Maurice Drake - The Mystery of the Mud Flats

‘How many’s that?’ he’d cry.

‘I make it a hundred and twenty-three.’

‘Hundred and twenty-three goes,’ he’d say, and tick them off without checking my figures, and then back to the tackles he’d go again. I put him down as unmethodical but a man-driver; and the driving was wanted no denying that, for those four Dutchmen might have been picked for their stupidity. In fact, two of them were no better than sheer imbeciles.

When we came to the bottom of the forty tons Cheyne began to get fussy. He was as careful to have the last pound or two of clay out of her as he’d been careless about the two-hundredweight tubs. He even had the tubs and buckets scraped and the sides of the hold cleaned down as though he wanted to make up for his slackness in the tallying. It was high water again by the time we had done and he said we could knock off till half-ebb.

‘Your chaps had better turn in for a spell,’ he told me. ‘We work at low water after this. I’m going up town now to get some grub. Care to join me, Capt’n? Yes? Come along, then.’

On the way he explained how he wanted us to ballast. ‘That mud you’re lying on is always silting up and we ballast with that to keep the channel open to the wharf. See?’

‘How are we to get it aboard?’

‘By brute force and bally ignorance, my son; same’s we got the clay out with. We can’t afford a dredger yet. All you have to do is to lower the tubs on the side away from the wharf, send two or three men overside with shovels, and the rest pullihaul, and there you are. How much d’ye want to steady that packet of yours?’

‘Twelve tons’ll be ample, this weather.’

‘Take twenty—take twenty,’ said he. ‘You never know when it may come on to blow off this coast. Besides, we want the stuff taken away, and it’s a charity to give those Dutch lumps another day’s work. Bright lot, ain’t they?’

As we walked along the top of the embankment I couldn’t help wondering where he was taking me, for not a sign of any town or village could, I see. On our left was the river, shallow water over mud-flats, broken here and there by a red or white iron beacon pole marking the channel to the entrance to the canal; on our right flat pastures divided by long lines of poplars, receding in perspective to the flat horizon. Dominating them, the great ship canal ran inland, its high banks planted with avenues of lime-trees, and, save for a block of buildings at its entrance, behind which rose a little church spire, not a house was to be seen.

Once we crossed the lock-gates the town, such as it was, became visible lying low in the farther angle formed by the embankment of the canal and river frontage. It proved to be the usual ’longshore Dutch village, half nautical, half pastoral: two or three tiny streets of one or two storeyed houses, red tiled, gay with green and white paint, and clean as rows of new pins. They clustered round the foot of the grey church tower, church and cottages alike dwarfed to toys by the great locks of the canal. The block of buildings I had seen proved to be a modern hotel, pleasantly placed for summer trade with wooden benches outside it under the lime-trees, a pilot-house, built of little Dutch bricks and looking for all the world like a doll’s house, and a tobacco shop, clean as a dairy, much patronised by the sailors passing through the locks. I never saw a quainter, prettier little place—a sleepy little farming village, with the canal alongside to smoke your pipe by, and watch the passing ships. The girls are pretty there too: big-eyed, pale and dark, which is not what one expects to find in Holland. The head-dress of the district is a wide-winged thing of white linen like a Beguine nun’s, and instead of the usual golden cups to hide their ears, the women wear thin fluttering plates of gold on either side of their forehead, which flip about and tinkle like golden butterflies. Under the summer evening light, I took to the place at once.

Contrary to all Cheyne’s talk of bad business and economy, he wasn’t mean about his personal expenditure. He stood me a thundering good dinner in the hotel, and a first-rate bottle of hock with it, and as many cigars as I could smoke. But somehow I couldn’t take to the man. He let on to be a square, hearty chap enough with no nonsense about him, but his manner was too uncertain for me. One minute he was over-effusive, slap-on-the-back, hail-fellow-well-met, and the next was standoffish, as though he’d remembered he was one of my employers and wanted to remind me of it too. He wasn’t as good a man as Ward, but he didn’t think so, and made no secret of his opinion.

‘Oh, Leonard’s all right,’ he said once, when I was telling him how I’d been chartered. ‘He’s all right enough, but he’s a squaretoes. I wonder he gave you a job, if you had on a brass hat when he first met you.’ Another time he said he was a fossil. ‘He’s too slow to come in out of a shower, is ol’ Len. Good job for him I’m here. He’d be robbed right and left else.’

He was ready enough to talk about himself. He’d been a sailor, too, it seemed. ‘With Warbeck’s, of Sunderland,’ he said, with an air, as though he expected a lowly coasting skipper like me to grovel at the very name of his tinpot firm. ‘I was third officer on their Gloucester .’

‘A fine boat that,’ I said, and let him gas about her for a while.

Later on I tried to sound him about the two girls, but all I could get out of him was that the Pamily one was his cousin, and the other—a Miss Lavington—was her cousin on the other side.’

His business talk varied between over-confidence and sudden reticence or evasions of the point under discussion. He gave me the notion, somehow, that he was rather incapable, but was trying hard to impress one with his wits and ability. If he’d been altogether reserved, I should have liked him better. It was none of my business, the way he conducted the company’s affairs; but his half-chummy, half-patronising way made me tired, and I was glad to get back and start ballasting the Luck and Charity .

The wet mud was stiff, awful stuff to shovel and worse to stand on. We put some planks on it to give foothold, but we were slipping about all the time, and in half an hour all hands were slime from head to foot. Voogdt chucked it. ‘I can’t shovel this stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s man’s work, and I’m only half-a-man. Am I sacked, skipper?’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Get aboard and find something to do on deck. This job ’ud kill a horse.’

Cheyne came down soon after in dirty clothes with a shovel, and asked what ‘that chap’ was doing aboard. He grumbled a little when I told him Voogdt couldn’t do heavy work. ‘This is an all-hands job. If I can take a shovel, he ought to.’

‘He can’t,’ I said, ‘and that’s all there is about it,’ and Cheyne said no more.

I’m bound to say he worked like a good one himself: by my reckoning we got a hundred and twenty tubs aboard in three hours. That made a good twelve tons and when the tide drove us off the mud I told him we were ready for sea.

‘No hurry,’ said he. ‘I haven’t got your sailing orders yet. Turn your chaps in for a spell, and we’ll get a few more tubs aboard next ebb.’

Next ebb wasn’t till midnight, and I told him so.

‘Can’t your tender babes work after dark?’ he sneered.

‘They’ll work when I tell ’em,’ I said rather hotly, for his tone annoyed me.

‘Then tell ’em now,’ he said. ‘Tell ’em it’s pay and a quarter for night work, if you like. I’ve got plenty of lanterns in the shed.’

Who could make anything of such ways? Employing fools because they were cheap, and paying able seamen pay and a quarter to help them! Extra pay for night work at putting more ballast in a boat than she needed, because he wanted mud cleared away! A dredger would have cleared the lot in a couple of days. I thought of Voogdt’s warning, and decided I might as well see if I could get another advance. I’d spent thirty pounds in fitting out and victualling, and clothes and things for the three of us, but that left me nearly twenty in hand, and of the money spent certainly ten or twelve pounds had been unauthorised expenditure on our personal needs. On the other hand, the freight worked out at about thirty pounds, so that really I still owed the company the twenty I had left. However, when I asked for an advance, Cheyne made no bones about granting it. ‘How much?’ was all he said.