The Abandoned (Jennie)

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Countess and the Crew

WHEN Peter had been a boy at home, Nanny had often told him stories about the small steamers that used to tie up at Greenock and Gourock, the two port towns outside of Glasgow, where she used to live when she was a little girl. But never, Peter decided, could there have been such an odd ship with such a strange and ill-assorted crew as the Countess of Greenock and her motley band of officers, sailors and deckhands whom he now learned to know as the Countess loafed lazily along the south and west coasts of England, thrusting her stubby, rust-eaten bow into port apparently at the slightest opportunity and even when there did not seem to be a legitimate reason for her doing so.

For nobody on board, as far as Peter could make out, seemed to make much sense. With the exception of the second engineer, who was absolutely not to be separated from the ancient and clanking machinery that somehow still managed to propel the Countess at jellyfish pace through the choppy waters of the Channel, each and every one appeared to have some peculiarity or hobby which interested him and took up more of his time than was devoted to the necessary duties connected with keeping the-ship afloat and guiding it to its destination.

To begin with, there was the Captain, Mr. Sourlies, and when, in their spare time during the afternoon, Peter and Jennie used to foregather in the cargo hold just abaft the island bridge, or keep a rendezvous astern to gossip and exchange notes on their work, adventures and the people they had met, they agreed that from everything they had seen and heard they had never encountered a queerer one than he.

His dislike of the sea and everything and everyone connected with it, Peter learned through listening to the officers and members of the crew discussing him, stemmed from the fact, according to Mr. McDunkeld, the chief engineer, that Captain Sourlies came from a long line of seafarers. But when it came his turn to take up the profession, he had run away from home in Glasgow to a farm, for what he was really interested in was agriculture.

Mr. Fairlie, the radio operator, to whom Mr. McDunkeld told this story, said that he had often heard of farm boys running away to sea, but never in all his born days had he known of a sea-type running away to a farm. Peter then heard Mr. McDunkeld say that as far as he knew it was true, and that Captain Sourlies' father had been very angry when he found him in the midst of a lot of cows and chickens and pigs, and brought him back, shipped him off to sea and forced him to take a master's ticket. When his father had passed on, he had hung the final anchor around his son's neck by willing him the controlling interest in the Countess of Greenock. Captain Sourlies' Scottish thrift and business acumen would not permit him to entrust her to others and so he, who so loved the land, was doomed to a life at sea.

By keeping the Countess in the coastwise trade, and causing her to call at as many ports, almost, as there were between London and Glasgow, he managed to avoid the sea as much as possible, as well as pick up a great deal of business. While en route between ports he was silent, gloomy, irritable and un– happy, and kept to himself in his cabin where he studied the subject of agriculture. He rarely appeared on the bridge. Any delay encountered at sea between ports, such as engine trouble, or fog, or headwinds, would see him show his head at his door for a moment to inquire into the cause thereof, and then, no matter what the reason, retire to his cabin in a huge and absolute tantrum which manifested itself in his breaking every bit of glassware or crockery that happened to be within reach at the time.

Peter and Jennie estimated that the captain weighed close on twenty-two stone, which would be over three hundred pounds. He had smallish eyes, somewhat deep-set and knowing, like a pig's, and a series of chins that rippled out from a small and petulant mouth, reminding Peter of the concentric rings that formed in a pond when you throw a stone into the water. But what astonished them both the most was that instead of the deep and thunderous rumble one would expect to have emerged from such an enormous frame and cavernous chest, his voice when he spoke was high-pitched and cooing like a dove, and the angrier he became over anything, and most things when he was at sea made him angry, the higher and sweeter and more softly he cooed. He never appeared on the bridge or anywhere on deck without his mustard-coloured trilby hat, and in bad or wet weather he wore not oilskins and sou'westers as did the rest of the crew, but a tan mackintosh. He only cheered up and appeared for occasional meals aft when the Countess was running up river somewhere, or landlocked in an estuary.

Quite the opposite was Mr. Strachan, the first mate, a tall, youngish fellow with red hair, narrow blue eyes and a low forehead, who, as Jennie pointed out, was not very bright, but who loved the sea and considered everything that took place on or about it to be an adventure, great or small. This naturally was bound to bring him into conflict with the captain, and truth to tell, the two men did not get on too well. But since, at any rate at sea, Captain Sourlies left practically the entire operation and management of things to Mr. Strachan, this did not matter too much.

Peter soon discovered that Mr. Strachan, in addition to his profession, had two major interests in life. One was indulgence in the art of fence—and he faithfully attended the sessions of a fencing club when he was ashore both in Glasgow and London-and the other was a passion for telling not entirely credible yarns tinged with a 'believe-it-or-not' flavour, of miraculous things and adventures that had happened to him in his life at sea and various foreign ports.

When the listener expressed wonder or even polite doubt that such an occurrence could have taken place, Mr. Strachan would present `proof' of the incident by, for instance, exhibiting a burnt-out matchstick, or a small pebble, or a bit of paper, and saying'. .. and this verra bit o' paper I'm showing ye here was in me pocket at the verra instant all this was hoppening to me.' He was always busy collecting such odd bits and scraps to be used for this purpose, and he was quite upset with Mealie, the cook, for eventually obeying Captain Sourlies' orders and dropping the rats and mice that Peter and Jennie had caught over the side, as he felt that the corpses of the rodents would have furnished incontrovertible evidence of the story of the two cats who had stowed away aboard ship and when found had their passage money ready in this form.

Quite fascinating to Peter who, as a boy, had always had a fondness for reading stories and seeing pictures of swordplay, was Mr. Strachan's fencing practice during the voyage. It took the form of attacking a dummy that Mr. Box, the ship's carpenter, had made for him and which he set up on the after cargo hatch when the weather was fine, and belaboured with a sword.

This dummy was known to one and all aboard the Countess of Greenock as 'Auld Sourlies,' for whether the carpenter had intended so or not, he had somehow managed to make him in considerable resemblance to the stout captain both in face and in figure. Auld Sourlies, the dummy, that is, had a wooden arm, canvas-covered, with a powerful spring in the wrist to which was attached his sword, an epee with three needle-sharp little steel points. When Mr. Strachan struck it preparatory to making an attack upon him it would waggle almost as though Auld Sourlies was vigorously defending himself.

And so when he was off duty, there would be Mr. Strachan on the canvas-covered after-hatch, bare to the waist and sword in hand, shouting 'Hah!' and 'Heh!' at Auld Sourlies set up dumbly facing him, and `Oh, ye would, would ye? Alez, then take thot and thot and thot!' as he leaped in and out jabbing the point of his sword into the dummy's canvas body, while Peter and Jennie, when they also happened to be off duty at the same time, sat a little distance away and watched him, enthralled, their eyes bound to the flashing point and their heads moving as it moved, forwards and backwards, or side to side, almost like patrons at a tennis match.

Once, quite early in the voyage, when Mr. Strachan made a particularly violent attack and lunge, he apparently missed parrying the dummy's riposte somehow, when the blade snapped back and Auld Sourlies' point then laid his arm open almost from wrist to elbow, wounding him grievously. All the crew and officers of the Countess promptly dropped whatever they happened to be doing at the moment and came to look, including Captain Sourlies who had the first-aid kit and put six stitches in Mr. Strachan's arm. He did so, it seemed to Peter, with considerable satisfaction. In fact, it appeared to both Peter and Jennie that the captain was almost pleased with what had happened and was acting in a way as though it had been he who had done it to Mr. Strachan instead of the dummy, as he swabbed and stitched the injured arm, murmuring that he hoped that this would be a lesson to Mr. Strachan.

To the mate, however, it was another miraculous yarn to tell of himself being probably the only fencer in the world ever to be defeated and seriously wounded by a dummy, and what was more, there was the proof of it on his arm which he would carry to his grave.

But Peter's real favourite amongst the officers was the second mate, little Mr. Carluke, who looked somewhat like an inoffensive stoat, and who wrote Wild West and cowboy and Indian stories for the tuppeny dreadfuls and serial magazines in his spare time to eke out his income and prepare for the day when he would retire from the sea and devote his entire time to literature. He had never seen an Indian except in the pictures, or been west of the Scilly Isles, but he had read a great deal about cowboys and their ways and was given to acting out some of his dramas in the seclusion of his cabin between watches, before setting them down on paper.

He was fond of cats, and so Peter was able to spend many a pleasant and exciting hour sitting on the table where Mr. Carluke was writing one of his tales. It was, he told Jennie later, almost as good as going to the cinema. For the little second mate would lay down his pen and quite suddenly and dramatically leap to his feet, clap both hands to his sides in the action of one extracting two horse pistols from their leather holsters, and then pointing his forefingers with thumbs cocked like the hammers of a pair of six– shooters, he would say in a tense voice, 'Dinna ye move, thar, Luke Short, ye no-good hoss thief, or I doot not I'll be lettin' some ventilation through ye with my twa double oction forty-five colibre gats, forbye!' Then he would go quickly back to his desk and write it all down exactly as he had said it, which Peter found quite miraculous. Or he would pick up a kitchen knife and go through the motions of lifting the scalp of an imaginary redskin, and even imitate the sound of the chase when the cavalry came to the rescue by slapping his hands briskly in rhythm against his legs, thup-athup, thup-athup, thup-athup.

Since Jennie's domain was the forecastle where during the night watches she constituted herself a very terror amongst the giant rats which inhabited it, to the delight and satisfaction of the members of the crew who had to live there, she was more familiar with the characters up for'ard and brought Peter tales she had managed to glean of some of the strange people in that part of the ship.

There was, she told him, a sailor who had once been a hermit and lived in a cave for ten years until one day he thought better of it, another who had operated a permanent-wave machine in a beauty parlour in Edinburgh until something had unhappily gone wrong with it and he had toasted a client's hair to a crisp, so that it had all fallen out and he had been discharged, and a third who used to give exhibitions at Brighton of staying under water for extraordinary lengths of time holding his breath.

Through practice and association, Jennie was becoming more conversant with human speech again, and her most remarkable story was of Angus the bo'sun and how he occupied his spare time when not on watch or engaged in other duties. What did Peter suppose he did?

Peter had seen Angus, an enormous giant of a man, whiskered like a Highlander, with arms like the branches of oak trees, horny hands with red, bony knuckles, and fingers as big and thick as blood– pudding sausages. When Peter said that he couldn't imagine what his hobby would be, she told him– 'Embroidering.' He embroidered beautiful flowers with coloured thread on a linen cloth stretched over a wooden hoop. They were really exquisite, for she had spent one entire morning watching him, and so lifelike one could almost smell them.

One of the new men on board had been so foolish as to sneer at Angus and mock him, whereupon Angus had stretched him unconscious on the deck with one blow, and thereafter there was no more laughter. When the fellow returned to consciousness, after several buckets of water, the men had told him that he had been foolish to ridicule Angus, not because of the blow he had received but because he ought to have known that when the Countess of Greenock arrived in Glasgow, Angus took the embroidery to a certain place and received three pounds ten for it.

It was remarkable that in spite of the strange mixture of men, interests and hobbies, the crew of the Countess of Greenock and the officers, with the exception of the captain and the first mate, got along quite nicely with one another and somehow managed to perform their duties sufficiently well to get her from port to port along the coast without breaking down, running her aground or getting lost too often. Jennie said that of all the ships she had travelled on she had never seen a more inept or inefficient bunch of sailors, and naturally with nearly everybody aboard having some kind of sideline or other interest, from the captain down, nobody had much time or inclination to keep the Countess either clean or shipshape. But since Captain Sourlies did not seem to care whether his ship looked like a pigsty, nobody else did either, and so they all lived quite happily and contentedly in the mess. Jennie found it rather distasteful, but Peter being part boy thought it a real lark to be some place you simply couldn't get dirty because it was already so, and he only bothered to keep himself clean because of not wishing to let Jennie down.

But outside of this, Jennie had few complaints to make, and Peter none at all. She had been quite right about the routine aboard the ship. Everyone attended either to his job or to his private affairs, whichever happened to interest him the most, and no one had either the time or the inclination to be loving or sentimental with the two cats. Mr. Carluke would sometimes timidly rub Peter's head a little when he sat on his desk, but otherwise they were left quite to themselves.

It was not necessary for them to eat their kill, for twice a day, morning and evening, Mealie the Jamaican cook set out a pan of delicious food for them—cereal with tinned milk over it, or salt meat chopped up, or a bit off the frozen joint mixed up with some vegetables. They were protecting his stores from the depredations of mice and rats, and he was grateful and treated them with the respect due to regular crew members who were doing their job. In the morning when he came in to make the galley fire he would call down the companionway to Peter below: "Ho, you Whitey! How many you cotch los' night?'

Then he would come and look down to where Peter would have the night's bag of mice neatly laid out at the foot of the ladder.

He would laugh and call down, `Ho, ho! You Whitey, you do good job. I give you and your gorl-friend good brokfost this morning. How you like to have a piece fry bacon?'

Peter and Jennie were on duty at night only, since by day the wary rodents kept out of sight, particularly after the news got around, which it did very quickly, that not one but two cats were on board. They then slept most of the morning after they had had breakfast and met in the late afternoon either in one of the cargo holds amidships, or when the weather was clear and sunny and the sea calm, on deck aft where they could breathe the fresh, invigorating salt air while the Countess of Greenock, pouring black smoke and cinders from her funnel, wallowed close enough to the emerald-green pastures and dark rocks of the English coast for them to see the purple haze of the vast bluebell patches, and, further south, the clifftops dotted with yellow primroses.

But they did not neglect their lessons and practice either, and in bad weather when it was blowing and raining, or when the Countess was held up by fog, they repaired to a clear space in the No. 2 cargo hold where Jennie resumed her labour of love to try to teach Peter all of the things he would need to know if he were to become a successful and self-supporting cat.