A DEAD CALM.
I was up and about a great deal during the night. It was not only
that the heat murdered sleep; there was something so ominous in the
profound stillness which fell upon our little ship that the mind found
itself weighed down as with a sense of misgiving, a dull incommunicable
dread of approaching calamity. Of the dead calm at sea I was by no
means ignorant; in African and West Indian waters I had tasted of the
delights of this species of stagnation over and over again. One calm,
I remember, came very close to realising Coleridge’s description, or
rather the description that the poet borrowed from the narrative of
old Sir Richard Hawkins preserved in the foxed and faded pages of the
Rev. Samuel Purchas. The water looked to be full of wriggling fiery
creatures burning in a multitude of colours till the surface of the sea
resembled a vast, ghastly prism reflecting the lights of some hellish
principality, deep sunk in the dark brine. But I never recollect the
ocean until this night as without some faint heave or swell; yet after
the weak draught of air had utterly died out, somewhere about midnight,
the yacht slept upon a bosom as stirless as the surface of a summer
lake. There was not the slightest movement to awaken an echo in her
frame, to run a tremor through her canvas, to nudge the rudder into
the dimmest clanking of its tiller chains. The effect of such a hush
as this at sea is indescribable. On shore, deep in the country, far
distant from all hum of life, the stillness of night is a desired and
familiar condition of darkness; it soothes to rest; whatever vexes
it is a violence; the sweeping of a gale through hissing and roaring
trees, the thunder of wind in the chimney, the lashing of the windows
with hail and rain, the red belt of lightning to whose view the bedroom
glances in blood to the eye of its disturbed occupant; all this brings
with it an element of fear, of something unusual, out of keeping, out
of nature almost. But at sea it is the other way about. ’Tis the dead
calm that is unnatural. It is as though the mighty forces of heaven and
ocean had portentously sucked in their breath in anticipation of the
shock of conflict, as a warrior fills his lungs to the full and then
holds his wind whilst he waits the cry of charge.
I tried to sleep, but could not, and hearing one o’clock struck on the
forecastle, dropped out of my bunk for ten minutes of fresh air on
deck. Cutbill sat with his back against the table; the small flame of
the lamp that hung without the least vibration from the cabin ceiling
gleamed in the sweat-drops that coated his face as though oil had been
thrown upon him. I said softly, pausing a moment to address him: ‘A
wonderfully still night, Cutbill.’
‘Never remember the like of it, sir,’ he answered in a whisper that
had a note of strangling in it, with his effort to subdue his natural
tempestuous utterance.
‘All quiet aft?’
‘As a graveyard, sir.’
‘In case Sir Wilfrid Monson should look out and see you, what excuse
for being here has Captain Finn provided you with?’
‘I’m supposed to be watching the bayrometer, sir. If Sir Wilfrid steps
out I’m to seem to be peering hard at that there mercury, then to go on
deck as if I’d got something to report.’
‘Oh, that’ll do, I dare say,’ I exclaimed. ‘He may wonder but that must
not signify. Heaven grant, Cutbill, that I am unnecessarily nervous;
but we’re a middling full ship; it is the right sort of night, too,
to make one feel the hugeness of the ocean and the helplessness of
sailors when deprived of their little machinery for fighting it; and
what I say is, a misgiving under such circumstances ought to serve us
as a conviction--so keep a bright look-out, Cutbill. Nothing is going
to happen, I dare say; but our business is to contrive that nothing
_shall_ happen.’
The huge fellow lifted his enormous hand very respectfully to his
glistening forehead, and I passed on to the deck.
The moon shone brightly and her reflection lay upon the sea like a
league-long fallen column of silver, with the ocean going black as
liquid pitch to the sides of the resplendent shaft. Not a wrinkle
tarnished that prostrate pillar of light; not the most fairy-like
undulation of water put an instant’s warping, for the space of a
foot, into it. I set the mainmast head by a star and watched it, and
the trembling, greenish, lovely point of radiance hung poised as
steadfastly on a line with the truck as though it were some little
crystal lamp fixed to an iron spike up there.
I spied Jacob Crimp near the wheel, but I had come up to breathe and
not to talk. I desired to coax a sleepy humour into me and guessed that
that end would be defeated by a chat with the surly little sailor,
with whom I rarely exchanged a few sentences without finding myself
drifting into an argument. So I lay over the rail striving to cool my
hot face with the breath off the surface of the black profound that lay
like a sheet of dark, ungleaming mirror beneath. On a sudden I heard a
great sigh out in the gloom. It was as though some slumbering giant had
fetched a long, deep, tremulous breath in a dream. I started, for it
had sounded close, and I looked along the obscure deck forward as if,
forsooth, there was any sailor on board whose respiration could rise to
such a note as that! In a moment I spied a block of blackness slowly
melting out like a dye of ink upon the indigo of the water with the
faint flash of moonlight off the wet round of it. A grampus! thought I;
and stared about me for others, but no more showed, and the prodigious
midnight hush seemed to float down again from the stars like a sensible
weight with one wide ripple from where the great fish had sunk,
creeping like a line of oil to the yacht’s side and melting soundlessly
in her shadow.
This grave-like repose lasted the night through, and when early in the
morning, awakened by the light of the newly risen sun, I mounted to the
deck, I found the ocean stretched flat as the top of a table, the sky,
of a dirty bluish haze, thickening down and merged into the ocean line
so that you couldn’t see where the horizon was, save just under the
sun where the head of the misty white sparkle in the water defined the
junction. It baffled and bothered the sight to look into the distance,
so vaporous and heavy it all was, with a dull blue gleam here and there
upon the water striking into the faintness like a sunbeam into mist,
and all close to, as it seemed, though by hard peering you might catch
the glimmer of the calm past the mixture of hazy light and hues where
sea and sky seemed to end.
Jacob Crimp had charge. I asked him if all had been quiet below in the
cabin.
‘Ay,’ he answered, ‘I’ve heard of nothen to the contrairy. Her ledship
came on deck during the middle watch and had a bit of a yarn with me.’
‘Indeed!’ said I.
‘Yes, she scared me into a reg’lar clam. I was standing at the rail
thinking I see a darkness out under the moon as if a breath of wind
were coming along, and a woice just behind me says, “What’s your name?”
Nigh hand tarned my hair white to see her, so quiet she came and her
eyes like corposants.’
‘What did she talk about?’ said I in a careless way.
‘Asked what the sailor was a-sitting in the cabin for. “To prevent
murder being done,” says I. “Murder?” says she. “Yes,” says I, “and to
prewent this wessel from being set on fire and blown to yellow blazes,”
says I, “for God knows,” says I, “what weight of gunpowder ain’t stowed
away forrard.” “Who’s a-going to do all this?” says she; so I jist told
her that Sir Wilfrid had been took worse, and that the order had come
forward that the cabin was to be watched.’
‘What did she say to that?’ I exclaimed.
‘Why, walked to t’other side of the deck and sot down and remained an
hour, till I reckoned that when she went below she must ha’ been pretty
nigh streaming with dew.’
‘What do you think of the weather, Mr. Crimp?’
‘It’s agin nature,’ he answered. ‘Like lying off Blackwall for
smoothness. ’Taint going to last, though. Nothing that’s agin nature
ever do, whether it’s weather, or a dawg with two tails, or a cat with
eight legs.’
‘I wish you were a magician,’ said I, ‘I’d tassel your handkerchief for
a strong breeze. A roasting day with a vengeance, and the first of a
long succession, I fear.’
At breakfast I told Miss Laura of Lady Monson’s visit on deck in the
middle watch, and the mate’s blunt statement to her. ‘It was a mighty
dose of truth to administer,’ said I. ‘She will pass some bad quarters
of an hour, I fear. Think of old Jacob talking to her of murder and
fire, and explosions unto yellow blazes, whatever _that_ may mean, with
her husband sleeping right abreast of her cabin and armed, as she must
know.’
‘Has he those pistols?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I gave the case to one of the stewards to return to
him, and now I am sorry I did so.’
‘Of course Henrietta will be frightened,’ she exclaimed. ‘I do not
envy her in her loneliness. Why should she refuse to see me? I easily
understand her objection to showing herself on deck by daylight; but
I am her sister; I could sit with her; I could be company for her,
win her, perhaps,’ she said with a wistful look, ‘to something like
a gentle mood.’ She sighed deeply and continued: ‘Wilfrid scared me
yesterday. There was that in his face which shocked me, but I could not
explain what it was. Yet I am not the least bit afraid he will commit
any deed of violence. Let him be twenty times madder than he now is,
his heart is so tender, his spirit so boylike, pure, honourable, there
is so much of sweetness and affection in his nature that I am certain
his cruellest delirium would be tempered by his qualities.’
I was grateful to her for thus speaking of my poor cousin, but I could
not agree with her. The qualities she pinned her faith to had suffered
him at all events to shoot Colonel Hope-Kennedy and to make nothing
of the man’s death. Yet, thought I, looking at her, seeing how this
sweet little creature values, and to a large extent understands him,
what devil’s influence was upon the loving, large-hearted, childlike
man when he chose the _other_ one for his wife? But, fond of him and
sorry for him as I was, I could not have wished it otherwise--for my
sake at all events; though on her part it would have made her ‘her
ladyship’ and found her a husband whose brain I don’t doubt might year
by year have grown stronger in the cheerful and fructifying light of
her cordial, sympathetic, radiant character.
I looked in upon him after breakfast. Miss Laura wished to accompany
me, but I advised her to delay her visit until I had ascertained for
myself how he did. He was lying in his bunk, a large pipe in his mouth,
at which he pulled so heartily that his cabin was dim with tobacco
smoke. His cheek was supported by his elbow and his eyes fixed upon
his watch, a superb gold time-keeper that dangled at the extremity of
a heavy chain hitched to a little hook screwed into the deck over his
head. On the back of this watch were his initials set in brilliants,
and these gems made the golden circle show like a little body of light
as it hung motionless before his intent gaze. He did not turn his head
when I opened the door, then looked at me in an absent-minded way when
I was fairly entered.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed languidly, ‘it is you, Charles. You promised to sit
with me awhile last night.’
‘I did, but the heat below was unendurable. It is no better now. The
temperature of this cabin must be prodigious. What calculations are you
making?’ said I.
‘None,’ he answered. ‘I have slung the watch to observe if there is
any movement in the yacht. She is motionless. Mark it. There is not a
hairbreadth of vibration. We are afloat, of course?’ he said, suddenly
looking at me.
‘I hope so,’ said I. ‘Afloat? Why, what do you suppose, Wilf? That
we’ve gone to the bottom?’
‘It would be all one for me,’ he answered with a deep sigh, and then
applying himself to his pipe again with a sort of avidity that made one
think of a hungry baby sucking at a feeding bottle. He clouded the air
with tobacco smoke and said: ‘I am heartily weary of life.’
‘And why?’ cried I: ‘because we are in a dead calm with the equator
close aboard. The very deep is rotting. A calm of this kind penetrates
through the pores of the skin, enters the soul and creates a thirsty
yearning for extinction. Being younger than you. Wilf, I give myself
another twelve hours, and then, if no breeze blows, I shall, like you,
be weary of life and desire to die.’
‘It is easily managed,’ said he.
‘Yes,’ cried I, startled, ‘no doubt; but the weather may change,
you know.’ And not at all relishing his remark nor the looks that
accompanied it, I seized my hat and fell to fanning the atmosphere with
the notion of expelling some of the tobacco smoke through the open
porthole.
‘I am of opinion,’ said he, puffing and dropping his words alternately
with the clouds he expelled whilst he kept his eyes fixed upon his
watch, ‘that, spite of the arguments of the divines, life is a free
gift to us to be disposed of as we may decide. Nature is invariably
compensative. We are brought into this world without our knowledge, and
therefore, of course, without our consent, d’ye see, Charles,’ and here
he rolled his eyes upon me, ‘and by way of balancing this distracting
obligation of compulsory being, nature says you may do what you like
with existence: keep it or part with it.’
‘I say, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘there are surely more cheerful topics for an
equinoctial dog-day than this you have lighted on. _Don’t_ speculate,
my dear fellow; leave poor old nature alone. Take short views, and let
the puzzling distance unfold and determine itself to your approach.
It is the wayfarers who decline to look ahead, who whistle as they
trudge along the road of life. The melancholy faces are those whose
eyes are endeavouring to see beyond the horizon towards which they are
advancing. Tell me now--about this cabin door of yours. My dear fellow,
it must be big enough this morning to enable you to pass through; so
come along on deck, will you, Wilfrid?’
‘Damn it, how blind you are!’ he exclaimed.
‘No, I’m not,’ said I.
‘D’ye mean to say that you can’t see what’s happened to me since we
last met?’
‘What now, Wilfrid?’
‘What now?’ he shouted. ‘Why, man, I can’t stand upright.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because I’m too tall for this cabin,’ he answered in a voice of
passion and grief.
‘Pray when did you find that out?’ said I.
‘On rising to dress myself this morning,’ he answered, ‘I was obliged
to clothe myself in my bunk. What a dreadful blow to befall a man! I
can’t even quit my bed now, and everything I want must be handed to me.’
Well, well! thought I; God mend him soon. Hot as it was, a chill ran
through me to the crazy, wistful, despairful look he directed at me,
and I was oppressed for a moment with the same sickness of heart that
had visited me during my interview with him on the preceding day.
‘I had resolved to sell the “Bride,”’ said he mournfully, putting his
pipe into a shelf at the back of him and folding his hands, which
seemed to me to have grown thin and white during the past few days,
upon his breast, ‘but I shan’t be able to do so now.’ I was silent.
‘She will have to be broken up,’ he added.
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed.
‘But I say _yes_!’ he suddenly roared; ‘how the devil else am I to get
out of her?’
‘Oh, I see!’ I answered soothingly, ‘I forgot that. But, Wilf, since
you’re too big to use this cabin, for the present only, for I am
certain you will dwindle to your old proportions before long, don’t you
think you ought to have an attendant constantly with you, some one at
hand sitting here to wait upon you?’
‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘no doubt of it. I am almost helpless now. But
I’ll not have that rascal Muffin.’
‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Nor would the stewards make the sort of servants you
want. If I were in your place I should like to be waited on by a couple
of jolly hearty sailors, fellows to take turn and turn about in looking
after me, chaps with their memories full of long yarns, unconventional,
sympathetic, no matter how rough their manners, agile, strong as
horses, with lively limbs, used to springing about. One or two such men
are to be met forward amongst your crew.’
‘A good idea,’ he cried. ‘Gad! after my experiences of Muffin I’d
rather be waited upon by the tarriest of tarry tarpaulins than one of
your sleek, soft-stepping, trained rogues who come and ask you for a
situation with an excellent character in one pocket from their late
master, and in the other the contents of his dressing-case. Ha, ha,
ha!’ and here he delivered one of his short roars of laughter.
I remained conversing with him until an hour was gone. Now that he had
put his pipe down the atmosphere of the cabin grew somewhat endurable,
yet the heat was extraordinarily great, and due, so far as one’s
sensations went, not more to the temperature than to the incredible
motionlessness of the yacht, so that there was not the faintest stir
of air in the porthole. I spoke of Lady Monson, fancying that the
thought of her might help to steady his mind and bring him away from
his crazy notions of growth and expansion; but he would not talk of
her; as regularly as I worked round to the subject of her ladyship, as
regularly was he sliding off into some other topic. Sometimes I’d think
that feeling had utterly changed in him; that there had grown up in
him for the woman whom he had again and again vowed to me he adored, a
loathing to which his innate good taste forbade him to give expression.
How it would be if they should meet I could not tell. Her black tragic
eyes might not have lost their fascination, nor her shape of beauty and
dignity its power of delighting and enamouring him. But certainly, as
we sat conversing, the sort of cowering air that accompanied his abrupt
changing of the subject every time I mentioned his wife’s name was
strongly suggestive of disgust and aversion. He talked very sensibly
save about his dimensions, but I took notice in him of a hankering
after the topic of suicide. Several times he tried to bring me into an
argument upon it.
‘Am I to be told,’ he said, ‘that a man’s life is not his own? If not,
to whom does it belong, pray?’
‘To heaven,’ I responded sullenly.
‘Prove it,’ he sneered.
‘Oh, ’tis too plain and established a fact to need proving,’ said I.
‘If a man’s life is his own,’ he cried, ‘who the deuce in this world
has the right to hinder him from doing what he will with it?’
‘Wilf, if this goes on,’ said I, ‘we shall be landed in a religious
controversy; a thing unendurable even under the sign of the frozen
serpent, but down here with a thermometer at about 112° in the cabin,
no ice nearer than 56° north?--see here, my dear cousin, get you small
again as soon as you can, back to your old size, join Laura and myself
at the table afresh, walk the decks with us, taste the fragrance of
a cigar upon the cool night air; realise that your little one is at
home waiting for you, and that on your return you will have plenty of
homely occupation in looking after those excellent improvements in your
property which you were telling me the other day you had in your mind.
This sudoriferous speculation as to whether people have a right to
hinder a man from taking his life will then exhale.’
And so I would go on chatting, talking him away, so to speak, from
this gloomy subject which his condition rendered depressing and most
uncomfortably significant in his mouth.
However, my visit to him had led to one stroke of good, for on
quitting him I at once went to Finn, who was on deck, and told him
how Sir Wilfrid had fallen into my scheme and was for having a couple
of sailors to wait upon him, one of whom should be constantly in his
cabin.
‘You must be plain with the fellows, captain,’ said I; ‘tell them
that Sir Wilfrid’s craze grows upon him and that he must be narrowly
watched, but with tact.’
‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ said he; ‘can’t do better than Cutbill and
Furlong, I think. They’re both hearty chaps, chock-a-block with lively
yarns, and they’ve both got good tempers. But dorn’t his honour get no
better then, sir?’
‘No,’ said I.
‘Dorn’t he feel as if he was a-coming back to his old shape, sir?’
‘On the contrary,’ I answered, ‘yesterday he had only broadened, but
this morning he feels so tall that he can’t stand upright.’
‘Well to be sure!’ cried the worthy fellow, with his long face working
all over with concern and anxiety. ‘It’s all her ladyship’s doing. It’s
all her caper-cutting that’s brought him to this. Such a gentle heart
as he has, too, and a true gentleman through and through him when his
mind sits square in his head? But lor’ bless me, sir, what did he want
to go and get married for? ’Taint as if he wanted a home, or a gal
with money enough to keep him. Not that it’s for me to say a word agin
marriage, for my missus has always kept a straight helm steady in my
wake ever since I took her in tow. But all the same, I’m of opinion
that matrimony is an institootion that don’t fit this here earth. It’s
a sort of lock-up; a man’s put into a cell along with a gal. If she’s
a proper kind of gal, why well and good. The window dorn’t seem barred
and ye don’t take much notice of your liberty being gone; but if she
tarns out to be of her ladyship’s sort, why there’s nothen to do but to
sing out through the keyhole for a rope to hang yourself with, or, if
ye ain’t got sperret enough for that remedy, to hang _her_ with.’
The delivery of this harangue seemed to ease his mind, and he went
forward with a face tolerably composed to give instructions to the two
men who were to serve as companions or, to put it bluntly, as keepers
to Wilfrid.
The weather held phenomenally silent and breathless. Just before lunch
I went right aft, where I commanded the length of the vessel, and
steadfastly watched her, and though I had my eye upon the line of her
jibboom I did not see that the end of the spar lifted or fell to the
extent of the breadth of a finger-nail. The sole satisfaction that
was to be got out of this unparalleled condition of stagnation was
the feeling that it could not possibly last. The dim and dirty blue
of the sea went rounding not above a mile distant into a like hue of
atmosphere, with a confused half-blinded vagueness of sky overhead
that did not seem to be higher up than twice the height of our masts,
and the appearance made you think of sitting in a glass globe sunk a
fathom or two under water with the light sifting through to you in a
tarnished, misty, ugly azure. A strange part of it was that though the
sky was cloudless the atmosphere was so thick you could watch the sun,
which hovered shapeless as a jelly-fish almost overhead, for a whole
minute at a time, without inconvenience; yet his heat bit fiercely for
all that; there was a wake, too, under him, flakes of muddy yellow-like
sheets of a ship’s sheathing scaling one under another, as though they
were going to the bottom in a procession. If you put your hand upon
the rail clear of the awning you brought it away with a stamp of pain.
I touched the brass binnacle hood by accident and bawled aloud to the
burn which raised me a blister on the side of my hand that lasted for
three days. A sort of impalpable steam rose from the very decks, so
that if a man stood still a moment you saw his figure trembling in it
like the quivering of an object beheld in clear running water. And how
am I to express that deeper quality of heat which seemed to come into
the atmosphere with the smell of the blistering of paint along the
yacht’s sides?
Yet there was no fall in the mercury, no hint above or below to
indicate a change at hand. Close alongside the burnished water lay
clear as crystal and gave back every image with almost startling
brilliance. I remember looking over and seeing my face in the clear
profound as distinctly as ever I had viewed it in a mirror. It lay like
a daguerreotype there. It was of course as deep down as I was high
above the surface, and I protest it was like looking at one’s self as
though one floated a drowned man.
It was the right kind of day for a plunge, and I pined for a swim,
for the delight of the cool embrace of the glass-clear brine. But the
skipper would not hear of it.
‘To the first splash, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘there’d sprout up a regular
crop of black fins. It isn’t because there’s nothing showing now that
there ain’t a deal more than I for one ’ud care to see close at hand.
No sir; be advised by me; don’t you go overboard.’
‘Oh, captain,’ said I, ‘I’ve been a sailor in my day and of course know
how to obey orders. But I’ve cruised a good deal in my time in John
Sharkee’s waters, and with all due deference to you I must say that
whenever there are sharks about one or more will be showing.’
‘Sorry to contradict ye, sir, but my answer’s no to that,’ he replied.
‘Tell ’ee what I’ll do, sir--there’s nothen resembling a shark hanging
round now, is there?’
We both stared carefully over the water, and I said no.
‘Well, now, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ll bet ’ee a farden’s worth of
silver spoons that I’ll call up a shark to anything I may choose to
chuck overboard.’
‘Make it a pennyworth of silver spoons,’ said I, ‘and I’ll bet.’
‘Done,’ said he with a grin, and straightway walked forward. After
a little he returned with a canvas-bag stuffed full of rubbish,
potato-parings, yarns, shavings enough to make it floatable, and the
like. He hitched the end of a leadline to it, jumped on to the taffrail
clear of the awning, and whirling it three or four times, sent it
speeding some distance away on the quarter. It fell with a splash, and
the blur it made upon the flawless surface was for all the world like
the impress of a damp finger upon a sheet of looking-glass. He towed
it gently, and scarce had he drawn in three fathoms of the line when a
little distance past the bag up shot the fin of a shark with a gleam
off its black wetness as though it were a beer-bottle. He hauled the
bag aboard and the fin disappeared.
‘Are they to be egg-spoons or dessert-spoons, Finn?’ said I, laughing.
‘By George, I shouldn’t have believed it, though. But it’s always so.
Let a man fancy that he knows anything to the very top of it, and he’s
sure to fall in with somebody who has a trick above him.’
But it was too hot for shark-fishing, let alone the mess of a capture
on our ivory-white planks. At first I was for decoying the beasts to
the surface and letting fly at them with one of the muskets below, but
Finn suggested that the firing might irritate Sir Wilfrid. What was to
be done but lie down and pant? Miss Laura was so overcome by the heat
that for once she proved bad company. At lunch she could not eat; she
was too languid to talk.
‘Just the afternoon for a game of draughts,’ said I, in playful
allusion to the want of air.
She waved away the suggestion with a weak movement. In fact she was
so oppressed that when I told her about Wilfrid’s new phase of growth
she could only look at me dully as though all capacity of emotion
lay swooning in her heart. I sat by her side fanning her, whilst the
perspiration hopped from my forehead like parched peas.
‘Oh,’ cried the little creature, ‘how long is this calm going to last?
What would I give for an English Christmas day to tumble down out of
the sky upon us, with its snow and hail.’
‘Let us go on deck,’ said I; ‘I am certain it is cooler up there.’
We mounted the steps, but she was scarcely out of the companion hatch
when she declared it was a great deal hotter above than below, and down
she went again. After all, thought I, Sir Wilfrid and his wife are as
well off in their cabins as though they had permitted themselves to
wander at large about the yacht. Yet it seemed a roasting existence to
my fancy for the self-made prisoners when I glanced aft and thought
of the size of their cabins, with not air enough to stir a feather in
the open ports, and Cutbill’s huge form in Wilfrid’s berth to give as
distinct a rise to the thermometer there as though a stove had been
introduced and a fire kindled in it.
All day long it was the same smoky, confused blending of misty blue
water and heaven shrouding down overhead and closing upon us, with
the sea like a dish of polished steel set in the midst of it, bright
as glass where we lay, then dimming into a bluish faintness in the
atmospheric thickness at its confines, and the sun a distorted face
of weak yellow brightness staring down as he slided westwards with
an aspect that made him look as though he were some newly-created
luminary. At about six o’clock he hung over the sea line glowing like
a huge live cinder, and the air was filled with his smoky crimson
glare that went sifting and tingling into the distance till one was
able to see twice as far again, a red gleam of sea opening past the
dimness and a delicate liquid dye of violet melting down, as one might
have thought, from the highest reaches of the heavens into the eastern
atmosphere.
‘Hillo!’ cried I to Jacob Crimp, who was leaning over the side with his
face purple with heat and full of loathing of the weather; ‘direct your
eyes into the south, will ye, and tell me what you see there?’
He turned with the leisurely action peculiar to merchant-sailors,
lifted the sharp of his hand to his brow and peered sulkily in the
direction which I had indicated.
‘Clouds,’ said he. ‘Is that what ye mean?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and a very noble and promising coast of them, too, as I
believe we shall be finding out presently when the change which I hope
their brows are charged with shall have clarified the air.’
In fact I had just then caught sight, away down in the south amidst the
haziness there, of some bronze streaks stretching from south-east to
south-west, with here and there dashes of exceedingly faint shadow of
the colour of flint. Much looking was not needful; it was quickly to be
seen that right astern of our course, though as the yacht lay just then
the appearance was off the starboard beam, there had gathered and was
slowly mounting a long, heavy body of thunderous cloud scarce visible
as yet save in its few bronze outlines.
‘It will mean a change I hope,’ said I to Crimp; ‘more than mere
thunder and lightning, let us pray. Yet the drop in the glass is
scarcely noticeable.’
‘Time something happened anyway,’ said he. ‘Dum me if it ain’t been too
hot even for the sharks to show themselves. I allow the “’Liza Robbins”
ain’t over sweet just now.’
‘No, I’d rather be you than your brother to-day, Crimp.’
‘Sorry to hear from the captain,’ said he, ‘that Sir Wilfrid’s got the
notion in his head that he’s growed in the night till he’s too tall to
stand upright.’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and I hope his craze may end at that.’
‘There’s but one cure for the likes of such tantrums,’ said he.
‘And pray what is that, Mr. Crimp?’
‘Fright. Git the hair of a chap that’s mad to stand on end, and see if
his crazes don’t fly clean off out of it like cannon balls out of a
broadside of guns.’
‘Ay, but fright, as you call it, might drive my poor cousin entirely
mad, Mr. Crimp.’
‘No fear,’ he answered. ‘Tell ’ee what I’ll ondertake to do. What’s the
hour now?’
‘Call it six o’clock,’ said I.
‘Well, I’ll ondertake by half-past six to have Sir Wilfrid running
about these ’ere decks.’
‘And what’s the prescription, pray?’
‘Why, there’s a scuttle to his cabin, ain’t there?’
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘An’ it lies open, I allow, a day like this. Werry well. Give me ten
minutes to go forrards and black my face and dress up my head according
to the notion that’s in my mind; then let me be lowered by a bowline
over the side. I pops my head into the scuttle and sings out in a
terrible woice, “Hullo, there, I’m the devil,” I says, says I, “and
I’ve come,” says I, “to see if ye’ve got any soul left that’s worth
treating for.” And what d’ye think he’d do at sight of me? Why run out
of his cabin as fast as his legs ’ud carry him.’
‘More likely let fly a pistol at you,’ I exclaimed, laughing at the
look of self-complacency with which the sour little fellow eyed me.
‘However, Mr. Crimp, we’ll leave all remedies for Sir Wilfrid alone
till we see what yonder shadow to the southward is going to do for us,’
and so saying I stepped below to change my coat for dinner.