CHAPTER VII A RACE AND A ROLLER
Mrs. Burke talked with me in my cabin for some time. She wondered that her husband could be so credulous as to believe in ghosts, and said she had never before suspected he was superstitious. She kissed me and said good-night, and went away thinking, I dare say, she had left me fairly cheerful; and so indeed I was while she was with me, but when she was gone, and I lay alone in the darkness, I felt very uneasy. The cabin porthole was high above the low bunk in which I rested; I could not see the stars in it, but the noise of waters fretted by a gentle catspaw of wind came through very clearly, along with a dim sifting of moonshine that ruled the gloom in a spectral spoke of light which was like dreaming to see; it was a dismal, sobbing, moaning noise of waters whilst it lasted, and made me think of the dead men deep down in the sea, and of the apparition that had moved upon the forecastle, and vanished seemingly as smoke goes out, till I was too afraid to sleep.
The last bells I heard stealing faintly through the calm were eight—four o'clock in the morning.
However, I was at the breakfast table at the usual hour; Captain Burke and his wife and the doctor came below from the deck and seated themselves. Presently I said:
'Are we making good way, Captain Burke?'
'Noble way. We've taken a fine royal breeze right abeam. It's hit our heels to a hair.'
I looked at him as he spoke, and observed a certain dulness in his countenance. The arch expression was gone out of his eyes, and if they seemed merry it was through their blue glitter, not their spirit. It may have been his face which made me ask:
'Was anything more seen of the ghost during the night?'
'No, miss,' he answered abruptly.
'It was no ghost, Miss Marie,' exclaimed my old nurse. 'Why, as Mr. Owen justly says, you can't have no better ingredients for a spectre than moonshine and the moving shadows of rigging.'
'For such a noodle as the fellow that saw the thing,' said the doctor, with a half-glance of interest and speculation at the captain.
'You're not going to get correct likenesses of living people out of moonshine and shadow,' said the captain.
'Why, yes, out of light and shade merely, captain,' said Mr. Owen. 'What else would you do work with in pencil or crayon?'
'I wonder you can be so silly, Edward,' said Mrs. Burke.
I looked at her inquiringly, perceiving that something lay behind this: on which she said, 'The man who saw the ghost has frightened Edward by saying he thought it was the captain at first, the face was so like.'
The captain sipped at a big breakfast cup to conceal his expression, and subdue, as I thought, some temper excited by his wife's remark. He then said, quietly smiling, but with no light of merriment upon him, 'I went forward last night after you were turned in, Miss Otway, to take a look round. I called to the fellow the ghost appeared to, and asked him to describe the thing to me; he did so, and said it had my face. My wife thinks I am frightened. You don't believe that, I hope? You'd not feel safe in a ship commanded by a skipper who's to be scared by a seaman's yarn.'
'Just a little bit of forecastle malice, depend upon it,' said the doctor. 'We'll have the truth of it yet. Perhaps they hope to justify their charges against your beef by dreaming terrific waking nightmares, and seeing precisely the sort of thing that an unsavoury harness cask would be fruitful of.'
'You'll have the other man saying now that the thing he saw was like you,' said Mrs. Burke.
'He's said it,' exclaimed the captain, with an emphatic nod at her.
Mr. Owen lay back in his chair with a loud laugh; an ill-timed explosion and forced withal, for you easily saw that the mood of the captain was then a distemper, which needed the medicine of a little skilful sympathy. But the subject was dropped after the doctor's laugh, and Captain Burke, turning to me, talked in a gentle voice of the letter I had sent home, and calculated the distance the brig had sailed since we spoke her, and chatted to entertain me and perhaps to brisken up his own spirits.
When I went on deck I beheld one of the most spacious splendid scenes of morning our ship had ever sprang through. It was blowing fresh, but the seas ran steadily in defined hard blue ridges, smoking as they came at us right abeam. The rolling of the ship was so regular as to be scarcely noticeable. It was all cream and yeast to leeward; I had never seen before alongside such a bubbling, throbbing spread of white spume, winking, seething, crackling like burning brushwood, sweeping off in steam whenever the heel of the ship hurled the blast under the foot of the mainsail sheer into it over the rail. The clouds hung in vast terraces to windward, with bodies of vapour blowing up to the zenith out of the silk-white heaps, then scudding westward to mass themselves low down in a coast of cloud, that looked, with its breaks and tints, like a rich land dimly seen in mist.
It was this cloud scenery, with its steady whirl of vapour between, that made the morning show as wide again as it was. Mr. Owen, seeing me alone looking at the water, joined me.
'It is difficult to feel superstitious on such a morning as this,' said he.
'If the stranger comes again I hope it will be in daylight,' I answered. 'The thing seems to have affected the captain's spirits.'
'But not yours, I hope.'
'I don't believe in ghosts,' said I, 'but I have faith in portents and presentiments and premonitions.'
He looked grave, and answered so had he, and was about to tell me something, then checked himself; I think his imagination was with his dead then, and that he could have told me of having received some warning of the loss that was to befall him.
'I am sorry,' said he, with a glance at the captain, who was on the weather side of the deck talking with his wife, 'that the sailor should have told Captain Burke the apparition was like him. These reports, if there's good faith in them, catch hold of a man's spirits. The captain's worried. We must avoid the subject in his presence.'
'I should not like to be told that I had appeared to a person,' said I.
'I don't know,' he exclaimed, 'whether sailors are more superstitious than others; they're thought to be so. They can plead good reasons. Last night, for example, was fuller of the mysterious and the spirit-like than any churchyard scene, however crumbling the church tower, however red the colour than of the moon with a streak of black cloud, like crape, above it. The superstitions of the sea are extraordinary, and some of them beautiful. The Ancient Mariner was a poet.'
'He talks like one in the poem,' said I, smiling.
'Coleridge went to the old sea chronicles for his ideas and imagery,' he exclaimed. 'Shelvocke gave him the albatross, and he found his painted ocean, and the shining and burning, wriggling things in it, in Richard Hawkins. We can never see again as the old saw. They came with the eyes of children and everything was marvellous. But many of the old superstitions linger.'
'Is there any particular superstition connected with apparitions at sea?'
'I am not well read in that subject,' he answered, laughing. 'Most of the apparitions I have heard about concern the coming on and ending of storms—mercurial spirits, spectres of the barometer. The old Jacks swore that the Virgin frequently appeared in the height of a gale; they had but to vow a taper and down dropped the wind. There was always a gale in the wake of the "Flying Dutchman."'
'There's nothing but weather for apparitions to predict at sea,' said I.
'That wet-faced ghost of last night,' said he, 'reminds me of Lord Byron's tale of a certain captain; his brother, who was in India, entered his cabin in mid-ocean, and lay down in his bunk; when the captain awoke he found his blankets wet through.'
'Perhaps he forgot to close his cabin window,' said I.
'Anyhow,' said Mr. Owen, 'Captain Kidd afterwards discovered that his brother was drowned at that exact hour of the night.'
'This is not nice talk for such a morning as this,' said I, chilled by a sudden return of the uneasy superstitious feeling.
'There's a fine sight coming along yonder,' cried out Captain Burke just then, and he pointed over the weather bow with the telescope he had been looking through.
I crossed the deck and saw two large stars of light on the sea-line almost directly ahead. Even whilst I gazed they sensibly enlarged. The sun at this time was hanging on the left of them, and his light was on the water between, flashing every headlong ridge into silver, and silvering the sea-smoke till it flew down the wind with the gleam of a silken veil; and beyond this rushing splendour of silver sea, softened here and there by the shadows of the sailing clouds, hung those two glowing stars, steady as though they were fixed in the heavens.
Captain Burke let fall the glass from his eye and said to Mr. Owen, 'An ocean race.'
'Yachts?' said the doctor.
'Bless me no. Clippers rushing it for a wager. If this was the other end of the year they'd probably prove tea-ships. It should be a fine sight,' he cried, anticipation and spirit working his face into something of its old merry, eager look.
We were ourselves sailing fast, and the two ships were coming along faster perhaps by two or three miles in the hour than we were going; in a magically short time they were two defined shapes upon the bow about a quarter of a mile apart, black spots under brilliant clouds showing like shapes of white flame through the windy blue dazzle trembling into the atmosphere they were coming through. The sailors dropped their several tasks to look; the surly mate stared with a fixed devouring leer; all hands I guessed understood what they were to see; the cook stepped from the galley to the rail. In less than half an hour from the moment of our sighting them they were abreast, and when they were right abeam this one hid the other, so completely were they neck and neck.
By this time our own ship's number was flying at our peak, and now as they came abreast, each having told us by a thin tongue of flag that our colours had been spelt out, they hoisted their own names.
'An Aberdeen clipper and a Blackwall liner,' said Captain Burke, reading out of a signal book. 'Both from an Australian port. A very pretty race indeed. But it's the spirit of Souchong that puts life into that sort of thing.'
Yet spite of that I thought the show as gallant as anything old ocean ever submitted, if it were not a scene of old line-of-battle ships in a gale of wind. They opened into six spires of delicate shadow and snowlike whiteness; they leaned their full and starlike breasts to us, the lustrous canvas tapering to an apex of cloth that was a very puff of sail, wan as some web of cloud near the afternoon moon. Every stitch that would draw was heaped upon them; they had the wind right abeam; to windward they were clothed with studding-sails; betwixt the masts some becalmed wing of fore and aft canvas would swing in and out idly like the pinion of a wounded bird. The sight was a marvellous hurry of shadows, and flashing lights, and steady shining of rounded canvas; and under the bows of each a glass-clear sea arching, flashed into a very snow-storm, and broke aft as far as the gangway.
They passed like clouds, silent and stately, and I continued to watch them till they were glowing astern, dwindling and dimming, but, as Captain Burke declared, neck and neck yet even when they had sunk their courses, and nothing above the clews of their topsails were 'dipping' upon the horizon.
It was not many days after this that we crossed the equator. A pleasant sailing wind blew us over the line and failed us not till we had reached almost within the Polar verge of the south-east trade wind, into which Captain Burke and the mate sneaked the ship by careful and unwearied attention to every faintest breathing that tarnished the surface of the long, blue equatorial heave. Then one morning, coming on deck, I found a strong wind humming like a concert of organs off the port bow, and the vessel with her yards fore and aft, breaking through a quick spitting sea, and clouds passing like dust over our mast-heads. This was the first of the south-east trade wind.
'It's all right with us now, Miss Otway,' said Captain Burke as he shook me by the hand. 'We're making a straight course for the Horn, and we shall be putting her nose off for the great South Sea presently.'
But even though he spoke lightly, and seemed very well satisfied to have taken the trade gale in its strength so young, there was the same suggestion of spiritlessness in his manner that had been more or less visible in him now ever since the sailor had told him he had seen his apparition. Though the ghost had not again appeared; though Mr. Owen, with the hope, no doubt, of settling the captain's spirits, had got the seaman to admit that he might have been mistaken, that he was leaning against the forecastle rail in a sort of doze perhaps when he started and saw the thing, which, he avowed, might very well have been an illusion of shadow and moonlight upon his sleepy vision—it was all one; a weight of dejection had come upon the captain's mind, and ever since the night of superstition he had ceased to be that merry, arch, humorous Irishman who had called upon my father, and made us laugh almost in the very anguish of my leave-taking. This was so noticeable in him whilst he talked to me about the south-east trade wind, and going for Cape Horn in a bee-line, and our first sunny port—full of quaint costumes and pleasant fruit and queer merry-makings—just round the corner, that on returning to the cabin sometime afterwards and finding Mrs. Burke there sewing, I sat down beside her and talked about him.
'What should there be in this thing, nurse, to dispirit your husband after all these days, now that the man has as good as sworn that he was mistaken?'
'Why, my dear, he is an Irishman, and they are a superstitious people.'
'The crew no longer trouble themselves about that ghost.'
'I don't think they do. The boatswain,' said she, laughing, 'told my husband a man had said that as the ghost appeared with a wet face it must have been Old Stormy.'
'Who's Old Stormy?' said I.
'Oh,' she answered, still laughing, 'there is a well-known windlass song called "Old Stormy, he is dead and gone!"'
'Old Stormy wouldn't be like Captain Burke,' said I.
'And that should satisfy him,' she answered. 'I doubt that he's quite the thing. These roasting latitudes use the liver cruelly. Then again there's the anxiety of command. The tone of the mind gets lowered by worry, which a man takes as a matter of routine, and doesn't heed though it's working in him all the same. It'll wear off, I dare say, when the weather gets cold.'
She talked placidly, going on with her work with a comfortable, smiling face. She had married too late in life to take anxious views of her husband. It's the young wife that frets, I think. Not that Mrs. Burke would not have shown herself deeply anxious had her husband been ailing in his health; it was his fancies she took no notice of, a smile was good enough for them.
It chanced that on this same day there occurred an incident that had nearly verified the judgment of any man who should have accepted the visit of the apparition as a menace. After loitering at the dinner-table in chat, I put on my hat and jacket and followed the captain and Mr. Owen on deck. It was blowing very fresh, and though the sun still nearly centred the heavens we were sailing under, the weight of the blast put an edge into the feel of it. But it was a glorious, invigorating, cordial draught; and I stood for awhile with my hand upon the companion-hood, deeply breathing, and relishing to the inmost pulses of my being that shouting musical tide of liberal gale, blue and salt, yet sweet as sugar when it came charged with the damp of the spray.
The brown scud was flying off the working ridges on the horizon, and the ship was bowed to her channels, charging the sea-flashes, with the forecastle reeling in the frequent thickness of foam flying athwart. She was carrying all she had of plain sail and clearly more than she needed, for I had not been five minutes on deck when the captain ordered the three royals to be clewed up and furled, and other sail to be taken in.
I continued standing at the hatch watching two men on the main royal yard stow the sail there. It was a giddy sight to my girlish eye. Indeed I had always found something wonderful in the agility and fearlessness of the crew when they sprang aloft, and slided out upon the yards, and struggled with the canvas that soared in huge bladders from their grasp. I gazed up at the two fellows and tried to figure the image our ship would make viewed from that height, and whilst I was picturing a narrow streak of hull rushing headlong with a wild play of dazzle on either hand of her, and all aslant to her trucks, with yard-arms pointing skywards and stirless canvas thrilling like a thousand drums out of the violet hollows, I was startled by a loud cry directly overhead: and looking up I spied a man in the mizzen-top, leaning off with one hand upon a shroud, and pointing eagerly to leewards with the other, whilst he cried:
'There's a whole coast of water a-coming along.'
I directed my eyes at the lee line of the sea, where I saw, nearly at the distance of the horizon, but clearly coming along at a prodigious rate directly against the wind and rushing surge, a wall of water: it was rounding its pouring volume high above the level of the sea, and the vast bulk of it, stretching north and south, blazed with the flashing of the sunlight upon the savage leaps and shattering recoils of the surge it was rolling up against. Mrs. Burke, losing her wits at the sight, shrieked out:
'Oh, Edward, it will drown us!'
Scarcely had she said this when her husband, who had taken but one glance to leeward, roared out:
'Hard up, hard up with the helm! Aft to the weather-braces. Square away fore and aft! Lively, my lads, for Jesus' sake! If it takes us abeam it'll sink the ship!'
He yelled the words and they rang through the vessel. The sailors fled to the braces: their practised ears heard in the captain's cry the note that signifies at sea life or death, though some probably did not know what the danger was. The gallant little ship answered her helm like a racing yacht, and seethed aslant down the wind in a semicircle, bowing the hawse-pipes into the billow breaking under her, and slowly righting as she brought her stern to the breeze, till she was looking at the long on-coming, cliff-like length of brine, with erect spars, rolling never and bowing only as she swept to that wonderful heap of sea.
It might have been hurling towards us at forty miles an hour, when we are going ten, and in a few heart-beats our bows were lifting to it.
'Hold on, all hands!' roared the captain from the wheel, which he was grasping conjointly with the helmsman.
'Hold tightly,' screamed Mrs. Burke to me as we stood together in the companion.
Mr. Owen flung himself on his knees behind the mizzen-mast. Green, the mate, stood at the mizzen-rigging grasping a belaying-pin. It was as though an electric storm was volleying in one continuous roar of cloud battery overhead. The ship seemed to be thrown keel out of water forward. I glanced astern at the instant that her bows took the first of the slant of that mighty heave of sea, and the line of her taffrail was depressed, like the edge of a spoon afloat in a cup, in the crackling whiteness there, with Captain Burke and the helmsman low down, pale and motionless. The sails throughout came in to the mast with a single clap. In a breath or two we were on the rounded top of that vast rolling lift of water that was roaring along either extremity of it to the horizon; the wind was full of the thunder of the shock and the snap of strong seas staggering on the under run; in that breathless moment of our being poised atop the whole weight of the wind was upon the ship; through the roar of the roller ran the bugling in the rigging, and the low, deep humming of the canvas as it strained with the blast.
Then like an arrow down rushed the vessel. Oh, that was a frightful moment! So steep was the slant that the water poured in tons over her bows as she went. I turned sick. I thought she would take the valley in a dive and strike clean through under the next sea, never again to rise. Fortunately the run of the mighty roller left the water smooth in its wake. The bows sprang buoyant, the whole ship seemed to leap with a sort of shudder of rejoicing throughout her.
'Trim sail the watch,' shouted the captain, letting go the helm and coming forward. 'Mr. Green, bring the ship to her course again. A desperately close shave. Had it come from the wind'ard, or taken us abeam to leeward, or found us a strake or two deeper——'
There was no need for him to finish the sentence. He came to the companion-way.
'An ocean hurdle,' said he, still very pale, and watching the wheel as the man revolved the spokes to bring the ship to.
'What was it, Edward?' cried his wife.
'A roller,' said he. 'I hope there may not be another.' He looked to leeward. 'One of those volcanic jokes or hurricane survivals which try periodically to swamp Ascension and St. Helena. Help Miss Otway below, Mary, and give her a little drop of wine, and take a nip yourself.'