Jukes was as ready a man as any half-dozen young mates that may be
caught by casting a net upon the waters; and though he had been somewhat
taken aback by the startling viciousness of the first squall, he had
pulled himself together on the instant, had called out the hands and had
rushed them along to secure such openings about the deck as had not been
already battened down earlier in the evening. Shouting in his fresh,
stentorian voice, “Jump, boys, and bear a hand!” he led in the work,
telling himself the while that he had “just expected this.”
But at the same time he was growing aware that this was rather more than
he had expected. From the first stir of the air felt on his cheek the
gale seemed to take upon itself the accumulated impetus of an avalanche.
Heavy sprays enveloped the Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and instantly in
the midst of her regular rolling she began to jerk and plunge as though
she had gone mad with fright.
Jukes thought, “This is no joke.” While he was exchanging explanatory
yells with his captain, a sudden lowering of the darkness came upon the
night, falling before their vision like something palpable. It was as
if the masked lights of the world had been turned down. Jukes was
uncritically glad to have his captain at hand. It relieved him as though
that man had, by simply coming on deck, taken most of the gale's weight
upon his shoulders. Such is the prestige, the privilege, and the burden
of command.
Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from any one on
earth. Such is the loneliness of command. He was trying to see, with
that watchful manner of a seaman who stares into the wind's eye as if
into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the hidden intention and
guess the aim and force of the thrust. The strong wind swept at him out
of a vast obscurity; he felt under his feet the uneasiness of his ship,
and he could not even discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it
were not so; and very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man's
helplessness.
To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine. Jukes, at his elbow,
made himself heard yelling cheerily in the gusts, “We must have got
the worst of it at once, sir.” A faint burst of lightning quivered all
round, as if flashed into a cavern--into a black and secret chamber of
the sea, with a floor of foaming crests.
It unveiled for a sinister, fluttering moment a ragged mass of clouds
hanging low, the lurch of the long outlines of the ship, the black
figures of men caught on the bridge, heads forward, as if petrified in
the act of butting. The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then
the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of
a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an
overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam
had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each
other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one
from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man
incidentally, as it were--without passion. A furious gale attacks him
like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind,
seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a
great distance through the air. Everything disappeared--even, for
a moment, his power of thinking; but his hand had found one of
the rail-stanchions. His distress was by no means alleviated by an
inclination to disbelieve the reality of this experience. Though young,
he had seen some bad weather, and had never doubted his ability to
imagine the worst; but this was so much beyond his powers of fancy that
it appeared incompatible with the existence of any ship whatever. He
would have been incredulous about himself in the same way, perhaps, had
he not been so harassed by the necessity of exerting a wrestling effort
against a force trying to tear him away from his hold. Moreover, the
conviction of not being utterly destroyed returned to him through the
sensations of being half-drowned, bestially shaken, and partly choked.
It seemed to him he remained there precariously alone with the stanchion
for a long, long time. The rain poured on him, flowed, drove in sheets.
He breathed in gasps; and sometimes the water he swallowed was fresh and
sometimes it was salt. For the most part he kept his eyes shut tight, as
if suspecting his sight might be destroyed in the immense flurry of
the elements. When he ventured to blink hastily, he derived some moral
support from the green gleam of the starboard light shining feebly upon
the flight of rain and sprays. He was actually looking at it when its
ray fell upon the uprearing sea which put it out. He saw the head of the
wave topple over, adding the mite of its crash to the tremendous uproar
raging around him, and almost at the same instant the stanchion was
wrenched away from his embracing arms. After a crushing thump on his
back he found himself suddenly afloat and borne upwards. His first
irresistible notion was that the whole China Sea had climbed on the
bridge. Then, more sanely, he concluded himself gone overboard. All the
time he was being tossed, flung, and rolled in great volumes of water,
he kept on repeating mentally, with the utmost precipitation, the words:
“My God! My God! My God! My God!”
All at once, in a revolt of misery and despair, he formed the crazy
resolution to get out of that. And he began to thresh about with his
arms and legs. But as soon as he commenced his wretched struggles he
discovered that he had become somehow mixed up with a face, an oilskin
coat, somebody's boots. He clawed ferociously all these things in
turn, lost them, found them again, lost them once more, and finally was
himself caught in the firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He returned
the embrace closely round a thick solid body. He had found his captain.
They tumbled over and over, tightening their hug. Suddenly the water
let them down with a brutal bang; and, stranded against the side of the
wheelhouse, out of breath and bruised, they were left to stagger up in
the wind and hold on where they could.
Jukes came out of it rather horrified, as though he had escaped some
unparalleled outrage directed at his feelings. It weakened his faith in
himself. He started shouting aimlessly to the man he could feel near him
in that fiendish blackness, “Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?” till his
temples seemed ready to burst. And he heard in answer a voice, as if
crying far away, as if screaming to him fretfully from a very great
distance, the one word “Yes!” Other seas swept again over the bridge.
He received them defencelessly right over his bare head, with both his
hands engaged in holding.
The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling
helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed
to find a wall to hit every time. When she rolled she fell on her side
headlong, and she would be righted back by such a demolishing blow that
Jukes felt her reeling as a clubbed man reels before he collapses. The
gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though
the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air
streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a
concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out
of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running
through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again
as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose
his mind and judge things coolly.
The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm
both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide,
beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread
under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain
MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as
ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of
the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of
his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him,
his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with
the fear of being swept overboard together with the whole thing in one
great crash--her middle structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a
coast. It was like an outlying rock with the water boiling up, streaming
over, pouring off, beating round--like a rock in the surf to which
shipwrecked people cling before they let go--only it rose, it sank, it
rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should
have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing upon the
sea.
The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive
fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings
blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted,
light-screens smashed--and two of the boats had gone already. They had
gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother
of the wave. It was only later, when upon the white flash of another
high sea hurling itself amidships, Jukes had a vision of two pairs of
davits leaping black and empty out of the solid blackness, with one
overhauled fall flying and an iron-bound block capering in the air, that
he became aware of what had happened within about three yards of his
back.
He poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His
lips touched it--big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone,
“Our boats are going now, sir.”
And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a
penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if
sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the
gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail and indomitable sound that
can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose,
that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when heavens
fall, and justice is done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him,
as if from very, very far--“All right.”
He thought he had not managed to make himself understood. “Our boats--I
say boats--the boats, sir! Two gone!”
The same voice, within a foot of him and yet so remote, yelled sensibly,
“Can't be helped.”
Captain MacWhirr had never turned his face, but Jukes caught some more
words on the wind.
“What can--expect--when hammering through--such--Bound to
leave--something behind--stands to reason.”
Watchfully Jukes listened for more. No more came. This was all Captain
MacWhirr had to say; and Jukes could picture to himself rather than see
the broad squat back before him. An impenetrable obscurity pressed down
upon the ghostly glimmers of the sea. A dull conviction seized upon
Jukes that there was nothing to be done.
If the steering-gear did not give way, if the immense volumes of water
did not burst the deck in or smash one of the hatches, if the engines
did not give up, if way could be kept on the ship against this terrific
wind, and she did not bury herself in one of these awful seas, of whose
white crests alone, topping high above her bows, he could now and then
get a sickening glimpse--then there was a chance of her coming out of
it. Something within him seemed to turn over, bringing uppermost the
feeling that the Nan-Shan was lost.
“She's done for,” he said to himself, with a surprising mental
agitation, as though he had discovered an unexpected meaning in this
thought. One of these things was bound to happen. Nothing could be
prevented now, and nothing could be remedied. The men on board did not
count, and the ship could not last. This weather was too impossible.
Jukes felt an arm thrown heavily over his shoulders; and to this
overture he responded with great intelligence by catching hold of his
captain round the waist.
They stood clasped thus in the blind night, bracing each other against
the wind, cheek to cheek and lip to ear, in the manner of two hulks
lashed stem to stern together.
And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than
before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious
rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange
effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo.
“D'ye know where the hands got to?” it asked, vigorous and evanescent at
the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from
Jukes instantly.
Jukes didn't know. They were all on the bridge when the real force of
the hurricane struck the ship. He had no idea where they had crawled to.
Under the circumstances they were nowhere, for all the use that could be
made of them. Somehow the Captain's wish to know distressed Jukes.
“Want the hands, sir?” he cried, apprehensively.
“Ought to know,” asserted Captain MacWhirr. “Hold hard.”
They held hard. An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the
wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like
a child's cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole
atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from
the tenebrous earth.
It suffocated them, and with eyes shut they tightened their grasp.
What from the magnitude of the shock might have been a column of water
running upright in the dark, butted against the ship, broke short,
and fell on her bridge, crushingly, from on high, with a dead burying
weight.
A flying fragment of that collapse, a mere splash, enveloped them in one
swirl from their feet over their heads, filling violently their ears,
mouths and nostrils with salt water. It knocked out their legs, wrenched
in haste at their arms, seethed away swiftly under their chins; and
opening their eyes, they saw the piled-up masses of foam dashing to and
fro amongst what looked like the fragments of a ship. She had given way
as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded, too, before the
tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate
plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.
The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back
where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and
a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown
to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung
down, leaped upon. Captain MacWhirr and Jukes kept hold of each other,
deafened by the noise, gagged by the wind; and the great physical
tumult beating about their bodies, brought, like an unbridled display
of passion, a profound trouble to their souls. One of those wild and
appalling shrieks that are heard at times passing mysteriously overhead
in the steady roar of a hurricane, swooped, as if borne on wings, upon
the ship, and Jukes tried to outscream it.
“Will she live through this?”
The cry was wrenched out of his breast. It was as unintentional as the
birth of a thought in the head, and he heard nothing of it himself. It
all became extinct at once--thought, intention, effort--and of his cry
the inaudible vibration added to the tempest waves of the air.
He expected nothing from it. Nothing at all. For indeed what answer
could be made? But after a while he heard with amazement the frail and
resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant
tumult.
“She may!”
It was a dull yell, more difficult to seize than a whisper. And
presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes,
like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean.
“Let's hope so!” it cried--small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to
the visions of hope or fear; and it flickered into disconnected words:
“Ship. . . . . This. . . . Never--Anyhow . . . for the best.” Jukes gave
it up.
Then, as if it had come suddenly upon the one thing fit to withstand
the power of a storm, it seemed to gain force and firmness for the last
broken shouts:
“Keep on hammering . . . builders . . . good men. . . . . And chance it
. . . engines. . . . Rout . . . good man.”
Captain MacWhirr removed his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and thereby
ceased to exist for his mate, so dark it was; Jukes, after a tense
stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go limp all over. The
gnawing of profound discomfort existed side by side with an incredible
disposition to somnolence, as though he had been buffeted and worried
into drowsiness. The wind would get hold of his head and try to shake
it off his shoulders; his clothes, full of water, were as heavy as lead,
cold and dripping like an armour of melting ice: he shivered--it lasted
a long time; and with his hands closed hard on his hold, he was letting
himself sink slowly into the depths of bodily misery. His mind became
concentrated upon himself in an aimless, idle way, and when something
pushed lightly at the back of his knees he nearly, as the saying is,
jumped out of his skin.
In the start forward he bumped the back of Captain MacWhirr, who didn't
move; and then a hand gripped his thigh. A lull had come, a menacing
lull of the wind, the holding of a stormy breath--and he felt himself
pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes recognized these hands, so
thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of
man.
The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all fours against
the wind, and had found the chief mate's legs with the top of his head.
Immediately he crouched and began to explore Jukes' person upwards with
prudent, apologetic touches, as became an inferior.
He was an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely
hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape. His
strength was immense; and in his great lumpy paws, bulging like brown
boxing-gloves on the end of furry forearms, the heaviest objects were
handled like playthings. Apart from the grizzled pelt on his chest, the
menacing demeanour and the hoarse voice, he had none of the classical
attributes of his rating. His good nature almost amounted to imbecility:
the men did what they liked with him, and he had not an ounce of
initiative in his character, which was easy-going and talkative. For
these reasons Jukes disliked him; but Captain MacWhirr, to Jukes'
scornful disgust, seemed to regard him as a first-rate petty officer.
He pulled himself up by Jukes' coat, taking that liberty with the
greatest moderation, and only so far as it was forced upon him by the
hurricane.
“What is it, boss'n, what is it?” yelled Jukes, impatiently. What could
that fraud of a boss'n want on the bridge? The typhoon had got on Jukes'
nerves. The husky bellowings of the other, though unintelligible, seemed
to suggest a state of lively satisfaction.
There could be no mistake. The old fool was pleased with something.
The boatswain's other hand had found some other body, for in a changed
tone he began to inquire: “Is it you, sir? Is it you, sir?” The wind
strangled his howls.
“Yes!” cried Captain MacWhirr.