HEAVY WEATHER.
After this, for a good many days nothing in any degree noteworthy
happened. It seemed, indeed, as though whatever little there was to
alarm or divert during this extraordinary voyage had been packed
into the beginning of it. Muffin lay ill of his back for two days
in his bunk; but for Wilfrid, Finn would have had the poor devil up
and about within an hour of drying and dressing himself. The skipper
could not forgive that menace of mutiny which had been involved
in the yellow-faced joker’s effort to procure the shifting of the
yacht’s helm for home, and he would always refer privately to me
with violent indignation to the valet’s trick upon his master. But on
Wilfrid’s hearing that the man was in pain and that his nerves had
been prostrated by the punishment, he ordered Finn to let him remain
below until he was better or well. There was no more ventriloquism;
the midnight silence of the forecastle was left unvexed by muffled
imprecations. The sailors, when Muffin left his bunk, asked him to
give them an entertainment, to which he replied by saying he would see
them in a nameless place first. The request, indeed, maddened him. I
gathered from sullen Crimp’s sour version of the incident that Muffin
shrieked at the men, shook his fist at them, his eyes started half out
of his head, the foam gathered upon his lips, and he heaped curses and
oaths of a nature so novel, so unimaginable, indeed, upon them, that
the stoutest shrunk back from the screaming creature, believing him
to be raving mad. However, he behaved himself very quietly on deck.
I never caught him looking our way nor speaking, nor heard him again
singing in a dog-watch in his woman’s voice. Life grew so tedious that
I should have been glad to see him aft again for the sake of his parts
as a mimic and actor. I was certain the man would have contrived a
very good entertainment for us night after night; but Wilfrid said no,
angrily and obstinately, once and for all, and so the subject dropped.
The north-east trades blew a fresh breeze and bowled us handsomely
athwart the broad blue field of the Atlantic. The ‘Bride’ was a noble
sailer when she had the chance, and some of our runs rose to three
hundred miles in the twenty-four hours, with a hill of snow at either
bow and the frothing surge of the trades chasing us, and a sensible
increase of heat day after day in the loud and shrilling sweep of air
and the glitter of flying-fish sparking on wings of gauze from the
white and gold of our vessel’s shearing passage. We had entered the
tropics, but had met with no ship that we could speak. At times a sail
shone, but always afar. The lookout aloft was as steadfast as the
rising and sinking of the sun. Day after day the polished tube up there
was sweeping the glass-like sapphire of the ocean boundary, steadily
circling the firm line of it, sweeping from either quarter to ahead.
But the cry of ‘Sail ho!’ delivered at long intervals never resulted in
more than the disclosure of a rig of a very different pattern from what
we were in pursuit of.
A settled gloom fell upon my cousin’s spirits. He complained of
sleeplessness; his appetite failed him, he talked but little, and his
one subject was the ‘Shark.’ I would sometimes long for a startling
incident to shake him out of the melancholy that sat darkly as the
shadow of madness upon him. Miss Jennings tried hard to keep up her
heart, but already I could see that the monotony of the voyage, coupled
with an incessant strain of expectation, was proving too much for
her. She had come to this strange quest, taking my cousin’s word for
what was to happen. She had given Wilfrid’s programme of hopes no
consideration. We were bound to fall in with the ‘Shark’ at sea, or
at the very worst to arrive at the Cape before her, and there lie in
wait. She was finding out now that the ocean was the prodigious plain I
had represented it for a pursuit of this kind, and that the journey had
already grown infinitely tedious, though Table Bay lay some thousands
of miles distant yet. Still, she stuck to her guns manfully. Her heart
would show in her eyes when she thought herself unobserved; but if
ever I approached the subject, in conversing with her on the vagueness
and vanity of this pursuit, she would tell me that it was idle to
talk, that she had made up her mind, that she had cast in her lot with
Wilfrid in this chase, and that whilst he continued to pursue his wife,
no matter to what part of the world he might direct Finn to steer the
vessel, she would remain at his side.
‘Should I ever forgive myself, do you think, Mr. Monson,’ she would
argue, ‘if after I had left him Wilfrid found Henrietta, and she
refused to return with him for lack, perhaps, of the influence I should
be able to exert?’
‘Ay, but do not you suppose too much?’ I would answer. ‘_Perhaps_
Wilfrid might fall in with his wife; _perhaps_ she might decline to
have anything to do with him; _perhaps_ if you were present she might
yield to your entreaties. As my sympathies are not so deeply concerned
as yours, I am able possibly to take more practical views. The one
staggering consideration with me is this: we arrive at Table Bay and
find the “Shark” has sailed, and there is nobody to tell us where she
has gone. Figure our outlook then!’
‘But you are supposing too. The “Shark” _may_ arrive whilst we are
lying in Table Bay. What then, Mr. Monson?’
It was idle talk, though to her ‘what then?’ I might have replied by
another question: ‘If Lady Monson, at Table Bay, should decline to
allow her husband to carry her home in his yacht, _what then?_’
It must have fared hard with me, I think, but for this girl; for had I
had during this journey no other companion than Wilfrid, likely as not
it would have ended in my carrying ‘a bee in my bonnet’ for the rest of
my days. Between us we managed to kill many tedious hours with cards,
chess, chats, reading aloud, whilst Wilfrid lay hid in God knows what
mysterious occupation in his cabin, or paced the deck alone, austere,
unapproachable, with an iron sneer on his lip and on his brow the scowl
of a dark mood out of which you might have looked to see him burst
into some wild, unreasoning piece of behaviour, some swearing fit or
insane soliloquy--one knew not what; only that the air of him held you
restless with expectation of trouble in that way.
The night-time was the fairest part of this queer trip when we got
under the tropic heights, with failing breezes, hot and moist,
softly-running surges languidly gushing into a sheet-lightning of
phosphoric froth, a full moon that at her meridian came near to
the brilliance of sunrise, the planets large, trembling, and of
heavenly beauty, a streak of dim fire in the dark water over the
counter denoting the subtle, sneaking pursuit of some huge fish; and
reflections of white stars like dim water-lilies riding the polished
ebony heave when it ran foamless. Evening after evening on such nights
as these would Miss Laura and I placidly step the deck together or sit
watching the exquisite effects of moonlight on sail and cordage; or the
rising of the luminary above the black rim of ocean, with the tremble
of the water in its light as though the deep thrilled to the first kiss
of the moonbeams gliding from one romantic fancy to another as tenderly
as our keel floated over the long-drawn respirations of the deep.
Indeed, it would come sometimes to my thinking that if the ‘Bride’ were
my yacht and Laura and I alone in her--with a crew to navigate the
craft, to be sure--I should be very well satisfied to go on sailing
about in this fashion in these latitudes, under those glorious stars
and upon these warm and gentle seas, until she tired. In its serene
moonlit moods the ocean possesses an incomparable and amazing magic of
spiritualising. The veriest commonplace glows into poetic beauty under
the mysterious, vitalising, enriching influence. I have seen a girl
whom no exaggerated courtesy could have pronounced comely by daylight,
show like an angel on the deck of a yacht on a hushed and radiant night
when the air has been brimming to the stars with the soft haze of
moonlight, and when the sea has resembled a carpet of black silk softly
waving. The moon is a witch, and her pencils of light are charged with
magic qualities. In the soft golden effulgence my companion’s face
would sometimes grow phantasmal, a dream of girlish loveliness, the
radiance of her hair and skin blending with the rich illusive light
till I would sometimes think if I should glance away from her and then
look again, I should find her fairy countenance melted--a romantic
confession that tells the story of my heart! Yes, I was far gone; no
need to deny it. Our association was intimate to a degree that no
companionship ashore could approach. Wilfrid left us alone together for
hour after hour, and there was nobody to intrude upon us. Finn clearly
understood what was happening, and sour old Crimp was always careful to
leave us one side of the deck to ourselves.
But there was now to happen a violent change: a transformation of
peaceful, amorous conditions of the right kind to affright romance and
to drive the spirit of poetry cowering out of sight.
We were in latitude about eight degrees north; the longitude I do not
remember. The night had been very quiet but thick; here and there a
star that was a mere lustreless blur in the void, and the water black
and sluggish as liquid pitch without a gleam in it. The atmosphere had
been so sultry that I could get no rest. The yacht dipped drearily
from side to side, shaking thunder out of her canvas and sending a
sound, like a low sobbing wail, off her sides into the midnight gloom.
This prevented me from opening the scuttle and I lay half stifled,
occasionally driven on deck by a sense of suffocation, though it was
like passing from one hot room to another in a Turkish bath. There
was a barometer in the cabin just under the clock in the skylight;
every time I quitted my berth I peeped at it, and every time I looked
I observed that the mercury had settled somewhat, a very gradual but
a very steady fall. That foul weather was at hand I could not doubt,
but it was hard to imagine the character it would take down amongst
these equatorial parallels, where one hardly looks for gales of wind or
cyclonic outbursts, or the rushing tempest red with lightning of high
latitudes; though every man who has crossed the Line will know that the
ocean is as full of the unexpected thereabouts as in all other parts of
the globe.
I somehow have a clearer recollection of that night than of the time
that followed, or, indeed, of any other passage of hours during this
queer sea ramble I am writing about. It was first the intolerable heat,
then the unendurably monotonous lifeless rolling of the yacht, with
its regular accompaniment of the yearning wash of recoiling waters,
the ceaseless and irritating clicking of cabin doors upon their hooks,
the idle beating of canvas above hollowly penetrating the deck with
a muffled echo as of constant sullen explosions, the creaking and
straining to right and to left and above and below, a hot smell of
paint and varnish and upholstery mingled with some sort of indefinable
marine odour; a kind of faint scent of rotting seaweed, such as
will sometimes rise off the breast of the sluggish deep when stormy
weather is at hand. I believe I drank not less than one dozen bottles
of seltzer water in the small hours. I was half dead of thirst, and
routed out the steward and obliged him to supply me with a plentiful
stock of this refreshment. But the more I drank the hotter I got, and
no ship-wrecked eye ever more gratefully saluted the grey of dawn than
did mine when, wakening from a half-hour of feverish sleep, I beheld
the light of morning lying weak and lead-coloured on the glass of the
porthole.
An uglier jumble of sky I never beheld when I sent my first look up
at it from the companion-hatch. It was as though some hundreds and
thousands of factory chimneys had been vomiting up their black fumes
throughout the night, the bodies of vapour coming together over our
mastheads and compacting there lumpishly amid the stagnant air with
the livid thickenings dimming into dusky browns; and here and there
a sallow lump of gloom of the kind of yellowish tinge to make one
think of fire and thunder. The confines of this ghastly storm-laden
pall drooped to the sea within three miles of the yacht, so that the
horizon seemed within cannon-shot--a merging and mingling of stationary
shadows whose stirlessness was rendered the more portentous by the
sulky pease-soup-coloured welter of the ocean washing into the shrouded
distance and vanishing there. All hands were on the alert. What was
to come Finn told me he could not tell, but he was ready for it. His
maintopmast was struck, that is, sent down on deck; he had also sent
down the topgallantyard. Every stitch of canvas was furled, saving
the close reefed gaff-foresail and the reefed stay-foresail. Extra
lashings secured everything that was movable. Much to my satisfaction,
I observed that he had struck the long gun forward down below. There
was not a breath of wind as yet, and the yacht looked most forlorn and
naked, as though indeed she were fresh from a furious tussle as she
rolled, burying her sides upon the southerly swell that was growing
heavier and heavier hour by hour.
We were at breakfast when the first of the wind took us. It came along
moaning at first, with a small dying away, and then a longer wail as
it poured hot as the breath of a furnace blast between our masts. This
was followed by some five minutes of breathless calm, during which
the yacht fell off into the trough again; then, having my eye upon a
cabin-window, I bawled out, ‘There it comes!’ seeing the flying white
line of it like a cloud of desert sand sweeping through the evening
dusk, and before the words were well out of my mouth the yacht was
down to it, bowed to her bulwark rail, every blessed article on the
breakfast table fetching away with a hideous crash upon the deck, with
the figures of the two stewards reeling to leeward, myself gripping the
table, Wilfrid depending wholly for support upon his fixed chair, and
Miss Jennings buoying herself off to windward upon her outstretched
arms with her face white with consternation.
The uproar is not to be described. The voice of the gale bellowing
through the gloom was a continuous note of thunder, and trembled upon
the ear for all the world as though it was the cannonading of some
fierce electric storm. The boiling and hissing of the seas made one
think of a sky full of water falling into the ocean. The yacht at the
first going off was beaten down on to her broadside and lay motionless,
the froth washing over the rail; and the horror of that posture of
seemingly drowning prostration, together with the fears it put into
one, was prodigiously increased by the heavy blows of seas smiting the
round of the hull to windward and bursting over her in vast bodies of
snow. But she was a noble sea boat, and was soon gallantly breasting
the surge, but with a dance that rapidly grew wilder and wilder as the
tempestuous music on high rang out more fiercely yet, until it became
absolutely impossible to use one’s legs. The sea rose as if by magic,
and the slide of the hull down the liquid heights, which came roaring
at her from a very smother of scud and vapour and flying spray, gave
her such a heel that every recovery of her for the next buoyant upward
flight was a miracle of resurrection in its way. The hatches were
battened down, tarpaulins over the skylight, and as for some time the
stewards were unable to light the lamp we remained seated in the cabin
in a gloom so deep that we could scarcely discern one another’s faces.
Off the cabin deck rose a miserable jangling and clatter of broken
crockery and glass and the like, rolling to and fro with the violent
movements of the yacht. For a long while the stewards were rendered
helpless. They swung by stanchions or held on grimly to seats, and it
was indeed as much as their lives were worth to let go; for there were
moments when the decks sloped like the steep roof of a house, promising
a headlong fall to any one who relaxed his grip of a sort to break his
neck or beat his brains out. At regular intervals the cabin portholes
would turn blind to a thunderous rush of green sea, and those were
moments, I vow, to drive a man on to his knees with full conviction
that he would be giving up the ghost in a very little while; for to
these darkening, glimmering, green delugings the cabin interior turned
a dead black as though it were midnight; down lay the yacht to the
mighty sweeping curl of water; a shock as of the discharge of heavy
artillery trembled with a stunning effect right through her to the
blows of the tons upon tons of water which burst over the rail to the
height of the cross-trees, falling upon the resounding deck from that
elevation with a crash that made one think of the fabric having struck,
followed on by a distracting sound of seething as the deluge, flung
from side to side, boiled between the bulwarks.
We had met with a few dustings before we fell in with this tempest, but
nothing to season us for such an encounter as this. I made an effort
after two hours of it to scramble on all-fours up the cabin ladder
and to put my head out through one of the companion doors. Such was
the power of the wind that to the first protrusion of my nose I felt
as if my face had been cut off as by a knife and swept overboard. The
hurricane was as hot as though charged with fire; the clouds of foam
blown off the sea and whirling hoarily under the black vapour low
down above our mastheads looked like steam boiling up off the hissing
surface of the mighty ocean cauldron. I caught sight of a couple of
fellows lashed to the wheel and the figure of Finn glittering in
black oilskins crouching aft under the lee of the bulwark, swinging
to a rope’s end round his waist; but all forward was haze, storms
of foam, a glimpse of the yacht’s bows soaring black and streaming,
then striking down madly into a very hell of white waters which leapt
upwards to the smiting of the structure in marble-like columns, round,
firm, brilliant, like the stem of a waterspout, but with beads which
instantly vanished in a smoke of crystals before the shriek and thunder
of the blast. The fragment of gaff foresail held bravely, dark with
brine from peak to clew, with a furious salival draining of wet from
the foot of it out of the hollow into which there was a ceaseless mad
hurling of water.
Heaven preserve me! never could I have imagined such a sight as that
sea presented. It might well have scared the heart of a far bolder man
than ever I professed to be to witness the height and arching of the
great liquid acclivities with their rage of boiling summits; the dusk
of the atmosphere darkened yet by the flying rain of spume torn by the
fingers of the storm out of the maddened waters; the ghastliness of the
dissolving mountains of whiteness glaring out into the wet and leaden
shadow; the leaping of the near horizon against the thick gloom that
looked to whirl like a teetotum, mingling scud and foam and hurtling
billow into a sickening confusion of phantasmal shapes, a mad, chaotic
blending of vanishing and reappearing forms timed by the yell and hum
of the gale sounding high above the crash of the breaking surge and the
shattering of wave by wave as though in very truth it fetched an echo
of its own deafening roaring out of the dark sky rushing low over this
tremendous scene of commotion.
Whatever it might be that blew, whether a straight-lined hurricane or
some wing of rotating storm, it lasted for three days; not, indeed,
continuing the terrible severity with which it had set in, for we were
all afterwards agreed that a few hours of the weight of tempest that
had first sprung upon us must have beaten the yacht down to her grave
by mere blows of green seas, let alone the addition of the incalculable
pressure of the wind. The stay-foresail in one blast that caught the
yacht when topping a sea was blown into rags, and whirled up into the
dusklike smoke. A fragment of headsail was wanted, but whilst some men
were clawing forwards to effect what was necessary the vessel shipped
a sea that carried three of them overboard like chips of wood, leaving
the fourth stranded in the scuppers as far aft as the gangway with his
neck and both legs broken! We were but a small ship, and luxurious
fittings counted for nothing in such a hellish tumblefication as that.
Wilfrid kept his berth nearly the whole time, having slightly sprained
his ankle, which topped by the motion prohibited him from extending
his leg by so much as a single stride. On the other hand Miss Laura
would not leave the cabin. I endeavoured to persuade her to take some
rest in her bunk, but to no purpose. I did what I could to make her
comfortable, crawled like a rat to her berth, where I found her maid
half dead with fright and nausea, procured a pillow, rugs, and so
forth, got her over to the lee side, where there was not much risk of
her rolling off the sofa, and snugged her to the best of my ability.
I sat with her constantly, said what I could to keep her spirits up,
procured food for her, fell asleep at her side holding her hand, saw to
her maid, and in a word acted the part of a devoted lover. But heaven
bless us, what a time it was! I would sometimes wonder whether if the
‘Shark’ met with this gale, she had seaworthiness enough to outlive
it. Occasionally Finn would arrive haggard, streaming, the completest
figure imaginable of a tempest-beaten-man, and report of matters above;
but I remember wishing him at the devil when he told us of the loss
of the four men, for a more depressing piece of news could not have
reached us at such a time, and Miss Laura’s spirits seemed to utterly
break down under it. It was impossible to light the galley fire, and
we had to subsist upon the remains of past cookery and on tinned food.
However, Finn told us that on the evening of the first day of the gale
the cook had fallen and broken two fingers of his right hand: so that
could a fire have been kindled there was no one to prepare a hot meal
for us.
But a little before eleven o’clock on the night of the third day
the gale broke. I was sitting alongside Miss Jennings in the cabin,
with a plate of biscuit and ham on my knee, off which she and I were
making a lover’s meal, I popping little pieces into her mouth as she
lay pillowed close against my arm, then taking a snack myself, then
applying a flask of sherry to her lips and finding the wine transformed
into nectar by her kiss of the silver mouth of the flask. A steward
sat crouching in the corner of the cabin; the lamp burnt dimly, for
there had been some difficulty in obtaining oil for it and the mesh was
therefore kept low. Suddenly, I witnessed a flash of yellow moonshine
upon the porthole directly facing me, and with a shout of exultation
I sprang to my feet, giving no heed to the plate that fell in a crash
upon the deck, and crying out, ‘Thank God, here’s fine weather coming
at last!’ I made a spring to the companion steps and hauled myself up
through the hatch.
It was a sight I would not have missed witnessing for much. The moon at
that instant had swept into a clear space of indigo black heaven; her
light flashed fair upon the vast desolation of swollen waters; every
foaming head of sea glanced with an ivory whiteness that by contrast
with the black welter upon which it broke showed with something of the
glory of crystalline snow beheld in sunlight; the clouds had broken
and were sailing across the sky in dense dark masses; it still blew
violently, but there was a deep peculiar note in the roar of the wind
aloft, which was assurance positive to a nautical ear that the strength
of the gale was exhausted, just as in a humming-top the tone lowers and
lowers yet as the thing slackens its revolutions. By one o’clock that
morning it was no more than a moderate breeze with a high angry swell,
of which, however, Finn made nothing; for after escorting Miss Jennings
to her cabin I heard them making sail on deck; and when, having had a
short chat with Wilfrid, who lay in his bunk earnestly thanking God
that the weather had mended, I went on deck to take a last look round
before turning in, I found the wind shifted to west-north-west and the
‘Bride’ swarming and plunging over the strong southerly swell under a
whole mainsail, gaff foresail and jib, with hands sheeting home the
square topsail, Crimp singing out in the waist, and Finn making a
sailor’s supper off a ship’s biscuit in one hand and a cube of salt
junk in the other by the light of the moon.