The Vultures

H >> Henry Seton Merriman >> The Vultures


Captain Cable turned and gravely shook hands with Captain Petersen.

"Thought you was a seafaring man," he said. And Captain Petersen replied
that he was "Vair pleased."

"The cargo is to be transshipped at sea, out of sight of land or
lightship. But that we can safely leave to you, Captain Cable."

"I don't deny," replied the mariner, who was measuring Captain Petersen
out of the corner of his eye, "that I have been there before."

"You can then go up the Baltic in ballast to some small port--just a
sawmill, at the head of a fjord--where I shall have a cargo of timber
waiting for you to bring back to London. When can you begin loading,
captain?"

"To-morrow," replied the captain. "Ship's lying in the river now, and if
these gentlemen would like to see her, she's as handy a--"

"No, I do not think we shall have time for that!" put in the banker,
hastily. "And now we must leave you and Captain Petersen to settle your
meeting-place. You have your charts?"

By way of response the captain produced from his pocket sundry folded
papers, which he laid tenderly on the table. For the last ten years
he had been postponing the necessity of buying new charts of certain
sections of the North Sea. He looked round at the high walls and the
overhanging trees.

"Hope the wind don't come blustering in here much," he said,
apprehensively, as he unfolded the ragged papers with great caution.

The fair-haired young man drew forward his chair, and Cable, seeing the
action, looked at him sharply.

"Seafaring man?" he inquired, with a weight of doubt and distrust in his
voice.

"Not by profession, only for fun."

"Fun? Man and boy, I've used the sea forty years, and I haven't yet
found out where the fun comes in!"

"This gentleman," explained the banker, "his Ex--Mr.--" He paused, and
looked inquiringly at the white-haired gentleman.

"Mr. Martin."

"Mr. Martin will be on board the _Olaf_ when you meet Captain Petersen
in the North Sea. He will act as interpreter. You remember that Captain
Petersen speaks no English, and you do not know his language. The
two crews, I understand, will be similarly placed. Captain Peterson
undertakes to have no one on board speaking English. And your crew, my
fren'?"

"My crew comes from Sun'land. Men that only speak English, and precious
little of that," replied Captain Cable.

He had his finger on the chart, but paused and looked up, fixing his
bright glance on the face of the white-haired gentleman.

"There's one thing--I'm a plain-spoken man myself--what is there for us
two--us seafaring men?"

"There is five hundred pounds for each of you," replied the white-haired
gentleman for himself, in slow and careful English.

Captain Cable nodded his grizzled head over the chart.

"I like to deal with a gentleman," he said, gruffly.

"And so do I," replied the white-haired foreigner, with a bow.

Captain Cable grunted audibly.




III

A SPECIALTY

A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind.
Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The
water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the
green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the
breeze--Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet
and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like
a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad
daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and
day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three
weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is
ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and
the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill
is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably
an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the
waste-places of the world--a place left clean on sailors' charts; no
one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have
earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never
relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their
embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp.
Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and
stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle
the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on
these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea,
where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the
world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on
these coasts.

"Barrin' fogs--always barrin' fogs!" Captain Cable had said as his last
word on leaving the Signal House. "If ye wait a month, never move in a
fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!"

And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one
of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or
reason.

At sunset the _Olaf_ had crept cautiously in from the west--a
high-prowed, well-decked, square-rigged steamer of the old school, with
her name written large amidships and her side-lights set aft. Captain
Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like
a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who
moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and
a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every
current.

Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon. He sighted the windmill
very carefully, very correctly, very cautiously. He described a
half-circle round the bank hidden a few feet below the muddy water. Then
he steamed slowly seawards, keeping the windmill full astern and the
beacon on his port quarter. When the beacon was bearing southeast he
rang the engine-room bell. The steamer, hardly moving before, stopped
dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then
Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high
forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The _Olaf_ was anchored at
the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no
vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went
down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into
night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below
the horizon now. Only the three-legged beacon stood near, turning its
winking, wondering eye round the waste of waters.

Here the _Olaf_ rode out the gale that raged all through the night, and
in the morning there was no peace, for it still rained and the northwest
wind still blew hard. There was no depth of water, however, to make a
sea big enough to affect large vessels. The _Olaf_ rode easily enough,
and only pitched her nose into the yellow sea from time to time,
throwing a cloud of spray over the length of her decks, like a bird at
its bath.

Soon after daylight the Prince Martin Bukaty came on deck, gay and
lively in his borrowed oilskins. His blue eyes laughed in the shadow of
the black sou'wester tied down over his eyes, his slight form was lost
in the ample folds of Captain Petersen's best oilskin coat.

"It remains to be seen," he said, peering out into the rain and spray,
"whether that little man will come to us in this."

"He will come," said Captain Petersen.

Prince Martin Bukaty laughed. He laughed at most things--at the timidity
and caution of this Norse captain, at good weather, at bad weather, at
life as he found it. He was one of those few and happy people who find
life a joy and his fellow-being a huge joke. Some will say that it is
easy enough to be gay at the threshold of life; but experience tells
that gayety is an inward sun which shines through all the changes and
chances of a journey which has assuredly more bad weather than good. The
gayest are not those who can be pointed out as the happiest. Indeed, the
happiest are those who appear to have nothing to make them happy. Martin
Bukaty might, for instance, have chosen a better abode than the stuffy
cabin of a Scandinavian cargo-boat and cheerier companions than a grim
pair of Norse seamen. He might have sought a bluer sky and a bluer sea,
and yet he stood on the dripping deck and laughed. He clapped Captain
Petersen on the back.

"Well, we have got here and we have ridden out the worst of it, and we
haven't dragged our anchors and nobody has seen us, and that exceedingly
amusing little captain will be here in a few hours. Why look so gloomy,
my friend?"

Captain Petersen shook the rain from the brim of his sou'wester.

"We are putting our necks within a rope," he said.

"Not your neck--only mine," replied Martin. "It is a necktie that one
gets accustomed to. Look at my father! One rarely sees an old man so
free from care. How he laughs! How he enjoys his dinner and his wine!
The wine runs down a man's throat none the less pleasantly because there
is a loose rope around it. And he has played a dangerous game all his
life--that old man, eh?"

"It is all very well for you," said Captain Petersen, gravely, turning
his gloomy eyes towards his companion. "A prince does not get shot or
hanged or sent to the bottom in the high seas."

"Ah! you think that," said Prince Martin, momentarily grave. "One can
never tell."

Then he broke into a laugh.

"Come!" he said, "I am going aloft to look for that English boat. Come
on to the fore-yard. We can watch him come in--that little bulldog of a
man."

"If he has any sense he will wait in the open until this gale is over,"
grumbled Petersen, nevertheless following his companion forward.

"He has only one sense, that man--a sense of infinite fearlessness."

"He is probably afraid--" Captain Petersen paused to hoist himself
laboriously on to the rail.

"Of what?" inquired Martin, looking through the ratlines.

"Of a woman."

And Martin Bukaty's answer was lost in the roar of the wind as he went
aloft.

They lay on the fore-yard for half an hour, talking from time to time in
breathless monosyllables, for the wind was gathering itself together for
that last effort which usually denotes the end of a gale. Then Captain
Petersen pointed his steady hand almost straight ahead. On the gray
horizon a little column of smoke rose like a pillar. It was a steamer
approaching before the wind.

Captain Cable came on at a great pace. His ship was very low in the
water, and kicked up awkwardly on a following sea. He swung round the
beacon on the shoulder of a great wave that turned him over till
the rounded wet sides of the steamer gleamed like a whale's back. He
disappeared into the haze nearer the land, and presently emerged again
astern of the _Olaf_, a black nozzle of iron and an intermittent fan
of spray. He was crashing into the seas at full speed--a very different
kind of sailor to the careful captain of the _Olaf_. His low decks were
clear, and each sea leaped over the bow and washed aft--green and white.
As the little steamer came down he suddenly slackened speed, and waved
his hand as he stood alone on the high bridge.

Then two or three oilskin-clad figures crept forward into the spray that
still broke over the bows. The crew of the _Olaf_, crowding to the rail,
looked down on the deeply laden little vessel from the height of their
dry and steady deck. They watched the men working quickly almost under
water on the low forecastle, and saw that it was good. Captain Cable
stood swaying on the bridge--a little, square figure in gleaming
oilskins--and said no word. He had a picked crew.

He passed ahead of the _Olaf_ and anchored there, paying out cable as if
he were going to ride out a cyclone. The steamer had no name visible, a
sail hanging carelessly over the stern completely hid name and port
of registry. Her forward name-boards had been removed. Whatever his
business was, this seaman knew it well.

No sooner was his anchor down than Captain Cable began to lower a boat,
and Petersen, seeing the action, broke into mild Scandinavian profanity.
"He is going to try and get to us!" he said, pessimistically, and went
forward to give the necessary orders. He knew his business, too, this
Northern sailor, and when, after a long struggle, the boat containing
Captain Cable and two men came within reach, a rope--cleverly
thrown--coiled out into the flying scud and fell across the captain's
face.

A few minutes later he scrambled on to the deck of the _Olaf_ and shook
hands with Captain Petersen. He did not at once recognize Prince Martin,
who held out his hand.

"Glad to see you, Captain Cable," he said. Cable finished drying the
salt water from his face with a blue cotton handkerchief before he shook
hands.

"Suppose you thought I wasn't coming," he said, suspiciously.

"No, I knew you would."

"Glad to see me for my own sake?" suggested the captain, grimly smiling.

"Yes, it always does one good to see a man," answered Prince Martin.

"They tell me you're a prince."

"That is all."

The captain measured him slowly with his eyes.

"Makings of a man as well, perhaps," he said, doubtfully. Then he turned
to cast an eye over the _Olaf_.

"Tin-kettle of a thing!" he observed, after a pause.

"My little cargo won't be much in her great hold. Hatches are too small.
Now, I'm all hatch. Can't open up in this weather. We can turn to and
get our running tackle bent. It'll moderate before the evening, and if
it does we can work all night. Will your Rile Highnes' be ready to work
all night?"

"I shall be ready whenever your High Mightiness is."

The captain gave a gruff laugh.

"Dammy, you're the right sort!" he muttered, looking aloft at the
rigging with that contempt for foreign tackle which is essentially the
privilege of the British sailor.

Cable gave certain orders, announced that he would send four men on
board in the afternoon to bend the running tackle "ship-shape and
Bristol fashion," and refused to remain on board the _Olaf_ for
luncheon.

"We've got a bit of steak," he said, conclusively, and clambered over
the side into his boat. In confirmation of this statement the odor of
fried onions was borne on the breeze a few minutes later from the small
steamer to the large one.

The men from Sunderland came on board during the afternoon--men who,
as Captain Cable had stated, had only one language and made singularly
small use of that. Music and seamanship are two arts daily practised in
harmony by men who have no common language. For a man is a seaman or
a musician quite independently of speech. So the running tackle was
successfully bent, and in the evening the weather moderated.

There was a half-moon, which struggled through the clouds soon after
dark, and by its light the little English steamer sidled almost
noiselessly under the shadow of her large companion. Captain Cable's
crew worked quickly and quietly, and by nine o'clock that work was begun
which was to throw a noose round the necks of Prince Bukaty, Prince
Martin, Captain Petersen, and several others.

Captain Cable divided the watches so that the work might proceed
continuously. The dawn found the smaller steamer considerably lightened,
and her captain bright and wakeful at his post. All through the day the
transshipping went on. Cases of all sizes and all weights were slung out
of the capacious hatches of the one to sink into the dark hold of the
other vessel, and there was no mishap. Through the second night the
creaking of the blocks never ceased, and soon after daylight the three
men who had superintended the work without resting took a cup of coffee
together in the cabin of the _Olaf_.

"Likely as not," said Captain Cable, setting down his empty cup, "we
three'll not meet again. I have had dealings with many that I've never
seen again, and with some that have been careful not to know me if they
did see me."

"We can never tell," said Martin, optimistically.

"Of course," the captain went on, "I can hold me tongue. That's
agreed--we all hold our tongues, whatever the newspapers may be likely
to pay for a word or two. Often enough I've read things in the newspaper
that I could put a different name to. And that little ship of mine has
had a hand in some queer political pies."

"Yes," answered Martin, with his gay laugh, "and kept it clean all the
same."

"That's as may be. And now I'll say good-bye. I'll be calling on your
father for my money in three days' time--barrin' fogs. And I'll tell him
I left you well. Good-bye, Petersen; you're a handy man. Tell him he's a
handy man in his own langwidge, and I'll take it kindly."

Captain Cable shook hands, and clattered out of the cabin in his great
sea-boots.

Half an hour later the _Olaf_ was alone on that shallow sea, which
seemed lonelier and more silent than ever; for when a strong man quits a
room he often bequeaths a sudden silence to those he leaves behind.




IV

TWO OF A TRADE

"His face reminds one of a sunny graveyard," a witty Frenchwoman had
once said of a man named Paul Deulin. And it is probable that Deulin
alone could have understood what she meant. Those who think in French
have a trick of putting great thoughts into a little compass, and, as
the hollow ball of talk is tossing to and fro, it sometimes rings for a
moment in a deeper note than many ears are tuned to catch.

The careless word seized the attention of one man who happened to hear
it--Reginald Cartoner, a listener, not a talker--and made that man Paul
Deulin's friend for the rest of his life. As there is _point de culte
sans mystere_, so also there can be no lasting friendship without
reserve. And although these two men had met in many parts of the
world--although they had in common more languages than may be counted on
the fingers--they knew but little of each other.

If one thinks of it, a sunny graveyard, bright with flowers and the gay
green of spring foliage, is the shallowest fraud on earth, endeavoring
to conceal beneath a specious exterior a thousand tragedies, a whole
harvest of lost illusions, a host of grim human comedies. On the other
hand, this is a pious fraud; for half the world is young, and will
discover the roots of the flowers soon enough.

Cartoner had met Deulin in many strange places. Together they had
witnessed queer events. Accredited to a new president of a new republic,
they once had made their bow, clad in court dress, and official dignity,
to the man whom they were destined to see a month later hanging on his
own flagstaff, out over the plaza, from the spare-bedroom window of
the new presidency. They had acted in concert; they had acted in direct
opposition. Cartoner had once had to tell Deulin that if he persisted
in his present course of action the government which he (Cartoner)
represented would not be able to look upon it with indifference, which
is the language of diplomacy, and means war.

For these men were the vultures of their respective Foreign Offices, and
it was their business to be found where the carcass is.

"The chief difference between the gods and men is that man can only be
in one place at a time," Deulin had once said to Cartoner, twenty years
his junior, in his light, philosophic way, when a turn of the wheel had
rendered a long journey futile, and they found themselves far from that
place where their services were urgently needed.

"If men could be in two places at the same moment, say once only during
a lifetime, their lives would be very different from what they are."
Cartoner had glanced quickly at him when he spoke, but only saw a ready,
imperturbable smile.

Deulin was a man counting his friends among all nationalities. The
captain of a great steamship has perhaps as many acquaintances as may be
vouchsafed to one man, and at the beginning of a voyage he has to assure
a number of total strangers that he remembers them perfectly. Deulin,
during fifty-odd years of his life, had moved through a maze of men,
remembering faces as a ship-captain must recollect those who have sailed
with him, without attaching a name or being able to allot one saving
quality to lift an individual out of the ruck. For it is a lamentable
fact that all men and all women are painfully like each other; it is
only their faces that differ. For God has made the faces, but men have
manufactured their own thoughts.

Deulin had met a few who were not like the others, and one of these
was Reginald Cartoner, who was thrown against him, as it were, in a
professional manner when Deulin had been twenty years at the work.

"I always cross the road," he said, "when I see Cartoner on the other
side. If I did not, he would go past."

This he did in the literal sense the day after Cartoner landed in
England on his return from America. Deulin saw his friend emerge from
a club in Pall Mall and walk westward, as if he had business in that
direction. Like many travellers, the Frenchman loved the open air.
Like all Frenchmen, he loved the streets. He was idling in Pall Mall,
avoiding a man here and there. For we all have friends whom we are
content to see pass by on the other side. Deulin's duty was, moreover,
such that it got strangely mixed up with his pleasure, and it often
happens that discretion must needs overcome a natural sociability.

Cartoner saw his friend approaching; for Deulin had the good fortune,
or the misfortune, to be a distinguished-looking man, with a tall,
spare form, a trim white mustache and imperial, and that air of calm
possession of his environment which gives to some paupers the manner of
a great land-owner. He shook hands in silence, then turned and walked
with Cartoner.

"I permit myself a question," he said. "When did you return from Cuba?"

"I landed at Liverpool last night."

Cartoner turned in his abrupt way and looked his companion up and down.
Perhaps he was wondering for the hundredth time what might be buried
behind those smiling eyes.

"I am in London, as you see," said Deulin, as if he had been asked a
question. "I am awaiting orders. Something is brewing somewhere, one may
suppose. Your return to London seems to confirm such a suspicion. Let us
hope we may have another little . . . errand together--eh?"

As he spoke, Deulin bowed in his rather grand way to an old gentleman
who walked briskly past in the military fashion, and who turned to look
curiously at the two men.

"You are dressed in your best clothes," said Deulin, after a pause; "you
are going to pay calls."

"I am going to call on one of my old chiefs."

"Then I will ask your permission to accompany you. I, too, have put on a
new hat. I am idle. I want something to do. Mon Dieu, I want to talk to
a clean and wholesome Englishwoman, just for a change. I know all your
old chiefs, my friend. I know where you have been every moment since you
made your mark at this business. One watches the quiet men--eh?"

"She will be glad to see you," said Cartoner, with his slow smile.

"Ah! She is always kind, that lady; for I guess where we are going. She
might have been a great woman . . . if she had not been a happy one."

"I always go to see them when I am in town," said Cartoner, who usually
confined his conversation to the necessaries of daily intercourse.

"And he--how is he?"

"He is as well as can be expected. He has worked so hard and so long in
many climates. She is always anxious about him."

"It is the penalty a woman pays," said Deulin. "To love and to be
consumed by anxiety--a woman's life, my friend. Oddly enough, I should
have gone there this afternoon, whether I had met you or not. I want her
good services--again."

And the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders with a laugh, as if suddenly
reminded of some grievous error in his past life.

"I want her to befriend some friends of mine, if she has not done so
already. For she knows them, of course. They are the Bukatys. Of course,
you know the history of the Bukatys of Warsaw."

"I know the history of Poland," answered Cartoner, looking straight in
front of him with reflective eyes. He had an odd way of carrying his
head a little bent forward, as if he bore behind his heavy forehead
a burden of memories and knowledge of which his brain was always
conscious--as a man may stand in the centre of a great library, and
become suddenly aware that he has more books than he can ever open and
understand.

"Of course you do; you know a host of things. And you know more history
that was ever written in books. You know more than I do, and Heaven
knows that I know a great deal. For you are a reader, and I never look
into a book. I know the surface of things. The Bukatys are in London. I
give you that--to put in your pipe and smoke. Father and son. It is
not for them that I seek Lady Orlay's help. They must take care of
themselves--though they will not do that. It does not run in the family,
as you know, who read history books."

"Yes, I know," said Cartoner, pausing before crossing to the corner
of St. James's Street, in the manner of a man whose life had not been
passed in London streets. For it must be remembered that English traffic
is different to the traffic of any other streets in the world.