Part 36 (2/2)
The liner captain looked at his watch.
”Can't be helped. It's in a good cause, I suppose, though the mischief of it is we were trying to pull down the record by an hour or so. The boat, there! Are you going to be all night with that bit of stuff?”
The cases of food were transs.h.i.+pped with frantic haste, and the boat returned. The greyhound leaped out into her stride again the moment she had hooked on, and shot ahead, dipping a smart blue ensign in salute.
The _Flamingo_ dipped a dirty red ensign and followed, and, before dark fell, once more had the ocean to herself.
The voyage home was not one of oppressive gayety. The first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, who were crammed into the narrow cabin found the quarters uncomfortable, and the little s.h.i.+pmaster's manner repellent. Urged by the precedent in such matters, they ”made a purse” for him, and a presentation address. But as they merely collected some thirty-one pounds in paper promises, which, so far, have never been paid, their grat.i.tude may be said to have had its economical side.
To the riffraff in the hold, for whose accommodation a poor man's fortune had been jettisoned, the thing ”grat.i.tude” was an unknown emotion. They plotted mischief amongst themselves, stole when the opportunity came to them, were unspeakably foul in their habits, and, when they gave the matter any consideration at all, decided that this fierce little captain with the red torpedo beard had taken them on board merely to fulfil some selfish purpose of his own. To the theorist who has sampled them only from a distance, these off-scourings of Middle Europe are downtrodden people with souls; to those who happen to know them personally, all their qualities seem to be conspicuously negative.
The _Flamingo_ picked up the landmarks of the Southern Irish coast, and made her number to Lloyd's station on Brow Head, stood across for the Tuskar, and so on up St. George's Channel for Holyhead. She flew a pilot jack there, and off Point Lynus picked up a pilot, who, after the custom of his cla.s.s, stepped up over the side with a hard felt hat on his head, and a complete wardrobe, and a selection of daily papers in his pocket.
”Well, pilot, what's the news?” said Kettle, as the man of narrow waters swung himself up on to the bridge, and his boat swirled away astern.
”You are,” said the pilot. ”The papers are just full of you, Captain, all of them, from the _s.h.i.+pping Telegraph_ to the London _Times_. The Cunard boat brought in the yarn. A pilot out of my schooner took her up.”
”How do they spell the name? Cuttle?”
”Well, I think it's 'Kattle' mostly, though one paper has it 'Kelly.'”
”Curse their cheek,” said the little sailor, flus.h.i.+ng. ”I'd like to get hold of some of those blowsy editors that come smelling round the dock after yarns and drink, and wring their necks.”
”Starboard a point,” said the pilot, and when the quartermaster at the wheel had duly repeated the course, he turned to Kettle with some amus.e.m.e.nt. ”Blowsy or not, they don't seem to have done you much harm this journey, Captain. Why, they're getting up subscriptions for you all round. Shouldn't wonder but what the Board of Trade even stands you a pair of binoculars.”
”I'm not a blessed mendicant,” said Kettle stiffly, ”and as for the Board of Trade, they can stick their binoculars up their trousers.” He walked to the other end of the bridge, and stood there chewing savagely at the b.u.t.t end of his cigar.
”Rum bloke,” commented the pilot to himself, though aloud he offered no comment, being a man whose business it was to keep on good terms with everybody. So he dropped his newspapers to one of the mates, and applied himself to the details of the pilotage.
Still, the pilot was right in saying that England was ringing with the news of Kettle's feat. The pa.s.sengers of the Cunarder, with nothing much else to interest them, had come home thrilled and ringing with it. A smart New Yorker had got a ”scoop” by slipping ash.o.r.e at Queenstown and cabling a lavish account to the American Press a.s.sociation, so that the first news reached London from the States. Followed Reuter's man and the Liverpool reporters on Prince's landing-stage, who came to glean copy as in the ordinary course of events, and they being spurred on by wires from London for full details, got down all the facts available, and imagined others. Parliament was not sitting, and there had been no newspaper sensation for a week, and, as a natural consequence, the papers came out next morning with accounts of the rescue varying from two columns to a page in length.
It is one of the most wonderful attributes of the modern Press that it can, at any time between midnight and publis.h.i.+ng hours, collate and elaborate the biography of a man who hitherto has been entirely obscure, and considering the speed of the work, and the difficulties which hedge it in, these lightning life sketches are often surprisingly full of accuracies. But let the frillings in this case be fact or fiction, there was no doubt that Kettle and his crew had saved a s.h.i.+pload of panic-stricken foreign emigrants, and (to help point the moral) within the year, in an almost similar case, another s.h.i.+pload had been drowned through that same blind, helpless, hopeless panic. The pride of race bubbled through the British Daily Press in prosaic long primer and double-leaded bourgeois. There was no saying aloud, ”We rejoice that an Englishman has done this thing, after having it proved to us that it was above the foreigner's strength.” The newspaper man does not rhapsodize.
But the sentiment was there all the same, and it was that which actuated the sudden wave of enthusiasm which thrilled the country.
[Ill.u.s.tration: STRANGERS CAME UP AND WRUNG KETTLE'S UNWILLING HAND.]
The _Flamingo_ was worked into dock, and a cheering crowd surged aboard of her in unrestrainable thousands. Strangers came up and wrung Kettle's unwilling hand, and dropped tears on his coat-sleeve; and when he swore at them, they only wept the more and smiled through the drops. It was magnificent, splendid, gorgeous. Here was a man! Who said that England would ever lose her proud place among the nations when she could still find men like Oliver Kelly--or Kattle--or Cuttle, or whatever this man was called, amongst her obscure merchant captains?
Even Mr. Isaac Bird, managing owner, caught some of the general enthusiasm, and withheld, for the present, the unpleasant remarks which occurred to him as suitable, touching Kettle's neglect of the firm's interest in favor of a parcel of bankrupt foreigners. But Kettle himself had the subject well in mind. When all this absurd fuss was over, then would come the reckoning; and whilst the crowd was cheering him, he was figuring out the value of the jettisoned cargo, and whilst pompous Mr.
Isaac was shaking him by the hand and making a neat speech for the ear of casual reporters, poor Kettle was conjuring up visions of the workhouse and pauper's corduroy.
But the Fates were moving now in a manner which was beyond his experience. The public, which had ignored his bare existence before for all of a lifetime, suddenly discovered that he was a hero, and that, too, without knowing half the facts. The Press, with its finger on the public's pulse, published Kettle literature in lavish columns. It gave twenty different ”eye-witnesses' accounts” of the rescue. It gave long lists of ”previous similar disasters.” It drew long morals in leading articles. And finally, it took all the little man's affairs under its consideration, and settled them with a lordly hand.
”Who pays for the cargo Captain Kuttle threw overboard?” one paper headed an article; whilst another wrote perfervidly about ”Cattle ruined for his bravery.” Here was a new and striking side issue. Lloyds' were not responsible. Should the week's hero pay the bill himself out of his miserable savings? Certainly not. The owners of the _Grosser Carl_ were the benefiting parties, and it was only just that they should take up the expense. So the entire Press wired off to the German firm, and next morning were able to publish a positive a.s.surance that of course these grateful foreigners would reimburse all possible outlay.
The subject of finance once broached, it was naturally discovered that the hero toiled for a very meagre pittance, that he was getting on in years, and had a wife and family depending on him--and--promptly, there opened out the subscription lists. People were stirred, and they gave nicely, on the lower scale certainly, with s.h.i.+llings and guineas predominating; but the lists totalled up to 2,400, which to some people, of course, is gilded affluence.
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