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A plume of spray whipped him in the face as he got to the top, and he swore shortly, wiping his eyes with his hands. At the same moment, Conroy, still stooping to the bell-lanyard, felt the Villingen lower her nose and slide down in one of her disconcerting curtseys; he caught at the rail to steady himself.
They were rigid, only their eyes moving. Conroy collected their glances irresistibly. When the captain had finished his reading he sighed and made a sign, lifting his hand like a man who resigns himself. The men holding the grating tilted it; the mate of the Villingen, with a little jerk, went over the side. "Shtand by der tobs'l halliards!" roared the second mate.
He stooped to pick up his knife and went forward to the tub under the head-pump, to wash his cuts in cold sea-water, the cheap balm for so many wrongs of cheap humanity. It was an accident such as might serve to dedicate the day to the service of the owners of the Villingen. It was early and sudden; but, save in these respects, it had no character of the unusual.
A globe-lamp under the forecastle head lighted the captain's investigations, gleaming on wet oilskins, shadow-pitted faces, and the curious, remote thing that had been the mate of the Villingen.
He seemed invulnerable, a thing too great to strike or defy, like the white squalls that swooped from the horizon and made of the vast Villingen a victim and a plaything. His full, boastful eye traveled over them absently, and they cringed like slaves. "Belay, dere!" came his orders, overloud and galling to men surging with cowardly and insufferable haste. "Lower tobsail haul! Belay!
The Villingen was still under reefed upper topsails, walking into the seas on a taut bowline, with water coming aboard freely. There was little for the watch to do save those trivial jobs which never fail on a ship.
The unkempt, weather-stained men, to whom the shifting seas were the sole arena of their lives, sat about on chests and on the edges of the lower bunks, at their breakfast, while the pale sunlight traveled to and fro on the deck as the Villingen lurched in her gait. Conroy, haggard and drawn, let the coffee slop over the brim of his hook-pot as he found himself a seat.
And since the lingua franca of the sea, the tongue which has meaning for Swedish carpenters, Finn sail-makers, and Greek fo'c's'le hands alike, is not German, orders aboard the Villingen were given and understood in English. "A hand com' aft here!" It was the mate's voice from the poop, robust and peremptory.
In the darkness forward, where the port watch of the Villingen was beginning the sea day by washing down decks, the brooms swished briskly and the head-pump clacked like a great, clumsy clock. The men worked in silence, though the mate was aft on the poop, and nothing prevented them from talking as they passed the buckets to and from the tub under the pump and drove their brooms along the planks.
They came upon bad weather gradually, drawing into a belt of half- gales, with squalls that roared up from the horizon and made them for the time, into whole gales. The Villingen, designed and built primarily for cargo capacity, was a wet ship, and upon any point of sailing had a way of scooping in water by the many tons. In nearly every watch came the roar, "Stand by yer to'gallant halliards!"
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