Forward the sailors had come to a stand, and were talking, smoking,
drinking, and eating by the will-of-the-wisp glare of the few lanterns
which hung that way. There was nobody aft, saving the helmsman and the
second officer who had turned out to relieve the chief mate that he
might join the supper party. He lay over the rail abreast of the
wheel, and I could hear him quietly singing. The lanterns burnt
brightly; against the brilliant atmospheric haze of moonshine to
larboard--_larboard_ was then the word--the bunting which walled the
poop glistened like oiled paper. The monotonous voice of old Bow was
still returning thanks below; again and again his deep sea notes were
broken by loud cheers. The life under decks, the speechifying and the
huzzaing there, the brightness of the light, the frequent chink of
glasses, put a wild sort of mocking look into the emptiness of this deck
with its lanterns swaying to the roll of the ship, and the motionless
figure of the steersman showing unreal, like some image of the fancy
down at the end of the vessel, through the vista of bunting and
kaleidoscopic light and white awning framing a star-studded square of
dark ether over the taffrail.
Yet I still wanted air. The poop was smothered up with flags and canvas;
the cross-jack was furled, spanker brailed up, and the mainsail hung
from its yard in festoons to the grip of its gear. There was no wing of
canvas therefore near the deck to fan a draught along, and so it came
into my head to jump aloft and see what sort of coolness of dew and
night were to be had in the maintop. I got on to the rail and laid hold
of the main shrouds, and leisurely travelled up the ratlines. Methought
it was as good as climbing a hill for the change of temperature the
ascent gave me. The iron of the futtock shrouds went through and through
me in a delicious chill, and with the smallest possible effort I swung
myself over the rim of the top and stood upon the platform, rapturously
drinking in the gushings of air which came in little gusts to my face
out of the pendulum beat of the great maintopsail against the mast to
the tender swing of the tall fabric.
If ever you need to know what a deep sense of loneliness is like, go
aloft in a dead calm when the shadow of the night lies heavy upon the
breathless ocean, and from the altitude of top, cross-tree or yard, look
down and around you! The spirit of life is always strong in the breeze
or in the gale of wind. There are voices in the rigging; there is the
organ note of the billow flung foaming from the ship’s side; there is a
tingling vitality in the long floating rushes of the fabric bursting
through one head of yeast into another. All this is company, along with
the spirit shapes of the loose scud flying wild, or the sociable
procession of large, slow clouds. But up aloft in such a clock-calm as
lay upon the deep that night you are _alone_! and the lonelier for the
distant sounds which rise from the decks--the dim laugh, the faint call,
liker to the memories of such things than the reality.
The body of the ship lay thin and long far beneath me like a black
plank, pallid aft with the spread of awning, with an oblong haze of
light in the main hatch where the grating was lifted, and dots of weak
flame from the lanterns forward, resembling bulbous corposants hovering
about the forecastle rail. The ship’s hull was complexioned to the
aspect of the leaf of the silver tree when lighted by the stars by the
broad raining of the moonshine. Yet, as she slightly rolled, breaking
the black water from her side into ripples, you saw the phosphor
starting and winking in the ebony profound there, like the reflection of
sheet-lightning. Exquisitely lulling was the tender pinion-like flapping
of the light, moonlit canvas, soaring spire-fashion in ivory spaces high
above my head, with the pattering of dew falling from the cloths as they
swayed. A sound of thin cheering from the cuddy floated to me; presently
a fiddle struck up somewhere forwards, and a manly voice began _Tom
Bowling_. Now, thought I, if they would only strip the poop of its
awning, that I might see them dancing by the lantern light when supper
was over, and they had fallen to caper-cutting afresh! What a scene of
pigmy revelry _then_! What a vision of Lilliputian enjoyment!
I seated myself Lascar fashion and lighted a cigar. Could I have
distin-guished the figure of a midshipman below I should have hailed
him, and sent down the end of a line for a draught of seltzer and
brandy. But the repose up here, the dewy coolness, the royal solitude of
the still, majestic night, with sentinel stars drowsily winking along
the sea-line, and the white planet of the moon sailing northwards into
the west amid the wide eclipse of its own soft silver glory, were all
that my fevered being could pray for.
It is as likely as not that after a little I was nodding somewhat
drowsily. I recollect that my cigar went out, and that on sucking at it
and finding it out I would not be at the trouble of lighting it again. I
say I might have been half-asleep sitting, still Lascar fashion, with my
back against the head of the lower-mast, when on a sudden,
something--soft, indeed, but amazingly heavy--struck me full on the face
and chest, and fell upon my knees, where it lay like a small
feathered-bed. But for my back being supported, I must have been
stretched at full length and, for all I know, knocked clean overboard,
or, worse still, hurled headlong to the deck.