He was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness.
Miserable devils that have no business to live at all.
He wouldn't do his duty and wouldn't let anybody else do theirs.
But what's the good of talking! You know well enough the sort of ill-conditioned snarling cur--"He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes.
And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression.And I knew well enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian.I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences.
I needed no more.I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping suit.
"It happened while we were setting a reefed foresail, at dusk.
Reefed foresail! You understand the sort of weather.The only sail we had left to keep the ship running; so you may guess what it had been like for days.Anxious sort of job, that.He gave me some of his cursed insolence at the sheet.I tell you I was overdone with this terrific weather that seemed to have no end to it.Terrific, I tell you--and a deep ship.
I believe the fellow himself was half crazed with funk.It was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned round and felled him like an ox.
He up and at me.We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship.
All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, `Look out! look out!' Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head.
They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship--just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle head and of the poop all awash driving along in a smother of foam.
It was a miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebitts.
It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up.He was black in the face.It was too much for them.It seems they rushed us aft together, gripped as we were, screaming `Murder!' like a lot of lunatics, and broke into the cuddy.
And the ship running for her life, touch and go all the time, any minute her last in a sea fit to turn your hair gray only a-looking at it.
I understand that the skipper, too, started raving like the rest of them.
The man had been deprived of sleep for more than a week, and to have this sprung on him at the height of a furious gale nearly drove him out of his mind.I wonder they didn't fling me overboard after getting the carcass of their precious shipmate out of my fingers.
They had rather a job to separate us, I've been told.A sufficiently fierce story to make an old judge and a respectable jury sit up a bit.
The first thing I heard when I came to myself was the maddening howling of that endless gale, and on that the voice of the old man.
He was hanging on to my bunk, staring into my face out of his sou'wester.
"`Mr.Leggatt, you have killed a man.You can act no longer as chief mate of this ship.'"His care to subdue his voice made it sound monotonous.
He rested a hand on the end of the skylight to steady himself with, and all that time did not stir a limb, so far as I could see.
"Nice little tale for a quiet tea party," he concluded in the same tone.
One of my hands, too, rested on the end of the skylight; neither did I stir a limb, so far as I knew.We stood less than a foot from each other.
It occurred to me that if old "Bless my soul--you don't say so"were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own gray ghost.
I became very much concerned to prevent anything of the sort.
I heard the other's soothing undertone.
"My father's a parson in Norfolk," it said.Evidently he had forgotten he had told me this important fact before.
Truly a nice little tale.
"You had better slip down into my stateroom now," I said, moving off stealthily.My double followed my movements;our bare feet made no sound; I let him in, closed the door with care, and, after giving a call to the second mate, returned on deck for my relief.
"Not much sign of any wind yet," I remarked when he approached.
"No, sir.Not much," he assented, sleepily, in his hoarse voice, with just enough deference, no more, and barely suppressing a yawn.
"Well, that's all you have to look out for.You have got your orders.""Yes, sir."
I paced a turn or two on the poop and saw him take up his position face forward with his elbow in the ratlines of the mizzen rigging before Iwent below.The mate's faint snoring was still going on peacefully.
The cuddy lamp was burning over the table on which stood a vase with flowers, a polite attention from the ship's provision merchant--the last flowers we should see for the next three months at the very least.
Two bunches of bananas hung from the beam symmetrically, one on each side of the rudder casing.Everything was as before in the ship--except that two of her captain's sleeping suits were simultaneously in use, one motionless in the cuddy, the other keeping very still in the captain's stateroom.
It must be explained here that my cabin had the form of the capital letter L, the door being within the angle and opening into the short part of the letter.A couch was to the left, the bed place to the right;my writing desk and the chronometers' table faced the door.
But anyone opening it, unless he stepped right inside, had no view of what I call the long (or vertical) part of the letter.
It contained some lockers surmounted by a bookcase; and a few clothes, a thick jacket or two, caps, oilskin coat, and such like, hung on hooks.
There was at the bottom of that part a door opening into my bathroom, which could be entered also directly from the saloon.
But that way was never used.
The mysterious arrival had discovered the advantage of this particular shape.