Hell's Hatches Read online

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  HELL'S HATCHES

  NEW FICTION

  THE CURTAIN _By Alexander Macfarlan_

  THE SYRENS _By Dot Allan_

  OLD MAN'S YOUTH _By William de Morgan_

  THE PURPLE HEIGHTS _By M. C. Oemler_

  HAGAR'S HOARD _By George Kibbe Turner_

  THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK _By Richard Dehan_

  IN CHANCERY _By John Galsworthy_

  SNOW OVER ELDEN _By Thomas Moult_

  EUDOCIA _By Eden Phillpotts_

  LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 21, Bedford Street, W.C. 2

  HELL'S HATCHES

  BY LEWIS R. FREEMAN Author of "In the Tracks of the Trades," etc.

  1921]

  LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER PAGE

  I A REPUTATION QUESTIONED 1

  II HARD-BIT DERELICTS 10

  III THE GIRL HERSELF 25

  IV "SLANT" ALLEN RETIRES AGAIN 38

  V A SHIP OF DEATH 50

  VI COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING 65

  VII RONA COMES ABOARD 80

  VIII I LEAVE THE ISLAND 93

  IX A GRIM TALE OF THE SEA 106

  X ART AND SUSPENSE 124

  XI A HERO'S HOMECOMING 142

  XII A BAD MAN'S PLEA 180

  XIII THE SCENE OF THE FINAL DRAMA 193

  XIV HELL'S HATCHES OFF 206

  XV THE FACE 220

  XVI A SUDDEN VISITOR 231

  XVII DOWN THE FLUME 255

  XVIII THE MASTERPIECE 268

  XIX AFTER ALL 282

  HELL'S HATCHES

  CHAPTER I

  A REPUTATION QUESTIONED

  "Slant" Allen and I, between us, had been monopolizing a good share ofthe feature space in the Queensland and New South Wales papers for aweek or more--he as "the Hero-Ticket-of-Leave-Man" and I as "the giftedFranco-American painter whose brilliant South Sea marines have taken theAustralian art world by storm"--and now that it was definitely reportedthat he had left Brisbane on his way to connect with the reception theboyhood home from which he had been shipped in disgrace five yearsbefore had prepared for him, I knew it was but a matter of hours beforehe would be doing me the honour of a call.

  He simply _had_ to see me, I figured; that was all there was to it: forwith Bell and the girl dead (that much seemed certain, both from thenewspaper accounts of the affair and from what I had been able to pickup in the few minutes I had been ashore during the stop of my southboundpacket at Townsville) I was the only living person who knew _he_ was notthe hero of the astonishing _Cora Andrews_ affair, the audacious daringand almost sublime courage characterizing which had touched theimagination of the whole world; that, far from having _volunteered_ tonavigate a shipload of plague-stricken blacks through some hundreds ofmiles of the worst reef-beset--and likewise the most ill-charted--watersof the Seven Seas on the off chance of saving the lives of perhaps onein ten of them, he had been brought off and forced to mount the gangwayof that ill-fated schooner at the point of a knife in the hands of aslender slip of a Kanaka girl.

  To be sure, two or three of the blacks who were hanging over the rail atthe end of that accursed afternoon may have been among the survivors(for it could have been only the strongest of them that had been able tofight their way up to the air when Bell chopped open the hatches theyhad been battened under ever since the _Cora's_ officers had succumbedwho knows how many hours before); but, even so, their rolling, bloodshoteyes could have fixed on nothing to have led them to believe that thegreasy shawl of Chinese embroidery the girl appeared to have thrownaffectionately over the shoulder of the belated passenger in the leakingoutrigger concealed the diminutive Malay _kris_ whose point she waspressing into the fleshy part of his neck above the jugular.

  No, there could be no doubt that I was all that stood between "Slant"Allen, "Ticket-of-Leavester," beachcomber, black-birder, pearl-pirateand (more or less incidentally to all of the foregoing) murderer, andthe Hon. Hartley Allen, second son of the late James Allen, Bart.,racing man, polo player and once the greatest gentleman jockey on theAustralian turf. Pardon for the comparative peccadilloes--a "pulled"horse or two, a money fraud in connection with a "sweep," and the ratherrough treatment of a chorus girl, who had foolishly asked for "time toconsider" his proposal that she come to him _at once_ from theQueensland stockman who was only just finishing refurnishing her GeorgeStreet flat--which, cumulatively, had been responsible for his beingpacked off to "The Islands," was already assured, and it looked asthough more was to come--that his "spectacular and self-sacrificingheroism" was going to wipe out the unpleasant memories that had barredhim from sporting and social circles even before the law stepped in. Asporting writer in that morning's _Herald_ had speculated as to whetheror not he would be seen again riding "Number 1" for the unbeaten"Boomerang" Four, with whom he had qualified for his handicap of "8,"still standing as the highest ever given an Australian polo player; andthe racing column of the latest _Bulletin_ had devoted a good part ofits restricted space to a discussion of the possibility that the weighthe had put on in his years of "easy life in 'The Islands'" might forcehim to confine his riding to steeplechases. Of the record which had madethe name of "Slant" Allen a byword for all that was desperate anddevilish from Port Moresby to Papeete, from Yap to Suva, little seemedto be known and nothing at all was said. But then, that oldbeach-combers' maxim to the effect that "What a man does in 'TheIslands' don't figure in St. Peter's 'dope sheet,'" was one from whicheven I myself had been wont to extract no little solace.

  With nothing but my fever-wracked and absinthe-soaked (I may as wellconfess at the outset that I was "in the grip of the green" at thistime) anatomy standing between, on the one hand, and Allen moredespicable than even I, who was fairly familiar with the lurid swath hehad cut across Polynesia, had ever dreamed he could be, and, on theother hand, an Allen who might easily become more the idol of sporting(which is, of course, the real) Australia than he had ever been at thezenith of his meteoric career as a turfman and athlete, it was plainenough that he would not--nay, could not--ignore for long my presence ina city that was standing on tiptoe to acclaim him as a native son whosedeed had done it honour in the eyes of the world. It was something likethat the _Telegraph_ had it, I believe.

  Where a word from me (and Allen would know that my friendship for Bell,to say nothing of the girl, would impel me to speak it in my own goodtime) wou
ld dash him from the heights to depths which even he had notyet sounded--there were degrees of treachery which "The Islands"themselves would not stand for--it was only to be expected that a man ofhis stamp would make some well-thought-out move calculated to imposeboth immediate and eventual silence upon me. If we were still "north oftwenty-two" I would have had no doubt what form that "move" would take,and even here in the heart of the Antipodean metropolis--well, that Iwas leaving no unnecessary loop-holes of attack open was attested by thefact that I was awaiting his coming wearing a roomy old shooting jacket,in the wide pockets of which a man's fingers could work both freely andunobtrusively. I had shot away a good half-dozen patch pockets from thatold jacket in practising "unostentatious self-defence," and when a mangets to a point where he can spatter a sea-slug at five paces from hiship he really hasn't a great deal to fear from the frontal attack ofanyone--or anything--that hunts by daylight.

  Yes, though I hardly expected to have to shoot Allen, at least on thisfirst showdown, I was quite prepared to do so if he gave me any excuseat all for it; indeed, I may as well admit that I was going to bedisappointed if he did not furnish me such an excuse. There need benothing on my conscience, that was sure, for, if the fellow had had hisdeserts according to civilized law, he would have been put out of theway something like twenty times already. I had heard him make that boasthimself one night in Kai, just before he went under Jackson's table as aconsequence of trying to toss off three-fingers of "Three Star" forevery man he claimed to have killed. Moreover, I had a sort of a feelingthat old Bell would have liked to have seen his score evened up thatway, for he, more than almost anyone I could recall, had marvelled atwhat he called the tricks I had tucked away in my "starboard triggerpocket." But--I may as well own it--my principal reason for hoping for adecisive showdown straightaway was that I felt sure I could see my waythrough an affair of that kind, even with so cool and resourceful a handas I knew Allen to be. As an absinthe drinker, what I dreaded was tohave the crisis postponed, knowing all the while that during only aboutfrom four to six hours of the twenty-four would I be fit in mind or bodyto oppose a child, let alone a man who, for five years and among asdesperate a lot of cut-throats as the South Pacific had ever known, hadlived up to his boast that he drew the line at no act under heaven togain his end.

  It had struck me as just a bit providential that Allen almost certainlywould be coming to see me in the early afternoon--the very time atwhich, physically and mentally, I would be best prepared for him. Itvaries somewhat with different addicts of the drug, but with me the"hour of strength"--the interval of the swinging back of the pendulum,when all the faculties are as much above normal as they have been belowit during the preceding interval of depression--was mid-afternoon. Fromabout ten in the morning I was just about my natural self--just about atthe turn of the tide between weakness and strength--for three or fourhours; but from about three to five, when the renewed cravings began tostir and it had long been my custom to pour my first thin trickle ofgreen into the cracked ice, I was preternaturally alive in hand andbrain. The rigorous restriction of my painting to these brief hours ofphysical and spiritual exaltation must share with my colours the creditfor the fact that I had already done work that was to win me a nichedistinctively my own as a painter of tropical marines. How muchabsinthe--or the reaction from absinthe--had to do with my earliersuccesses was conclusively proven by the way my work at first fell offwhen those colourful years I was later to spend with the incomparableHuntley Rivers in the Samoas and Marquesas began to bring me backmanhood of mind and body and to rid me--I trust for good and all--of thecurse saddled upon me in my student days in Paris. But that is neitherhere nor there as regards the present story.

  I had ascertained that Allen's train was to arrive from Brisbane at tenin the morning, and that he was to be taken directly from the station tothe Town Hall to receive the "Freedom of the City." Then, out ofconsideration for the fact "that the hero" (as the _Herald_ had it) was"still far from recovered from the terrible hardships he had endured asa consequence of his unparalleled self-sacrifice," the remainder of theday was to be left at his disposal to rest in. The further program--inwhich His Excellency the Governor-General himself was to takepart--would be arranged only after the personal desires of the "modesthero" had been consulted.

  A 'phone to the gallery where my Exhibition was on--or an inquiry ofalmost anyone connected with the show at the Town Hall, for thatmatter--would apprise Allen that I was staying at the _Australia_, andthere I knew he would come direct the moment he could shake himself freefrom his entertainers. Someone was to take him off to lunch, to be sure,but--especially as it was reported that he was already dieting to getback to riding weight--I felt sure this would not detain him long. "Itwill be about three," I told myself, and left word at the office thatany man asking for me around that hour should be brought straight to myrooms without further question. I also 'phoned Lady X---- and begged offfrom showing her and a party of friends from Government House mypictures at four, as I had promised a couple of days previously. Beingborne off to the inevitable and interminable Australian afternoonteas--or to anything else I could not easily shake myself free from veryshortly after five--was one of the worst ordeals incident to the spellof lionizing that had set in for me from the day of my arrival inSydney. What did I care for Sydney, anyhow? Paris was my goal--gay,cynical, heartless Paris, who took or rejected what her lovers laid ather feet only as it stirred, or failed to stir, her jaded pulses, askingnot how it was made or what it had cost. Paris! To bring that languidbeauty fawning to my own feet for a day--even for an hour, myhour--_that_ would be something worth living--or dying--for. For manyyears I had been telling myself that (between three and five in theafternoon, of course) and now--quite aside from my nocturnal flightsthere on the wings of the "Green Lady"--it seemed that the end so longstriven for was almost in sight.

  I lunched lightly--a planked red snapper and a couple of alligatorpears--in my room, and toward two o'clock (to be well on the safe side)slipped into the old hunting jacket I have mentioned, and was ready;just that--ready. My nerves were absolutely steady. The hand holding thepalette knife with which (to kill the passing minutes) I began daubingpigments upon a rough rectangle of blotched canvas on an easel in theembrasure of the windows, might have adjusted the hair-spring of mywrist-watch, and the beat of my heart was slow and strong and steadylike the throb of the engines of a liner in mid-ocean. If either hand ornerve inclined more one way than the other, it was toward relaxationrather than tenseness. Tenseness--with a man who has himself in hand--isfor the moment of action, not for the interval of waiting which precedesit. My whole feeling was that of complete _adequacy;_ but then, thesensation was no new one to me--at that time of day.

  Exhausting the gobs of variegated colour on my palette, I went to atable in the bathroom and started chipping the delicately tinted liningsfrom the contents of a packing case of assorted sea shells, confining myattentions for the moment to a species of bivalve whose refulgent innersurface had caught and held the lambent liquid gold of sunshine that hadfiltered through five fathoms of limpid sea-water to reach the coralcaverns where it had grown. Powdering the coruscant scalings in amortar, I screened them from time to time, carefully noting thegradations of colour--ranging from soft fawn to scintillant saffron--asthe more indurated particles stood out the longer against the frictionof the pestle. At this time, I might explain, I was in the tentativestage of my experimentation to evolve and perfect a greater variety ofmedia than had hitherto been available with which to express in colourthe interminable moods of sea and sky and sunshine. The value of mycontribution to art--not yet complete after five years--will have to bejudged when I pass it on to my contemporaries and posterity. Of the partthese colours played in my later and more permanent success (todifferentiate it from the spectacular but transient spell of fame uponthe threshold of which I stood at the moment of which I write), I canonly say that had I been confined to the pigments with which mypredecessors had been forced to express
themselves, I should never haverisen above the rating of a second or third class dauber of sea-scapes.