The Black Bag - Louis Joseph Vance (best reads of all time txt) 📗

either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even

Mulready, the black-avised.

 

“I sye, ‘re you lookin’ for some one you know?”

 

“Yes—your passengers. I presume they’re below—?”

 

“Passengers!”

 

A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker’s eye in

pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.

 

“Where’s Miss Calendar?” the young man demanded sharply. “I must see her at

once!”

 

The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to

Kirkwood’s perturbed countenance. “Wot’re you talking about?” he demanded

brusquely.

 

“I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready.” Kirkwood

paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker’s inscrutable

regard.

 

“That’s why I came aboard,” he amended, blind to the absurdity of the

statement; “to see—er—Calendar.”

 

“Well … I’m damned!”

 

Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.

 

“Why?” insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.

 

“D’you mean to tell me you came off from—wherever in ‘ell you did come

from—intendin’ to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?”

 

“Certainly I did. Why—?”

 

“Well!” cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air

oppressively obsequious, “I’m sorry to hin-form you you’ve come to the

wrong shop, sir; we don’t stock no Calendars. We’re in the ‘ardware line,

we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you’ll find what you want at

the stytioner’s, round the corner.”

 

A giggle from his audience stimulated him. “If,” he continued acidly,

“I’d a-guessed you was such a damn’ fool, blimmy if I wouldn’t’ve let you

drownd!”

 

Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.

 

“Calendar,” he stammered, trying to explain, “Calendar said—”

 

“I carn’t ‘elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe ‘e did myke an engygement with

you, an’ you’ve gone and went an’ forgot the dyte. Mebbe it’s larst year’s

calendar you’re thinkin’ of. You Johnny” (to a lout of a boy in the group

of seamen), “you run an’ fetch this gentleman Whitaker’s for Nineteen-six.

Look sharp, now!”

 

“But—!” With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. “Am I to

understand,” he said, as calmly as he could, “that you deny knowing George

B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and—”

 

“I don’t ‘ave to. Listen to me, young man.” For the time the fellow

discarded his clumsy facetiousness. “I’m Wilyum Stryker, Capt’n Stryker,

marster and ‘arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says ‘ere is law. We don’t

carry no passengers. D’ye understand me?”—aggressively. “There ain’t no

pusson nymed Calendar aboard the Allytheer, an’ never was, an’ never will

be!”

 

“What name did you say?” Kirkwood inquired.

 

“This ship? The Allytheer; registered from Liverpool; bound from London

to Hantwerp, in cargo. Anythink else?”

 

Kirkwood shook his head, turning to scan the seascape with a gloomy

gaze. As he did so, and remarked how close upon the Sheppey headland the

brigantine had drawn, the order was given to go about. For the moment he

was left alone, wretchedly wet, shivering, wan and shrunken visibly with

the knowledge that he had dared greatly for nothing. But for the necessity

of keeping up before Stryker and his crew, the young man felt that he could

gladly have broken down and wept for sheer vexation and disappointment.

 

Smartly the brigantine luffed and wore about, heeling deep as she spun away

on the starboard tack.

 

Kirkwood staggered round the skylight to the windward rail. From this

position, looking forward, he could see that they were heading for the open

sea, Foulness low over the port quarter, naught before them but a brawling

waste of leaden-green and dirty white. Far out one of the sidewheel boats

of the Queensborough-Antwerp line was heading directly into the wind and

making heavy weather of it.

 

Some little while later, Stryker again approached him, perhaps swayed by an

unaccustomed impulse of compassion; which, however, he artfully concealed.

Blandly ironic, returning to his impersonation of the shopkeeper, “Nothink

else we can show you, sir?” he inquired.

 

“I presume you couldn’t put me ashore?” Kirkwood replied ingenuously.

 

In supreme disgust the captain showed him his back. “‘Ere, you!” he called

to one of the crew. “Tyke this awye—tyke ‘im below and put ‘im to bed;

give ‘im a drink and dry ‘is clo’s. Mebbe ‘e’ll be better when ‘e wykes up.

‘E don’t talk sense now, that’s sure. If you arsk me, I sye ‘e’s balmy and

no ‘ope for ‘im.”

XII PICARESQUE PASSAGES

Contradictory to the hopeful prognosis of Captain Stryker, his unaccredited

passenger was not “better” when, after a period of oblivious rest

indefinite in duration, he awoke. His subsequent assumption of listless

resignation, of pacific acquiescence in the dictates of his destiny, was

purely deceptive—thin ice of despair over profound depths of exasperated

rebellion.

 

Blank darkness enveloped him when first he opened eyes to wonder. Then

gradually as he stared, piecing together unassorted memories and striving

to quicken drowsy wits, he became aware of a glimmer that waxed and waned,

a bar of pale bluish light striking across the gloom above his couch; and

by dint of puzzling divined that this had access by a port. Turning his

head upon a stiff and unyielding pillow, he could discern a streak of

saffron light lining the sill of a doorway, near by his side. The one

phenomenon taken with the other confirmed a theretofore somewhat hazy

impression that his dreams were dignified by a foundation of fact; that, in

brief, he was occupying a cabin-bunk aboard the good ship Alethea.

 

Overhead, on the deck, a heavy thumping of hurrying feet awoke him to

keener perceptiveness.

 

Judging from the incessant rolling and pitching of the brigantine, the

crashing thunder of seas upon her sides, the eldrich shrieking of the gale,

as well as from the chorused groans and plaints of each individual bolt

and timber in the frail fabric that housed his fortunes, the wind had

strengthened materially during his hours of forgetfulness—however many the

latter might have been.

 

He believed, however, that he had slept long, deeply and exhaustively. He

felt now a little emaciated mentally and somewhat absent-bodied—so he put

it to himself. A numb languor, not unpleasant, held him passively supine,

the while he gave himself over to speculative thought.

 

A wild night, certainly; probably, by that time, the little vessel was in

the middle of the North Sea … bound for Antwerp!

 

“Oh-h,” said Kirkwood vindictively, “hell!”

 

So he was bound for Antwerp! The first color of resentment ebbing from his

thoughts left him rather interested than excited by the prospect. He found

that he was neither pleased nor displeased. He presumed that it would be

no more difficult to raise money on personal belongings in Antwerp than

anywhere else; it has been observed that the first flower of civilization

is the rum-blossom, the next, the conventionalized fleur-de-lis of the

money-lender. There would be pawnshops, then, in Antwerp; and Kirkwood was

confident that the sale or pledge of his signet-ring, scarfpin, matchbox

and cigar-case, would provide him with money enough for a return to London,

by third-class, at the worst. There … well, all events were on the knees

of the gods; he’d squirm out of his troubles, somehow. As for the other

matter, the Calendar affair, he presumed he was well rid of it,—with a

sigh of regret. It had been a most enticing mystery, you know; and the

woman in the case was extraordinary, to say the least.

 

The memory of Dorothy Calendar made him sigh again, this time more

violently: a sigh that was own brother to (or at any rate descended in

a direct line from) the furnace sigh of the lover described by, the

melancholy Jaques. And he sat up, bumped his head, groped round until his

hand fell upon a doorknob, opened the door, and looked out into the blowsy

emptiness of the ship’s cabin proper, whose gloomy confines were made

visible only by the rays of a dingy and smoky lamp swinging violently in

gimbals from a deck-beam.

 

Kirkwood’s clothing, now rough-dried and warped wretchedly out of shape,

had been thrown carelessly on a transom near the door. He got up, collected

them, and returning to his berth, dressed at leisure, thinking heavily,

disgruntled—in a humor as evil as the after-taste of bad brandy in his

mouth.

 

When dressed he went out into the cabin, closing the door upon his berth,

and for lack of anything better to do, seated himself on the thwartships

transom, against the forward bulkhead, behind the table. Above his head a

chronometer ticked steadily and loudly, and, being consulted, told him that

the time of day was twenty minutes to four; which meant that he had slept

away some eighteen or twenty hours. That was a solid spell of a rest,

when he came to think of it, even allowing that he had been unusually and

pardonably fatigued when conducted to his berth. He felt stronger now, and

bright enough—and enormously hungry into the bargain.

 

Abstractedly, heedless of the fact that his tobacco would be water-soaked

and ruined, he fumbled in his pockets for pipe and pouch, thinking to

soothe the pangs of hunger against breakfast-time; which was probably two

hours and a quarter ahead. But his pockets were empty—every one of them.

He assimilated this discovery in patience and cast an eye about the room,

to locate, if possible, the missing property. But naught of his was

visible. So he rose and began a more painstaking search.

 

The cabin was at once tiny, low-ceiled, and depressingly gloomy. Its

furniture consisted entirely in a chair or two, supplementing the transoms

and lockers as resting-places, and a center-table covered with a cloth of

turkey-red, whose original aggressiveness had been darkly moderated by

libations of liquids, principally black coffee, and burnt offerings of

grease and tobacco-ash. Aside from the companionway to the deck, four

doors opened into the room, two probably giving upon the captain’s and the

mate’s quarters, the others on pseudo state-rooms—one of which he had just

vacated—closets large enough to contain a small bunk and naught beside.

The bulkheads and partitions were badly broken out with a rash of pictures

from illustrated papers, mostly offensive. Kirkwood was interested to read

a half-column clipping from a New York yellow journal, descriptive of the

antics of a drunken British sailor who had somehow found his way to the

bar-room of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; the paragraph exploiting the fact that

it had required four policemen in addition to the corps of porters to

subdue him, was strongly underscored in red ink; and the news-story wound

up with the information that in police court the man had given his name as

William Stranger and cheerfully had paid a fine of ten dollars, alleging

his entertainment to have been cheap at the price.

 

While Kirkwood was employed in perusing this illuminating anecdote, eight

bells sounded, and, from the commotion overhead, the watch changed. A

little later the companionway door slammed open and shut, and Captain

Stryker—or Stranger; whichever you please—fell down, rather than

descended, the steps.

 

Without attention to the American he rolled into the mate’s room and roused

that personage. Kirkwood heard that the name of the second-in-command was

‘Obbs, as well as that he occupied the starboard state-room aft. After a

brief exchange of comment and instruction, Mr. ‘Obbs appeared in the shape

of a walking pillar of oilskins capped by a sou’wester, and went on deck;

Stryker, following him out of the state-room, shed his own oilers in a

clammy heap upon the floor, opened a locker from which he brought forth a

bottle and a dirty glass, and, turning toward the table, for the first time

became sensible