THE SHIP'S LOOKOUT
Captain Layard entered the cabin and called to the dog, which instantly
sprang up.
"Sailor, go on deck and keep a lookout," said he, and in a breath the
Newfoundland rushed up the companion-steps and vanished.
"He hasn't had his supper yet, father," exclaimed the little boy.
"I will send it forward to him," answered the captain, seating himself
in the chair he had vacated, and helping himself to a piece of chicken.
Hardy had risen when Layard entered, but seeing the captain sit he
resumed his place. His watch would come round at eight o'clock. There
would be little time for sleep if he withdrew to his berth. He had
supped well, had drunk a glass of grog, had enjoyed his chat with the
little boy, whose charming face and sweet, ingenuous, yet manly prattle
delighted him; he was comfortable, and the captain inspired no feeling
of restraint nor sense of intrusion, so he sat on.
"The fog is as thick as mud in a wine-glass," exclaimed Captain Layard.
"Some go fast and some go slow through these smothers. The fast man
holds that a ship is under more immediate control when travelling; I
am a slow man when I can't see. In fact," he continued, with a look of
exaltation, with a smile of profound self-complacency, "I claim to know
my business. There is no man afloat who is going to teach me what to do
when a thing is to be done, and done properly."
"If all ships would heave to," said Hardy, witnessing the captain's
mind in the expression which subtly interpreted it, "then it would be
the right thing in a fog to stop your engines, or back your topsail.
But it's the other fellow you can't see that makes the fear." He
immediately added, "Your dog is extraordinarily sagacious, sir."
"It amused me to train him," replied the captain, smoothing Johnny's
little hand as it lay upon the table. "There is no fog-horn which
equals the screams of an irritated sow. A sow once saved me from a
collision by causing a dog, in an invisible ship close aboard on the
starboard bow, to bark. That put the idea into my head. Sailor has the
voice of a trombone, and he didn't need much training either; he is now
perched between the knight-heads with more searching eyes and clearer
ears than the whole ship's company could put together if they made
their heads into one."
Hardy laughed.
"Don't forget Sailor's supper, father," said Johnny.
"I'll not forget," answered the captain.
As he spoke the words the man who waited on the cabin came down the
steps.
"Is it still very thick?" asked the captain.
"Blinding, sir," was the answer.
"Get the dog's supper, and take it to him on the fok'sle," said
Captain Layard. "See that he has water; it may be an all-night job for
him. Pearson was a very humane man," he went on, addressing Hardy. "I
might guess that by the medicine-chest he's left me. I overhauled it
before we sailed, and wondered at the quantity of sleeping and death
stuffs it contained. I found out that in one of his passages home from
Calcutta several men died of cholera, and he was at his wits' ends
for drugs. Ships bound to India should always carry a surgeon; they
would--they must, if there are passengers. But glauber salts are good
things for Jack: 'tis an all-round physic, as good for smallpox as for
indigestion." He laughed somewhat heartily, and continued, "Pearson's
men might have died to a man, for his medicine-chest showed badly
like the end of a long voyage. Fortunately half of them took it into
their heads to live, and they got the ship home. After this Pearson
never went to sea without plenty of drink for cholera. He's left some
doctor's handbook on the diseases of sailors, and there's a volume on
poisons full of pencil marks. His humanity was unwearying, but he got
the sack all the same. Johnny, my darling, it's time for bed. Come
along, my lamb."
He took the boy by the hand, and they went into the captain's cabin,
the child crying as his father opened the door, "Good night, Mr. Hardy."
It was half-past seven; Hardy went into his berth to smoke a pipe
before relieving the deck. The captain's cabin glowed with the soft
illumination of an oil lamp screwed to a bulkhead, and swinging in its
bracket to the heave. It was a fine large cabin, equipped with a table
covered with green baize on which were writing materials, nautical
instruments, and such things; a fore-and-aft bunk for the captain, and
a brass cot at the foot of the bunk, safely secured to the deck, for
Johnny. It was comfortable with a carpet, chairs, a short sofa, a chest
of drawers, and washstand. Close beside Johnny's cot on the deck was
the boy's drum.
The captain began to undress the little fellow, who talked to him of
Mr. Hardy; he said he wished Mr. Hardy could sleep with them. No mother
ever used a tenderer hand in putting her child to bed than did this
strange sea-captain, mad or not mad. His eyes were tender, twice he
kissed the boy's fair brow; he seemed reluctant to make an end of this
undressing, as though he loved to have his hands upon the child, to
have his face close to him.
"Now your prayers, Johnny," said he. And the boy knelt by his cot, and
in words he had learnt from his father, prayed that his mother would
look down and watch over them both, and that God would bless his father
and himself.
The captain stood by in devout posture, and whispered the words which
the child uttered, then hoisted the little fellow into bed, covered him
up, and kissed him.
"Mayn't Mr. Hardy come and see me in bed?" said the child.
"Ay," answered the captain, and he stepped to the door, and called the
chief officer by name.
Hardy instantly came out, leaving his pipe behind him.
"Come and see my boy in bed," said the captain.
Hardy, not knowing that this was due to the child and not to the
father, was secretly astonished, for though he had always lived on very
good terms with the captains he had sailed with, he had never met
any commander who treated him just as though they occupied the same
platform.
He followed him into his cabin, and the boy with his bright hair on the
pillow smiled a greeting.
"It is a beautiful bed, Johnny," said the mate, stepping close to the
cot, and looking at him with the affection which such a child as this
will excite in a sailor's heart at sea, moved by thoughts of home and
of the fair land he has left, of his own childhood perhaps, and visited
by that mute sense of solitude, peril, and the holy and brooding
presence of the Great Spirit, which is the impulse of the deep, and
understood by those to whom the ocean, eternal and boundless in the
constant recession of its horizon, is an interpretable face. He turned
to the captain and exclaimed:
"If your boy ever dreams, sir, it is of the angels who guard his bed."
He kissed the little chap, and was going.
"A moment, Mr. Hardy," exclaimed the captain, who did not seem to
have caught or noticed what the mate said. "This is an example of old
Pearson's forethought and humanity."
He stepped, followed by Hardy, to a corner of the cabin, in which
stood a small mahogany chest, and lifted the lid. This lid was
furnished with scissors, syringes, and the like, and the contents of
the chest consisted of a number of stoppered green bottles, as well as
sticking-plaster, lint, and surgical instruments. The captain, pointing
to the bottles as he spoke, said:
"This is laudanum; this is labelled morphia; this is atropine for the
ulcerated eye; this is chlorodyne. Here are drugs enough to start a
man as a chemist. This is a book," said he, half lifting a thin volume
from a pocket and letting it slip back, "that tells you how to make use
of all this stuff; ay, even the right dose of Glauber's salt is given."
"I hope there's no chance of Master Johnny handling those bottles,
sir?" said the mate, who, though he gazed with curiosity at this
revelation of the open lid, was not inattentive to the expression of
the commander's face, which was one of superiority, as though he had
appropriated and was triumphing in the merits of the kind foresight
which were certainly not his but Pearson's.
"You will never look into this chest, Johnny?" said Hardy.
"His mother was the very soul of honour," exclaimed Captain Layard,
"and that child cannot but be the spirit of truth and honesty itself."
He shut the lid and added, "Where, I wonder, does the human soul come
from? The father cannot give his, or a portion of his, to the child,
nor can the mother, for that might involve the forfeiture of their
title to immortality. The great poet must be right; the soul which
informs a child, which spiritualises it in the womb and at its birth,
must come from God, who is its Home. What a wonderful thought! What a
revelation it has been to me! What an assurance and promise!"
He stood gazing steadfastly at Hardy, who, saying, a little uneasily,
"These are matters quite beyond me, sir," again made for the door,
through which he passed in silence, the captain standing motionless,
his hands clasped before him, and his eyes seeming to see something
beyond the bulkhead, upon which he had fastened them.
At eight o'clock Hardy's watch came round. He went on deck in a very
thoughtful state, and the deep dye of that tremendous void of black
vapour was very well qualified to darken his mood into the hue of the
crow--a bird deemed portentous in ancient seafaring. He stood in the
spokes of lamp-sheen about the skylight and called to Mr. Candy, who
came upon him suddenly out of some part of the deck like a man walking
through a glass in a dark room. He exchanged a few sentences with this
second mate, but they wholly concerned the business of the ship. Candy
was not a person to take into one's confidence; his silver-white lash
shaded a pale eye that marked one of those souls which, as you cannot
make up your mind about them, you resolve to distrust; otherwise Hardy,
in defiance of all law of discipline, and even of sea-breeding, would,
in the humour of anxiety that then possessed him, have been glad to
hear Mr. Candy's opinion of the commander.
The second mate went below to bed after reporting that he had visited
the forecastle, and found the Newfoundland awake and vigilant, also
that two hands paced the forward-deck as lookouts.
The air of wind was still northwest; it breathed with just weight
enough to steady the topsails and the foresail. As the ship leaned
with the languid heave of the sea, the sails hanging from the yards on
the caps, and the festooned clews of the invisible mainsail, flapped
in strokes of the pinions of mammoth birds winging betwixt the masts.
The lap of the brine against the bows, which were slowly breaking
the hidden waters, saddened the blindness of the night with a note
of supernatural pain and grief. The ship was moving slowly, and, as
before, nothing of her was distinguishable but the dim lustre smoking
in hurrying streams and wreaths of vapour about the skylight and about
the binnacle-stand.
It was damp, depressing, heart-subduing. The philosophy of the mariner,
which is one of endurance, and of that species of submission which is
attended with sea blessings and the profanities of the ocean-parlour,
breaks down in the fog. Here is the helplessness, here is the sealed
eye, the spiriting of groping anxiety, which is a sort of anguish. It
is not his ship or himself that he fears; the emotions bred by fog are
ahead or abeam, and it need not be steam, for a dirty little brig or
schooner, with her half-dozen of a crew shouting their consternation
under the foretopmast stay, has been known to smite and sink an ocean
palace full of light, of superb machinery, of saloon tables glowing
with fruit and plate, and populous with diners.
The deck was not to be comfortably measured in a quarter-deck walk, in
blackness so dense that if you swerved by so much as two degrees of
angle of foot you thumped your breast against the bulwarks. Hardy laid
hold of the wet weather vang on the quarter and fell into reflection,
for loneliness breeds thought, and no man is more lonely than the
officer of the watch on board a merchantman. His mind went again to
Julia Armstrong, but it had found an unsettling fascination in Captain
Layard, and it quickly returned to him. He could not doubt that he
was a little mad; his ideas were strange, yet his speculations showed
thought and culture. He was insane to one to whom he talked freely, but
to his crew, to whom he would not and did not talk, he must be the
commonplace "old man" of the quarter-deck, and in this way Hardy feared
he might prove dangerous even to tragedy.
The ship's bell was hung in the wake of the galley, and a little clock,
illuminated by a bull's-eye lamp, was hung up under a penthouse on a
timber erection just before it. A lookout man would walk to the clock
to see the time, and at ten he struck "four bells," at which hour it
was as black and thick as ever after its first coming; the light breeze
blew, and the ship swayed softly through the void.
Hardy made his way forward to see to the dog. He struck between two men
who were walking the deck, and one muttered, "What cheer?"
"By God, my lads," said Hardy, "you'll not find out what a wolf's had
for dinner by squinting down his throat!"
There was a faint haze about the forescuttle: it came up into the inky
thickness from the forecastle lamp. It was a slight relief, and even a
rest for the eye, but the shadow forward was deeper than it was aft,
for up there in the void was the raven thundercloud of foresail and
foretopsail, and further forward yet, like ebon waterspouts soaring
from sea to topmast head, were the midnight dyes of the jib and
staysail.
Hardy found the night-lights burning brightly, and going toward the
heel of the bowsprit he touched the Newfoundland lookout with his foot.
He patted the invisible, shaggy head, and passed his arm around its
neck, and pressed the creature's long wet jaw to his breast, a token of
love and encouragement which the dog acknowledged by a grunt or two of
happiness.
"Keep a bright lookout, Sailor," said Hardy, patting the shaggy,
invisible head again, and knowing there were two human lookouts
somewhere about, he called, and they answered out of the black
blankness to leeward. Well, he could not tell them to keep their eyes
skinned, for the sight of man and even of dog lay dead upon that
forecastle, but he directed them to listen with all their might, to go
often to the head-rail and strain their ears, and they answered, "Ay,
ay, sir."
Very plainly on this forecastle did you hear the sulky sob of the sea
like something large and timid, gasping to the rude shock of the stem.
The ocean hissed a little here and there, but the light wind could not
give life enough to the glance of the curl of sea to strike through it
to the eye, even though one looked straight down over the rail.
Hardy slowly made his way aft, and on approaching the binnacle
discerned the captain standing in the faint sheen close to the helmsman.
"I never remember a thicker fog," said the captain, and he asked
questions about the lookout, the dog, and the side-lights. Then walking
out of the binnacle haze he struck the bulwarks almost abreast, and
Hardy followed and stood alongside.
"Whenever I am in this sort of thing," said Captain Layard, "I think of
the blind. It is terrible to wake of a bright morning to the eternal
darkness of one's life. I should fear the presence of visions in that
everlasting gloom. It would be haunted with phantoms, and as thick-set
with wild, grotesque, horrible, brassy faces as the human eye when
morphia closes the lid."
"My father is, as you know, sir, a doctor," said Hardy, "and I've
heard him speak of the blind. He declares they are less to be pitied
than the stone deaf." The captain pshaw'd. "He would say," continued
Hardy, "contrast the faces of the two afflictions. They both force the
mind's eye more deeply inwards, but in the one there is the pain of
attention ever strained and a baffled, helpless look, whilst the other
is mild and restful as though it had found peace in its communes with
God."
"Your father may be a very clever man," said Captain Layard, "but I
have no faith in doctors. I have never met a doctor who did me any
good, and I have been ill in my time, believe me. They let my wife die."
He paused as if in some passage of deep emotion. In this interval
Hardy thought to himself what an extraordinary conversation for the
quarter-deck of a ship, close upon midnight, in a dense fog!
Some hanging fold of canvas flapped aloft. In a voice as changed as
though he was acting, the captain exclaimed:
"That's the speech of a sail that asks to be furled. The glass is high,
and there's no foul weather anywhere. If the breeze freshens by ever so
little, or if this light air draws ahead, call me, sir."
There was positive refreshment in this plain speech of the sea to
Hardy, who on replying to the captain found that he had gone, and in
the steaming faintness hovering in the companion just caught a sight of
his head disappearing.
Eleven bells had been struck, and Hardy was beginning to think that
it would be eight bells soon, which must signify shelter, freedom
from the dwarfish drench of the vapour, as fine but as penetrating
as rain in Lilliput, a warm blanket, half a pipe, and then oblivion
for an off-shore spell of nearly four hours, when on a sudden the dog
barked. The tones were deep and constant, and to the first roll of
those organ notes the loose wet canvas beat the masts aloft in a sudden
heave of the whole fabric, and an element of alarm and even of fearful
expectation entered the black void and thickened it, and seemed to
close it round about till the smoking colour of light on forecastle and
quarter-deck dimmed into the preternatural faintness of the salt sea
glow when it shudders a fathom deep under some smooth tropic surface.
The dog continued to bark, and there was an importunate vehemence in
his notes, a bounding pulse of urgency as though the noble creature
with instincts superior to man's knew that a matter of life or death
was concerned in his sentinel bugling. Voices sounded forward, you
heard a hurry of feet; again the ship leaned, and the sails smote
the masts with an alarum sound of metal; and to the accompaniment of
this midnight concert, made ghastly by blackness, by the overwhelming
blindness of fog and by the presence of danger, Hardy rushed forward,
taking his chance of what might be in the road.
"Jump for a port-fire, one of you," he shouted, sending his cry slap
into a very web of seamen's growling voices, the owners of which were
no more to be seen than the ship's keel. "What is it, Sailor?"
And now he was alongside the dog, and with his hand on its head felt
in the direction of the creature's muzzle, and found that it was
delivering its notes straight away over the head-rail, about two points
on the weather bow.
"Wheel, there!" he roared. "Starboard your helm. Let her go off five
points."
"Starboard it is, sir," came back the answer.
"See that sheen out to starboard there, sir?" rang out a voice which
sounded clear through the barking of the dog.
"Hush! Sailor. Down, sir. Hush, my beauty," cried Hardy, and the dog
was instantly silent. "Hark! now."
A sort of oozing of light, dimly scarlet, wild and weak and wet as some
ghostly star of death hovering over a grave, was visible to windward,
a trifle forward of the fore-rigging. "Hark!" cried Hardy, and sure
enough amid the greasy slopping of water, falling lazily from the
thrust of the ship's bow, they could hear a distant noise of shouting,
of cries reëchoed as from one part of a deck to the other, with a
deeper threading of some throat hoarse in a speaking-trumpet.
"Is the mate forward?" sang out the voice of the ship's carpenter.
"Fire one right away off," shouted Hardy, knowing what the fellow had
got and meant.
In a few heart-beats a stream of sun-bright fire was pouring like
water from a hose over the bow, but its lightning illumination
touched but a narrow stretch of the dark water. The foresail turned
of a sickly yellow, and the staysail soared wan as the wing of the
albatross in dying moonlight. All above and abaft, and then forward
to the flying-jib boom end, yards and sailcloth lay steeped in the
impenetrable smother, and within the area of the light the fog drove
slowly in a very Milky Way of silver crystals. But the men could see
one another, and helped by the light Hardy sped aft to be near the
wheel, and there he found Captain Layard.
"There's a ship off the starboard bow, sir," he exclaimed.
"They'll never see that port fire," answered the commander. "They're
burning flares, or we shouldn't see _her_. A foreigner, by the row.
How's she heading?"
That question was answered even as he asked it by the revelation of a
ship. It had the suddenness of a magic-lantern picture flung swiftly.
They saw at the range of a pistol a lurid shape, which they easily
distinguished as a barque with painted ports, a tall poop, and a tall
topgallant forecastle. She was burning flares upon her main-deck and
waist, and the red flames, winding tongues of fire into feathers of
soot-black smoke, jewelled the whole apparition with red-hot stars.
They pierced through the fog like sunlit rubies from glass and brass,
from wet plank and mast, and the grease of spars. She was so close that
she shone out clearly, and made light enough for the people of the
_York_ to see by. Her helm was hard up and she was slowly paying off,
but her flying-jib boom must catch the mizzen-rigging of the Australian
clipper. You heard the splintering of wood aloft, the crash of nearer
timber, broken off carrot-like betwixt a lazy roll of both ships.
The barque's decks were a sight for the gods. Figures of men could be
seen rushing frantically here and there. They were all shouting; men on
the poop were screeching orders, and nothing but the helm gave heed;
men on the forecastle were roaring and flourishing their fists. The
flames duplicated the shadows of the running figures; painted lines
of the rigging upon the planks writhed between the water-ways, like
serpents snaking their attenuated lengths overboard. Never did any sea
light flash up a more startling, a wilder, a more ghastly tapestry.
'Twas like a painting in flames and ruddy stars upon the black canvas
of the fog, and the hull, with its lines of ports like the keys of
a piano, reeled slowly off on the lift of the brine, yard-arm to
yard-arm, the beating canvas of each red as the powder flag, and dying
out up aloft like the reflection of a burning ship upon a cloud.
It was all too breathless for action aboard the _York_. Before a brace
could be let go, before an order could be yelled, the stranger's
flying-jib boom was crackling and gone, and her topgallantmast,
with its canvas, was plastering the topsail; and then it was almost
channel to channel, and the barque's poop was abreast of the _York's_
quarter-deck.
"Great God!" cried Hardy.
A figure standing near the stranger's mizzen-rigging fell, and another
figure fled aft, but at that instant some back draught of breeze
thickened the crystals of the fog smoking close to the stranger's
taffrail with a dense feathering of the black stench from the flares;
the burning picture vanished out astern, as though to the fall of a
curtain of midnight hue, the sounds of shouting sank, and in the hush
that fell upon the _York's_ deck, nothing was to be heard but the
dreary lamentations of broken water under the bows, and the weeping
noise of eddies under the counter.
"A close shave!" said Captain Layard, fetching a deep breath. "She has
not hurt us, I think."
"I saw a man fall as if stabbed," said Hardy.
"Back the topsail! I'll keep the ship hove to till we can see,"
exclaimed the captain, whose attention, concentrated by the sudden
blackness into which the ship had floated, was wholly in the
manoeuvre he had commanded.
The order was sung out, the sailors came groping their way aft to the
main-braces, the yards were swung, and the ship was brought to a stand,
lightly rolling her masts with a slap of hidden pinion, which made you
think of some gigantic navy signal-man waving flags.
"My noble dog has saved my ship," exclaimed the captain. "I am a
remarkable man!" And, to use a Paddyism, Hardy could _hear_ in the
skipper's speech the expression of exaltation which his face did
undoubtedly wear. The skipper whistled, and in a few moments felt the
snout of the fine black creature pressing lovingly against his thigh.
"Come along below," said he, passing his hand caressingly along the
invisible feathers of the dog's back, "till I dry you and see how you
look, and we'll take a peep at Johnny." And he and the dog vanished.
Just at that moment eight bells were struck. It was midnight, and the
starboard watch must tend the ship till four. Whilst the last chimes
were trembling into the damp, depressing, flapping sounds which clothed
the obscured heights, the chief mate was hailed by a man whose voice
proceeded from abreast of the gangway. Hardy stepped to the companion
where the sheen lay, and exclaimed, "I am here." At the same moment
Mr. Candy came out of the companion and joined him. Before one could
address the other, three figures entered the space of faint saturated
light.
"Here's a man," said one of them, "that's jumped aboard us off the
barque. He come up to me and asked to see the capt'n."
"Which is the man?" said Hardy, straining his sight.
One of them said, "I am, mister. I am French." And then in French he
asked if Hardy spoke that tongue.
"No," answered Hardy. "Come below into the cabin to the captain."
And after a few words with Mr. Candy, who heard now for the first time
that they had nearly been run into by a tall French barque, he went
down the cabin steps, followed by the Frenchman.
In this interior plenty of light was shining, and it was as noontide
after the midnight of the deck. The captain was near the table drying
the dog with a cloth, and talking to him, and praising him as though he
were a man, and the creature's mild and benevolent eyes looked up into
his face, and you read gratitude and affection in the noble brute.
"Who's that?" said the captain, throwing the cloth down, and looking
with a knitted brow at the Frenchman.
"He will explain, sir," Hardy answered.
"Softly," exclaimed the captain, "an angel lies asleep in that cabin,"
and with a melodramatic flourish of his arm, he pointed to the door of
his berth.
The Frenchman looked at Hardy. He was a man of middle height, in a
drill or thin canvas blouse, over which was buttoned at the throat a
rough, old jacket, the sleeves hanging loose. He wore blue trousers
patched with black, stuffed into half-boots bronzed by wear and brine.
His black hair curled upon his shoulders, and he held a cap fashioned
out of some sort of skin. His face was a ghastly yellow; his lips a
vivid red; his nose long, lean, and humped, and the black pupils of his
eyes sparkled in the flashes of the swinging lamp amid their whites,
which, by the way, were crimson with drink or gout, or both. It was a
face to peer at you, malevolently, from a time-darkened canvas, very
picturesque, very romantic, but something that you would not like to
think was treading behind you on a lonely road.
"Who are you?" said the captain, putting his hand upon the head of the
dog, in whose body a sort of rolling noise might have been heard, not
quite a growl, but a note as of suspicion grumbling deep down below the
throat.
"You speak French, I hope, sar?" said the man.
"And you speak English!" responded the captain, with a side look and
a grin at Hardy. "It's no business of yours whether I speak French or
not. Start your yarn."
And the man, clearly understanding what was said, began.