I BOARD A WRECK.
The time slipped by. Life is monotonous at sea, and, though the days
seem to have speeded quickly past when one looks back, they appear
to be crawling along on all-fours when one looks ahead. We sighted
nothing that carried the least resemblance to the vessel we were in
chase of. Within a week we spoke two ships, both Englishmen, one a
fine tall black clipper craft from Sydney, New South Wales, full of
Colonials bound to the old country for a cruise amongst the sights
there; the other a little north-country brig laden down to her chain
plates in charge of the very tallest man I ever saw in my life, this
side I mean of the giants who go on show, with a roaring voice that
smote the ear like the blast of a discharged piece; but neither vessel
gave us any news of the ‘Shark’; no craft of the kind had been sighted
or heard of by either of them.
It was as I expected. For my part the adventure remained a most
ridiculous undertaking, and never more so than when I thought of the
speck a ship made in the vast blue eye of the wide ocean. We fell in
with some handsome breezes for travelling, several of which drove us
through it in thunder with a hill of foam on either quarter and an acre
of creaming white spreading under the chaste golden beauty the yacht
carried on her stem-head. The wind flashed blue into the violet hollows
of the canvas, the curves of whose round breasts shone out past the
shadowings to the sun, and rang splitting upon the iron taut rigging of
the driven craft with joyous hunting-notes in its echoings as though
the chase were in view and there were spirits in the air hallooing us
into a madder speeding.
Wilfrid and Finn and I hung over the chart, calculating with sober
faces, finding our position to be there and then there and then there,
till we worked out an average speed from the hour of our departure
that caused the skipper to swear if the ‘Shark’ was not already astern
of us she could not be very far ahead, unless a great luck of wind
had befallen her; a conjecture scarce fair to put down as a basis to
build our figures upon, since it was a hundred to one that her fortune
in the shape of breezes had been ours. For, be it remembered, we were
in a well-scoured ocean; the winds even north of the ‘rains’ and
‘horse-latitudes’ were in a sense to be reckoned on, with the trades
beyond as steady in their way as the indication of a jammed dogvane,
and the ‘doldrums’ to follow--the equinoctial belt of catspaws and
molten calms where one sailor’s chance was another’s the wide world
round.
But so reasoned Finn, and I was not there to say him nay; yet it was
difficult to hear him without a sort of mental shrug of the shoulders,
though it was a talk to smooth down the raven plume of Wilfrid’s
melancholy ‘till it smiled.’ My cousin managed very well without his
valet, protested indeed that he felt easier in his spirits since the
fellow had gone forward, as though, all unconsciously to himself, he
had long been depressed by the funeral face of the man.
‘Besides,’ said he, in his simple, knowing way, with a quivering of the
lids that put an expression of almost idiot cunning into the short,
pathetic peering of his large protruding eyes, ‘he was with me when
my wife left my home; he it was who came to tell me that Lady Monson
was not to be found; it was he, too, who put Hope-Kennedy’s letter
into my hand, though it was picked up by one of the housemaids. These
were thoughts that would float like a cloud of hellish smoke in my
brain when he was hanging about me, and so I’m glad to have him out of
my sight; yes, I’m the better for his absence. And then,’ he added,
lowering his voice, ‘his behaviour proves that he is not sound in his
mind.’
That Muffin was as well content with the arrangement as his master I
cannot say. They kept him at work forward upon small mean jobs, and he
seldom came aft unless it was to lend a hand in pulling upon a rope.
Yet after a little I would see him in a dog-watch on the forecastle
with a huddle of seamen on the broad grin round him. One special
evening I remember when the watch had run out into the dusk, and it
might have been within half-an-hour of eight-bells, I arrived on
deck from the dinner table and heard, as I supposed, a woman singing
forward. The voice was a very good clear soprano, with a quality in it
that might have made you imagine a middle-aged lady was tuning up. The
song was ‘The Vale of Avoca.’ The concertina accompaniment was fairly
played. I listened with astonishment for some time, wondering whether
Miss Jennings’ maid had got among the men, and then called to Crimp--
‘Who’s that singing?’ said I.
‘Him they’ve nicknamed the mute,’ said he.
‘What, Muffin?’
‘Ay! sounds as if he’d swallowed his sister and she was calling out to
be released.’
There happened inside this particular week with which I am dealing an
incident much too curious not to deserve a place here. All day long it
had been blowing a fresh breeze from north-east, but as the sun sank
the wind went with him, and about an hour before sunset there was a
mild air breathing with scarce weight enough in it to blow the scent
off a milkmaid, as sailors say, though it was giving the yacht way
as you saw by the creep of the wrinkles at her stem working out from
the shadow of the yacht’s form in the water into lines that resembled
burnished copper wire in the red western light. Miss Laura and Wilfrid
were on deck, and I was leaning over the rail with a pipe in my mouth,
all sorts of easy, dreamy fancies slipping into me out of the drowsy
passage of the water alongside with its wreath of foam bells eddying or
some little cloudy seething of white striking from our wet and flashing
side into a surface which hung so glass-like with the crimson tinge in
the atmosphere sifting down into it that you fancied you could see a
hundred fathoms deep. Presently running my eyes ahead I caught sight of
some minute object three or four points away on the weather bow, which
every now and again would sparkle like the leap of a flame from the
barrel of a musket. I stepped to the companion, picked up the telescope
and made the thing out to be a bottle, the glass of which gave back
the sunlight in fitful winkings to the twists and turns of it upon the
ripples.
‘What are you looking at?’ cried Wilfrid.
‘A bottle,’ I answered.
‘Ho!’ he laughed, ‘what you sailors call a dead marine, ha? What sort
of liquor will it have contained, I wonder, and how long has it been
overboard?’
The glass I held was Captain Finn’s; it was a very powerful instrument,
and the bottle came so close to me in the lenses that it was like
examining it at arm’s length.
‘It is corked,’ said I.
‘Can we not pick it up?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘Oh, but an empty bottle, my dear,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, with a shrug.
I examined it again. ‘I tell you what, Wilfrid; that it is corked
should signify there is something in it. Who troubles himself to plug
an empty bottle when it is flung overboard unless it is intended as a
messenger?’
He was instantly excited. ‘Why, by all means then----,’ he broke off,
looking round. The mate had charge; he was sulkily pacing the deck
to leeward with a lift of his askew eye aloft and then a stare over
the rail, all as regular as the recurrence of rhymes in poetry. ‘Mr.
Crimp,’ called Wilfrid. The man came over to us. ‘Do you see that
bottle?’
Crimp shaded his eyes and took a steady view of the water towards which
my cousin pointed, and then said, ‘Is that there thing flashing a
bottle?’
‘Yes, man; yes.’
‘Well, I see it right enough.’
‘Get it picked up, Mr. Crimp,’ said Wilfrid.
The mate walked aft. ‘Down hellum,’ he exclaimed to the fellow who was
steering. The wheel was put over and the bottle was brought almost
directly in a line with the yacht. The topgallant-sail ‘lifted,’ but
what air blew was abaft the beam and the distance was too short to
render necessary the handling of the braces and sheets. Crimp went
a little way forward and hailed the forecastle, and presently a man
stood ready at the gangway with a canvas bucket slung at the end of a
line. A very small matter will create a great deal of interest at sea.
Had the approaching bottle been a mermaid the group of sailors could
not have observed it with livelier attention nor awaited its arrival
with brisker expectations. Presently _splash_! the bottle was cleverly
caught, hauled up, dried and brought aft.
‘It’s not been in the water long,’ said I; ‘the wooden plug in the
mouth looks fresh.’
‘Mr. Crimp, sing out for a corkscrew,’ cried Wilfrid.
‘No good in that,’ cried I; ‘break the thing. That will be the
speediest way to come at its contents.’
I held the bottle to the sun a moment, but the glass was thick and
black, and revealed nothing. I then knocked it against the rail, the
neck fell and exposed a letter folded as you double a piece of paper to
light your pipe with. I pulled it out and opened it; Miss Laura peeped
over one shoulder, Wilfrid over the other; his respirations swift,
almost fierce. It was just the thing to put some wild notions about the
‘Shark’ into his head. From the forecastle the sailors were staring
with all their eyes. The paper was quite dry; I opened it carefully
with an emotion of awe, for trifling as the incident was apparently,
yet to my fancy there was the mystery and the solemnity of the ocean
in it too. Indeed, you thought of it as having something of the wonder
of a voice speaking from the blue air when your eye sought the liquid
expanse out of whose vast heart the tiny missive had been drawn. It was
a rude, hurried scrawl in lead pencil, and ran thus:
‘_Brig Colossus. George Meadows, Captain. Waterlogged five days--all
hands but two dead; fast breaking up. No fresh water. Raw pork one
cask. Who finds this for God’s sake report._’
The word September was added, but the writer had omitted the date,
probably could not remember it after spelling the name of the month. I
gave Crimp the note that he might take it forward and read it to the
men, telling him to let me have it again.
‘They will all have perished by this time, no doubt,’ said Wilfrid in
his most raven-like note.
‘Think of them with raw pork only! The meat crystallised with salt, the
hot sun over their heads, not a thimbleful of fresh water, the vessel
going to pieces plank by plank, the horrible anguish of thirst made
maddening by the mockery of the cold fountain-like sounds of that brine
there flowing in the hold or washing alongside with a champagne-like
seething! Oh,’ groaned I, ‘who is that home-keeping bard who speaks of
the ocean as the mother of all? The mother! A tigress. Why, if old Davy
Jones be the devil, Jack is right in finding an abode for him down on
the ooze there. Mark how the affectionate mother of all torments its
victims with a hellish refinement of cruelty before strangling them!
how--if the land be near enough--she will fling them ashore, mutilated,
eyeless, eaten, in horrid triumph and enjoyment of her work, that we
shuddering radishes may behold and understand her power.’
‘Cease, for God’s sake!’ roared Wilfrid; ‘you’re talking a nightmare,
man! Isn’t the plain fact enough?’ he cried, picking up the broken
bottle and flinging it in a kind of rage overboard, ‘why garnish?’
‘I want to see the ocean properly interpreted,’ I cried. ‘Your poetical
personifications are claptrap. Great mother, indeed! Great grandmother,
Wilfrid. Mother of whales and sharks, but when it comes to man----’
‘Oh, but this is impiety, Mr. Monson,’ cried Miss Laura, ‘it is really
dangerous to talk so. One may _think_--but here we are upon the sea,
you know, and that person you spoke of just now (pointing down) might
with his great ears----’
‘Now, Laura, my dear,’ broke in Wilfrid, ‘can’t we pick up a wretched
bottle and read the melancholy message it contains without falling ill
of fancy?’ He went to the skylight--‘Steward, some seltzer and brandy
here! Your talk of that salt pork,’ he continued, coming back to us,
‘makes my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I would give much for
a little ice, d’ye know. Heigho! Big as this ocean is, I vow by the
saints there’s not room enough in it for the misery there is in the
world!’ with which he set off pacing the deck, though he calmed down
presently over a foaming glass; but he showed so great a dislike to
any reference to the bottle and its missive that, to humour him, Miss
Jennings and I forbore all allusion to the incident.
It was next forenoon, somewhere about the hour of eleven o’clock, that
the lookout man on the topgallant yard--whom I had noticed playing for
some time the polished tubes, which glanced like fire in his lifted
hands as he steadied the glass against the East--suddenly bawled down
with a voice of excitement, ‘Sail ho!’
Wilfrid, who was lounging on the skylight, jumped off it; I pricked up
my ears; Miss Laura hollowed her gloved hands to take view of the man
aloft.
‘Where away?’ cried Finn.
‘Right ahead, sir.’
‘What do you make her out to be?’
The seaman levelled the telescope again, then swinging off from the
yard by his grip of the tie, he sung out, ‘She looks to be a wreck,
sir. I don’t make out any canvas set.’
‘She’ll be showing afore long, your honour,’ said Finn, and he cast his
eye upon the water to judge of our speed.
All night long it had blown a weak wind, and the draught was still a
mere fanning, with a hot sun, that made the shelter of the awning a
necessary condition of life on deck by day; a clear, soft, dark-blue
sky westwards, and in the east a broad shadowing of steam-like cloud
with a hint in the yellow tinge of it low down upon the sea of the
copper sands of Africa, roasting noons and shivering midnights, fever
and cockroaches, and stifling cabins. So that, merely wrinkling through
it as we were, it was not until we had eaten our lunch, bringing the
hour to about a quarter before two o’clock, that the vessel sighted
from aloft in the morning had risen above the rim of the ocean within
reach of a glass directed at her over the quarterdeck rail.
‘It will be strange,’ said I, putting down the telescope after a long
stare at her, ‘if yonder craft don’t prove the “Colossus.” Look at her,
Wilfrid. A completer wreck never was.’
He seized the glass. ‘By George, then,’ he cried, ‘if that’s so the
two men that paper spoke of may be still alive. I hope so, I hope
so. We owe heaven a life, and it is a glorious thing to succour the
perishing.’ His hand shook with excitement as he directed the glass at
the vessel.
Points of her stole out as we approached. She had apparently been a
brig. Both masts were gone flush with the deck, bowsprit too, channels
torn from their strong fastenings, and whole lengths of bulwark smashed
level. I supposed her cargo to have been timber, but her decks showed
bare, whence I gathered that she was floating on some other sort of
light cargo--oil, cork; no telling what indeed. She swayed wearily upon
the long ocean heave with a sulky, sickly dip from side to side, as
though she rocked herself in her pain. There was a yard, or spar, in
the water alongside of her, the rigging of which had hitched itself in
some way about the rail, so that to every lurch on one side the boom
rose half its length, with a flash of the sun off the wet end of it,
and this went on regularly, till after watching it a bit I turned my
eyes away with a shudder, feeling in a sense of creeping that possessed
me for an instant the sort of craziness that would come into a dying
brain aboard the craft to the horrible maddening monotony of the rise
and fall of that spar.
‘Such a picture as that,’ whispered Miss Jennings softly in my ear,
‘realises your idea of the ocean as a tigress. What but claws could
have torn her so? And that soft caressing of the water--is it not the
velvet paw stroking the dead prey?’
‘There’s a man on board,’ cried Wilfrid wildly; ‘look, Charles.’
He thrust the glass into my hand whilst he pointed with a vehement
gesture. I had missed him before, but the broadside opening of the
wreck to our approach disclosed his figure as he sat with folded arms
and his chin on his breast in a sleeping posture against the companion
that remained intact, though the wheel, skylight, and all other deck
fixtures that one could think of were gone. I eyed him steadily through
the lenses, but though he never raised his head nor stirred his arms,
which lay folded, yet owing to the roll of the hulk it was impossible
to say that his body did not move.
‘There’s the word “Colossus,”’ said I, ‘painted plainly enough upon her
bow. Yonder may be the writer of the letter received. Wilf, you should
send a boat. He may be alive--God knows! But though _he_ be dead there
might be another living.’
‘Finn,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘bring the yacht to a stand and board that wreck
instantly, d’ye hear?’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’
‘I’ll make one of the boat’s crew with your good leave, captain,’ I
sung out.
‘Take charge by all means, Charles,’ said Wilfrid.
‘With pleasure,’ said I. ‘See two things in the boat, Finn, before we
start--fresh water and a drop of brandy or rum.’
The yacht’s topsail was backed, the helm put down and the vessel’s
way arrested. We came to a halt within half-a-mile of the wreck. The
ocean swung smoothly in wide-browed folds that went brimming to the
bulk in rounds polished enough at times to catch the image of her till
she showed as she leaned from us with her reflection leaning too as if
she had broken in halves and was foundering. The boat was lowered and
brought to the gangway; I jumped in and we shoved off. Five fellows
pulled, and on a sudden I had to turn my head away to smother a laugh
whilst I seemed to wave a farewell to Wilfrid and Miss Laura on noting
that one of the rowers was no less a man than Muffin. Whether he had
thrust himself into this errand owing to some thirst for any momentary
change in the discipline of his shipboard life, or whether Finn had
remembered that the fellow talked much of being able to feather an oar
and had ordered him into the boat I cannot tell, but there he was, as
solemn as a sleeping ape, his old straw hat pulled down to his nose
and his eyes steadfastly fixed upon the oar that he plied. He pulled
well enough, but his anxiety to keep time and to feather besides was
exceedingly absurd, and it cost me no small effort to master my face,
though the struggle to look grave and ignorant of his presence was
mightily helped in a minute by the sight of the silent figure seated
upon the wreck’s deck.
I earnestly overhauled with my eyes the wallowing fabric as we
approached her, but saving that lonely man motionless in his posture of
slumber there was nothing to be distinguished outside the melancholy
raffle of unrove rigging and ropes’ ends in the bow, vast rents in the
planks of the deck, splinters of bulwark, stanchion, and the like.
The fellow that pulled stroke was the big-whiskered man that acted as
boatswain, named Cutbill. I said to him as he came stooping towards
me for the sweep of his oar, ‘She’s so jagged the whole length of
her broadside, that I believe her stern, low as it lies, will be the
easiest and safest road to enter by.’
He looked over his shoulder and said, ‘Ay, sir. But there is no need
for you to trouble to step aboard. I’ll overhaul her if you like, sir.’
‘No, I’ll enter. It’s a break, Mr. Cutbill. But you will accompany me,
for I may want help.’
He shook his head. ‘You’ll find nothing living there, sir.’
‘No telling till we’ve found out anyway,’ said I. ‘Oars!’ I sung out.
We floated under the wreck’s counter, hooked on, and, waiting for the
lift of the swell, I very easily sprang from the boat’s gunwale to the
taffrail of the hulk, followed by Cutbill. The decks had blown up, and
the sort of drowning rolling of the hulk rendered walking exceedingly
dangerous. The water showed black through the splintered chasms,
with a dusky gleam in the swaying of it like window-glass on a dark
night; and there was a strange noise of sobbing that was desperately
startling, with its commingling of sounds like human groans, and hollow
frog-like croakings, followed by blows against the interior caused
by floating cargo driven against the side, as if the hull was full of
half-strangled giants struggling to pound their way out of her.
From the first great gap I looked down through I remember recoiling
with a wildness that might easily have rolled me overboard to the sight
of a bloated human face, with long hair streaming, floating on the
surface of the water athwart the ragged orifice. It was like putting
one’s eye to a _camera obscura_ and witnessing a sickening phantom of
death, saving that here the horror was real, with the weeping noises in
the hold to help it, and the great encompassing sea to sweep it into
one’s very soul as a memory to ride one’s sleepless hours hag-like for
a long term.
We approached the figure of a man. He was seated on a three-legged
stool, with his back resting against the companion. I stooped to look
at his face.
‘Famine is the artist here!’ I cried instantly, springing erect. ‘My
God! what incomparable anguish is there in that expression!’
‘See, sir,’ cried the burly sailor by my side in a broken voice, and he
pointed to a piece of leather that lay close beside the body. One end
of which had been gnawed into pulp, which had hardened into iron again
to the air and the sun.
‘Yet the letter we picked up,’ said I, ‘stated there was a cask of raw
meat on board.’
‘_That_ was chewed for thirst, sir,--for thirst, sir!’ exclaimed the
seaman. ‘I suffered once, and bit upon a lump of lead to keep the
saliva a-running.’
‘Best not linger,’ said I. ‘Take a look forward, will you?’
He went towards the forecastle; I peered down the little companion way;
it was as black as the inside of a well, with the water washing up the
steps within reach of my arm. There could be nothing living down there,
nor indeed in any other part of the wreck if not on deck, for she was
full of water. The men in the boat astern were standing up in her with
their heads bobbing together over the line of the taffrail to get a
view of the figure, for it was seated on the starboard side, plain in
their sight, all being clear to the companion; yet spite of that lump
of whiskered mahogany faces, with Muffin’s yellow chops in the heart of
it to make the whole group as commonplace as a sentence of his, never
in all my time did so profound a sense of desolation and loneliness
possess me as I stood bringing my eyes from the huge steeping plain
of the sea to that human shape with its folded arms and its bowed
head. Heavens, thought I, what scenes of human anguish have the ocean
stars looked down upon! The flash past of the ghastly face in the hold
beneath--that bit of gnawed leather, which even had you thought of a
dog coming to such a thing would have made your heart sick--the famine
in that bowed face where yet lay so fierce a twist of torment that the
grin of it made the slumberous attitude a horrible sarcasm----
‘Nothing to be seen, sir,’ exclaimed Cutbill, picking his way aft with
the merchantman’s clumsy rolling step.
I went in a hurry to the taffrail and dropped into the boat, he
followed, and the fellow in the bow shoved off. Scarce, however, had
the men dropped their oars into the rowlocks, each fellow drawing in
his breath for the first stretch back, when a voice hailed us from the
deck:
‘_For God’s sake don’t leave me!_’
‘Oh!’ shrieked Muffin, springing to his feet and letting his oar slide
overboard; ‘there’s someone alive on board!’
‘Sit, you lubber!’ thundered the fellow behind him, fetching him a chip
on the shoulder that brought him in a crash to his hams, whilst the man
abaft picked up the oar.
Every face wore an expression of consternation. Cutbill’s, that looked
like a walnut-shell between his whiskers, turned of an ashen hue; he
had stretched forth his arms to give the oar its first swing, and now
they forked out paralysed into the stiffness of marline-spikes by
astonishment.
‘Smite my eyes,’ he muttered as though whispering to himself, ‘if it
ain’t the first dead man’s voice _I_ ever heard.’
‘Back water!’ I cried out, for the swell had sheered the boat so as
to put the companion way betwixt us and the figure. I stood up and
looked. The man was seated as before, though spite of the sure and
dreadful expression of death his famine-white face bore, spite of my
being certain in my own mind that he was as dead as the creature whose
face had glimmered out upon the black water in the hold, yet the cry
to us had been so unmistakably real, had come so unequivocally, not
indeed only from the wreck, but from the very part of the hulk on which
the corpse was seated, that I found myself staring at him as though I
expected that he would look round at us.
‘There’s no one alive yonder, men,’ said I, seating myself afresh.
‘What was it that spoke, think ’ee, sir?’ exclaimed the man in the bow,
bringing his eyes full of awe away from the sheer hulk to my face.
‘Mr. Monson, sir, I ’umbly beg pardon,’ exclaimed Muffin, in the greasy
deferential tone he was used to employ when in the cabin, ‘but there
must be something living on board that ship, unless it were a sperrit.’
‘A spirit, you fool!’ cried I in a passion, ‘what d’ye mean by such
talk? There’s nothing living on that wreck, I tell you. Jump aboard
anyone of you who doubts me and he can judge for himself.’
Muffin shook his head; the others writhed uneasily on the thwarts of
the boat.
‘Cutbill and I overhauled the vessel; she’s full of water. What is on
her deck you can see for yourselves, and nothing but a fish could live
below. Isn’t that right, Cutbill?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he answered; and then under his breath, ‘but what voice was
it that hailed us then!’
‘Come, give way!’ I cried, ‘they’ll be growing impatient aboard the
yacht.’
The oars dipped, feathered, flashed, and in an instant the blue sides
of the smart and sparkling little craft were buzzing and spinning
through it in foam. It was like coming from a graveyard to the sight
of some glittering, cheerful, tender poetic pageant to carry the eye
from the hull to the yacht. She seemed clad by the contrast with new
qualities of beauty. You found the completest expression of girlish
archness in the curtseying of her shapely bows, with a light at her
forefoot like a smile on the lip when she lifted her yellow sheathing
there, pouting, as one might say, from the caressing kiss of the blue
brine, to gleam like gold for a moment to the sunlight. We swept
alongside and I sprang on board.
‘The poor creature is dead, I suppose?’ exclaimed Wilfrid, inspecting
the wreck through a binocular glass.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘dead as the dead can be; too dead to handle, faith.
I might have sought in his pockets for some hints to found a report
upon, but his face had the menace of a fierce whisper.’
‘It seems cruel to leave him unburied,’ said Miss Laura, with her soft
eyes full of pity, and the emotions begotten of the presence of death.
‘That hulk must soon go to pieces,’ said I, ‘and then she will give him
a sailor’s funeral.’
‘When nature acts the part of high priestess, if there be such a part,’
exclaimed Wilfrid in a low, tremulous voice, not without a kind of
sweetness in its way, thanks, perhaps, to the mood of tender sentiment
that was upon him, ‘how grandly she celebrates the humblest sailor’s
obsequies! how noble is her cathedral! Observe the altitude of that
stupendous roof of blue. How sublime are the symphonies of the wind;
how magnificent the organ notes which they send pealing through this
great echoing fabric! Nature will give yonder poor fellow a nobler
funeral than it is in our power to honour him with. But Charles,’ he
cried, with a sudden change of voice, and indeed with a new manner in
him, ‘have you ever remarked the exquisite felicity with which nature
invents and fits and works her puppet shows? Take yonder scene at which
we have been suffered to steal a peep. What could be more choicely
imagined than that a dead man should have charge of such a dead ship as
that, and that the look-out he is keeping upon her deck should be as
black as the future of the vessel he still seems to command?’
‘Well, well,’ said I, ‘all this may be as you put it, Wilf. But all the
same, I am glad to see that topsail-yard swung and that spectre there
veering astern. I protest my visit has made me feel as though I must
lie down for a bit;’ and, in a sober truth, the body I had inspected,
coupled with the thrill of amazement that had shot through me to the
voice we had heard, had proved a trifle too much for my nerves, topped,
as it all was, with certain superstitious stirrings, the crawling, as
it might be, upon the memory of that ghostly, insoluble hail, along
with the workings of an imagination that was too active for happiness
when anything approaching to a downright horror fell in its way. So I
went below and lay upon a sofa, but had scarcely hoisted my legs when
Wilfrid arrived, bawling to the steward for a bottle of champagne, and
immediately after came Miss Jennings, who must needs fetch me a pillow,
and then, as though she had a mind to make me feel ridiculous, saturate
a pocket handkerchief with eau de Cologne, all which attentions I
hardly knew whether to like or not till, having swallowed a bumper of
champagne, I hopped off the couch with a laugh.
‘A pretty sailor I am, eh, Wilfrid?’ cried I; ‘a likely sort of figure
to take command of the Channel Fleet. Miss Jennings, your eau de
Cologne has entirely cured me.’
‘What’s to be the next incident now--the “Shark”?’ exclaimed Wilfrid.
He thrust his hands deep into his trousers pocket and marched into his
cabin, head hanging down.