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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Captain Kettle, K.C.B., 1903,
with "His Native Land"
CAPTAIN KETTLE wedged himself more tightly into the settee, and jammed the toe of his wooden leg against a batten in the chart-house floor.
"The old packet has got a roll on her and that's a fact," said Mr. McTodd. "And it's breezing up. Let's be thankful that you and I are passengers, and not aboard in offeecial positions. I bet those ducks down in the engine-room are half scared out of their greasy lives every time she races. The condition of the thrust-blocks is just scandalous."
"We've cut it fine on repairs, I'll admit," said Kettle. "And, besides, the old Frying-pan's never been what you might call a new ship ever since we've known her. I can picture Captain Walkfield's anxiety," he added with a sigh.
"But man, Kettle, we're not responsible now, that's where the humour comes in. It's Walkfield and the engine-room staff that are responsible now if we're all drowned, and you and I are just bloated passengers. That's what tickles me. But you were saying?"
"I was telling you the gentleman's name is Hunter, and Mrs. Kettle writes me that he's a stuff merchant in Bradford, a very respectable occupation."
"Which daughter?" asked McTodd, relighting the stump of his cigar.
"Eldest."
"But I thought she was engaged to a young fellow named well, it wasn't Hunter. I mind ye read me out the letter which brought the announcement one morning in Casadir after old Kaid Bergash had sent me and Fenner a present of poisoned cous cousoo."
"Well," snapped the little sailor, "I'll not deny that my girl's been asked before, and had three engagements that have dangled. But she's getting on a bit now, and it's time (so the Missis writes) that she was settled. The fellow's no chicken, either, from what I gather. He has been running after four different girls a year ever since he grew a moustache, and so should have experience enough to make a valuable husband."
"He sounds a slippery one." Mr. McTodd rubbed his grimy hands. "Man, you'll no' think it, but I've been slippery wi' the weemin mysel'. Gosh! if Walkfield lets her go on rolling in the trough like this, he'll shake the funnel out of her next. It used to be landladies' daughters wi' me, then it was theatricals, and then it was landladies. My latest was a weedow—Scottish. I'm thinking it was my enormous wealth she was after; but anyway, she gave me much flattery, and I enjoyed it. I mind one very humorous scene between us in a hansom cab. We'd just come out of the Trocadero-"
"You dissolute mechanic! I'll thank you not to compare a daughter of mine with any woman who'd walk out with you in a public place like that."
"But, man, where's the harm in taking your lady friends to see a barmaid? It's a barmaid you married yourself."
"Mrs. Kettle," said her husband stiffly, "was a lady of good family, though once in reduced circumstances. She was a clergyman's daughter—Congregational. It's her direct wish that all allusion to her former business occupation should be avoided, and if she says a thing like that, I'm the man to see it carried out. So if any son of a dog wants to know exactly what broken ribs feel like, he's just to bring up that subject, and I'll show him in two twinkles."
The engineer winked a malicious eye, and would probably have continued the conversation, but just then, in one of her heavier lurches, the Frying-pan took a sea green and solid over her bridge deck, and the house was buried in an avalanche of roaring, spouting, raging water. It squelched in above the doorcombings, it poured in a solid stream through the roof ventilator, and when outside it had drained away, there remained within a private lake, lively with the manoeuvres of a fleet of shoes and camp stools.
"Very humorous," said McTodd, tucking up his legs. "Imagine Walkfield's anxiety, and him a man of no nerve. He'll be getting at the whiskey bottle presently."
"He'll not dare with me on board." Kettle squinted up at the hanging compass. "He's eight points off his course, as it is. I think he'd be well advised to put her head on to it a bit more, and risk the engines racing. But it's not for me to interfere."
"Speaking just as a passenger, I've a mind that if those engines have an opportunity to race thoroughly, about twice and no more, they'll break down permanently in six different places. It's splendid to think of those ducks down in the engine-room sweating and straining for their dear lives, and thinking of new swears between whiles. Eh, man Kettle, expeerience is a fine thing when you're lying luxuriously at ease like this, and want to picture the 'depths from which yer talents have digged ye—I'll trouble ye for matches. Mine's soaked."
Again the Frying-pan took it green over the top of her superstructure, and again the drench of yeasty water roared over the chart-house, and squirted noisily through ventilators and crevices.
"There's a heavy breeze and that's a fact," grumbled Kettle. "And there's far too bad a sea running to monkey with. I want to get home to see my girl married to this Hunter, and if this goes on I'm afraid I shan't. I wish Walkfield had a bit more nerve and a lot more brain. Being just a bally passenger—"
"It would be most unprofessional of you to supply them. Man, it's splendidly comical for both of us. It's like reading Punch; there's a lot of wit spread about if you can only find it."
Captain Kettle bit on the stump of a cold, wet cigar, and presently, finding the stump of a pencil and a piece of limp white paper among the swirl of oddments on the floor, betook himself to that making of verse which had brought him consolation in the midst of so many former difficulties. McTodd chuckled over his thoughts. It was quite an hour later that Captain Walkfield looked in upon them.
The man was obviously in liquor, and indeed made no attempt to conceal it. "Well," he said, "I guess we're booked. The old Frying-pan will take us to Jones in another hour unless the weather eases, and there's no signs of that. I always did say it was a cold job dying sober, and I daresay you've thought the same yourself, old cock."
This last was addressed to Kettle, and that small mariner stood upright with a sudden jerk.
"By James, do you know you're addressing your owner? Where's your proper respect? D'you think that's the way to speak to your superiors, you half-baked scum of a Newport coal-shoot? By dash, your collar's as rotten as the rest of you. Is there no part of your useless carcass that isn't too limp for me to handle?"
From the other settee there came a chuckle.
"Man Kettle, but it's most unprofessional for a mere passenger to get handling the skipper."
"You shut your head, or I'll clean the floor with you, too. Look at this thing that used to be called Walkfield until I took it in hand and altered it. Just think that it carries a full master's ticket, and the hands have to touch hats to it, and speak of it as the Old Man. Why, I could make a better ship-master out of Node's 'Epitome' and a handful of putty."
Look at this thing that used to be called Walk-
field until I took it in hand and altered it.
"Don't throw it round any more," suggested McTodd, "or you'll wreck the deck-house. I think it's quite dead now. Better sling it overboard."
"You let me alone," groaned a very dishevelled Captain Walkfield from the corner by the wash-stand. "I've done my best, and if we are to be drowned it's your fault. The old packet's under-manned and underfound in every way."
Again Kettle turned fiercely against him. "As if that was any argument. Steamers are run to pay, not to make private yachts for their skippers. What ship, I should like to know, ever had enough men of a crew, or all the repairs she indented for, unless she was a man-of-war? A skipper's hired because he's supposed to have brains clever enough and hands strong enough to make up those deficiencies. I've spent a whole lifetime doing it, so I know. But you, you whiskey-tinctured jellyfish...."
Once more the sodden steamer rolled her bridge deck under, and this time, as Walkfield had left the chart-house door open behind him, the sea came in green and solid, filling the place with violent water. In due time they emerged from this, spluttering and profane, and, in Captain Walkfield's case, hopeless.
"There," he said, "you can see for yourself. She can't live much longer with the sea running."
"Get back to your work, you hound!" Kettle shouted at him.
"I tell you it's useless, and anyway I'm disabled. I believe you've broken me some ribs."
"Good," said Kettle, "then if you tell me officially you're not fit to carry on duty, I'll just step in as substitute"—the little man breathed pleasurably—"I've almost forgotten how to handle a crew," he said, as he went out on deck, "but I daresay it will come back to me."
"Cocky little fool!" snarled Walkfield.
"You shut your blasted head," said McTodd politely, "or I'll throw your twaddling carcass into the ditch. There's only one man I allow to abuse Captain Kettle, and that's mysel'. You can stay here in the chart-house and get washed sober. If any one calls in to inquire, you may say I've gone to the engine-room to get a smell of warmth, and watch those ducks down there at work."
Out on deck the prospect was cheerless enough. The steamer was in the Bay, and Biscay weather was at its worst. The gale blew with hungry violence, and the great crested seas that drove before it stumbled and snarled, till all order of their charge was lost, and they fled in confused rout. Their tops were whipped off by the wind, and blew in a gray smother that was almost as solid as the water itself.
Captain Kettle introduced himself to the dejected mates and the scared deckhands in a method peculiarly his own, and though he did not perhaps convince them that the Frying-pan would eventually escape swamping, at any rate he demonstrated to them that they were not drowned yet, and were still capable of appreciating pain and indignities as administered by himself. It took him a good hour to bring about this new phase of discipline, but once it was established, he directed a very sore and angry crew to set up extra funnel stays, to replace the tarpaulins on number two hatch, and to clear away the wreckage of the after wheel-house, which was doing its best to jam the steering-gear.
At the end of this time a very composed McTodd clawed away up to him on the reeling upper bridge, and bawled in his ear above the howl of the gale, "Man, but even you'd laugh if you'd step down into yon engine-room. They're steaming on one boiler now. They've cut the other out. It's adrift. You can see it gather more way ever time she rolls, and presently it will wrench itself clear of seacocks and steampipes and all its connections."
"Will it go through the ship's side?"
"It might or it mightn't, though I'm a full believer in the rottenness of everything on board. But whether it rolls out through her ribs into the Atlantic, or whether it stays in its steps, makes very little difference to the professional feelings of yon crowd in the engine-room. Ye're a layman yourself, and cannot understand these niceties, but I may indicate that to be pointed out in any barroom (if you chance to survive) as an engineer that's had his boilers adrift is very injurious to the finer sentiments."
"I care not one jot for their feelings," said Kettle violently. "The black gang on this packet seem just as incompetent as the deck crowd. You'd better take over charge yourself."
"It would be most revolutionary. The chief here has read all the books that were ever written, and he's certificates enough to fill the low press cylinder. Now I don't carry a chief's certificate. That blighted Board of Trade refused me one. They did not sufficiently admire my spelling."
"Mac," said Kettle, looking him in the eyes, "if I didn't know you to be the most able man in the ship, do you think I should ask you to interfere? Besides, it's a special case. I've lived hard; latterly I've made money; and now I want to get home to the farm, and see the Missis and my girls again. And there's another thing. There's a chapel up there in Wharfedale of which I am boss. I started it; I worked out a new kind of creed; and if I got home again I believe I could add to the congregation. It would be just maddening to drown out here without a chance."
"D'ye think you're the only man with ambition? Here's me just ravening to display my wealth in Ballindrochater. It's where I was born, and it's a place that hitherto I have not distinguished myself in. If I get home, I'm going to have a public dinner given me in Ballindrochater, though I have to pay for it mysel'. It's a thing I've been figuring on for years."
But to cure the errant boiler was a task beyond even Mr. N. A. McTodd's vigour. The gale hardened down into something very nearly approaching a hurricane, and the run of the sea grew more terrible. The loose boiler threatened every moment to take charge, and to ease it of its own weight of water they ran the scalding contents out into the stokehold. The fires were drenched, the ship out of all steam command. On deck Kettle hove her to with a sea anchor of derricks and a swamped boat—and lost three men, crushed to death or washed overboard in the process. Below—with all his bilge pumps out of action—McTodd arranged bucket gangs to bale the engine-room and stokeholds clear by hand.
The steamer was old and tender, and through many a long year concrete had been applied to her internally to stop leaks. Her rolling and bucking and plunging among the seas loosened much of this, and already before steam gave out the bilge pumps had been running to their full capacity in dealing with the leaks. With the bilge pumps standing, it was more than the buckets could do with the uttermost strain to keep these inrushes in check.
The men worked with that frenzied energy which men can put out when their own lives hang on their efforts. Mr. McTodd was here, there and everywhere, encouraging them to do a little more than their best; and occasionally he assisted his tuition with a three-quarter inch spanner. The mates and the deckhands all worked at this intolerable baling. Captain Owen Kettle stumped about the bridge deck, or sat in the chart-house watching the ship, and attending briskly to his duties as her master when occasion arose.
For a night and a day this terrible work went on, and by degrees the weather eased; but human endurance has its limits, and the baling eased also. There was no question of getting fires again in the remaining boiler's furnaces. There were ten feet of water in the stokehold—and—it was not diminishing. Rivets were out all over her, and there was a weep round the lap-joints of every plate. There was no blinking the fact that she was gradually settling.
Of her four boats two had been stove in davits, and then swept away by the seas; one made part of the sea anchor and was wrecked beyond repair; one alone remained seaworthy. This last Kettle measured, and then made thoughtful calculation. She was built as a lifeboat, with air-lockers, and at the utmost would carry seventeen people. There were twenty-one souls on board.
Then he went into the chart-house again and examined the glass. It had risen since the last gale, and now it was steadily sinking.
"Ah, well," he said, "there's no wriggling out of it this trip."
He opened a drawer and pulled out notepaper. He tore off twenty narrow slips, and seventeen of these he marked with a big blue pencilled B. Then he folded these separately, and threw them into Captain Walkfield's shore-going felt hat.
When the hands assembled on the bridge deck some five minutes later, they showed no surprise at being ordered to leave the ship. For one thing they were too numbed with weariness for any great display of emotion, and for another it was obvious that such an order must come sooner or later. They dipped for seats in the boat, and those that drew a B out of the hat showed no undue elation, and those that picked the blanks took their luck stolidly.
They dipped for seats in the boat,... and those
that picked the blanks took their luck stolidly.
A knot of men cast off the awning lacings of the boat; two threw out her davit tackles and overhauled them; the rest ran to the galley and pantries, collecting scraps of food and bottles of water.
"I'm sorry for these ducks we must leave behind," said McTodd, who had drawn a seat.
"We're obliged to you for your kind sympathy," said Kettle.
"You! But, man, you're not going to stay. You're rich. Your life's of value. You're never going to chuck it away."
"I've got to stand by the ship."
"Rubbish. Ye're a passenger. It's the duty of all passengers to be saved first thing."
"I was a passenger, but my nasty bossing way got the better of me as usual. If I'd remained a passenger a seat in that boat would have been mine by rights, and I'd have it if I had to break up half the hands to get there. But I didn't know when I was well off. I fired Walkfield and made myself skipper in his place, and, by James, skipper I've got to be, and I must stand by the old packet while there's any one else left on her. There's another reason, too, why I didn't draw. Gambling's distinctly frowned upon by the Wharfedale Particular Methodists."
The engineer drew a face of dismay.
"Your releegious objections to a flutter I consider just absurd. But you're sound about what's due from a skipper. Man, I'm awful sorry to lose ye, but there's no choice."
"No," said Kettle, "no choice. There, hurry, man, and get down into that boat, or those tailors will have her stove against the ship's side, and we shall all be in the soup."
The engineer boarded the leaping boat, and the others joined him. She was cast off, and a wave spurned her from the ship's side. A mast was stepped and a rag of a sail hoisted, and away she drove with frightened haste before the rising gale.
One last glance of Captain Kettle they had as the steamer bowed over the flank of a sea, and her chart-house was displayed to them through its doorway. Captain Kettle, with his wooden leg wedged against a deck cleat, sat on one of the settees. A great cigar was smoking in his mouth. A paper block was on his knee, and he was writing rapidly. There was a certain grim look of satisfaction on his face, that was carried out even in the truculent cock of his red torpedo beard.
The news of the steamer's loss received scarcely so much as a paragraph's notice at first in the English papers. But presently there arrived in England from Morocco a certain Mr. Martin Fenner, who straightway foregathered with a mournful McTodd. They had their talk, a pitiful sorrowing talk of old times, and then Fenner said: "I shan't go back to Casadir. I haven't the heart to. I liked Kettle more than any one else on earth, I think."
"Me too. He was a good little beggar.' I shan't go back either. It will be a pity. Kaid Bergash will lose his stiffening without us, and then the Sultan of Morocco will come down and cut off every head that wags in the Sus country, and all our work will go for nothing except the sordid dollar making."
Fenner rubbed at his great beak of a nose. "No, I'm hanged if that brute of a Sultan shall clip in now. We at least owe that to Kettle's memory. His work is good enough to be made permanent. England's strong just at present, and she's nothing on hand. By gad, I'll work the Government to proclaim a protectorate over the districts-"
Now, "working the Government" is not a thing to be done in a moment, because governments have a fine sense of their own dignity, and are not apt to move with any haste. But, as Fenner said, even the Press could have its uses, and here was one of them.
Their previous exploits in the Sus country had been ignored, or merely stigmatized as piratical. But Fenner got hold of an interviewer and explained them picturesquely. He lived at the Cecil, and was readily accessible to any pressman who cared to call; and as he exuded good copy for the asking, the pressmen called in numbers.
Through this medium, then, the British public were informed of the pit from which Southern Morocco had been digged, of the pleasant prosperity to which it had ascended, and the blight of the Sultan with which it was now threatened. Fenner talked of Kettle with an appreciative tongue. There was a man of genius, a man of brazen bravery, a man of infinite tact and organizing power—in fact, an Empire builder! Moreover, he was a man who did not advertise.
And the public were quick to catch at this fact and applaud it. Advertisers they had always with them. But such men as this Kettle are very rare. From being an unknown adventurer, Captain Owen Kettle suddenly leapt into being talked of as one of the most eminent constructive politicians of the century. Men turned up army lists to find his regiment. Ladies wore a Kettle button as a brooch. All mourned his untimely cutting off.
A sculptor, struck by a happy idea, modelled in clay a "Captain O. Kettle" brandishing a sword (one of the few weapons he had never touched) and apparently leading on troops. It was the hit of a good Academy.
Of the man himself only one further message came in. A bottle thrown up beside the red rocks on a Biarritz beach held some mildewed paper, with the writing almost obliterated. Two lines alone could be distinguished:
"And wayward fortune thus did settle
Captain the Revd. Owen Kettle."
This was suppressed; his taste for poetry was not mentioned, and, indeed, many of the little mariner's other traits shared the same oblivion; he appeared only as a strong man, the unappreciated man, the neglected man. A Kettle cult arose, which deplored the fact so great, so wonderful a life could have been passed in the quiet shelter of obscurity. On the de mortuis principle none of his many faults were remembered. It was only his virtues that were recounted.
Thus daily his halo grew, and presently a movement was set afoot to cast the Academy statue in bronze, and have it set up in one of London's thoroughfares. The idea was kept hot; an enthusiast promised to defray the cost; a committee was formed and approached a Cabinet Minister as to a site.
Now a psychological moment then just arrived, and it suited the Government to yield to public clamour. They "acceded to the urgent prayer" of the Kaid of Sus (who had so recently made himself an independent potentate), and in view of the large number of British subjects residing in his Highness's dominions, they proclaimed a British protectorate over the country.
Accurately, the British subjects in Casadir and in all the Sus country at that particular moment consisted of some ten or thirteen Gibraltar scorpions. But these were enough for diplomatic purposes, and the patriotism of the Government was acclaimed by a delighted country.
The Colonial Secretary, brimming with enthusiasm for himself, received the Kettle Statue Committee (with their attendant train of reporters) and delivered himself of an important and epoch-making speech, which an hour later was buzzing over the wires to every capital in Europe.
At the end, and, in fact, like a lady's postscript, he alluded to the point that had brought them together. The permanent officials had informed him that there was strong precedent why His Majesty's Government could not grant permission to erect the statue of this noble Empire-builder as desired. No one regretted this decision more than himself, but there was the precedent, and it must be abided by. As a solace he might say that, had Captain Kettle fortunately survived, he would have felt it his obvious duty to have recommended such a national benefactor to His Majesty as a Knight Commander of the Bath.
The papers, one and all, reported this almost verbatim next morning; one even went so far as to head its column: "The late Sir Owen Kettle K.C.B." All the Britons proclaimed the justice of the promotion, and if the Continental Press did grow spiteful over the "decoration of another English pirate," that (so thought his friends) would only make poor Kettle appreciate his honours all the more.
And then on the crest of this wave of hero-worship, there was emitted on to these shores, by the help of a distressed mariner's free pass, a spruce Captain Owen Kettle in the lean, spare flesh.
The country of course shouted with joy, but their shouts were a trifle flat and forced. The man had been dead, and they had worshipped him. It would be embarrassing to any sect if all its saints returned to life.
In very tense language the papers described the final sinking of that redoubtable steamer, the Frying-pan, the rescue of her remaining people by a four-masted sailing ship bound for Melbourne, and the subsequent disablement of this vessel by a tornado, which explained her lengthy voyage. The public took but a languid interest in it all, and in two days the subject lapsed.
But the Colonial Secretary, to his honour be it said, remembered his word. The British Government is slow to move, but once it is pledged to any course, either for good or evil, it usually keeps its promise. The red-tape knots were untied. The slow machinery of actual promotion was thrown in gear, and the clutch slid home.
In the meanwhile, a joyful Kettle, preceded by telegrams, raced to Skipton, and over into Wharfedale, and as he told me himself (with a moist eye) the welcome of Mrs. Kettle and his daughters was worth the waiting for. It was long years since he had last seen the farm; through force of circumstances his correspondence had been something of the most irregular; but through all that weary exile he had been working with both eyes on them, and (low be it confessed), with very small thought for the welfare of the British Empire. It was only incidentally that the Empire had profited.
But the wheels of promotion, if they were geared low, slipped no cogs. It was the morning of the eldest Miss Kettle's marriage to Mr. Hunter, of Bradford, that the massive blue envelope arrived, and it was a Lady Kettle who gave her daughter away, and a Rev. Sir Owen Kettle K.C.B. who (with the assistance of a registrar) married them. Never before has the one and only chapel dedicated to the Wharfedale Particular Methodist faith seen such a glittering ceremony, and till the next Miss Kettle quits the maiden state it is not likely to see such another.
It was the morning of the eldest Miss Kettle's
marriage that the massive blue envelope arrived.
There was a reception afterward at the farm, and Fenner, with a nose that was more masterful than ever, made a speech that was not all that could be desired. His own keen and hopeless desire for domestic joys led him sometimes into statements which were embarrassing. McTodd was there, also, and kept sober. Mr. McTodd had recently been made a freeman of Ballindrochater, and was much impressed with the honour, and with the cost and uselessness of the free library which had procured it for him.
So here we leave Sir Owen Kettle K.C.B., master mariner and pastor, in the odour of that home for which he had sighed during so many battling years, a man looked up to and respected, even by the many who disagree with most of his opinions.
There is a colony of brown-headed gulls which breed in a scaur above the farm, and earn a livelihood in the fields, and in the shallows of the Wharfe. The mewings of these sometimes fall on the little sailor's ears, and his eyes look on his mind goes to scenes far from Wharfedale, wild scenes, fierce scenes, where Strenuous men ...
Ah, well!
But he has always a reserve of strength sufficient to pull himself from this violent past, and one touch of his wife's hand is enough to bring him back again to pleasurable contentment.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.