The Black Cargo

CHAPTER 1-1

CHAPTER 1Though forty years have gone, they still say I was one of Eliphalet Greer’s men. They still look at me and whisper when I walk down the street, and they’ve got a right to whisper. There was only one man like Eliphalet, and there’s still his shadow.

Somehow it’s got around that he sent me to a South Pacific island. The crew of the Felicity must have told it. The men in the long boat must have seen me take a pistol from my pocket when I went ashore alone. I should never have gone if I had been older or if I had any prospects to boast of, and I had to pay for going. I am paying for it still, which is why I am going to tell the whole story, right down to the time when I drew a weapon on Eliphalet himself.

You may say I should have guessed why Eliphalet sent me to that island; that I should have known he would have a hold on me like the Old Man of the Sea when I got back. Perhaps I should, but I did not know Eliphalet then as well as I knew him later. I suspected something was wrong, but not as wrong as that. I never knew that he wanted me to do what he was afraid to do himself—not until it was all too late. Only when the Felicity got back did I begin to know for certain that something was wrong.

I am setting down what I know about a disgraceful business, not from any love of reminiscence, but because my name is mixed up in it. There will be something of Eliphalet’s past in it, but only what I know. There is no need of conjecturing what he did off the Guinea coast. Yet after all it is his story I am writing more than mine. It cannot help but be his story, for he was the strongest of us all. In all his weakness he was the strongest, even when the end of everything came.

They still say I was one of Eliphalet Greer’s men. I could not help myself if I was. He was far too strong. When he touched me I grew still. I would grow still if he touched me now. He was strong when he fought against himself, strong in his remorse. I think sometimes that his strength pulled him above everything he did, although he was a bad old man. Sometimes I do not care what he did in the Indian ocean, or what they say of him at Lloyds. And why should I, when even the man who hated him worst of all ceased to care, when all the scores were settled?

Only yesterday I saw the brig Felicity drifting in on the fullness of the tide. I could make her out even without her masts and spars which used to cut the sky above her. It was she, even though she was stripped of masts and bulwarks, stripped as ruthlessly as all things are which are made by man for one use and abandoned to another. Yes, it was the Felicity, even though her ports were boarded up, though their frames of black and white were gone along with the scroll work of the stern windows, though her sides were bleached like driftwood, and though they ran green from copper. There was still the old uncompromising turn of her bow, and the unforgettable steadying breadth of beam. It was hard to remember she was beautiful once, as she scraped against the piling of the coal wharf. It was hard to look upon her at all, for age has a hideous humor, surpassing in its cruelty, with which inanimate things can never cope, and live things only seldom.

Indeed not only the Felicity, but almost everything, I think, moves on towards a farcical decline, and an ending not unmixed with sardonic mirth, and even these few papers are like the rest. They should by rights be tragic enough, for they deal with an old man’s weakness. There should be a silent sadness about them, such as surrounds our empty warehouses which lie rotting in the sun. There should be something in them unnatural and repellent, for they concern the bitterest and deepest of all human emotions. But somehow, as I contemplate what it is I mean to say, and grope back among the shadows to the time when those events had their beginning, out of the silence which surrounds me I seem to catch the ring of ghostly laughter. Like the brig Felicity, I sometimes think that age has given all the roles we played a similar distorted aspect.

She was one of Eliphalet Greer’s ships, one of the six he had built in the old Morrill yards. You can still see the warped timbers of the ways a half a mile up the river. My father took me with him in his phaeton when she was launched, with a man behind and a hamper full of Burgundy, but that was very long ago. It is odd to look back on it when I think of the relation Eliphalet Greer and I stood in at a later time. The Felicity was one of the best of old Morrill’s ships. He picked the timbers himself the year before they laid him away in the West Hill burying ground, and people have told me he would walk around the hull long after dark, smoking his pipe and running his hand along the ribs and sheathing. I have often heard them wonder what old Morrill would have done if he had been there to see Eliphalet Greer break a bottle of sweet cider on her bow the day she took the water.

Eliphalet Greer never made a better investment. Even in the days when he took over our wharves and lofts in lieu of my father’s note, and when my father shot himself just as the sheriff came to attach his house, the Felicity was as good as anything in Eliphalet’s fleet—never fast, but staunch and a close sailer. It was later when Eliphalet Greer and I came to know each other, but the Felicity was still carrying her cargo. In those days almost anyone was glad to know him. He had grown as rich as any of our ship owners in Boston or to the north. In 1830 he was said to have the fastest carrying vessels along the coast, which was doing very well for a man who once owned and sailed a single sloop. It seems strange of all his houses, his wharves, his vessels, each as trim as any model in a marine underwriter’s office, only the Felicity is left.

And now she lies at the coal wharf, a poor, slatternly servitor of an age which has driven her from the sea—a coal barge drawn along the shore. She makes a strange final decoration for Eliphalet Greer’s story, like a single bit of wreckage drifting back to the lee shore of home. Black dust is over her, and there is a grating of hand-barrows on her decks, and her bow points up an empty stream. The gulls are sitting on the harbor buoy, whose echoes roll uselessly on a land breeze out toward an empty sea. They are never quiet for long, those gulls. They keep circling about, edging upward until they seem like bits of cloud drift, and then dropping back to the buoy again. I wonder—are they watching for a ship as they used to watch?

They will never see one again. There are still clouds on the horizon, but never a ship comes out of them, a live thing, the tangible shape of a score of aspirations, the embodiment of a score of concerted wills. It is an effort to remember that the Felicity was once alive.

Yet the sight of her brings back what I have to tell. For it was on board the Felicity that I sailed on a certain errand which it still does my conscience little good to think about, and aboard the Felicity that I knew once and for all that Eliphalet Greer was not a simple Puritan walking with soul at rest along the rocky road. Yes, shadows are still about her, lurking in the work that dead hands have left behind, and in the water at her side I seem to see vague shapes. Even with the coal dust she bears her freight of memories.

I sometimes think it’s strange when everything else has gone, that the spring of 1832, when the Felicity made port from West Africa, was no different from the weather we are having now. As the days lengthen and the water begins coursing down our gutters, it seems incredible that nothing should remain of the life we once led, and that the river ice should go to sea past a deserted waterfront with hardly anyone to watch. There was a lingering fringe of ice about the wharves that spring, and a half-melted coating of snow on the marshes which gave an added clearness to the sky. They were busy at the shipyards. They were moving consignments of goods along the shore. We could hear their voices, and the rumble of carts on the cobbles, and as we drew nearer, we could smell the paint, new wood and tar.

Above the waterfront our town was standing, newly washed by the rains. Again and again I had pictured it while in many strange roadsteads—the warm brick of its dwellings with their white wood trimmings, its broad streets, its squares, its rows of elms. On many a night when I had closed my eyes, I could seem to see its cupolas and its steeples, for our lives were strongly blended with religion, and in the lapping of the water on our bows I had often seemed to hear the notes of their bells. I could hear those bells ringing then, striking out the hour of four. I know that there is a sad irony in our longings, for I have been disappointed by the sight of many things I have most longed to see, but never by our town. It has always been as I have looked for it, quiet in the sunlight, and solid in the storm.

I can recall the inflection of Captain Murdock’s soft whistle, as he examined the network of rigging by the shore after the anchor was down. After a while he ceased whistling and listened to the noisy wrangling of the crew, who already were busy with their sea-chests.

“Well,” he said at length, “we’re home.”

Save when taking the name of the Lord in vain, I had found Captain Murdock a silent man, niggardly of the voice he gave his thoughts. But perhaps the prospect of an early termination of his responsibilities made him unduly communicative.

“Tonight,” continued Captain Murdock, c*****g his eye up at me and squaring his shoulders, “I’m going to get drunk.”

Not infrequently in our conversations I had heard him make a similar statement, but I noticed that he said it sadly.

“You don’t appear to be looking forward to it,” I remarked.

“Look forward to it!” he repeated. “Why in hell should I look forward to it? Mebbe you won’t look forward to it when you get as old as me. What is it, anyway, but just licker—licker—licker?”

“Why not think,” I suggested ironically, “of your wife and little ones?”

His answer was cordially frank.

“I ain’t got a wife.”

“But see here, Captain,” I interrupted, “everyone says you’ve got a daughter, living away somewhere. Now why don’t you get her to come home——”

Captain Murdock’s voice became sweet with Christian patience.

“Ain’t I trying to tell you,” he began. “That’s why I’m going to get drunk. She is home! Oh—you ain’t got a hell cat for a daughter. What do you know about wimmen? By Crickey—she’ll kill me yet. She is home—and she wouldn’t be if I could help it!”

His voice was growing plaintively loud from the weight of his worldly woes.

“What is there left but licker? I always have got drunk when I come ashore—first it was my wife and now my daughter! Why should she put on airs with me? Ain’t I good enough for anyone? Why should I have to bear it? Wimmen—wimmen—wimmen! What else is there for a gentleman to do but get in his licker!”

He was lost in his own misfortunes.

A boat had drawn alongside, but when I endeavored to call it to his attention, he only nodded absently and continued to speak the louder.

“What else was there to do, settin’ under a piece of sail with the sweat a-runnin’ off you while the n*****s ran in and out of the hold, and the planks were swelling and cracking with the heat. There was rum and tea and lemon—that’s what there was. Young man, there’s a kind of licker for every occasion, and ought to be used on every occasion, and no Bible-hopping hayseed is going to tell me any different. Here—stop your pulling at my sleeve! What’s more, I say if it ain’t licker a man lives on, it’s something else. Everybody’s got to have something to carry them through. It may be love or hate. I don’t love anyone. I don’t hate anyone, and there’s only licker left.”