LITTLE PEOPLE! Read online

  Harry tried to catch his arm, but he twisted away and strode into the wheelhouse. The twelve-to-four quartermaster hadn’t relieved Johnny Weiss yet.

  “Change course,” barked the mate, his small, chunky body trembling. “East-nor’east!”

  Johnny looked him over coolly and spat. “Cap’n changes course, mate.”

  “Then change course!” Toole roared. “The squarehead’s nuts. From now on I’m running this ship!”

  “I ain’t been told of it,” said Johnny quietly, and steadied on his westerly course.

  “Well, by God, I’m the mate!” Toole said. “You’ve had no orders from that lunatic to disregard a command of a superior officer. Steer east!”

  Weiss gazed out of the wheelhouse window, taking his time about thinking it over. The mate made his point; to refuse further would be rank insubordination. Though Johnny was strong in his loyalty to the skipper, he was too much of a seaman to be pig-headed about this until he knew a little better where he stood.

  “East it is, sir,” he said, and his eyes were baleful. He hauled at the wheel, and a hint of a grin cracked his leathery face. “She—won’t answer, sir!”

  I saw red. “Go below!” I growled, and butted him from behind the wheel with my shoulder. He laughed aloud and went out.

  I grasped the two top spokes, hunched my shoulders and gave a mighty heave. There was suddenly no resistance at all on the wheel, and my own violence threw me heels over crupper into the second mate, and we spun and tumbled, all his mass of lard on top of me. It was like lying under an anchor. The wind was knocked out of him, and he couldn’t move. I was smothering, and the mate was too surprised to do anything but stare. When Harry finally rolled off me it was a good two minutes before I could move.

  “Damn that quartermaster,” I gasped when we were on our feet again.

  “Wasn’t his fault,” wheezed Harry. “He really tried to spin the wheel.”

  Knowing Johnny, I had to agree. He’d never pull anything like that. I scratched my head and turned to the mate. He was steering now, apparently without any trouble at all. “Don’t tell me you can turn the ship?”

  He grinned. “All it needed was a real helmsman,” he ribbed me. And then the engines stopped, and the telegraph rang and spun over to “Stop,” and the engine-room tube squealed.

  “Now what?”

  “I dunno,” came the third’s plaintive voice. “She just quit on us.”

  “O.K.; let us know when you’ve shot the trouble.” The engineer rang off.

  “Now what the hell?” said the mate.

  I shrugged. “This is a jinxed trip,” I said. I verified the “Stop” signal on the telegraph.

  Harry said: “I don’t know what’s got into you guys. The skipper said somethin’ about a new charter. He don’t have to tell us who gave it to us.”

  “He don’t have to keep us in the dark, either,” said Toole. Then, glancing at the compass, he said, “Looka that! She’s swingin’ back to west!”

  I looked over his shoulder. Slowly the ship was turning in the gentle swell, back to due west. And just as she came to 270° on the card—the engines began to pound.

  “Ah!” said the mate, and verified the “Full ahead” gong that had just rung.

  The third whistled up again and reported that he was picking fluff off his oilskins. “I’m going on the wagon,” he said. “She quits by herself and starts by herself, an’ I’m gonna bust out cryin’ if it keeps up!”

  And that’s how we found out that the ship, with this strange cargo, insisted on having her head. For every time we tried to change course, the engines would stop, or a rudder cable would break, or the steering engine would quit. What could we do? We stood our watches and ran our ship as if nothing were the matter. If we hadn’t we’d have gone as mad as we thought we already were.

  Harry noticed a strange thing one afternoon. He told me about it when we came off watch.

  “Y’know that box o’ books in the chart room?” he asked me.

  I did. It was an American Merchant Marine Library Association book chest, left aboard from the time the ship was honest. I’d been pretty well all through it. There were a few textbooks on French and Spanish, half a dozen detective novels, a pile of ten-year-old magazines, and a miscellaneous collection of pamphlets and unclassifiable.

  “Well, about three o’clock I hear a noise in the chart-room,” said Harry, “an’ I have a look. Well, sir them books is heaving ’emselves up out of the chest and spilling on th’ deck. Most of ’em was just tossed around, but a few was stackin’ in a neat heap near the bulkhead. I on’y saw it for a second, and then it stopped, like I’d caught someone at the job, but I couldn’t see no one there.” He stopped and licked his lips and wheezed. “I looks at that pile o’ books, an’ they was all to do with North America an’ the United States. A coupla history books, an atlas, a guidebook to New York City, a book on th’ national parks—all sech. Well, I goes back into the wheelhouse, an’ a few minutes later I peeks in again. All them books on America was open in different places in the chart-room, an’ the pages was turnin’ like someone was readin’ them, only—there just wasn’t nobody there!”

  What the hell was it that we had aboard, that wanted to know about the United States, that had replaced our captain with a string of coincidence, that had “chartered” the ship? I’d had enough. I firmly swore that if I ever got back to the States, police or no, I’d get off this scow and stay off her. A man can stand just so much.

  About three days out the torpedo boat picked us up. She was a raider, small and gray and fast and wicked, and she belonged to a nation that likes to sink arms runners. One of the nations, I mean. I had just come off watch, and was leaning on the taffrail when I saw her boiling along behind us, overtaking.

  I ran forward, collaring an ordinary seaman. “Run up some colors,” I said. “I don’t give a damn what ones. Hurry!”

  Pounding up the ladder, I hauled Toole out of the wheelhouse, pointed out the raider and dived for the radio shack, which was some good to us now that the generator was going again.

  I sat down at the key and put on a headset. Sure enough, in a second or two I heard: “What ship is that? Where from? Where bound?” repeated in English, French, German and Spanish. I’d have called the skipper, but had given him up as a bad job. Toole came in.

  “They want to know who we are,” I said excitedly. “Who are we?”

  “Wait’ll I look at the flag the kid is running up,” he said. He went to the door, and I heard him swear and whistle. “Give a look,” he said.

  Flying from the masthead was a brilliant green flag on which was a unicorn, rampant. I’d seen it—where was it? Years ago—oh, yes; that was it! In a book of English folk tales; that was supposed to be the standard of Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of . . . of the fairies, the Little Folk!

  Dazed, I turned to the key and began pounding. I didn’t even realize what I was sending. Some imp controlled my hand, and not until it was sent did I realize I had said, “S.S. Princess of Birmingham, Liverpool, bound for Calais with a load of airplane parts!”

  “Thank you!” said the raider, and put a shell across our bow. Toole had gone back to the bridge, and I sat there sweating and wondering what the hell to do about this. Of all stupid things to say to an enemy raider!

  The engine vibration suddenly became labored and the ship slowed perceptibly. Oh, of course, the old wagon would pick a time like this to become temperamental! I beat my skull with my fists and groaned. This was curtains.

  The raider was abeam and angling toward us. “Heave to!” she kept buzzing through my phones. Through the porthole beside me I could already see the men moving about on her narrow decks. I turned to my key again and sent the commander of the raider some advice on a highly original way to amuse himself. In answer he brought his four swivel guns to bear on us.

  The bridge tube whistled. Toole said, “What the hell did you say to him? He’s fixin’ to sink us!”

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sp; “I don’t know,” I wailed. “I don’t know nothing!”

  I ripped off the headset and put my elbows on the port ring across the room, staring out to sea with my back to the swiftly approaching raider. And there in the sunny waves was a conning tower, periscope and all!

  Now get this. Here we were, lying helpless, going dead slow with crippled engines between a surface raider and a sub. We were meat for anyone working for any government. Most of us were Americans; if the raider took us it would mean an international incident at a time when no one could afford one. If the sub took us, it was the concentration camp for us. Either might, and probably would, sink us. We were outlaws.

  I went up on the bridge. No sense doing anything now. If we got into boats, we’d likely be cut down by machine-gun bullets. Toole was frantically tugging at the handle of the engine-room telegraph.

  “I’m trying to stop her!” he gasped. “She’s going dead slow; there’s something wrong with the engines. They’re making such a racket back there that the first assistant can’t hear the tube whistle. The telegraph is jammed! The helm won’t answer! Oh, my God!”

  “Where’s your quartermaster?”

  Toole jerked a thumb toward the bridge ladder. “I sent him aft to run down to the engine-room, and he tripped and fell down to the boat deck! Knocked himself out!”

  I ran to the port wing and looked out at the sub. True to her kind, she was attacking without asking questions. There was a jet of spume, and the swift wake of a torpedo cut toward us. At the rate we were going, it would strike us just between the after dry-cargo hold—where the “farm machinery” was stowed—and the fire-room. It would get both the explosives and the boiler—good night nurse!

  And then our “coincidental commander” took a hand. The crippled, laboring engines suddenly raced, shuddered and took hold. Grumbling in every plate, the Dawnlight sat down on her counter, raised her blunt nose eight feet, and scuttled forward at a speed that her builders would have denied. In fifty seconds she was doing fourteen knots. The torpedo swept close under our stern, and the raging wash of the tanker deflected it, so that it hurtled—straight toward the raider!

  It struck just aft the stem piece, blowing away the gunboat’s bow and turning her on her beam ends. She righted slowly, lying far down by the head, and lay helpless. The sub, seeing her for the first time, came to the surface and men tumbled out of the hatches to man her four-incher. She began blasting away at the torpedo boat as fast as she could load, and the raider answered her, two shots to the sub’s one. And there we left them, and for all I know they are blasting away yet, far too busy to pay attention to a crummy old tankship. And Toole and I—well, we cried on each other’s shoulders for twenty minutes, and then we laughed ourselves sick.

  The next four days were straight sailing, but for the pranks that were played on us. The skipper stuck to his cabin; we found out why later, and I can’t really blame him. There was still no sign of the mob of beings that could be felt aboard, but for—again—the pranks that were played on us. We stood our watches and we ate our meals and we painted and chipped and scraped as usual. But for the—but I said that before.

  Like the time the buff-colored paint the day gang was laying on the after bulkhead turned the steel transparent for forty-eight hours. Beside the bulkhead was the crew’s washroom. The view from up forward was exquisite. As the four-to-eight fireman expressed it: “I wouldn’t give a damn if the washroom was just fer washin’.”

  And lots of little things, like a spoonful of salt turning to thumbtacks in the Cajun’s best gumbo soup, and live lobsters in the linen locker, and toadstools in the bos’n’s stores, and beautiful green grass, an acre of it, with four concentric fairy rings, growing on a flaked hawser in the forward cargo hold; and then there were the dice that, in the middle of a crap game, developed wickedly humorous caricatures of the six ship’s officers—including me. That might not seem like much to you; but when you remember how clever they were, and when you could never meet one of your crew without his bursting into fits of laughter when he saw your face—well, it wasn’t the best thing in the world for discipline.

  About the captain—We got curious, Toole and I, about how he was getting on. He had locked himself in his room, and every once in a while would whistle for more food. He ate fish almost exclusively, in enormous quantities. We decided to do something about it. Some minor pretext to get a peek into his room. He wouldn’t come to the door if we knocked; the portholes were the answer. Now, how could we get the curtain off from the outside without the irascible old man’s coming out with a gun in each hand? We finally hit on something ideal. We’d get a broken spar with a snaggy end from somewhere, carry it past his porthole, and “accidentally” stick it in, tearing off the curtain and giving us a good look.

  I’m sorry we did. We’d no business looking into the Old Man’s private life that way. After all, we decided when we batted the wind about it afterward, the Old Man had a right, if he wanted to, to have a . . . a mermaid in his room! We saw her without being seen, and the skipper must have been in the inner room. She was very lovely, and I got a flash of scales and golden hair, and felt like a heel for looking.

  Toole and I talked it over one afternoon as we neared the coast. The two of us had seen more of the whole screwy business than anyone else, and besides, Toole was an Irishman. No one will ever know if he was right or not, but his explanation is the only one that will fit all the facts. Pieced together from a two-hour conversation, this is about what he said, and now—I believe him:

  “Third, this is a silly trip, hey? Ah, well. There are many things that you or I can’t understand, and we’re used to them, like the northern lights and the ways of a woman. I think that the skipper sold us out. No; no harm to us.” He dragged on his cigar and stared out to sea as he talked. “Something, or somebody, made a deal with him the day after we sailed. Listen; hear that?”

  Far out on the beam sounded the steady smack-splash of huge schools of porpoise. Oh, yes; they might have been porpoise.

  “You told me what the skipper said to you about those critters. And they don’t act like porpoises. I don’t know if it was one of them or not; maybe it was something we couldn’t see that talked. I think the skipper could. He’s a squarehead, and they’re seagoing people, and they know the sea from ’way back. He’s been to sea half-again as long as the oldest sailor aboard; you know that. I don’t have to tell you that the sea is something that we’ll never really understand. You can’t know all about anything, even an atom; and the sea is so damn big.

  “Well, he was made an offer; and it was probably a lifetime supply of whiskey and a week or so with that m-mermaid we—thought we saw in his room. What was the deal?

  “That he should turn over his ship, and the crew to work it, to whatever party it was that wanted it for a trip from the African coast to America. There must have been provisions, if I know the skipper; he’s a downy bird. He must have provided that the ship was to be protected against weather and bullets, mines and torps. He must have stipulated that no one aboard was to be harmed permanently, and—I’m sure of this—that ship and cargo were to be returned to him at the end of the trip. Everything else I’ve guessed at has turned out, hasn’t it? Why not that? The only thing that really bothers me is the loss of time, because time is really big money in this racket. But you can bet that the squarehead wasn’t beaten down. We’ll find out—I’m certain of it.

  “Now, about the passengers. Laugh at me and I’ll dry up like a clam; but I believe I have the answer. The old country has inhabitants that men have dreamed and sung and written and told about a great deal, and seen more than seldom. I’ve spent a lot of time off watch reading about ’em, and my mother used to tell me—bless her! Anyway, there was ghosts and pixies, goblins and brownies, and dervishes and fairies and nymphs and peris and dryads and naiads and kelpies and sprites; gnomes and imps and elves and dwarves and nixies and ghouls and pigwidgeons, and the legion of the leprechauns, and many another. And so
me were good and some were not, and some helped and some hindered; but all were mischievous as hell. They weren’t too bad, any more than are the snakes and spiders that eat mosquitoes, and many were downright beneficial.

  “There’s hell to pay in Europe now, third. You can’t expect a self-respectin’ pixie to hide in a shell hole and watch a baby torn to shreds. They sickened of it, and their boss man, whoever he is, got ’em together and made arrangements to ship ’em someplace where there’s a little peace and quiet once in a while, where they can work their harmless spells on a non-aggressive populace. They can’t swim worth a damn, and you couldn’t expect the sea folk to ferry ’em over; they’re an unreliable lot anyway, to all accounts.

  “I read a book once about 0l’ Puck, and how the Little People were brought to the British Isles from the Continent. They couldn’t swim even that, and they got a blind man to row and a deaf mute to stand lookout, and never a word was said of it until Puck himself told of it. This is the twentieth century, and it’s a big ocean they’ve got to cross, and there are many more of them. Did ye notice, by the way,” he broke off suddenly, “that though our tanks are empty an’ we’ve used fuel and water and stores for near two weeks, that we’re low in the water?” He laughed. “We’ve many and many of ’em aboard.

  “We’ll unload ’em, and we’ll get our pay for the job. But this I’ll tell you, and now you may laugh, for you’re in the same boat. We’re r’arin’, tearin’ lawbreakers aboard here, third, and we don’t give a damn, or we wouldn’t be here. But if there’s any kind of a good place for us to go at the end of the voyage, then we’ll go there for this week’s work. It was always a good thing to help a war refugee.”

  I didn’t laugh. I went away by myself and chewed and swallowed that, and I thought about it a bit, and now I believe what I believe, and maybe a little bit more. It’s a big world, and these are crazy times.

  ###

  Well, almost as we expected, we unloaded, but it only took us three hours instead of fourteen. Yes, we struck fog off the Carolinas, and the ship nosed up and heeled over in it, and we could feel the pressure getting less aboard. And when the thing under the ship sank and floated us again, the sun came out—