The Mutiny of the Elsinore | Page 5

the cabman, and
while the tug's sailors were carrying my luggage on board I was led by
the pilot to an introduction with Captain West. At the first glimpse I
knew that he was no more a sea captain than the pilot was a pilot. I had
seen the best of the breed, the captains of the liners, and he no more
resembled them than did he resemble the bluff-faced, gruff-voiced
skippers I had read about in books. By his side stood a woman, of
whom little was to be seen and who made a warm and gorgeous blob of
colour in the huge muff and boa of red fox in which she was well-nigh
buried.
"My God!--his wife!" I darted in a whisper at the pilot. "Going along
with him? . . . "
I had expressly stipulated with Mr. Harrison, when engaging passage,
that the one thing I could not possibly consider was the skipper of the

Elsinore taking his wife on the voyage. And Mr. Harrison had smiled
and assured me that Captain West would sail unaccompanied by a wife.
"It's his daughter," the pilot replied under his breath. "Come to see him
off, I fancy. His wife died over a year ago. They say that is what sent
him back to sea. He'd retired, you know."
Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands
touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips
moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality.
Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was
as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote
as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And then,
just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and controlled
geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of the eyes;
the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful warmth;
the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the
instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound
into speech.
So curiously was I affected by this first glimpse of Captain West that I
was aware of expecting to fall from his lips I knew not what words of
untold beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most commonplace
regrets at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me. It
was low and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as a bell and touched with
a faint reminiscent twang of old New England.
"And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay," he
concluded my introduction to his daughter. "Margaret, this is Mr.
Pathurst."
Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine,
and I found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and
gravely upon me. It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching
gaze. It was not that it was challenging, but that it was so insolently
business-like. It was much in the very way one would look at a new
coachman he was about to engage. I did not know then that she was to
go on the voyage, and that her curiosity about the man who was to be a

fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only natural.
Immediately she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes
smiled as she spoke.
As we moved on to enter the tug's cabin I heard Possum's shivering
whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the
creature in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my luggage,
wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my little
automatic rifle. I was startled by the mountain of luggage around which
mine was no more than a fringe. Ship's stores, was my first thought,
until I noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and
bundles of all sorts. The initials on what looked suspiciously like a
woman's hat trunk caught my eye--"M.W." Yet Captain West's first
name was Nathaniel. On closer investigation I did find several "N.W's."
but everywhere I could see "M.W's." Then I remembered that he had
called her Margaret.
I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold
deck biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly stipulated with the
agents that no captain's wife was to come along. The last thing under
the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman. But I had
never thought about a captain's daughter. For two cents I was ready to
throw the voyage over and return on the tug to Baltimore.
By the time