This Mortal Coil | Page 9

once amused and bewildered by the careless confidence with which his seafaring friend dashed boldly in and out among brigs and schooners, smacks and steamships, on port or starboard tack, in endless confusion, backing the little "Mud-Turtle" to hold her own in the unequal contest against the biggest and swiftest craft that sailed the river. His opinion of Relf rose rapidly many degrees in mental register as he watched him tacking and luffing and scudding and darting with cool unconcern in his toy tub among so many huge and swiftly moving monsters.
"Port your helm!" Relf cried to him hastily once, as they crossed the channel just abreast of Greenwich Hospital. "Here's another sudden death down upon us round the Reach yonder!" And even as he spoke, a big coalsteamer, with a black diamond painted allusively on her bulky funnel, turning the low point of land that closed their view, bore hastily down upon them from the opposite direction with menacing swiftness. Massinger, doing his best to obey orders, grew bewildered after a time by the glib rapidity of his friend's commands. He was perfectly ready to act as he was bid when once he understood his instructions; but the seafaring mind seems unable to comprehend that landsmen do not possess an intuitive knowledge of the strange names bestowed by technical souls upon ropes, booms, gaffs, and mizzen-masts; so that. Massinger's attempts to carry out his orders in a prodigious hurry proved productive for the most part rather of blank confusion than of the effect intended by the master skipper. After passing Greenhithe, however, they began to find the channel somewhat clearer, and Relf ceased for a while to skip about the deck like the little hills of the Psalmist, while Massinger felt his life comparatively safe at times for three minutes together, without a single danger menacing him ahead in the immediate future from port or starboard, from bow or stern, from brig or steamer, from grounding or collision.
About two o'clock, after a hot run, they cast anchor awhile out of the main channel, where traders ply their flow of intercourse, and stood by to eat their lunch in peace and quietness under the lee of a projecting point near Gravesend.
"If wind and tide serves like this," Relf observed philosophically, as he poured out a glassful of beer into a tin mug the "Mud-Turtle's" appointments were all of the homeliest "we ought to get down to Whitestrand before an easy breeze with two days' sail, sleeping the nights in the quiet creeks at Leigh and Orfordness."
"That would exactly suit me," Massinger answered, draining off the mugful at a gulp after his unusual exertion. "I wrote a hasty line to my cousin in Suffolk this morning telling her I should probably reach Whitestrand the day after to-morrow, wind and weather permitting. I approve of your ship, Relf, and of your tinned lobster too. It's fun coming down to the great deep in this unconventional way. The regulation yacht, with sailors and a cook and a floating drawing-room, my soul wouldn't care for. You can get drawing-rooms galore any day in Belgravia; but picnicking like this, with a spice of adventure m it, falls in precisely with my view of the ends of existence.
"It's a cousin you're going down to Suffolk to see. then?
"Well, yes; a cousin a sort of cousin; a Girton girlthe newest thing out in women. I call her a cousin for Convenience sake. Not too nearly related, if it comes to that; a surfeit of family's a thing to be avoided.' But we're a decadent tribe, the tribe of Massinger; hardly any others of us left; when I put on my hat, I cover all that remains of us; and cousinhood's a capital thing in its way to keep up under certain conditions. It enables a man to pay a pretty girl a great deal of respectful attention, without necessarily binding himself down to anything definite in the matrimonial direction."
"That's rather a cruel way of regarding it, isn't it?" "Well, my dear boy, what's a man to do in these jammed and crushed and overcrowded days of ours? Nature demands the safety-valve of a harmless flirtation. If one can't afford to marry, the natural affections will find an outlet, on a cousin or somebody. But it's quite impossible, as things go nowadays, for a penniless man to dream of taking to wife a penniless woman and living on the sum of their joint properties. According to Cocker, nought and nought make nothing. So one must just wait till one's chance in life turns up, one way or the other. If you make a fluke some day, and paint a successful picture, or write a successful book, or get off a hopeless murderer at the Old Bailey, or invent