WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE
It seemed to me that I had but taken a turn from right to left, or gone
round a wheel, when I repeated the same words, and I heard Temple
somewhere near me mumble something like them. He drew a long breath, so
did I: we cleared our throats with a sort of whinny simultaneously. The
enjoyment of lying perfectly still, refreshed, incurious, unexcited,
yet having our minds animated, excursive, reaping all the incidents of
our lives at leisure, and making a dream of our latest experiences,
kept us tranquil and incommunicative. Occasionally we let fall a sigh
fathoms deep, then by-and-by began blowing a bit of a wanton laugh at
the end of it. I raised my foot and saw the boot on it, which accounted
for an uneasy sensation setting in through my frame.
I said softly, 'What a pleasure it must be for horses to be groomed!'
'Just what I was thinking!' said Temple.
We started up on our elbows, and one or the other cried:
'There's a chart! These are bunks! Hark at the row overhead! We're in a
ship! The ship's moving! Is it foggy this morning? It's time to get up!
I've slept in my clothes! Oh, for a dip! How I smell of smoke! What a
noise of a steamer! And the squire at Riversley! Fancy Uberly's tale!'
Temple, with averted face, asked me whether I meant to return to
Riversley that day. I assured him I would, on my honour, if possible;
and of course he also would have to return there. 'Why, you've an
appointment with Janet Ilchester,' said I, 'and we may find a pug;
we'll buy the hunting-knife and the skates. And she shall know you
saved an old woman's life.'
'No, don't talk about that,' Temple entreated me, biting his lip.
'Richie, we're going fast through the water. It reminds me of
breakfast. I should guess the hour to be nine A.M.'
My watch was unable to assist us; the hands pointed to half-past four,
and were fixed. We ran up on deck. Looking over the stern of the
vessel, across a line of rippling eddying red gold, we saw the sun low
upon cushions of beautiful cloud; no trace of fog anywhere; blue sky
overhead, and a mild breeze blowing.
'Sunrise,' I said.
Temple answered, 'Yes,' most uncertainly.
We looked round. A steam-tug was towing our ship out toward banks of
red-reflecting cloud, and a smell of sea air.
'Why, that's the East there!' cried Temple. We faced about to the sun,
and behold, he was actually sinking!
'Nonsense!' we exclaimed in a breath. From seaward to this stupefying
sunset we stood staring. The river stretched to broad lengths; gulls
were on the grey water, knots of seaweed, and the sea-foam curled in
advance of us.
'By jingo!' Temple spoke out, musing, 'here's a whole day struck out of
our existence.'
'It can't be!' said I, for that any sensible being could be tricked of
a piece of his life in that manner I thought a preposterous notion.
But the sight of a lessening windmill in the West, shadows eastward,
the wide water, and the air now full salt, convinced me we two had
slept through an entire day, and were passing rapidly out of hail of
our native land.
'We must get these fellows to put us on shore at once,' said Temple:
'we won't stop to eat. There's a town; a boat will row us there in
half-an-hour. Then we can wash, too. I've got an idea nothing's clean
here. And confound these fellows for not having the civility to tell us
they were going to start!'
We were rather angry, a little amused, not in the least alarmed at our
position. A sailor, to whom we applied for an introduction to the
captain, said he was busy. Another gave us a similar reply, with a
monstrous grimace which was beyond our comprehension. The sailor Joe
was nowhere to be seen. None of the sailors appeared willing to listen
to us, though they stopped as they were running by to lend half an ear
to what we had to say. Some particular movement was going on in the
ship. Temple was the first to observe that the steamtug was casting us
loose, and cried he, 'She'll take us on board and back to London
Bridge. Let's hail her.' He sang out, 'Whoop! ahoy!' I meanwhile had
caught sight of Joe.
'Well, young gentleman!' he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.
My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on
board, only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity. 'You're such a
deuce of a sleeper,' he said. 'You see, we had to be off early to make
up for forty hours lost by that there fog. I tried to wake you both; no
good; so I let you snore away. We took up our captain mid-way down the
river, and now you're in his hands, and he'll do what he likes with
you, and that's a fact, and my opinion is you's see a foreign shore
before you're in the arms of your family again.'
At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse,
transported into the bargain.
I insisted on seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing
over the vessel's bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping
into the distance, and the land receding, gave me—coming on my
wrath—suffocating emotions.
No difficulties were presented in my way. I was led up to a broad man
in a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his
eyebrows as if he were always making head against a gale. He nodded to
my respectful salute. 'Cabin,' he said, and turned his back to me.
I addressed him, 'Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain. I must and
will go! I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked
me here. I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won't be
detained.'
Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a
school-slate for geography and Euclid's propositions.
'Cabin, cabin,' the captain repeated.
I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he
occupied the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and
boxes, and it would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when
by another right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at
the blank space between his shoulders.
Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I
bade him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it
was, and beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready
for hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to
the cabin. 'Captain Jasper Welsh,' he was reiterating, as if sounding
it to discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain's
name, that he had learnt from one of the seamen.
Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: 'A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the
vicinity of the city of Bristol.'
This set Temple off laughing: 'And so he bought a ship and had traps
laid down to catch young fellows for ransom.'
I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had
launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the
veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal
feast. I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view
of an excited multitude. As he boasted that there was the end of
Captain Welsh, I broke the rope. But Temple spoiled my triumph by
depriving him of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was
a heavy man. I could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his
ship's crew upon the gallows in a rescue. Temple allowed him to be
carried off by his faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain
was never after able to release his neck from the hangman's slip knot.
The consequence was that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for
concealment by day, and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his
wife said she was a deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.
The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our
impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far
distant to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.
When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful. Captain Welsh
was one of those men who show you, whether you care to see them or not,
all the processes by which they arrive at an idea of you, upon which
they forthwith shape their course. Thus, when he came to us in the
cabin, he took the oil-lamp in his hand and examined our faces by its
light; he had no reply to our remonstrances and petitions: all he said
was, 'Humph! well, I suppose you're both gentlemen born'; and he
insisted on prosecuting his scrutiny without any reference to the
tenour of our observations.
We entreated him half imperiously to bring his ship to and put us on
shore in a boat. He bunched up his mouth, remarking, 'Know their
grammar: habit o' speaking to grooms, eh? humph.' We offered to pay
largely. 'Loose o' their cash,' was his comment, and so on; and he was
the more exasperating to us because he did not look an evil-minded man;
only he appeared to be cursed with an evil opinion of us. I tried to
remove it; I spoke forbearingly. Temple, imitating me, was sugar-sweet.
We exonerated the captain from blame, excused him for his error, named
the case a mistake on both sides. That long sleep of ours, we said, was
really something laughable; we laughed at the recollection of it, a
lamentable piece of merriment.
Our artfulness and patience becoming exhausted, for the captain had
vouchsafed us no direct answer, I said at last, 'Captain Welsh, here we
are on board your ship will you tell us what you mean to do with us?'
He now said bluntly, 'I will.'
'You'll behave like a man of honour,' said I, and to that he cried
vehemently, 'I will.'
'Well, then,' said I, 'call out the boat, if you please; we're anxious
to be home.'
'So you shall!' the captain shouted, 'and per ship—my barque Priscilla;
and better men than you left, or I'm no Christian.'
Temple said briskly, 'Thank you, captain.'
'You may wait awhile with that, my lad,' he answered; and, to our
astonishment, recommended us to go and clean our faces and prepare to
drink some tea at his table.
'Thank you very much, captain, we'll do that when we're on shore,' said
we.
'You'll have black figure-heads and empty gizzards, then, by that
time,' he remarked. We beheld him turning over the leaves of a Bible.
Now, this sight of the Bible gave me a sense of personal security, and
a notion of hypocrisy in his conduct as well; and perceiving that we
had conjectured falsely as to his meaning to cast us on shore per ship,
his barque Priscilla, I burst out in great heat, 'What! we are
prisoners? You dare to detain us?'
Temple chimed in, in a similar strain. Fairly enraged, we flung at him
without anything of what I thought eloquence.
The captain ruminated up and down the columns of his Bible.
I was stung to feel that we were like two small terriers baiting a huge
mild bull. At last he said, 'The story of the Prodigal Son.'
'Oh!' groaned Temple, at the mention of this worn-out old fellow, who
has gone in harness to tracts ever since he ate the fatted calf.
But the captain never heeded his interruption.
'Young gentlemen, I've finished it while you've been barking at me. If
I'd had him early in life on board my vessel, I hope I'm not
presumptuous in saying—the Lord forgive me if I be so!—I'd have stopped
his downward career—ay, so!—with a trip in the right direction. The
Lord, young gentlemen, has not thrown you into my hands for no purpose
whatsoever. Thank him on your knees to-night, and thank Joseph Double,
my mate, when you rise, for he was the instrument of saving you from
bad company. If this was a vessel where you'd hear an oath or smell the
smell of liquor, I'd have let you run when there was terra firma within
stone's throw. I came on board, I found you both asleep, with those
marks of dissipation round your eyes, and I swore—in the Lord's name,
mind you—I'd help pluck you out of the pit while you had none but one
leg in. It's said! It's no use barking. I am not to be roused. The
devil in me is chained by the waist, and a twenty-pound weight on his
tongue. With your assistance I'll do the same for the devil in you.
Since you've had plenty of sleep, I'll trouble you to commit to memory
the whole story of the Prodigal Son 'twixt now and morrow's sunrise.
We's have our commentary on it after labour done. Labour you will in my
vessel, for your soul's health. And let me advise you not to talk; in
your situation talking's temptation to lying. You'll do me the
obligation to feed at my table. And when I hand you back to your
parents, why, they'll thank me, if you won't. But it's not thanks I
look for: it's my bounden Christian duty I look to. I reckon a couple
o' stray lambs equal to one lost sheep.'
The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, 'By!' and faltered.
'You were going to swear!' said Temple, with savage disdain.
'By the blessing of Omnipotence! I'll save a pair o' pups from turning
wolves. And I'm a weak mortal man, that's too true.'
'He was going to swear,' Temple muttered to me.
I considered the detection of Captain Welsh's hypocrisy unnecessary,
almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was
boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of
eloquence with which I was big. Soon after, I was trying to bribe the
man with all my money and my watch.
'Who gave you that watch?' said he.
'Downright Church catechism!' muttered Temple.
'My grandfather,' said I.
The captain's head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something
indescribable.
'My grandfather,' I continued, 'will pay you handsomely for any service
you do to me and my friend.'
'Now, that's not far off forgoing,' said the captain, in a tone as much
as to say we were bad all over.
I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows. My desolation, my
humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together. Out it came—
'Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent
it. Our relatives will be miserable about us. They—captain!—they don't
know where we are. We haven't even a change of clothes. Of course we
know we're at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man. You shall
be paid or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we
shall be eternally grateful to you. Of course you mean kindly to us; we
see that—'
'I thank the Lord for it!' he interposed.
'Only you really are under a delusion. It's extraordinary. You can't be
quite in your right senses about us; you must be—I don't mean to speak
disrespectfully—what we call on shore, cracked about us....'
'Doddered, don't they say in one of the shires?' he remarked.
Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I
appealed to his manliness. Why should he take advantage of a couple of
boys? I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery
were not our friends suffering now. ('Ay, a bucketful now saves an
ocean in time to come!' he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more
pathetic dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.
'Is that Latin or Greek?' he asked.
I would not reply to the cold-blooded question. He said the New
Testament was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could
read it in the original.
'Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?' said
Temple, an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to
the point than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so;
however, I took it up:—
'How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on
board your vessel? Tell us that.'
He played thumb and knuckles on his table. Just when I was hoping that
good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried,
'Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh. What do you
mean to do with us?'
'Mean to take you the voyage out and the voyage home, Providence
willing,' said the captain, and he rose.
We declined his offer of tea, though I fancy we could have gnawed at a
bone.
'There's no compulsion in that matter,' he said. 'You share my cabin
while you're my guests, shipmates, and apprentices in the path of
living; my cabin and my substance, the same as if you were what the
North-countrymen call bairns o' mine: I've none o' my own. My wife was
a barren woman. I've none but my old mother at home. Have your sulks
out, lads; you'll come round like the Priscilla on a tack, and discover
you've made way by it.'
We quitted his cabin, bowing stiffly.
Temple declared old Rippenger was better than this canting rascal.
The sea was around us, a distant yellow twinkle telling of land.
'His wife a barren woman! what's that to us!' Temple went on, exploding
at intervals. 'So was Sarah. His cabin and his substance! He talks more
like a preacher than a sailor. I should like to see him in a storm!
He's no sailor at all. His men hate him. It wouldn't be difficult to
get up a mutiny on board this ship. Richie, I understand the whole
plot: he's in want of cabin-boys. The fellow has impressed us. We shall
have to serve till we touch land. Thank God, there's a British consul
everywhere; I say that seriously. I love my country; may she always be
powerful! My life is always at her—Did you feel that pitch of the ship?
Of all the names ever given to a vessel, I do think Priscilla is
without exception the most utterly detestable. Oh! there again. No,
it'll be too bad, Richie, if we're beaten in this way.'
'If YOU are beaten,' said I, scarcely venturing to speak lest I should
cry or be sick.
We both felt that the vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect. I
set my head to think as hard as possible on Latin verses (my instinct
must have drawn me to them as to a species of intellectual biscuit
steeped in spirit, tough, and comforting, and fundamentally opposed to
existing circumstances, otherwise I cannot account for the attraction).
They helped me for a time; they kept off self-pity, and kept the
machinery of the mind at work. They lifted me, as it were, to an upper
floor removed from the treacherously sighing Priscilla. But I came down
quickly with a crash; no dexterous management of my mental resources
could save me from the hemp-like smell of the ship, nor would leaning
over the taffrail, nor lying curled under a tarpaulin. The sailors
heaped pilot-coats upon us. It was a bad ship, they said, to be sick on
board of, for no such thing as brandy was allowed in the old Priscilla.
Still I am sure I tasted some before I fell into a state of
semi-insensibility. As in a trance I heard Temple's moans, and the
captain's voice across the gusty wind, and the forlorn crunching of the
ship down great waves. The captain's figure was sometimes stooping over
us, more great-coats were piled on us; sometimes the wind whistled
thinner than one fancies the shrieks of creatures dead of starvation
and restless, that spend their souls in a shriek as long as they can
hold it on, say nursery-maids; the ship made a truce with the waters
and grunted; we took two or three playful blows, we were drenched with
spray, uphill we laboured, we caught the moon in a net of rigging, away
we plunged; we mounted to plunge again and again. I reproached the
vessel in argument for some imaginary inconsistency. Memory was like a
heavy barrel on my breast, rolling with the sea.