“Keep the helm right amidships.”
It answered in a tone of patient suffering:
“Right amidships, sir.”
Then I descended to the quarter-deck. It was impossible to tell
whence the blow would come. To look round the ship was to look into a
bottomless, black pit. The eye lost itself in inconceivable depths.
I wanted to ascertain whether the ropes had been picked up off the
deck. One could only do that by feeling with one’s feet. In my cautious
progress I came against a man in whom I recognized Ransome. He possessed
an unimpaired physical solidity which was manifest to me at the contact.
He was leaning against the quarter-deck capstan and kept silent. It was
like a revelation. He was the collapsed figure sobbing for breath I had
noticed before we went on the poop.
“You have been helping with the mainsail!” I exclaimed in a low tone.
“Yes, sir,” sounded his quiet voice.
“Man! What were you thinking of? You mustn’t do that sort of thing.”
After a pause he assented: “I suppose I mustn’t.” Then after another
short silence he added: “I am all right now,” quickly, between the
tell-tale gasps.
I could neither hear nor see anybody else; but when I spoke up,
answering sad murmurs filled the quarter-deck, and its shadows seemed to
shift here and there. I ordered all the halyards laid down on deck clear
for running.
“I’ll see to that, sir,” volunteered Ransome in his natural, pleasant
tone, which comforted one and aroused one’s compassion, too, somehow.
That man ought to have been in his bed, resting, and my plain duty was
to send him there. But perhaps he would not have obeyed me; I had not
the strength of mind to try. All I said was:
“Go about it quietly, Ransome.”
Returning on the poop I approached Gambril. His face, set with hollow
shadows in the light, looked awful, finally silenced. I asked him how he
felt, but hardly expected an answer. Therefore, I was astonished at his
comparative loquacity.
“Them shakes leaves me as weak as a kitten, sir,” he said, preserving
finely that air of unconsciousness as to anything but his business a
helmsman should never lose. “And before I can pick up my strength that
there hot fit comes along and knocks me over again.”
He sighed. There was no reproach in his tone, but the bare words were
enough to give me a horrible pang of self-reproach. It held me dumb for
a time. When the tormenting sensation had passed off I asked:
“Do you feel strong enough to prevent the rudder taking charge if she
gets sternway on her? It wouldn’t do to get something smashed about the
steering-gear now. We’ve enough difficulties to cope with as it is.”
He answered with just a shade of weariness that he was strong enough to
hang on. He could promise me that she shouldn’t take the wheel out of
his hands. More he couldn’t say.
At that moment Ransome appeared quite close to me, stepping out of the
darkness into visibility suddenly, as if just created with his composed
face and pleasant voice.
Every rope on deck, he said, was laid down clear for running, as far as
one could make certain by feeling. It was impossible to see anything.
Frenchy had stationed himself forward. He said he had a jump or two left
in him yet.
Here a faint smile altered for an instant the clear, firm design
of Ransome’s lips. With his serious clear, gray eyes, his serene
temperament--he was a priceless man altogether. Soul as firm as the
muscles of his body.
He was the only man on board (except me, but I had to preserve my
liberty of movement) who had a sufficiency of muscular strength to trust
to. For a moment I thought I had better ask him to take the wheel. But
the dreadful knowledge of the enemy he had to carry about him made me
hesitate. In my ignorance of physiology it occurred to me that he might
die suddenly, from excitement, at a critical moment.
While this gruesome fear restrained the ready words on the tip of my
tongue, Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight.
At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been
withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into
the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I
penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had
closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither
could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone
where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings,
rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that
absolute night.
A flash of lightning would have been a relief--I mean physically. I
would have prayed for it if it hadn’t been for my shrinking apprehension
of the thunder. In the tension of silence I was suffering from it seemed
to me that the first crash must turn me into dust.
And thunder was, most likely, what would happen next. Stiff all over and
hardly breathing, I waited with a horribly strained expectation. Nothing
happened. It was maddening, but a dull, growing ache in the lower part
of my face made me aware that I had been grinding my teeth madly enough,
for God knows how long.
It’s extraordinary I should not have heard myself doing it; but I
hadn’t. By an effort which absorbed all my faculties I managed to keep
my jaw still. It required much attention, and while thus engaged I
became bothered by curious, irregular sounds of faint tapping on the
deck. They could be heard single, in pairs, in groups. While I wondered
at this mysterious devilry, I received a slight blow under the left
eye and felt an enormous tear run down my cheek. Raindrops. Enormous.
Forerunners of something. Tap. Tap. Tap. . . .
I turned about, and, addressing Gambrel earnestly, entreated him to
“hang on to the wheel.” But I could hardly speak from emotion. The
fatal moment had come. I held my breath. The tapping had stopped
as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of
intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking
screw. I don’t suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my
conviction that there was nothing else for it but to scream.
Suddenly--how am I to convey it? Well, suddenly the darkness turned into
water. This is the only suitable figure. A heavy shower, a downpour,
comes along, making a noise. You hear its approach on the sea, in the
air, too, I verily believe. But this was different. With no preliminary
whisper or rustle, without a splash, and even without the ghost
of impact, I became instantaneously soaked to the skin. Not a very
difficult matter, since I was wearing only my sleeping suit. My hair
got full of water in an instant, water streamed on my skin, it filled
my nose, my ears, my eyes. In a fraction of a second I swallowed quite a
lot of it.
As to Gambril, he was fairly choked. He coughed pitifully, the broken
cough of a sick man; and I beheld him as one sees a fish in an aquarium
by the light of an electric bulb, an elusive, phosphorescent shape. Only
he did not glide away. But something else happened. Both binnaclelamps
went out. I suppose the water forced itself into them, though I wouldn’t
have thought that possible, for they fitted into the cowl perfectly.
The last gleam of light in the universe had gone, pursued by a low
exclamation of dismay from Gambril. I groped for him and seized his arm.
How startlingly wasted it was.
“Never mind,” I said. “You don’t want the light. All you need to do
is to keep the wind, when it comes, at the back of your head. You
understand?”
“Aye, aye, sir. . . . But I should like to have a light,” he added
nervously.
All that time the ship lay as steady as a rock. The noise of the water
pouring off the sails and spars, flowing over the break of the poop, had
stopped short. The poop scuppers gurgled and sobbed for a little
while longer, and then perfect silence, joined to perfect immobility,
proclaimed the yet unbroken spell of our helplessness, poised on the
edge of some violent issue, lurking in the dark.
I started forward restlessly. I did not need my sight to pace the poop
of my ill-starred first command with perfect assurance. Every square
foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very
grain and knots of the planks. Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over
something, landing full length on my hands and face.
It was something big and alive. Not a dog--more like a sheep, rather. But
there were no animals in the ship. How could an animal. . . . It was an
added and fantastic horror which I could not resist. The hair of my
head stirred even as I picked myself up, awfully scared; not as a man
is scared while his judgment, his reason still try to resist, but
completely, boundlessly, and, as it were, innocently scared--like a
little child.
I could see It--that Thing! The darkness, of which so much had just
turned into water, had thinned down a little. There It was! But I did
not hit upon the notion of Mr. Burns issuing out of the companion on all
fours till he attempted to stand up, and even then the idea of a bear
crossed my mind first.
He growled like one when I seized him round the body. He had buttoned
himself up into an enormous winter overcoat of some woolly material, the
weight of which was too much for his reduced state. I could hardly feel
the incredibly thin lath of his body, lost within the thick stuff, but
his growl had depth and substance: Confounded dump ship with a craven,
tiptoeing crowd. Why couldn’t they stamp and go with a brace? Wasn’t
there one Godforsaken lubber in the lot fit to raise a yell on a rope?
“Skulking’s no good, sir,” he attacked me directly. “You can’t slink
past the old murderous ruffian. It isn’t the way. You must go for him
boldly--as I did. Boldness is what you want. Show him that you don’t
care for any of his damned tricks. Kick up a jolly old row.”
“Good God, Mr. Burns,” I said angrily. “What on earth are you up to?
What do you mean by coming up on deck in this state?”
“Just that! Boldness. The only way to scare the old bullying rascal.”
I pushed him, still growling, against the rail. “Hold on to it,” I said
roughly. I did not know what to do with him. I left him in a hurry, to
go to Gambril, who had called faintly that he believed there was some
wind aloft. Indeed, my own ears had caught a feeble flutter of wet
canvas, high up overhead, the jingle of a slack chain sheet. . . .
These were eerie, disturbing, alarming sounds in the dead stillness
of the air around me. All the instances I had heard of topmasts being
whipped out of a ship while there was not wind enough on her deck to
blow out a match rushed into my memory.
“I can’t see the upper sails, sir,” declared Gambril shakily.
“Don’t move the helm. You’ll be all right,” I said confidently.
The poor man’s nerves were gone. Mine were not in much better case.
It was the moment of breaking strain and was relieved by the abrupt
sensation of the ship moving forward as if of herself under my feet.
I heard plainly the soughing of the wind aloft, the low cracks of
the upper spars taking the strain, long before I could feel the least
draught on my face turned aft, anxious and sightless like the face of a
blind man.
Suddenly a louder-sounding note filled our ears, the darkness started
streaming against our bodies, chilling them exceedingly. Both of us,
Gambril and I, shivered violently in our clinging, soaked garments of
thin cotton. I said to him:
“You are all right now, my man. All you’ve got to do is to keep the wind
at the back of your head. Surely you are up to that. A child could steer
this ship in smooth water.”
He muttered: “Aye! A healthy child.” And I felt ashamed of having been
passed over by the fever which had been preying on every man’s strength
but mine, in order that my remorse might be the more bitter, the feeling
of unworthiness more poignant, and the sense of responsibility heavier
to bear.
The ship had gathered great way on her almost at once on the calm water.
I felt her slipping through it with no other noise but a mysterious
rustle alongside. Otherwise, she had no motion at all, neither lift nor
roll. It was a disheartening steadiness which had lasted for eighteen
days now; for never, never had we had wind enough in that time to raise
the slightest run of the sea. The breeze freshened suddenly. I thought
it was high time to get Mr. Burns off the deck. He worried me. I looked
upon him as a lunatic who would be very likely to start roaming over the
ship and break a limb or fall overboard.
I was truly glad to find he had remained holding on where I had left
him, sensibly enough. He was, however, muttering to himself ominously.
This was discouraging. I remarked in a matter-of-fact tone:
“We have never had so much wind as this since we left the roads.”
“There’s some heart in it, too,” he growled judiciously. It was a remark
of a perfectly sane seaman. But he added immediately: “It was about time
I should come on deck. I’ve been nursing my strength for this--just for
this. Do you see it, sir?”
I said I did, and proceeded to hint that it would be advisable for him
to go below now and take a rest.
His answer was an indignant “Go below! Not if I know it, sir.”
Very cheerful! He was a horrible nuisance. And all at once he started to
argue. I could feel his crazy excitement in the dark.
“You don’t know how to go about it, sir. How could you? All this
whispering and tiptoeing is no good. You can’t hope to slink past a
cunning, wide-awake, evil brute like he was. You never heard him talk.
Enough to make your hair stand on end. No! No! He wasn’t mad. He was
no more mad than I am. He was just downright wicked. Wicked so as to
frighten most people. I will tell you what he was. He was nothing
less than a thief and a murderer at heart. And do you think he’s any
different now because he’s dead? Not he! His carcass lies a hundred
fathom under, but he’s just the same . . . in latitude 8 d 20’ north.”
He snorted defiantly. I noted with weary resignation that the breeze had
got lighter while he raved. He was at it again.
“I ought to have thrown the beggar out of the ship over the rail like a
dog. It was only on account of the men. . . . Fancy having to read the
Burial Service over a brute like that! . . . ‘Our departed brother’ . . .
I could have laughed. That was what he couldn’t bear. I suppose I am
the only man that ever stood up to laugh at him. When he got sick it
used to scare that . . . brother. . . . Brother. . . . Departed. . . .
Sooner call a shark brother.”
The breeze had let go so suddenly that the way of the ship brought the
wet sails heavily against the mast. The spell of deadly stillness had
caught us up again. There seemed to be no escape.
“Hallo!” exclaimed Mr. Burns in a startled voice. “Calm again!”