Hurricane Williams

Front matter

HURRICANE WILLIAMS

By GORDON YOUNG

Author of SAVAGES, WILD BLOOD, ETC.

Chapter 1

HURRICANE WILLIAMS

CHAPTER I

THE SHIP WITH A VIKING NAME

HONOLULU buzzingly gossiped about the ship with the viking name; for ships, like women in many other ways too, get themselves talked of if they misbehave.

Her runaway sailors, finding haven in one bar shanty or another, told of a madman that lived aft and owned the ship. Her mate had been thrown bodily from the deck. He swam ashore; he had to swim or sink. Gorvhalsen, the owner, did not care what he did—what the mate did; or what he himself did, for that matter. The mate's baggage and wages were sent after him. The American consul was hearing about it. The sailors, deep in gin, said what they had suffered. The consul would hear about that too.

The captain came off with his bag and baggage. He had been engaged to bring the Heraldr into Honolulu; there she was, and, roundly, he did not care what happened to her from then on. The owner, he said, was a queer animal; but the seamen had no proper grievance at all. As for the mate—there was a “woman” on board.

In a port where whalers flocked, their rough discipline brutally kept and taken by sailors, everybody, as a part of sea-life, complaining stories needed to tell at least of murder to stir officials. An officer's story was not so readily overlooked, yet the mate's unsympathetically like complaining of ill luck with a woman. This woman, it was said, had screamed; and the owner, Gorvhalsen, some sort of a relative to her, had heard. He was a powerful brute.

The consul visited the Heraldr. He came back enthusiastic. Gorvhalsen, distinguished scientist, with a wife and friends, was at Honolulu.

The next day they came ashore as his guests.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

A WOMAN, RED AND PURPLE, LIKE FIRE AND BRUISES

A BEACH-COMBER known as McGuire was usually among the idlers around the boat-landing, with wreath-makers, fruit-venders, sailors waiting for boats, other loafers of one kind and another and small naked youngsters who came out of the water from time to time and sprawled on the warm sand.

A soothing drowsy laziness like the restful weariness of work well done filled the days, put even the more civilized men into long cane chairs with tall glasses and siphons near by. In the evening they would stir about leisurely, with cigars aglow and leis on their necks, talk of home, shipments, sugar in the valleys, coffee in the uplands—and be bumped from the path by the whirling flash of some brown-bodied boy grasping at a happily excited girl, coming out of the dark breathless in love-drunken play and vanishing with a blur of soft footfalls into shadows.

McGuire was known as a happy-go-lucky beach-comber, a harmless sort of fellow, worthless. The tedium of existence seemed just about all that he could stagger through the world with unless he happened to get into the water. He was a good swimmer.

Oddly enough McGuire had innocent blue eyes somewhat obscured by drooping lids. The innocent light, appealing as sadness, was unconvincing to those who knew him or of him. Whatever attractiveness he had was in his personality, not in his appearance. The ugliness was pronounced, unescapable on sight, but hardly remembered. The smile was remembered and the words, often unexpected as epigrams. He had a sun-burned, freckle-splattered face, a wide mouth and badly formed, long nose. He would talk freely of anything to anybody and spoke native languages like a Kanaka. His voice was gentle, slow, disarmingly amiable; but it was the height of unwisdom to believe anything that he said.

A long, lean, silent old man by the name of Brundage was his friend. Brundage was thought to have money. For a time he had tried to buy a small schooner, then suddenly decided to buy nothing and took to the backless chair on the porch of a sailors' boarding-house in Market Street. McGuire lived with him.

After the Heraldr arrived, McGuire began loafing by the landing. He would lie motionless in the shade, his brick-red head on a tattooed arm, and sleepily watch the ship.

Near him the flower-girls chattered, laughing, eating, teasing. When a drunken sailor came by like an unlovely reveler, his pawing hands would be beaten away amid shrill words. They would laugh, unangered, as he staggered off, covered with flowers thrown at him.

As the boat approached the landing with the consul's guests McGuire began from afar to guess at the strange faces.

Among them was the familiar face of Matt Ward, the new captain of Heraldr—a fellow with a large waistline and an overhanging mustache with tobacco-stained fringe. He was hard-spoken and glowered at whomever he talked. With his own hands he had been picking a crew for the Heraldr even before she came, and he seemed to want all of the scoundrels and roughs in sight. A lot of them, lured by the hint of trouble and treasure, were eager to sign on.

Some weeks before, Ward had appeared at Honolulu and began making inquiries about two fellows whom nobody knew. He had fallen in with McGuire, and the talk drifted around to “Hurricane Williams,” the “pirate” who had lately made off with a big iron bark and, so rumor said, her treasure chest held a half-million pounds sterling, in gold. Ward did not say why he wanted a deck full of rough fighting men. Like a discreet treasure hunter he asked questions and told nothing, but maintained an air of mystery and gave vague hints. They were enough for McGuire. And after that Brundage took to his backless chair and quit looking for a schooner.

The consul, all in white, his red freshly shaven face aglow, and swinging a gold-headed cane, strolled toward the landing to wait for his guest. He stopped by the wreath-makers—very pretty girls, some of them, in their long one-piece loose gowns of white muslin and colored calico. While leis were placed about his neck and hat-crown he talked to them, or thought that he did, in the native tongue; but he had no sooner walked away than they turned on McGuire, demanding to know of him what the consul had tried to say.

“Ever'thing that is true,” he answered carelessly. “You are lazy girls. Ought to be bending in taro patches—that you ought to send your pretty sisters to the beach so strangers won't be disappointed.”

They jeered him stormily. The consul was a gallant man. They knew that. McGuire was the father of all untruth. They knew that, too.

Three women were in the approaching boat, and McGuire recognized far off the one of whom the runaway sailors talked so much.

“I tell uh,” a gin-laden fellow had said, his head unsteadily bobbing while a gestural arm feebly wandered about, “I tell uh she's beau-beau-t'ful—like a show-girl.”

His ill-stocked brain had no memories to draw on for comparison but the tawdry tinseled wastrel women of shows in drinking-places along port water fronts.

Jeanne Vaughn—he knew her name—was beautiful in the surprising, bizarre way of remote and unattainable women. He had seen her on deck when he was at the wheel, had been close to her and had been left with the haunting shadow of her in his brain.

“She's got red hair—not like your'n. An jew'lry. The mate—he put 'is hand on 'er. That black devil throwed him over. Mos' beaut'ful like a show-girl.”

The boat curved broadside to the landing-steps where the consul stood hatless and bowing. Native girls and loafers pressed respectfully about the party.

Gorvhalsen, huge, black-bearded, almost as awkward as an animal unused to its hind legs, fascinated the water-front idlers.

“He ought to live in a tree,” McGuire muttered to a native girl in front of him. She turned alertly. Her dark face, overhung with a coronal of white blossoms, was puzzled but eager. “You never saw a gorilla. If you had, Tilua, you'd pick up your skirts now an' run.”

She knew that McGuire talked much nonsense, so she smiled understandingly and looked again, not at Gorvhalsen but at the flame-woman, the wonderful creature with red hair.

Jeanne Vaughn was without a head-covering other than the purple parasol that matched her silken waist and stockings. Her hair was an auroral glory, shortened, bushily curling, bright. It flared, startling, unreal, like the head-dress of a Fijian. Her dark eyes were alert, watchful, as if to see who was not admiring her.

“Poor moths,” said McGuire.

He had been drinking before he got to the boarding-house that night and found Brundage, like a piece of stonework with animated eyes, sitting on his backless chair, feet on the railing. He was a grim old man, stern, erect, silent, and he hated women, all of them.

“Damned beautiful. You'd like her, Jake. “Flame woman, Tilua calls her. Must have moths, these women. You'd be a fine gray old moth. I'd sit a long time to see you flutter.”

McGuire flapped his thin arms up and down in pantomime. Brundage smoked on, his eyes looking away into the darkness.

“Bold as a woman who doesn't know she isn't pretty. Nothin' bolder, Jake. Always at the mast head—these danger-women. Always on the watch. Wantin' some man to make 'em love him.

“There's your chance. Aye, twenty years ago when your blood was warm. No—too soon. Forty years ago. You were human forty years ago, weren't you? I doubt it.

“She thinks she's full o' life, too. She's empty. That's the trouble. Her eagerness is hunger—for moths. She flamed up on the Heraldr's poop because there were some half-shaped devils that looked like men in the fo'c's'le. Always on the look out, Jake, to stir men up. All red an purple—like fire an' bruises. One o' these days her soul'll go up to God, an' God'll say2”

Brundage growled. The ineffable name on McGuire's lips made him uneasy. It was the only thing under heaven that could stir him from his remote, stony aspect; but McGuire's drunken tongue was at times enough to disquiet an atheist. Brundage was nothing so philosophical as an atheist. He was an old tough-bodied man, full of crime and no repentance, though he thought that any man might rest a little easier if a prayer was said at his grave's edge.

McGuire had closely watched everybody in the party.

Mrs. Gorvhalsen was tall, poised and unexpectedly refined for the mate of an anthropoid.

With her was a young boy and an even younger girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen. The boy had the friendliness of a lanky ill-fed pup that has hopefully attached himself to strangers. The shoulders were prematurely rounded with the marked curvature that books put on their victims. His curly blond hair did not belong above the pinched face that needed only a few wrinkles to look aged. His clothes did not fit.

His sister—there could be no doubt that she was his sister—had a wide-eyed trustfulness and wonder in her eyes. She was a blonde little thing, not yet in bloom; hipless and breastless. In the midst of dark robust maidens who bloomed rapidly she seemed pathetically immature, faded if not blighted; and as yet she was unconscious of the graces woman is supposed to have. She was learning geography, but was unaware of men—except as races. A man of judgment, the consul for instance, would have seen in Mrs. Gorvhalsen's niece only a little school-girl, unwisely innocent but protectively unattractive. McGuire guessed that if she did not believe in giants and dragons, surely she had faith in pots of gold where rainbows end, princes in disguise, and probably kept a diary.

Matt Ward gripped a cigar at the corner of his mouth, firmly, almost savagely, as though letting the world know he could hold men as he held that cigar. McGuire thought this captain would have a fine time with his bold sea-dog manner if he ever got in the way of the great black, brainy animal that owned the ship.

One of the native girls threw a wreath about the boy's neck. He jumped guiltily, then thanked her as soberly as he had ever thanked any of his sister's convent friends for a nosegay.

The flower-girls, giggling, laughing, acting shy but being bold, adorned the party.

The heaviest shower fell about the neck of Gorvhalsen, who was like some great muscular Silenus being decked for a drunken feast. He stooped submissively while flower-chains were put on his neck. His hat had been snatched away and Tilua was swiftly fastening a lei on it. Bare-headed, his thick dark hair falling to his ears, he stood awkwardly, powerful, amiable. A calicoed girl with sudden boldness began to weave red flowers into the black wavy beard that overflowed his breast.

From hat-crown to waist he was festooned. He straightened toweringly; then with a gesture almost like that of capture his hand reached out and closed on the arm of a girl. She pulled back, jerking as hard as she could and laughing nervously. Her embarrassment was real. He was more than a strange man; he was a strange kind of man. Slowly he drew her toward him. She struggled, begging and laughing together. His hand slipped along her arm and held her wrist, then pressed money into her fingers. Some change fell through; and at once, like imps exploded into flight, little black bare bodied boys darted scramblingly into the sandy dust.

The girl whirled away. Others pressed toward him with eager fluttering and happy cries: Gorvhalsen was emptying his pockets into their hands, sometimes tossing the coins, sometimes holding his hand closed so they must pry and pull at his fingers. Then he strode off, laughing deep, swaying, dripping petals at every step.

McGuire caught the seasickly-looking youth straggling behind the party. He would turn aside at each bush to poke it with his nose.

“See those girls?” McGuire asked. “Used to put women to death for that.”

Young Corydon was startled both by the stranger's approach and words. All that he could see were two fat women in the shade munching bananas, and he sidled off distrustfully.

“That's right,” McGuire affirmed.

“You know I'm just a stranger.”

“Sure I know it. Thought you'd like to learn some things. Ask the consul. 'F you come ashore some time I'll take you round. Ask the consul about the bananas. See this tree? Candle-nut tree. Grows candles an'2”

But his sister called to him, and Corydon hurried off.

Later he did ask the consul about the bananas. He asked with exceeding timidity, feeling a little foolish as one does when suspicious of a question's good sense; then he felt surprise and some gratitude toward McGuire. In the heathen times women were put to death for eating bananas—and for eating many other things that men particularly liked.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

CONVENT FEET TOUCH PAGAN GROUND

IN A few days McGuire had a devoted admirer, and scarcely knew what to do with him. Young Corydon rapidly became at ease with the oddest companion that the world's rag-bag could have furnished, and for a long time believed that McGuire was a real friend of his own kind.

He had never heard of beach-combers, the outcasts from even tropic tolerance, who live—that is about all that can be said. By some satanic miracle, they live and do not die off.

Day after day Corydon came ashore, looking for and finding him. McGuire was puzzled at first, then liked the boy—he was so blazingly innocent and incurious. He did not drink—or anything. He did not want to see a hulahula. He wanted to see landmarks and have McGuire tell their legends. McGuire could imagine legends as fast as he could talk—good lively ones.

One morning McGuire was drowsily listening to native gossips when Corydon touched his shoulder, saying:

“I brought my sister to go with us to-day.”

The answer came in a language that Corydon had the luck not to understand; and McGuire, quite awakened, was looking at the girl. Slight, immature, alone as though lost, she stood some fifty yards away, watching him with wide curious eyes. She held a little pasteboard box.

“She has brought lunch for us,” Corydon said.

“She can't go. It won't do. Hell, no!”

The boy was stubborn. He wanted her to go. He said:

“And I've told her of you, how you know everything!”

If she had been a woman, McGuire would not have cared. He was hardened enough for that. Jeanne Vaughn, for instance. He would not have minded how much embarrassment, confusion, anger, came upon her at learning she had spent the day with a beach-comber. But a girl-child— No!

And he could not explain to her that white women did not speak to him. He was not the type of sinner, anyhow, to redeem himself by self-depreciation. It would have been too much like claiming virtue.

There she stood, like a colorless little straggler in browns and grays, wistfully expectant. Her light hair strayed inquisitively from under her stiff straw hat that was held by an elastic under the chin. The cut of her thin gray blouse gave her shoulders a rounded effect, much like her brother's curvature. The brown skirt fell formlessly against her legs. There was a simple, uninteresting, bud-like beauty in her face—a very innocent and unthrilling face, devoid of the stimulation that awakens men sud denly, stirring the worst or the best in them. She was a sober little mortal and all eager to know about the world. Her faith in McGuire was great, rooted in the confidences and admiration communicated by her brother.

McGuire abruptly decided that it wouldn't greatly hurt anybody if she had at least one day of her youth to remember in her old age. The three of them got into a cab and drove rapidly over the smooth streets, out through the green and white town, into the valley.

As suddenly as if by the raising of a foliage curtain they came into a little clearing where three or four houses stood like shaggy hayricks with door ways in the end. Chickens scattered from under the pony's feet. A dog barked half-welcomingly from a doorway, then stretched himself stiffly and came forward with much tail-wagging and head-bobbing. He knew McGuire, but those funny strangers would have to be nosed and looked over.

A naked baby, its full little brown stomach advanced like an alderman's and a small mouth stretched over the end of a sugar cane, stared stolidly.

Voices were heard, faces peered out. Around the houses came four or five nearly naked boys of all the small sizes. Knowing that strangers had come, the girls paused to slip hastily into their loose gowns, then bounded out with brown legs flashing under white muslin.

They pawed and bantered McGuire, but fell upon Eve as though to tear her to pieces in delight at having her for a guest. Her little half-frozen soul was startled. The unsightly hat was whisked from her feebly groping hands, and out of their own hair they took wreaths and flowers for her blonde head.

In the whole of her life she had never known more of a welcome than the perfunctory embrace and dull flat kiss of a relative. Now she was just about lifted and carried to where one of the youngsters struggled with a rolled mat, brought through the doorway for the stranger guests.

A matronly woman, big, fat, came up slowly, smiling at McGuire. Her loose dress was spotted, her big feet were bare; but somehow she had dignity, even grace.

McGuire, after expressing his unconvincing opinion of her daughters, nieces, and all the youthful maiden connection she had, spoke of his friends.

The baby waddled importantly across to the mat, wedged between the girls and, advancing into the midst of the circle, collapsed and regarded Eve with dignified appraisement. She reached out coaxingly. But it was beneath him to yield to the arms of a strange woman.

McGuire was saying: “—from a great cold country where people freeze in the cradle. Never get warm, some of 'em, till they die—then they roast.”

The baby, having passed judgment, thrust out its sugar stick, offering to share its worldly goods. Eve leaned forward and opened her mouth; and as the sticky baby hand came against her face, something warm and overpowering seemed to burst inside of her breast. With a gesture convulsively eager she snatched the baby into her arms. That was no way to treat a fellow. He kicked and squirmed, wriggled loose, got out from among the girls and with waddling, pompous steps approached McGuire.

“—taught from babyhood to believe they'll go to a warm island—like this—somewhere up there, if they're good an not too happy2”

Lest there should be a trace of hunger in the guests, a wooden calabash half as big as a wagon wheel, heaped with bananas, mangos, papayas, blue grapes and oranges, was placed before Eve and Corydon. A beflowered cupbearer broke into and offered cool green cocoanuts.

“—their bare feet have never known the touch of the naked earth. They get their flowers from bottles, one drop at a time2”

That night two weary, bedraggled young people, one with her stiff hat askew and the other with his ears flattened by the soiled, over-sized helmet, trailed tired feet toward the landing. Their faces were alight with inner contentment and their arms were loaded with boughs. They were covered with dust and flowers. Their clothes were ruined. Every muscle ached in astonished anger. But the boy and girl were happy. They looked at each other again and again, too worn out to speak; but reassuring glances declared each to the other that it had been a day of days.

A weary confusion of pleasant impressions bore upon Eve. She was past trying to think, and knew only that she had never been so tired and had so many delights. There was warmth of satisfaction in the very exhaustion.

All day they had climbed about, finding fruit and flowers, eating, sniffing, laughing, racing.

At a deep clear pool the boys had been sent away. The brown girls, dropping their dresses with swift disrobing-gestures, flashed into the water.

Eve removed her shoes and stockings and for the first time her pale little bleached feet and ankles felt anything like the pagan caress of earth, sun and hillside water.

The floor of the pool was enameled with smooth stones. Like water-girls of fables the Hawaiians danced and glided, laughed and splashed.

Twitches of vague uneasiness came to Eve. It seemed wrong to be bathing unclothed in the sunlight, with only leafy beflowered screens about; but she had been comforted by the thought that it must be all right, for McGuire had readily gone away with the boys. She never doubted that he would have disapproved had it really been wrong.

McGuire was totally beyond her experience and imagination. His slow, lazy, good-humored manner fascinated her; but when he took to words she was thrilled. He talked so effortlessly and rounded everything like a story-teller, and he seemed to know all things and understand them. She was happily unconscious of his disregard for the truth in the legends and folk-lore. That would have troubled her. She would have preferred the strict truth and enjoyed it less, and no doubt she would still have admired him too; but growing wonderment would not have touched and filled her until the man himself was distorted almost heroically.

He returned to them in the dusk with two Kanakas following. The natives ran a boat off the sand and shot alongside the steps. McGuire helped her into it, making sure that she had every twig that bore a precious blossom. Her little fingers were not too weary to be greedy for all the floral loot.

Corydon, of course, almost fell into the water getting seated. His feet and hands were always in his way. He tried to tell McGuire what a splendid day they had spent.

Eve, somehow, as women can, put nearly all that she felt into a simple good-by. She waved at him in the darkness.

His answering smile was obscured in the thickening twilight; and it was just as well. It was a weary, half-mocking smile, perhaps self-mocking.

They never saw him again on shore.

The consul, who had come to the Heraldr for dinner, heard about the day from the exhausted boy and girl. He managed to restrain himself until he had Mrs. Gorvhalsen's ears alone with his shocked voice.

“That McGuire2”

Mrs. Gorvhalsen was not excitable. She said nothing at all to Eve, but took pains to see that she did not again go wandering away with a stray beach-comber. Somehow Corydon also found his aunt making arrangements that kept him from getting on shore by himself.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV

A DEVIL'S CREW BOARDS THE BLACK DANE'S SHIP

MATT WARD called himself a devil-tamer, and got together a crew unenvied by any captain in port.

McGuire came out on the eve of sailing with two boat-loads of Ward's devils, as yet untamed. They were a riffraff of quarreling, singing fellows, many ragged, some hungry—but none sober.

They were mostly bearded; many had small loops of gold in their ears, and one piratical Frenchman with a red cloth bound over his forehead wore ear rings that tinkled when he moved. There was a crucifix about his neck.

Shirts of all the bright and dirty colors were among them, with a glow of yellow silk on the black body of a big American negro. Trousers were of canvas and dungarees, brown, blue and white. Knives, some of them very long, were on their hips, with lanyards through the rings.

One bearded fellow crouched down in the boat as though with a broken body. Men tossed fragments of flower-chains at him, and drunken laughter mocked him for being drunk. An enfeebled old fellow—the sailmaker—patiently struck sulphur matches against the wet gunnel, his pipe between his teeth. A burly American prize-fighter insisted that he was champeen and that his name was Clobb. A Spaniard rattled in his soft tongue to a dozing Swede. Two bearded old whalers sat together and sang wailingly of a sailor's sad life.

They had the impudence of chosen men, and bawled cheers at the Heraldr's poop where Jeanne Vaughn and Eve stood among three or four figures.

Two mates bent above the accommodation ladder, expecting trouble. A fellow with a girth like a barrel's stood at the foot of the ladder to take a hand in quieting down the raffle. He was the boatswain.

The mates cursed stormily as the men with a rush, almost capsizing, crowded toward the ladder, clustering up unsteadily, their feet less sure than their hands. They clutched the man-ropes and stumbled.

The one wholly drunk man was dragged on board with his head hanging from a neck as limp as if broken. He was dropped like a sack of unneeded ballast. Men stumbled over and stepped on him.

They were kicked, dragged, shunted, cursed forward, where they swarmed about the forecastle like upturned ants. They tumbled about, unable to decide where to go or what to do, roaring, singing, fighting, snoring, swearing, settling on hatches and in scuppers, getting in their own way, staggering if their feet moved.

They filled the deck-house and dungeon-like quarters in the forecastle, overflowing all about the deck. It was impossible to call a muster. They would not have answered Gabriel himself. The boatswain, a big Britisher, got orders to keep the crew piped down. The women aft were being made uneasy. Gorvhalsen and Matt Ward were not yet on board.

Most of the crew had been swept up from the beach, pulled out of adobe shacks and gin-shops around the fish-market. Among them were men who had been shipwrecked, some on coral, some on ice; a few real sailormen who had bucked the westward wind around the Horn; fellows who had hunted whales from the Behring to the Tuscarora, rioted in the bazaars of Singapore.

They were superstitious and blasphemous, the jetsam of a tropic port, driftings from the seas of all the world: Portuguese, a Frenchman, three Hawaiians who considered McGuire as one of themselves, a Swedish carpenter, two Chinese cooks, a Jap boy, a Chilian or two, a California miner, British deserters who knew many ballads and believed a scratch on the mizzen would raise a wind.

Thirty-one men before the mast. Matt Ward was looking for trouble.

Strange tales they told one to another, with fierce oaths casually used, of fights and sights and drunken nights.

A fellow named Smith, an old-timer in the South Seas, babbled of having seen the Mariana, the iron bark stolen by the pirate, “Hurricane” Williams, when she put into Havannah Harbor.

Brundage, sleepless and aloof, sat quietly watching Smith and listening to the sons of the men who had built Babel's tower.

Men were called liars who said that the girls in the Tunis bazaars wore gaily colored breast-clothes and tight creamy trousers; but every yarn of a spectral craft was taken with the solemn nod of approval.

They yarned, jabbered, fought and sang.

Shortly before dark the boatswain came forward with a belaying-pin to pipe down a noisy quartet draped about the topgallant forecastle windlass and yelling a sad song of a faithless shore-girl.

It was a good fight. Then the burly boatswain, aglow with the spirit of battle, yelled louder than they had sung: “Now 'f hany more o' hu livelies wants a bashed 'ead, just hu sing hout!”

He was answered with jeers and groans from all sides. He bounded down the ladder, tramping and peering about, his bull neck outthrust, and when he caught sight of a fellow's open mouth he jumped for him. Somebody with a piece of wood in hand hit the boatswain from behind. He fell and lay for many minutes like a drunken man.