The Lord of the Sea by M. P. Shiel

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It is impossible to describe with how wild a heart, or thrilling a
boding, the world heard this thing: eight days later the
International Conference of Maritime Nations met at The Hague.

But nothing happened--or the opposite of what was feared: for, as
months passed, the _Boodah_, planted there in the ocean, rapidly
became the recognized gathering-point of the fashion and gaiety of
Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the "arrived"
together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and
elegance became a superiority. Gradually, as the names "Beech",
"Ecuador", ceased to be associated with the islands, the name of
Hogarth took their place; and Hogarth had engaged Wanda, sweetest of
tenors, to a year's stay in the _Boodah_, whose orchestra was the
most cultured anywhere; Roche, her _chef_, had two years previously
been put into a laboratory to devote his soul to the enlargement of
his art; and he and that tenor lived in suites of the _Boodah_ such
as most princes would consider Utopian.

Hardly anything in her interior suggested _the ship_: no hammocks
for marines, rolling-racks, sick-bay, lockers, steam-tables, wash-
rooms, she being just a palace planted in the Atlantic, her bottom
going down to a layer of comparative calm, so that hardly ever, in a
storm, when the ocean robed her sides in white, washed abroad her
slippery plateau, and drenched with spray her lighthouse tops, did
the ballroom below know shock or motion. Into her principal hall,
far down, circular, one descended by a circle of steps of marble,
round which stood a colonnade of Cuban cedar, supporting candelabra
and silks; and from atrium-pools sunk in the floor twelve twining
fountains brandished spiral sprays, the floor being of a glassy
marble, polished with snakestone, suffused with blushes at the
coloured silks and at a roof gross with rose and pomegranates,
hanging chandeliers; round the raised centre of the floor stood two
balustrades, three feet high, hung with silks, the inner circle
thirty feet across, higher than the outer, forty-five across: a
roseate room, strewn with cushions, colours, flushes; but that
raised space was empty: reserved for--a throne.

The throne, still unfinished, had been three years making in India.

And during nine months the _elite_ and joyous yachts arrived, not at
the _Boodah_ only, but at others of the twelve which, one by one,
were launched and towed to position; and a round of events
transacted themselves in the fortresses: Marie Antoinette balls,
classic concerts, theatrical functions by _troupe_ or amateur,
costume-balls, children's-balls, banquets of the gods, grave
receptions. By now there ran right across the _Boodah's_ roof, in
the form of a cross, two double colonnades of Doric pillars, at the
four ends being Roman arches: and here, some summer afternoon, the
passing ship would see a bazaar, all butterfly flutter, feminine
hues like flower-beds, cubes of coloured ice, flags, and a buzz of
gaiety, and strains of Tzigany music--rainbow-tints of Venice mixed
with the levity of the Andrassy Ut of Pesth. Sometimes a fleet of
craft would surround the islands. Besides, to each was attached a
yacht, and a trawler which continually plied for it between island
and land.

At this time Hogarth was deep in debt, and Beech's living upon
credit.

So, gradually, a good deal of the awe which the structures had
inspired passed off. On the whole, they seemed mere whimsical
castles-of-pleasure. The trains of industrious ships grew habituated
to their gaudy brightness by night, to their seething reefs, or
placid mass, by day. On foggy days the mariner was aware of the
islands wailing weird siren-sounds of warning. The islands waved
common-code signals of greeting to the passer. Trinity House sent
them the usual blanks and instruments for recording meteorological
observations. Their positions were marked in British Admiralty
Charts, in American Pilot Charts, in "Sailing Directions". The great
greyhounds, racing to Sandy Hook, raved with jest past them. The
islands began to seem a natural part of the sum of things. There
they lay, stable, rooted, trite, familiar; and the question almost
arose: "How came it that they were never there _before?_"--just that
object, of that form and colour, seemed so old and natural in that
particular spot. So the frogs hopped finally upon the log that God
sent them for sovereign.

Meantime, the more thoughtful of men did not fail to observe, and
never forgot, that no ship could possibly depart from, or arrive at
Europe, without passing within range of some one of the islands'
guns. A row of eight lay an irregular crescent (its convexity facing
Europe) from just outside the Straits of Gibraltar, where O'Hara
admiraled the _Mahomet_, to the 55th of latitude, where the _Goethe_
lay on the Quebec-Glasgow _route_: these commanding the European
trade with the States and with S. America, as well as with W. and S.
Africa, and with Australia by Cape Horn; another in the narrows of
the Gulf of Aden, commanding the world's traffic by Suez with the
East and with S. Africa; another in the middle of the narrows of the
Kattegat, commanding all Baltic trade; another, fifteen miles from
San Francisco, and another a hundred and fifty miles from Nagasaki,
on the edge of the Black Stream, commanding the Japanese-San
Francisco, the Australian-San Francisco trades, and great part of
the Japano-Russo-Chinese. These were the principal trades of the
world.

Like the despair of Samson awaking manacled and shaven, an
occasional shriek would go up from some lone thinker, who perceived
that the kingdoms of the world had lapsed into a single hand; and in
the privy cabinet the governors drank to the dregs the cup of
trembling. But their speech was bold, the matter hung long, the
peoples ignored and wrought: there was seed-time and harvest; the
newsboy brawled; the long street roared. Far yonder in the darkness
and distance of the deep the islands flashed and danced, and were
fashionable.

Richard Hogarth held back his hand.

XXXIV

THE "KAISER"

It was the habit of Hogarth, when in the _Boodah_, to rise very
early and ascend in flannels to one of the four doors opening upon
the ledge--blocks five feet thick, moved by hydraulic motors--and
sometimes Loveday would accompany these walks, they always seeing on
the plane of the sea some sail, or by a spyglass the fading light-
beam of the _Goethe_ north, of the _Solon_ south; or they watched
how the _Boodah's_ galaxy, too, waxed faint and garish as some drama
of colour evolved in the East; saw gulls hover and swing, fins
wander: and marking that simple ampleness of the plan of sea and
arch of heaven, their hearts felt enlargement.

One morning, the 3rd October, Loveday was up even before Hogarth,
having started awake from a gory nightmare, this altogether not
being a day like others: and when the two friends met on the ledge,
they walked a long time in silence.

Only after the dayspring began definitely to dabble in its chromatic
chemistries Loveday at last remarked: "Did you ever think why I took
such pains to get you to come down with me to Lord Woolacot's last
autumn two years?"

"Yes", answered Hogarth: "you wanted me to see the model farms, and
how the young ladies fed the poor, and how the tenants loved their
lord, and everyone thought himself happy. Only, I didn't see what
the pastimes of Lord Woolacot's daughters have to do with the
process of the suns, and with the woe of Oldham. Ah, Lord, it is a
job, I tell you, pulling this vile thing straight! Of course, the
eagle doesn't blink: but I am only one man, and the world, and its
stupid sins, are a tidy burden. Ha!--never mind. Look at that big
_Boodah_ of a sun how he blooms: isn't he launched and handled all
right? Let us of this desert bend the knee to him like the old
Sabaeans. There is hope"....

It was known that on that day, at half-past eleven A.M., the _Kaiser
Wilhelm der Groesste_ would pass on her second voyage within some
miles of the _Boodah_, this ship being the greatest afloat, having a
cargo-carrying deadweight of 45,000 tons, and travelling the waters
like a railway-train at 37 miles (32 knots).

So toward noon Hogarth, in a peaked cap, jacket, and white boots,
was again on the roof, a glass and book of Costonlights in his hand,
while not far off a knot of five officers in frockcoats talked, and
near one light-house, where a number of men stood, a flagstaff flew
the ensign--blue letters "R. F." on a white ground, looking Russian;
on the northern horizon two fox-tails of smoke; on the western three
diminutive sails; between the two, quite real and big, a brig
becalmed; and now the _Kaiser Wilhelm_: for that yonder could be
only she, with so fervent a growth, from the first moment of her
upward climb, did she approach. It was twenty minutes to noon, and
she was somehow a little late, that punctual strong wrestler with
space.

The officers on the _Boodah_ spoke of her in low and stealthy
voices; looked at her with queer and stealthy glances.

"'As a bird to the snare...'" muttered one.

"She comes all right, but will never go", said another.

"She will be always near us", said a third.

"Life is an earnest thing, after all", said a fourth: "there are
wrongs, it seems, which only blood can wash out: it comes to that at
last".

Now Loveday ran up, looking scared and busy, a quill behind his ear,
Hogarth now having the glass at his face, while his eyes struggled
with the reek from his cigar-end.

"Is that she?" Loveday asked him.

"Yes, poor boat".

She was nine miles away; in four minutes she was less than seven,
and now distinct:--her three staysails; her four funnels; the
stretched-out space between her raked masts; her host of cowls and
boats; her high victorious hull, silently running.

And all along her lines were lines of faces thick as dahlia-rows in
June--globe-trotters; captains of industry; children; the Wall
Street operator who plotted a stroke in Black-Sea wool, and to him
time was money--I guess; commercial travellers, all-modern,
spinning, prone, to whom the sea was an insignificant and conquered
thing; engineers; capped enthusiastic Germans, going forth to
conquer; publishers, ladies, lords, all the nondescript prosperous:
and all ran there blithe, sublime, and long drawn-out; and they
toyed with oranges, nuts; and they looked abroad to see the
_Boodah_--ship's-surgeons and officers with them--jesting, as they
munched or sucked.

But the Captain who had often seen the _Boodah_, was log-writing in
the chart-room...

As her ensign of greeting ran up her main, her clocks struck twelve,
the full noon--like an omen--come; she not then three miles from the
_Boodah_.

And simultaneously with the hoisting of that ensign, and the
striking of those clocks, the old-worn wheels of Roman Civilization
stopped dead.

The _Boodah_ ran up the signal: "_Stop!_"

Those who understood rubbed their eyes: it was like a vision at high
noon; they could not believe.

At that news the Captain, a handsome fair-bearded man, rushed like a
madman from pilot-house to bridge, and the startled passengers saw
his lighted eyes. He had some moments of indecision; then down he,
too, rang that word: "_Stop_".

The engines left off; the _Kaiser's_ speed, as from heart-failure,
gave in, died away.

By this time all the passengers knew, in a state of tremor saw
confused runnings to and fro, and face caught from face dismay; the
voyage was spoiled, the record! What, then, had happened to the
world? And now again the _Boodah_ is signalling: "_Let the Captain
come_".

The Captain's hands were shaking; he could not speak, could only
gasp to the first-officer: "By God, no; O, by God, no". Then, as
great quantities of black-grey reek, wheeling all convolved, were
now enveloping the vessel, resting on the sea, reaching away in
thinner fog even to the _Boodah_, and as, the day being calm, there
was a difficulty in reading the flags, the Captain gasped: "Take the
trumpet--ask them--But don't they pay for this...?"

So out brayed the trumpeted query, and back the inexorable trumpeted
answer: "_Let the Captain come_".

So, then, the _Kaiser_ would never reach Sandy Hook? To put out
boats!--to parley!--while the earth span with quick-panting throbs,
every second worth seven thousand pounds!

"But don't they _pay_ for it...?" so, with a painful face of care,
the Captain questioned space.

But he would be mild and patient as a lamb that day! His order went
forth: the ship forged ahead; a longboat, hurriedly lowered to
starboard, was manned for the first-officer to put off in her, while
every heart of the passengers thumped, every face an ecstasy of
emotions.

Then a wretched, long interval...

The ship's-officers were received on the _Boodah_ in a deck-room
containing a number of boats with castored keels, capable of being
quickly launched down an incline, where Mr. F. Quilter-Beckett, the
Admiral, with some lieutenants, awaited them at a bureau on which
lay documents, while in the background stood Hogarth and Loveday,
and, "Gentlemen, this is a most damned wild piece of madness!" broke
out wrathfully the first-officer, as he dashed up wild-eyed to the
level: "in consideration of the guns you have in this thing--"

"But your Captain?" asked Quilter-Beckett, a courtly man, with a
dark-curling beard, a star on his breast.

"The Captain won't come!" whined the officer in perfect English: "I
suppose you realize the terrible consequences of this stoppage,
gentlemen?"

"But you are wasting time, sir. You represent your Captain?"

"Of course, I represent--!"

"Then just cast your eye over this"--that so slighted letter, sent
years before by Hogarth to Foreign Offices, claiming the sea as his
private manor.

The officer read it half through with flurried closeness; then,
"Well, but what is all this?" he broke out: "is it a piece of
comedy, or what, gentlemen?"

"It is serious; and the last clause comes into operation to-day:
only such ships being held authorized to pass on the sea as pay to
the first-reached sea-fort on any voyage a tax, or sea-rent, of 4s.
per ton on their registered tonnage, with an additional stamp-tax of
33s. 4d. for receipt, and a stamp-tax of L1 16s. 8d. for clearance.
You will see at a glance the clauses of the law, if you cast your
eyes over this schedule--"

"Law!" the other broke in: "you talk of _Law_! But doesn't the sea,
then, belong by right to all men--?"

"Not more than the land. Ask yourself: why should it? But I do hope
you won't argue: your time must be so precious".

Out shrilled the _Kaiser Wilhelm's_ whistle of recall.

"I must go!" said the officer with a worried hand-toss: "I must go.
If you give me those documents, I will show them to the Captain--but
he is not the sort of man--this is mere piracy, after all! But, good
God, gentlemen, if you only dare touch that ship, I shouldn't put
myself in your place this day week for all--"

He snatched the papers, dashed, and his men, in a passion of haste,
lay to the oars, the _Kaiser_ only four hundred yards from the
_Boodah_; and the officer, shaking aloft the documents, pitched up
the stair, the centre of five hundred pairs of scared eyes, while
the captain bored his way to him.

Two minutes of intense low speech, crowded with gestures: and
suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went
his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the
bridge; and now he is bending down with howling throat: "Passengers
to their berths!"

Simultaneously, above the engine-room stair a bell jangled; round
swung the pointer to "_Full Ahead_"; and ere the decks were cleared
of their bustle the _Kaiser_, like a back-kicking hen, scratched up
under her poop a spreading pool of spume, which tossed spasmodic
spray-showers and spoutings: and she stirred, stretched like a
street, churned the sea, and, wheeling to reveal her receding stern,
was away.

By which time Hogarth was standing at a cubical cabin of steel on
the roof, with him Loveday and Quilter-Beckett, his brow puckered
with wrinkles, the sun troubling his eyes.

"I suppose the _chef_ is warned?"--he threw away his cigar.

"Oh, yes, my Lord King", Quilter-Beckett answered.

And Loveday: "She sweats like a thoroughbred"--haggard, but assuming
calm: "few things could be more profusely expeditious".

"Ah, make phrases, John," murmured Hogarth...."Well, but hadn't you
better be getting out the boats?"

Upon which Quilter-Beckett stepped into the little erection, touched
a button, and in a minute the water round the southern side was
swarming with twenty-three boats whose blue-jackets began to row
toward the _Kaiser_.

And presently, "It's no use waiting", said Hogarth, looking in upon
Quilter-Beckett: "I should mine and shell her at the same moment, if
I were you; tell them to get it in well amidships".

Now a few seconds, full of expectation, passed, the _Kaiser Wilhelm_
already two miles away: till suddenly space opened its throat in a
gulf to bay gruff and hollow like hell-gate dogs; and, almost at the
same moment, close by the _Kaiser_ a column of water hopped with one
humph of venom two hundred feet on high: when this dropped back
broad-showering with it came showering a rain of wreckage; and
instantly a shriek of lamentation floated over the sea, mixed with
another shriek of steam.

For the moment the ship, enveloped in vapours, could not be seen;
but in two minutes glimpses of her hull appeared, shewing the bluff
bulge of her starboard bottom: for she leaned steeply to port with a
forward crank, her two starboard screws, now free, spinning asleep
like humming-tops. A six-inch shell, beautifully aimed, had
shattered her engines, killing two stokers, and a torpedo-mine had
knocked a hole nine feet across in her port beam.

But as the _Boodah's_ boats, meanwhile, had been racing toward her,
and as her own port boats were quickly out, all were got off; in
fact, she floated so long, that her ship's papers with L270,000 in
specie, and a few hundred-weight of mailbags were saved, and even
after the boats reached the _Boodah_ she still stretched there
motionless, until, with a sudden flurry, she determined to plunge.

Soon afterwards Hogarth had the Captain in his suite, to tell him
that he did not wish any intelligence of the event to reach the
world for four days, during which passengers and crew would be his
guests, and then be sent on to America, his object, he said, being
to impress the loss of the _Kaiser_ upon the consciousness of all,
by making all anxious as to her fate.

So that night her passengers danced till late, for there was no
resisting the hospitality of Hogarth, or the witchery of those
vistas and arcades, grand hall and lost grot, _salons_ and
conservatories, there in the dark of the ocean, or such an
enchantment of music, and fabulousness of table; the host, too,
pleaded prettily for himself; and now they pardoned, and now they
pouted, but always they banqueted, kissed, lost themselves in
visions, were charmed, and danced.

XXXV

THE CUP OF TREMBLING

It was by the merest chance that Baruch Frankl and his daughter were
not on the _Kaiser_: for Frankl was the half-nephew of Mrs. Charles
P. Stickney, a New York Jewess, and as the marriage of Miss Stickney
with Lord Alfred Cowern was only fifteen days off, Frankl had made
arrangements to accompany the bridegroom across, but had been
detained by stress of business; happily for him--for Lord Alfred,
the bridegroom, was a dancing prisoner in the _Boodah_.

Early, then, on the third morning thence, Charles P. Stickney, the
bride's father, a natty little Yankee, hurried a-foot to the
Maritime Exchange: for, to his infinite surprise, the _Kaiser's_
arrival had not been in the morning's paper: so the little arch-
millionaire stepped toward Beaver Street, sure that the _Kaiser_ had
come in too late for the press.

Early as it was, he found the place as thickly a-buzz as though it
was that feverish hour between eleven and twelve.

He pushed his way to the bulletin-board, inscribed with the hours at
which ships are sighted and entered into dock: the Kaiser was not
there: and with prone outlook he went seeking an assistant
superintendent; but, sighting a fellow-operator, come, as usual, to
digest the world, from barometer-reports to coffee-quotations at
Rio, Charles P. Stickney cried to him: "Funny about the _Kaiser_!
Know anything?"

"It's the darndest thing..." mumbled the other, still star-gazing at
a blackboard prices-current of American staples: "raise Hell this
day, I guess"....

And on through the rooms Stickney shouldered: all in the air here an
odour of the sea, and of them that go down to it in ships; pilot,
captain, supercargo, purser; abstracts from logs, copies of
manifests and clearances, marks and numbers of merchandise, with
quantities, shippers, consignees; here peaked caps, and the jaw that
chewed once, and paused long, and, lo, it moved anew; Black Books,
massive volumes enshrining ancient wrecks; vast newspaper-files in
every tongue; records of changes in lightships, lights, buoys, and
beacons, from Shanghai to Cape Horn; reports, charts, atlases,
globes; the progress of the rebellion in Shantung, and the
earthquake last night in Quito; directories, and high-curved
reference-books, and storm-maps; every minute the arrival of cipher
cablegrams, breathless with the day's Amsterdam exchange on London,
or with the quantities of tea _in transitu_ via Suez or Pacific
Railway; and the drift of ocean-currents, and the latest position of
the _Jane Richardson_, derelict, and the arrival of the _Ladybird_
at Bahia; and the probabilities of wind-circulation, atmospheric
moisture, aberrations of audibility in fog; and in the middle of it
the pulse of the sun, the thundering engines and shooting shuttles
of this Loom; a tiptop briskness and bustle of action; a scramble of
wits; a _melee_ to the death; mixed with pea-jackets, and aromas of
chewed pigtail, and a rolling in the gait.

Into this roar of life that word _Kaiser_ stole: and it grew to a
chorus.

Charles P. Stickney, butting upon a tearing clerk who was holding
aloft a bulletin of icebergs and derelicts, tried to stop him: upon
which the clerk, who would not be stopped, cried with a back-looking
face of passionate haste: "London message just received--_no
intelligence of Kaiser_--"

But he had hardly disappeared, when another man from an inner room
rushed, waving something: the Navesink Highlands lookout had wired
the _Kaiser_ in sight! And while the Exchange rang with cheers,
Stickney, a colour now in his sere cheeks, went boring his way
outward.

The lookout had said it--those blue eyes that never failed there on
his watch-tower, he knowing the ships that sail the sea as the
Cyclops his sheep, in his heart so knowing them all, that as that
sea-glass detected a speck on the horizon, those sea-wise nostrils
sniffed its name: for between the _Mary Jane_ and the _Mary Anne_,
both off-shore schooners, is all the world of difference: if you
would not see it, _he_ knows. And he had wired the _Kaiser!_--so
expectant his outlook: and that day wept like a ruined man.

Swift upon his first wire a second flashed: and one of those craped
days of the tragedies of commerce followed, the boding, the loss,
flashed everywhere, pervading Europe and America.

The next morning the Exchange, all the exchanges, the Lloyds', the
bourses, were crowded from an early hour, but subdued: no news, not
a word; but still--there was certainty: for had the _Kaiser_ and her
wireless been merely disabled, she would undoubtedly by now have
been reported: she had foundered.

_Foundered!_--in the serenest weather in which ship ever crossed the
water....

But at eleven the truth came: for the brig which had lain becalmed
near the _Boodah_ at the moment of the tragedy, and now was nearer
England, had flashed the news: "many of the Kaiser's passengers
mutilated, many drowned".

Death, then, was in the pottage of Life; the air tainted with specks
of blood....

That day Man, as it were, rent his garments, sitting in ashes, and
to Heaven sent up a howl of fear, of anguish, and of hissing hate.

Those who lacked the intelligence to feel the fear, felt the hate:
every girl, the shirt-maker, the shopman, feeling himself robbed of
his very own; the Duke in the centre of his oak-lands felt it; the
burglar, the junk-dweller of the Yangtse, the pariah of the Hugli.
Lamentation and a voice in Ramah, wail on wail. For God had given
the sea to man, and it had been seized by a devil.

God had also given the shore; and it, too, had been seized: but, as
that had been before their birth, they had not observed it--in such
a numb somnambulism shambles humanity.

But the theft of the sea was new and flagrant, it, and the air,
being all that had remained: and a roar for vengeance--sharp, and
rolled in blood--rose from the throat of man.

Accordingly, when Mr. C. P. Stickney during the afternoon wired for
information to the White House, he received the reply: "Encourage
calm on 'Change. Government in touch with Europe. Great naval
activity. Await good news, seven P.M."

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