CHAPTER V THE HIDDEN LIFE OF THE SHIP
I devoted the afternoon of the first day of my recovery from sickness to a journal which I meant should serve as a letter both for my father and Mr. Moore, to be transmitted home in sheets as the opportunity occurred. My old nurse told me that her husband had written to my father whilst in the Channel, and had sent the letter ashore at Plymouth by a smack; so they would have news of me at home down to two days before.
I was so much interested in the little incident of the tainted meat I have told you of, that I asked Captain Burke this day to let me taste a specimen of the beef sailors were fed on. He laughed and said:
'Miss, your teeth are too little and white for such beef as that.'
'I'll try a cut, too, with your leave, captain,' said Mr. Owen.
The captain grinned at his wife, but complied nevertheless, and when we sat down to supper, the steward placed a cube of forecastle beef before us. There were plenty of good things on the table: my father had half filled the lazarette, or after-hold, with delicacies, and we carried an abundance of live stock: everything in that way, perhaps, but a cow, for which no room could be made; but the steam of the sailors' beef filled the atmosphere; the smells of all the other dishes yielded to it. And yet it was good meat of its sort.
Mrs. Burke wrinkled her nose, and said, 'Miss Marie, please do not touch it.'
'Captain Burke, I will taste a piece,' said I.
'And I will thank you for a slice, captain,' said Mr. Owen.
The captain made a great business of sharpening a carving knife, all the while glancing from me to his wife with a laughing eye. The stuff yielded to the sharp blade in a curled shaving: it was like cutting a block of wood, that part I mean where the heart is.
'Don't put it to your lips, my dear,' cried Mrs. Burke.
I tasted a morsel: the steward watched me with an ill-concealed grin; the meat, if meat it could be called, was hard as leather, salt as the brine over the side, of a texture and hue no more resembling corned beef such as we know the thing on shore than a whelk is like a turtle.
Mr. Owen chewed and chewed. 'This is what the sailors make snuff-boxes and models of ships of,' said he.
'Is this as good as can be got?' I asked.
'As good as the best,' said the captain, looking at it earnestly.
'You'll have plenty to talk about when you get home,' said my old nurse.
'It is strange that science doesn't provide the seamen with food fit to eat,' said Mr. Owen, helping himself eagerly to a slice of ham. 'I believe I shall give the subject my attention when I get back.'
'Science doesn't think of sailors, only of ships,' said Captain Burke. 'If I had my way my crew should have a fresh mess every day. But you can't go to sea all live stock.'
Thus we chatted. I listened with interest and asked questions. It was a new life to me. Little did I then imagine how fearfully and tragically deep I was to read into the darkest secrets of it.
During a few days, which carried us to the Madeira latitudes, the weather continued gloriously fine. A quiet north-westerly wind blew throughout; the ship leaned gently away from the breeze and rippled through the blue swell dreamily; all was so quiet aloft, all went so peacefully on deck. I'd hang over the side for an hour at a time, viewing the passage of the foam stars and flower-shaped bells, and wreaths of froth sliding aft into a white line on either hand the oil-smooth scope of wake; I'd watch with admiration the flight of the flying fish, glancing from the ship's side like arrows of light discharged through her metal sheathing; I'd drink in the large and liberal sweetness of the wind, and stand in the sun that its light might sink through and through me.
In those few days Mr. Owen assured me the ocean had already done me good.
'But you are bound to profit,' he said as we walked the deck together, 'because you have not come too late to this physic of climates. People are sent to sea with one lung gone and the other going, and their friends wonder they should die, and talk of a voyage to sea as of no use where there is organic mischief. You are here in good time, Miss Otway: be that reflection your comfort.'
Then there came a change of weather; a few days of wet gale; green seas ridging into cliffs upon the bow, and all the discomfort of a long pitching and tossing bout. But I suffered no longer from sickness however; I ate and slept well, and spent all the time in the cabin, reading, working, chatting with Mrs. Burke or her husband, or Mr. Owen.
Captain Burke amused me in these early days by explaining how he worked out his sights. He gave me a very good idea of the art of navigation; he and his wife shared a pleasant cabin confronting mine. It was a little parlour in its way as well as a bedroom, cheerful with oil paintings of ships, a small collection of china, and other matters all carefully cleated and otherwise secured. Amongst the pictures was a cutting in black paper mounted upon white of myself when a child in my nurse's arms, the lineaments defined by streaks of bronze. Captain Burke told me that his wife valued that little memorial above everything in the cabin, including himself and all that they owned ashore.
He showed me his chronometers and explained their use; placed charts before me and talked of the places we were to visit, and promised that I should be able to take sights and work out the latitude and longitude before we returned home.
He said this at the dinner table during one of those days of wet, foul weather.
'Miss Otway,' he added, addressing Mr. Owen, 'is just doing what everyone should do who goes a voyage, whether for entertainment or on business; she's taking an intelligent interest in whatever's passing. If everybody who went to sea did that the case of Jack would be understood, and you'd hear no more of young ladies being astonished on discovering that sailors look exactly like men.'
'I never could make head nor tail myself,' said Mrs. Burke, 'of my husband's method of finding out where the ship is.'
'No voyage can ever be dull,' exclaimed Mr. Owen, 'that's sensibly lived into. Yet every voyage is found dull.'
'There's too much water,' said Mrs. Burke, 'and not enough things to look at. But dull days have long legs, Miss Marie. Time soon passes,' said she with a cheery look. 'The top's never spinning so fast as when it is asleep.'
'There's plenty to look at,' said I. 'I don't like weather that keeps you under deck; but it can't be always so.'
'Scarce once in a white moon, and never even that for sailors,' said the captain.
'What,' asked Mr. Owen, 'do you consider the great sights of the sea?'
Captain Burke shut his eyes and scratched the back of his head, then looking full at me he said:
'What do you think of a ship in full sail, becalmed in the heat of the fan-shaped reflection of the moon, Miss Otway? Or would you prefer a whale as big as a brig leaping half out of water with a killer at its throat? Or what d'ye say to a quadrille of water-spouts, the white satin shoes on their feet gleaming as they slide, and the black feathers in their hair nodding stately among the clouds brilliant with electric gems.'
'How?' inquired Mr. Owen, smoothing his bald head.
'But at sea the less you find to talk about the better,' exclaimed Captain Burke; 'I'd like my ship's log-book to be as dull as a parson's tale. Trifles on the ocean become serious in a moment; a slight deviation from dulness will start a tragedy. Give us no excitements.'
The conversation was ended by his going on deck to send the mate down to dinner.
The miserable weather came to an end, and then we took the north-east trades and swept down the Atlantic under wide spaces of canvas which for many feet overhung the ship's weather side, and she rushed onwards with the salt smoke blowing from her bows, and that swallow of the deep, the stormy petrel, freckling in its swarm the wide hollows betwixt the quartering ridges. For five days we sighted nothing, though Captain Burke promised that the first homeward-bound ship he met with willing to back her topsail should receive my letter.
Once during these mornings, on coming on deck after breakfast, I found the ship steadily washing through the seas with easy bowing motions, leaving a league-long line of white behind her. We were in hot weather now; an awning sheltered the quarter-deck, and comfortable chairs were under it.
It was the improving health in me that gave me the spirit I had; I did not want to sit; the life of the sea seemed to sweep into my being in a holiday dance of heart. Now that I could feel without the suffering that had before prostrated me, the whole vitality of the ship coming out of the gallant flying fabric of her into the very poise of my form, with a sense as of waltzing in each compelled motion of the figure, I found an enjoyment in her buoyant motions, and in the rolling measures of the surge, beyond anything my poor health had suffered me to know in the ball-room, beyond all delight fine music had given me.
When we came on deck Mrs. Burke stood a little while with her hand on my arm, whilst I looked aloft and around; our gaze met; she laughed in the fulness of some instant emotion of pleasure, and cried:
'Oh, dear Miss Marie, I wish Sir Mortimer could see the light that is in your eyes at this minute!'
'I wonder,' said I, 'if Dr. Bradshaw and the others foresaw that I should enjoy this voyage?'
'Are you enjoying it?' she exclaimed eagerly.
'I am constantly pining for home,' I answered, 'and longing—and longing, to see father and Archie. And yet, somehow, this splendid sunshine and wonderful scene of sea, this delicious feeling of being borne through the air, makes me so glad and light-hearted that I believe the strong tonic of the wind has affected my head.'
'No more than it has mine,' she exclaimed.
'It is like drinking wine in sorrow,' said I; 'the mind seems merry with it, and the eyes sparkle, but the heart is sad all the same and will speak presently.'
'I'll tell Mr. Owen how you talk,' said she. 'You're not fair to the remedy.'
'I don't want to sit,' said I. 'Let me look at the ship this fine morning: I should like to take a peep at the sailors' parlour. And suppose we go right into the bows there and watch the glorious white foam.'
Captain Burke was in his cabin, the surly mate had charge of the ship, so Mr. Owen accompanied us. There was little to see, however; we went to the galley and looked in, and here we found the ship's cook making a pie for the cabin. He was the fat-armed, dough-faced man who had stared at us with imbecile curiosity when we came on board. It was a queer little kitchen, not many times larger than a sentry box. Mrs. Burke asked the man if the oven baked well.
'Too vell, mum,' he answered, turning his face with an expression of dull surprise upon it at sight of us standing in the galley doorway. 'He's for burning up. He vants too much vatching.'
'How do you like being ship's cook?' said Mr. Owen.
'Almost as much, I dessay, as you likes being ship's doctor,' he answered.
Mr. Owen looked deaf on a sudden, and, stepping back, found something to interest him aloft.
'What pie is that?' said Mrs. Burke, who had been casting her eye over the little interior, with its equipment of shelves, crockery, oven, coppers and the like, with the critical gaze of an exacting housekeeper.
As she asked the question the ship leaned sharply upon a sea; the cook staggered with a wild flourish of the knife he was trimming the pie-crust with; the pie slipped and fell with a crash, breaking in halves, and out rolled a dishful of preserved gooseberries.
'You can see vat it is for yourself, mum,' said the cook, lancing his knife at the mess on the deck with a force which drove the blade quivering into the hard plank. 'Who'd be a blooming ship's cook? This is the sort of life it is!' and, heedless of our presence, he began to swear, and then roared out for Bill or some such name—meaning, I suppose, his mate—that the fellow might come and swab up the gooseberry puddle.
We walked on to the forecastle.
'That cook's a very insolent fellow,' said Mr. Owen. 'I hope he will give me the pleasure of prescribing for him.'
'All sea cooks are ill-tempered,' said Mrs. Burke. 'They live in little boxes like that, and are obliged, for want of room, to stand close to furnaces all day long, and their livers swell. But their trials are many. I've heard of a sea striking a galley where the cook was in it full of the business of the cabin dinner, and washing him and his kitchen right aft, where he was rescued out of a depth of water as high as a man's waist holding on for his life to a frying-pan. Cooks ashore never meet with blows of that sort.'
A number of the crew were at work on various jobs in this part of the vessel. Two sat upon a sail, stitching at it. Hard by was a little machine called a spun-yarn winch, merrily clinking, with a boy walking backwards from it as it yielded the line it twisted.
A man with a marline spike stood in the fore-shrouds working at a ratline. I looked at everything I saw with interest and attention; to me it was like the rising of a curtain upon a theatrical show of incomparable beauty and variety; I found novelty in the very men; I don't remember that I had ever seen such men on shore, least of all down by the seaside, where the landsman seeks the sailor and finds him in anything that wears a jersey and owns a boat. They were hairy, burnt, wildly dressed, half-naked some of them; their trousers turned above their knees, their chests bare, mossy, gleaming with perspiration; arrows in Indian ink pointed like weather-cocks upon their muscular naked arms as they moved them, and every man's fist was barbarous with rings in Indian ink and his wrists with blue bracelets.
'Do you see that hole there, Miss Otway?' said Mr. Owen, pointing to a square hatch in the forecastle deck. 'Those men sleep down in that hole,' said he.
I drew close to the queer little trap-door to look down, taking care to hold on to Mrs. Burke; for it was not only that the heave of the ship was to be felt here in her falls and jumps, lofty as the peaks and deep as the valleys which underran her: the trade wind stormed in thunder out of the huge rigid hollow of the fore-course with the weight as of a whole gale in the sweep of it, flying in long, steady shriekings and whistlings under the arched foot, and smiting every heave of brine leaping white above the cathead into crystal smoke.
I gazed into a sort of well, at the bottom of which upon an old green battered sea-chest sat a sailor. The man had a squint that had almost twisted each ball of vision into his nose; he was deeply pitted, and had long, curling, sand-coloured hair and a yellow beard; he was pale and weedy, with but a little piece of nose in the middle of his face, and cheek-bones starting through his skin pale with heat, and when he looked up and continued to stare at us with his desperate squint, he made me guess how drowned sailors look when their bodies are washed ashore. He was a sick man and off duty.
'How are you feeling?' the doctor called down to him.
'Oh, dot I vhas kep' togedder mit red-hot corkscrews,' he answered in a voice that creaked like a sea-gull's note.
'Go on taking your physic,' said Mr. Owen.
'By Gott, yaw, dot vould be easy if der physic vhas rum,' answered the man with a ghastly smile, continuing to stare up at us with an occasional snapping blink of his eyelids. 'But der vater in der bilge—und I gif you all der rats of der ship to be drownt in her too—vas sweet gombared to him.'
Mr. Owen drew back and the sufferer ceased to speak.
'A nasty attack of sub-acute rheumatism,' the doctor said behind me.
The rest of the sailors were on deck: this man sat alone on his chest in the bottom of that well, and I pitied the poor solitary wretch from my heart when I considered how every plunge and sharp movement of the ship must serve to give a new twist to all those red-hot corkscrews he complained of. It was too dark below to distinguish more than the man's figure. I observed the fluctuations of a thin, watery yellow light, and tasted in the occasional puffs of thick atmosphere that came up a horrid smell of burning fat.
'Do they cook down there?' I asked.
'It is the fumes of the forecastle lamp Miss Otway smells,' said the doctor. 'It's fed with the slush the sailors make their puddings with.'
I wished to ask several questions, but the roar of the wind and the sea silenced me. Mr. Owen took me by one arm, Mrs. Burke by the other, and we carefully made our way into what is called the ship's head, past a huge anchor and a little capstan, and ropes taut as harp-strings, and vibrating with the wild drumming music of the sails whose corners they confined. The huge bowsprit shot out directly ahead of us. It ran tapering, and was like the finger of a giant pointing, inviting the eye to the deep blue distant recess towards which we were rushing, and which opened like the whole morning upon the sight each time our bows soared to the foaming summit.
They say that the finest sight in the world is a ship in full sail, and perhaps it is, but I doubt if there's one in a thousand, one in a hundred thousand, who has ever seen such a thing; and the reason is that a ship in full sail means studding sails out on both sides, and every stitch of the rest of her canvas set, and this figure she can make only under conditions of wind so rare as to render the spectacle, as I understand it, something outside the experience of anyone, sailor or landsman, that ever I have conversed with.
But to my mind there is a finer sight than a ship in full sail: and that is the view of the vessel you are on board of rushing at you, thundering at you, for ever charging into the seething troughs of brine with the white foam scaling her wet and flashing bow, you meanwhile perched out beyond her, watching her coming at you.
They provided this magnificent treat for me that day. It fell out thus: I overhung the rail in the head, looking down at the boiling dazzle there, watching with indescribable delight and wonder the beautiful sight of the cutwater of the ship, metalled high, sliding through the brine, bowing till the ivory-white lady that was her figure-head was depressed almost to the sip of the cloud of foam which the hurl of the bows sent roaring and flashing far ahead, to rush back in a singing, seething sheet a moment after when the ship's head lifted upon the next swelling heave, bright blue till it was charged and out-turned into a noise and splendour of thunder and snow. Mrs. Burke and the doctor looked down with me. My old nurse would sometimes turn an eye full of satisfaction upon my face, which I felt was glowing with the spirit this rushing ocean picture had kindled. I looked yearningly towards the bowsprit end and exclaimed:
'Oh, now, if I were a man, to be able to get out there and watch the ship coming at me!'
'Here comes Captain Burke,' said Mr. Owen.
He had arrived on deck just then, and, seeing us in the bows of the ship, was advancing.
'Are you going to paint a picture of the "Lady Emma," Miss Otway?' said he, coming to my side and looking down at the thick and giddy foam, roaring and spitting sometimes within arm's reach, and throbbing aft into a wake whose tail went out of sight in the windy blue haze.
'No.'
'You are studying every effect!'
'It is worth leaving home to see this!' said I. 'How fast are we sailing?'
'Thirteen knots an hour.'
'Miss Marie wishes she was a man, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.
'All gallant-hearted girls wish that,' said he. 'But why?'
'That she might be able to climb out on to the bowsprit and watch the "Lady Emma" rushing at her.'
'Is that so, miss?' cried the captain, whipping round upon me with his Irish briskness and arch merry eyes. I smiled. 'It can be managed if you please.'
I looked at the long bowsprit forking out into jib-booms far ahead, with white jibs curving upon it motionless as ice, save when now and again one or another breathed to the plunge of the ship.
'There must be no risks!' cried Mrs. Burke.
'Chaw!' exclaimed her husband. 'Will you trust yourself in my hands, Miss Otway?'
'I will indeed.'
He called to the boatswain of the ship, a big seaman with strong red whiskers and a whistle round his neck: the finest specimen of an English seaman I ever saw out of a man-of-war; this man who acted as second mate, though uncertificated, I had once or twice conversed with when he was on the quarter-deck, and found him very civil and communicative, and a relief to the eye after leering Mr. Green.
The captain gave him certain directions. He called to a couple of men, and amongst them—but I am unable to explain their procedure—they rigged up a chair attached by a tackle to a stay; they bound me securely in the chair, and by some machinery of ropes they gently and slowly hauled me on to the bowsprit, the captain and the boatswain sliding out in company. Mrs. Burke watched us with a countenance of fright: I felt excessively nervous whilst I was being drawn to the extremity of the great spar, and held my eyes closed, but did not shriek nor speak. Indeed, somehow I felt safe, though a landsman might have regarded my situation as in the last degree perilous.
'Now look at the ship and tell me what you think of her,' said the captain.
They had got me to the end of the bowsprit sitting very comfortably and tightly secured in a chair, and the captain and boatswain were on either hand of me, though what they held on by I don't know. I looked, and what I saw I shall never forget. For there, right in front of me, heeled by the shouting wind, was the whole body of the ship, her milky whiteness, mounting to the royal yards, rounding into violet gloom from the sun, with gleaming half-moons of blue betwixt each yard, and every afterbreast sliding under the netted shadow of rigging. I rose high in my chair above the sea. Under me ran the blue surge sparkling deep and clear to the bows, where it burst into snowstorms. I commanded a clear view of the white decks through the arch of the foresail, a hundred shadows slipped along them as they slanted up and then slanted down with the rhythmic swing of a pendulum; a hundred fiery lights broke from all parts as the ship leaned to the sun. The wind was filled with the music of the rigging: deep organ notes, then a large swelling of fifes and trumpets, coming in a sudden gust or gun of wind, with a drum-like roll trembling out of the taut shrouds and backstays, and a ceaseless bugling in the hollow of the canvas that arched like some vast pinion close beside me.
They carefully swayed my chair down the bowsprit and got me on to the forecastle.
'If this don't do you good, Miss Marie,' said my old nurse, extending her hand to help me on to my feet, 'what will?'