until I get back!”
The wheelhouse was just across from us, to the front. She wasn't gone more than half a minute when we heard it through the drumming rain—the sound of glass and a man swearing. And not more than half a minute later we heard the noise of scurrying feet on the sloppy deck, and Sophie came racing back, wetter than ever, her red-butterfly kind of clothes streaming red puddles on the floor as she ran and stood by me, and I put my extra arm around her.
“Do—do you know”—said the first mate, coming clumping in after her. He was a strange-looking thing, with a wild mustache. He looked like a deep-sea fish in oilskins. “Do you know what she's done? The compass!” he said. “She's smashed it to bits, with the ship's glasses!”
And he stared at the captain and then at me. And I laughed and put down the gun which he'd been too excited even to see up to then.
“You laugh, you fool!” he said, after staring a minute. “What is there to laugh at? You can't see the length of your eyelashes in this gray smother, and night's coming on. You can't keep her on her course five minutes. That was the last compass on board!”
“That's easy,” I said, smiling. “That's nothing—not half. There's a ship charging in now, trying to hit us, that must be about due. Yes, a flock of ships by this time, if you want to know it, starting in here now as fast as they can churn. One may poke through us any time.”
“Ships coming!” he said, his eyes standing out like door knobs. “How?”
“The SOS!” I said. “I just sent it out.”
“Sent it out!” he said. “In advance!” I had to laugh. He thought I was crazy.
“Ask the captain,” I told him, “if you don't believe me.”
But the captain didn't answer him direct. He stood staring.
“Slow down the engines!” he said then. “Start the whistle!”
“And I'll get the liner again,” I told him.
I could hear them chattering from all parts of the compass, wondering why I didn't answer them, thinking the worst.
“The Anglo-Saxons are coming,” I said to the captain. “Not the yellow ones; the white ones.”
And I turned to my instrument, and told them all not to get excited; that what we needed was just a compass. We needed it in our business, right away, having broken our last one; but otherwise we were all right. And this liner that was nearest to us agreed naturally to let us have one, after chattering a while about how we happened to be shy. And I thanked them and told them just to come along and drop it when they went by. And I turned and looked at Sophie, and grinned at her—at the way she looked at me; that first shy way again, like a kid.
“Hurry up!” I said. “Get your letters ready! The mail man will be here in just a few minutes now for the U. S. A.!”
And then I got the wireless man on the liner and told him what I wanted him to arrange for on the side, personally, when they came alongside us, and how much there would be in it for him when he handed those letters in at the bank.
The captain had gone out in the meanwhile. By the time she came back with the things we were there alone.
“Just listen!” I said, taking off the receiver, after we'd said one or two things to each other, the best we could under the circumstances. “I'm not going to answer them any more. Just listen to what I've stirred up—all the Anglo-Saxons! The air is full of them, American and English both.”
“Like bees,” she said, repeating her father. “Far away!”
“Or hornets, maybe!” I said, feeling pleased with myself, slopping over a little again about the U. S. A.—glad to be getting home. “There's one thing about them,” I told her: “There are crooks among them, I suppose, just like all the other races. Occasionally one or two may be yellow. But when you want them they're mostly there.”
“I'll say so!” said Sophie.
You'd be surprised how fast she picked up American talk.
“I hope they always will be!” I told her. “And pretty soon, if they keep on,” I said, grinning, “you'll hear nothing but the Anglo-Saxons talking across the world, like your father says. One world language!”
“That'll suit me fine!” said Sophie.
And then I noticed for the first time how wet she was.
“We're crazy,” I said. “Go down and change your wet clothes now, and leave those papers here with me. I'll see they go when the ship gets here.”
So finally she went along, pouting.
“That's the trouble with you,” she said, “you Americans, you Anglo-Saxons!”
“What is?”
“You're so domineering, so strong-handed, so—so bosslike, so bossy!” she said, getting it finally.
“We have to be with you foreigners!” I said, kissing her the last time and making her go.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1952, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 71 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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