: The Devil's Admiral by Moore Frederick Ferdinand - Sea stories; Adventure stories; Pirates Fiction; Journalists Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

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CHAPTER

MISSIONARY AND RED-HEADED BEGGAR

We all have better memories for our brave moments than for the fear which threatened for a time to prove us cowards. The man who has faced death and says he was not afraid is either a fool or a liar; and, if only a liar, still a fool for telling himself that which he knows to be a lie. The bravery of the seaman is that he fears the sea and knows its ruthlessness and its ultimate victory, and accepts it as a part of his day's work. This is a sea-story.

The deep, bright red band on her funnel gave her a touch of coquetry, but she had the drabness of senility; she was worn out, and working, when she should have gone to the junk pile years before. But her very antiquity charmed me, for her scars and wrinkles told of hard service in the China Sea; and there was an air of comfort about her, such as one finds in an ancient house that has sheltered several generations.

I am quite sure that if Captain Riggs were still alive he would agree that the story should begin with my first sight of the missionary and the little red-headed man, so I will launch the narrative with an account of how I first met the Rev. Luther Meeker.

He was in the midst of a litter of nondescript baggage on the Manila mole when I came ashore from a rice-boat that had brought me across the China Sea from Saigon. The first glance marked him as a missionary, for he wore a huge crucifix cut out of pink shell, and as he hobbled about on the embankment it bobbed at the end of a black cord hung from his neck.

He was a thin old man, clad in duck, turning yellow with age. When he threw the helmet back it exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head, except for a few wisps of hair at the temples. He appeared to be of great age--a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard; and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions. It was plain that the tropics were fast making an end of him.

He was whining querulously as I stepped ashore, and the first words I heard him say were:

"An organ! An organ! An organ in a cedarwood box! An organ in a cedarwood box, and the sign of the cross on the ends! Oh, why do you try my soul? Such stupidity! Such awful stupidity!"

The native porters were grinning at him as they simulated a frantic search for his organ in a cedarwood box, but they probably knew all the time where it was. He was surrounded by baskets and chests; and, if the crucifix were not enough to indicate his profession, black lettering on his possessions advertised him as "The Rev. Luther Meeker, London Evangelical Society." The multiplicity of labels proclaimed him a traveller known from Colombo to Vladivostok, and he must have been wandering over Asia for years, as his luggage was as ancient as himself.

Fighting my way out of the multitude on the river-bank, I gained the cable office near the customhouse and reported myself in Manila, bought all the newspapers I could to learn how the war was going in Manchuria, and to anticipate if possible where I might be ordered next.

I revelled in the noise and crowds as only one can after a week at sea. While I was on the way from Saigon the Russian armies might have been beaten or the Japanese fleet destroyed. There might be orders sending me anywhere, but I hoped that I would leave Manila for the Strait of Malacca to meet the Baltic fleet. What I feared most was the end of the war, for a war-correspondent without a war is deprived of his profession. I was young and ambitious, then, and seeking a journalistic reputation at the cable's mouth.

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