It is a truism nowadays, in this age of travelling, that you see a
great deal more of people in a few weeks on board ship at sea together
than you would see in a few years of that vacant calling and dining and
attending crushes which we ordinarily speak of as society. Nora Dupuy
and the two Hawthorns certainly saw a great deal more of Dr Whitaker
during their three weeks on board the _Severn_ than they would ever
have seen of him in three years of England or of Trinidad. Nora had
had the young man’s acquaintance thrust upon her by circumstances,
to be sure; but as the Hawthorns sat and talked a great deal with
him, she was compelled to do so likewise, and she had too much good
feeling to let him see very markedly her innate prejudice against his
colour. Besides, she admitted even to herself that Dr Whitaker, for a
brown man, was really a very gentlemanly, well-informed person—quite
an exceptional mulatto, in fact, and as such, to be admitted to the
position of a gentleman by courtesy, much as Gulliver was excepted
by the Houyhnhnms from the same category of utter reprobation as the
ordinary Yahoos of their own country.
Most of the voyage was as decently calm as any one can reasonably
expect from the North Atlantic. There were the usual episodes of
flying-fish and Mother Carey’s chickens, and the usual excitement
of a daily sweepstake on the length of the ship’s run; but, on the
whole, the only distinct landmarks of time for the entire three weeks
between Southampton and St Thomas were breakfast, luncheon, dinner,
and bedtime. The North Atlantic, whatever novelists may say, is not
a romantic stretch of ocean; and in spite of prepossessions to the
contrary, a ship at sea is not at all a convenient place for the
free exercise of the noble art of flirting. It lacks the needful
opportunities for retirement from the full blaze of public observation
to shy corners; it is far too exposed, and on the whole too unstable
also. Altogether, the voyage was mostly a monotonous one, which
is equivalent to saying that it was safe and comfortable; for the
only possible break in the ordinary routine of a sea-passage must
necessarily be a fire on board or a collision with a rival steamer.
However, about two days out from St Thomas, there came a little relief
from the tedium of the daily situation; and the relief assumed the
unpleasant form of a genuine wild West Indian hurricane.
Nora had never before seen anything like it; or, at any rate, if she
had, she had clean forgotten all about it. Though the captain had
declared it was ‘too soon’ for hurricanes, this was, in fact, a very
fine tropical tornado of the very fiercest and yeastiest description.
About two o’clock in the afternoon, the passengers were all sitting
out on deck, when the sea, till then a dead calm, began to be faintly
ruffled by little whiffs and spurts of wind, which raised here and
there tiny patches of wavelets, scarcely perceptible to the blunt
vision of the unaccustomed landsman. But the experienced eye of a
sailor could read in it at once a malignant hint of the coming tempest.
Presently, the breeze freshened with extraordinary rapidity, and before
five o’clock, the cyclone had burst upon them in all its violence.
The rush of a mighty gale was heard through the rigging, swaying and
bending the masts like sapling willows before the autumn breezes. The
waves, lashed into fury by the fierce and fitful gusts of wind, broke
ever and anon over the side of the vessel; and the big _Severn_ tossed
about helplessly before the frantic tempest like the veriest cockboat
in an angry sea upon a northern ocean. Of course, at the first note of
serious danger, the passengers were all ordered below to the saloon,
where they sat in mute suspense, the women pale and trembling, the men
trying to look as if they cared very little about it, while the great
ship rolled and tossed and pitched and creaked and rattled in all her
groaning timbers beneath the mad frenzy of that terrific commotion.
Just as they were being turned off the decks to be penned up
down-stairs like so many helpless sheep in the lower cabin, Nora Dupuy,
who had been standing with the Hawthorns and Dr Whitaker, watching the
huge and ever-increasing waves bursting madly over the side of the
vessel, happened to drop her shawl at starting on to the deck beside
the companion-ladder. At that very moment, a bigger sea than any they
had yet encountered broke with shivering force against the broadside of
the steamer, and swept across the deck in a drowning flood as though
it would carry everything bodily before it. ‘Make haste, there!’ the
captain called out imperatively.—‘Steward, send ’em all down below,
this minute. I shouldn’t be surprised if before night we were to have a
capful of nasty weather.’
But even as he spoke, the wave, which had caught Nora’s shawl and
driven it over to the leeward side, now in its reflux sucked it back
again swiftly to windward, and left it lying all wet and matted
against the gunwale in a mass of disorder. Dr Whitaker jumped after it
instinctively, and tried to catch it before another wave could carry it
overboard altogether. ‘Oh, pray, don’t trouble about it,’ Nora cried,
in hasty deprecation. ‘It isn’t worth it. Take care, or you’ll get wet
through and through yourself before you know it!’
‘The man’s a fool,’ the unceremonious captain called out bluntly from
his perch above. ‘Get wet indeed! If another sea like that strikes the
ship, it’ll wash him clean overboard.—Come back, sir; I tell you, come
back! No one but a sailor can keep his feet properly against the force
of a sea like that one!’
Nora and the few other passengers who had still remained on deck stood
trembling under shelter of the glazed-in companion-ladder, wondering
whether the rash mulatto would really carry out his foolhardy endeavour
to recover the wrapper. The sailor stood by, ready to batten down the
hatches as soon as the deck was fairly cleared, and waiting impatiently
for the last lingerer. But Dr Whitaker took not the slightest notice of
captain or sailor, and merely glanced back at Nora with a quiet smile,
as if to reassure her of his perfect safety. He stood by the gunwale,
just clutching at the shawl, in the very act of recovering it, when
a second sea, still more violent than the last, struck the ship once
more full on the side, and swept the mulatto helplessly before it right
across the quarter-deck. It dashed him with terrific force against the
bulwarks on the opposite side; and for a moment, Nora gave a scream
of terror, imagining it would carry him overboard with its sudden
flood. The next second, the ship righted itself, and they saw the young
doctor rising to his feet once more, bruised and dripping, but still
not seriously or visibly injured. The sea had washed the shawl once
more out of his grasp, with the force of the shock; and instead of
rushing back to the shelter of the ladder, he tried even now to recover
it a second time from the windward side, where the recoil had again
capriciously carried it. ‘The shawl, the shawl!’ he cried excitedly,
gliding once more across the wet and slippery decks as she lurched
anew, in the foolish effort to catch the worthless wrapper.
‘Confound the man!’ the captain roared from his place on the bridge.
‘Does he think the Company’s going to lose a passenger’s life for
nothing, just to satisfy his absurd politeness!—Go down, sir—go down,
this minute, I tell you; or else, by jingo, if you don’t, I shall have
you put in irons at once for the rest of the voyage.’
The mulatto looked up at him with a smile and nodded cheerfully. He
held up his left hand proudly above his head, with the dripping shawl
now waving in his grasp like a much bedraggled banner, while with his
right he gripped a rope firmly and steadily, to hold his own against
the next approaching billow. In a second, the big sea was over him once
more; and till the huge wall of water had swept its way across the
entire breadth of the vessel, Nora and Marian couldn’t discover whether
it had dashed him bodily overboard or left him still standing by the
windward gunwale. There was a pause of suspense while one might count
twenty; and then, as the vessel rolled once more to port, Dr Whitaker’s
tall figure could be seen, still erect and grasping the cable, with the
shawl triumphantly flourished, even so, in his disengaged hand. The
next instant, he was over at the ladder, and had placed the wet and
soaking wrapper back in the hands of its original possessor.
‘Dr Whitaker,’ Nora cried to him, half laughing and half pale with
terror, ‘I’m very angry with you. You had no right to imperil your life
like that for nothing better than a bit of a wrapper. It was awfully
wrong of you; and I’ll never wear the shawl again as long as I live,
now that you’ve brought it back to me at the risk of drowning.’
The mulatto, smiling unconcernedly in spite of his wetting, bowed a
little bow of quiet acquiescence. ‘I’m glad to think, Miss Dupuy,’
he replied in a low voice, ‘that you regard my life as so well worth
preserving.—But did you ever before in all your days see anything so
glorious as those monstrous billows!’
Nora bit her lip tacitly, and answered nothing for a brief moment.
Then she added merely: ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ in a constrained
voice, and turned below into the crowded dining saloon. Dr Whitaker did
not rejoin them; he went back to his own stateroom, to put on some dry
clothes after his foolhardy adventure, and think of Nora’s eyes in the
solitude of his cabin.
There is no position in life more helplessly feeble for grown-up men
and women than that of people battened down in a ship at sea in the
midst of a great and dangerous tempest. On deck, the captain and the
officers, cut off from all communication with below, know how the
storm is going and how the ship is weathering it; but the unconscious
passengers in their crowded quarters, treated like children by the
rough seafaring men, can only sit below in hopeless ignorance, waiting
to learn the fate in store for them when the tempest wills it. And
indeed, the hurricane that night was quite enough to make even strong
men feel their own utter and abject powerlessness. From the moment
they were all battened down in the big saloon, after the first fresh
squall, the storm burst in upon them in real earnest with terrific
and ever-increasing violence. The wind howled and whistled fiercely
through the ropes and rigging. The ship bounced now on to the steep
crest of a swelling billow; now wallowed helplessly in the deep trough
that intervened between each and its mad successor. The sea seemed to
dash in upon the side every second with redoubled intensity, sweeping
through the scupper holes with a roar like thunder. The waves crashed
down upon the battened skylights in blinding deluges. Every now and
then, they could hear the cracking of a big timber—some spar or boom
torn off from the masts, like rotten branches from a dead tree, by
the mighty force of the irresistible cyclone. Whirling and roaring
and sputtering and rattling and creaking, the storm raged on for hour
after hour; and the pale and frightened women, sitting huddled together
in little groups on the crimson velvet cushions of the stuffy saloon,
looked at one another in silent awe, clasping each other’s hands with
bloodless fingers, by way of companionship in their mute terror. From
time to time, they could just overhear, in the lulls between the great
gusts, the captain’s loud voice shouting out inaudible directions to
the sailors overhead; and the engineer’s bell was rung over and over
again, with bewildering frequency, to stop her, back her, ease her,
steady her, or put her head once more bravely against the face of the
ever-shifting and shattering storm.
Hour after hour went by slowly, and still nobody stirred from the
hushed saloon. At eleven, all lights were usually put out, with Spartan
severity; but this night, in consideration of the hurricane, the
stewards left them burning still: they didn’t know when they might be
wanted for prayers, if the ship should begin to show signs of sudden
foundering. So the passengers sat on still in the saloon together, till
four o’clock began to bring back the daylight again with a lurid glare
away to eastward. Then the first fury of the hurricane began to abate
a little—a very little; and the seas crashed a trifle less frequently
against the thick and solid plate-glass of the sealed skylights. Edward
at last persuaded Marian and Nora to go down to their staterooms and
try to snatch a short spell of sleep. The danger was over now, he said,
and they might fairly venture to recover a bit from the long terror of
that awful night.
As they went staggering feebly along the unsteady corridors below,
lighted by the dim lamps as yet unextinguished, they happened to pass
the door of a stateroom whence, to their great surprise, in the midst
of that terrible awe-inspiring hurricane, the notes of a violin could
be distinctly heard, mingling strangely in a weird harmony with the
groaning of the wind and the ominous creaking of the overstrained
and rumbling timbers. The sounds were not those of a regular piece
of studied music; they were mere fitful bars and stray snatches of
tempestuous melody, that imitated and registered the inarticulate
music of the whirlwind itself even as it passed wildly before them.
Nora paused a moment beside the half-open door. ‘Why,’ she whispered
to Marian in an awestruck undertone, clutching convulsively at the
hand-rail to steady herself, ‘it must be Dr Whitaker. He’s actually
playing his violin to himself in the midst of all this awful uproar!’
‘It is,’ Edward Hawthorn answered confidently. ‘I know his
stateroom—that’s the number.’
He pushed the half-open door a little farther ajar, and peeped inside
with sudden curiosity. There on the bunk sat the mulatto doctor,
unmoved amid the awful horse-play of the careering elements, with his
violin in his hands, and a little piece of paper ruled with pencilled
music-lines pinned up roughly against the wall of the cabin beside him.
He started and laughed a little at the sudden apparition of Edward
Hawthorn’s head within the doorway. ‘Ah,’ he said, pointing to a few
scratchy pencil-marks on the little piece of ruled paper, ‘you see,
Mr Hawthorn, I couldn’t sleep, and so I’ve been amusing myself with a
fit of composing. I’m catching some fresh ideas for a piece from the
tearing wind and the hubbub of the breakers. Isn’t it grand, the music
of the storm! I shall work it up by-and-by, no doubt, into a little
hurricane symphony.—Listen, here—listen.’ And he drew his bow rapidly
across the strings with skilful fingers, and brought forth from the
violin some few bars of a strangely wild and storm-like melody, that
seemed to have caught the very spirit of the terrible tornado still
raging everywhere so madly around them.
‘Has the man no feelings,’ Nora exclaimed with a shudder to Marian,
outside, ‘that he can play his fiddle in this storm, like Nero or
somebody when Rome was burning!’
‘I think,’ Marian said, with a little sigh, ‘he has some stronger
overpowering feeling underneath, that makes him think nothing of the
hurricane or anything else, but keeps him wrapped up entirely in its
own circle.’
* * * * *
Next day, when the sea had gone down somewhat, and the passengers had
begun to struggle up on deck one by one with pallid faces, Dr Whitaker
made his appearance once more, clothed and in his right mind, and
handed Nora a little roll of manuscript music. Nora took it and glanced
carelessly at the first page. She started when she saw it was inscribed
in a round and careful copper-plate hand—‘To Miss Dupuy.—Hurricane
Symphony. By W. Clarkson Whitaker, M.B., Mus. Bac.’ Nora read hastily
through the first few bars—the soughing and freshening of the wind in
its earlier gusts, before the actual tempest had yet swept wildly over
them—and murmured half aloud: ‘It looks very pretty—very fine, I mean.
I should like some day to hear you play it.’
‘If you would permit me to prefix your name to the piece when it’s
published in London,’ the mulatto doctor said with an anxious air—‘just
as I’ve prefixed it there at the head of the title-page—I should be
very deeply obliged and grateful to you.’
Nora hesitated a moment. A brown man! Her name on the first page of
his printed music! What would people say in Trinidad? And yet, what
excuse could she give for answering no? She pretended for a while to be
catching back her veil, that the wind blew about her face and hair, to
gain time for consideration; then she said with a smile of apology: ‘It
would look so conceited of me, you know—wouldn’t it, Dr Whitaker? as
if I were setting myself up to be some great one, to whom people were
expected to dedicate music.’
The mulatto’s face fell a little with obvious disappointment; but
he answered quietly: ‘As you will, Miss Dupuy. It was somewhat
presumptuous of me, perhaps, to think you would accept a dedication
from me on so short an acquaintance.’
Nora’s cheeks coloured quickly as she replied with a hasty voice: ‘O
no, Dr Whitaker; I didn’t mean that—indeed, I didn’t. It’s very kind of
you to think of putting my name to your beautiful music. If you look
at it that way, I shall ask you as a personal favour to print that very
dedication upon it when you get it published in London.’
Dr Whitaker’s eye lighted up with unexpected pleasure, and he answered,
‘Thank you,’ slowly and softly. But Nora said to herself in her own
heart: ‘Goodness gracious, now, just out of politeness to this clever
brown man, and because I hadn’t strength of mind to say _no_ to him,
I’ve gone and put my foot in it terribly. What on earth will papa say
about it when he comes to hear of it! I must try and keep the piece
away from him. This is the sort of thing that’s sure to happen to one
when one once begins knowing brown people!’
(_To be continued._)