The After House | Page 5

old
Larimer's, and she thinks I'm the whole cheese. I'll suggest you as ships
doctor."
"How many men in the crew?"
"Eight, I think, or ten. It's a small boat, and carries a small crew."
"Then they don't want a ship's doctor. If I go, I'll go as a sailor," I said
firmly. "And I want your word, Mac, not a word about me, except that I
am honest."
"You'll have to wash decks, probably."
"I am filled with a wild longing to wash decks," I asserted, smiling at
his disturbed face. "I should probably also have to polish brass. There's
a great deal of brass on the boat."
"How do you know that?"
When I told him, he was much excited, and, although it was dark and
the Ella consisted of three lights, he insisted on the opera-glasses, and
was persuaded he saw her. Finally he put down the glasses and came
over, to me.
"Perhaps you are right, Leslie," he said soberly. "You don't want
charity, any more than they want a ship's doctor. Wherever you go and
whatever you do, whether you're swabbing decks in your bare feet or
polishing brass railings with an old sock, you're a man."
He was more moved than I had ever seen him, and ate a gum-drop to
cover his embarrassment. Soon after that he took his departure, and the
following day he telephoned to say that, if the sea was still calling me,
he could get a note to the captain recommending me. I asked him to get
the note.
Good old Mac! The sea was calling me, true enough, but only dire

necessity was driving me to ship before the mast - necessity and
perhaps what, for want of a better name, we call destiny. For what is
fate but inevitable law, inevitable consequence.
The stirring of my blood, generations removed from a seafaring
ancestor; my illness, not a cause, but a result; McWhirter, filling
prescriptions behind the glass screen of a pharmacy, and fitting out, in
porcelain jars, the medicine-closet of the Ella; Turner and his wife,
Schwartz, the mulatto Tom, Singleton, and Elsa Lee; all thrown
together, a hodge-podge of characters, motives, passions, and
hereditary tendencies, through an inevitable law working together
toward that terrible night of August 22, when hell seemed loose on a
painted sea.
CHAPTER II
THE PAINTED SHIP
The Ella had been a coasting-vessel, carrying dressed lumber to South
America, and on her return trip bringing a miscellaneous cargo - hides
and wool, sugar from Pernambuco, whatever offered. The firm of
Turner and Sons owned the line of which the Ella was one of the
smallest vessels.
The gradual elimination of sailing ships and the substitution of
steamers in the coasting trade, left the Ella, with others, out of
commission. She was still seaworthy, rather fast, as such vessels go,
and steady. Marshall Turner, the oldest son of old Elias Turner, the
founder of the business, bought it in at a nominal sum, with the
intention of using it as a private yacht. And, since it was a superstition
of the house never to change the name of one of its vessels, the
schooner Ella, odorous of fresh lumber or raw rubber, as the case might
be, dingy gray in color, with slovenly decks on which lines of seamen's
clothing were generally hanging to dry, remained, in her
metamorphosis, still the Ella.
Marshall Turner was a wealthy man, but he equipped his new
pleasure-boat very modestly. As few changes as were possible were

made. He increased the size of the forward house, adding quarters for
the captain and the two mates, and thus kept the after house for himself
and his friends. He fumigated the hold and the forecastle - a precaution
that kept all the crew coughing for two days, and drove them out of the
odor of formaldehyde to the deck to sleep. He installed an electric
lighting and refrigerating plant, put a bath in the forecastle, to the
bewilderment of the men, who were inclined to think it a reflection on
their habits, and almost entirely rebuilt, inside, the old officers' quarters
in the after house.
The wheel, replaced by a new one, white and gilt, remained in its old
position behind the after house, the steersman standing on a raised iron
grating above the wash of the deck. Thus from the chart-room, which
had become a sort of lounge and card-room, through a small barred
window it was possible to see the man at the wheel, who, in his turn,
commanded a view of part of the chartroom, but not of the floor.
The craft was schooner-rigged, carried three lifeboats and a collapsible
raft, and was navigated by a captain, first and second mates, and a crew
of six able-bodied sailors