Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn, vol. 2.

by William Clark Russell

CHAPTER XV THE ICE IN THE SOUTH

I left a light burning brightly at the mast-head: the wild meteoric dance of that gleam was a sort of hope: no ship sighting it but would guess from the rapidity of its oscillations that it danced on an open boat, or shone from some short height upon a dismasted hull.

The wind was freshening with a long deep moan in the rush of it through the flying dusk when I left the deck: but I gathered from a general atmospheric hardening all round, a firmer line in the curl of the surge, a distincter flash in the foam of it, that it was to be a clear night, with perhaps a star or two by-and-by. The hull made good play: she was like a live thing; and no helm and no fragment of canvas vexing her, she took up her own position and wallowed dryly, save that now and again in a sharp pitch she'd meet some lateral run of sea and whiten in the air forward into the look of a snow-storm: but the froth mostly blew clear, and the water when it came streaming aft quickly froze into the snow.

Miss Otway sat beside the stove: she had removed her hat, otherwise was wrapped up to the throat in furs; her yellow hair was shot with amber light when the swing of the lamp flashed the radiance upon it, but her looks were white, and something wild with grief, anxiety and fear. She asked me if there was any ice in sight.

'None that I can see in the dusk,' I answered.

'I'm all the while dreading the ice,' said she. 'I should not fear this high sea and our lying dismasted in it, if it were not for the ice.'

'There's none near to hurt us just now,' said I.

'When I first came into this cabin,' she exclaimed, 'in the Thames, a chill ran through me that was cold as ice itself. It was warm, and yet I shivered as though freezing. Was it an omen? The memory has been haunting me in my time of loneliness here. A little while before we were dismasted we sighted a huge iceberg that was like a cathedral: it had a beach of frozen foam, and the snow whirled in white dust on one side of it against the dark clouds. Oh, Mr. Selby,' she cried, 'think of this helpless hull striking against such a mountain of ice as that, and our getting upon it and perishing with the cold—the awful cold!'

'Why, Miss Otway,' said I with a bustle of voice and manner as I got up to set the kettle on the stove. 'This sort of talk is good for neither of us. Do you believe in omens? But don't be scared till danger's come, and not then. There's plenty to eat and drink in this ship and I'm for faring heartily for the sake of hoping heartily, and working heartily, should work be wanted. Come, you shall fry some ham; it's my turn to prepare the table.'

Presently we were seated as before. I talked more reassuringly than I had ventured on earlier, for now that her hat was off I saw her face very clearly, how refined she was, how gentle, how well nurtured; my very heart pitied her: I felt as though commanded by God Himself to take charge of her, to watch over her, to keep her heart up; I can't express indeed how she appealed to me out of her gentleness and refinement, the horrible situation she was in, the unspeakably dreadful time she had passed through alone.

And often I would catch her in the intervals of our speech eyeing me under drooping lids with an eager searching look of enquiry, as though she would comfort her poor little self by finding out what sort of a man was I who had come into this rolling hull where she was alone? I wished her to find out quickly that she might be easy; but we both needed time, I to act and she to discover.

I cleared the table and went on deck. The lantern burned brightly. The night lay black, but the atmosphere was hard as when I had gone into the cabin, and you found a distance in the gloom. All was as well with the hull as one could dare hope for, and, closing the companion doors, I re-entered the cabin.

It was about six o'clock then. I lighted a bull's-eye and went into the captain's berth for the log-book which I had noticed upon the table, and to overhaul a bag of charts. I brought the log-book and the chart I wanted to the cabin table: Miss Otway seeing me at this, came opposite and stood there looking on. I wished to see the last entry in the log-book; which done, I opened the chart, and was startled to observe that, supposing the drift of the vessel to have been continuously to the southward, as somehow I imagined it was, that group of islands called the South Orkneys, stretching some sixty-five miles east and west, could not be farther than twenty-five or thirty leagues.

'Are you finding out where we are?' said Miss Otway.

'I shall know exactly when I get an observation,' said I, and carried the log-book and chart back into the captain's cabin.

But I confess my heart was sunk. To be sure, throughout I had vaguely known our place—could have named it within fifty or eighty miles perhaps—yet the business I had been about ever since I woke up stopped me from realising till I looked on the chart, when of course I understood that if our drift was south we stood to go to pieces upon land that would be the most God-forsaken on the wide face of the oceans of the globe, if it were not that, hard by them, covering a range of eight or nine degrees of longitude, lay groups of rocks with a range of mountainous continent stretching due south (magnetic) even more desolate, naked and iron-sheathed.

But we were not ashore yet: nor could I know certainly that our drift was south; and then there was to-morrow's daylight with its hope of succour.

I sat beside the stove and talked with Miss Otway. She spoke of the voyage and of the apparition which had haunted the memory and depressed the spirits of Captain Burke down to the hour of his death. I sought to amuse her by relating certain experiences of my own; and she forgot her situation whilst listening to some of my yarns. The truth is I had gone to sea at the age of thirteen and had followed the life fourteen years, during which I had served in several capacities in many kinds of vessels, though my experiences lay chiefly in the India and China trade. I had plenty then to talk about: it amused me to yarn, and she listened with more life and intelligence than I should have expected in one with so fixed an expression of dismay, of hearkening consternation and mourning.

After satisfying myself with a look around on deck, I returned, and going to the bookshelves, read the names of some of the volumes. It was a good collection of books: the best of the poets and novelists were there, with odds and ends of scrappy reading like Hone's and D'Israeli's. Here I found dear old 'Peter Simple,' and carrying the tale to the stove, I read bits aloud, and once or twice she laughed. Then something suggesting the topic, I got telling her about shipwrecks, my notion being to let her understand how much better off were we than others who had suffered from disasters at sea. I talked of the raft of the 'Medusa,' described that pathetic, lamentable scene in the round-house of the 'Abergavenny'—the wax-lights, the captain clasping his daughters to him—related the loss of the 'Amphitrite,' as told to me by a man I had sailed with who had been one of the survivors of that most tragic of shipwrecks, which littered the Boulogne sands with scores of bodies of handsome, finely built young women.

'Are there instances of people,' she asked, 'who have been wrecked upon icebergs and survived?'

I spun her a few yarns of polar experiences in this way: of Russian seamen found floating on ice: of a whaler half full of men stranded on a berg and floating in her giant cradle down into open waters where she was boarded and the people taken out of her.

'How long had they been locked up?'

'Several months.'

'Were their sufferings great?'

Not knowing, I had to invent, and to cheer her, said: 'Oh, no. They kept up good fires, had plenty of beef and tobacco, heartened themselves by singing songs, telling stories, playing at games of their own invention, and fashioning ornaments out of whale ivory. It came right with them. When things come right it's the same as if they never were wrong. Nothing counts but the loss of time whilst you're waiting for the settlement. How soon, when you get well, you forget that you were ill! How quickly you forget the weather! Who's it says it's always too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, but that God so contrives it, at the end of the year it's all the same? Keep up your heart, Miss Otway, and reflect that when this is ended and you're safe ashore with your people it'll be no more than an experience to talk about.'

'Yes,' said she, with a faint smile, 'it will be all right when I am ashore; but who's that other person who says, philosophy triumphs over past and future ills, but present ills triumph over philosophy?'

This passed my plain understanding, and I let the subject go.

I went on deck for more ice to melt and boil, and found it blowing pretty strong. A high sea, ridged in lines of ebony against the light of their own foam, and melted in roaring snowdrifts under the hull that was topping them with a wonderful buoyancy. I looked for a star, but all was sweeping blackness aloft, save the point of light at the stump-head.

Knowing this hard heave of sea must certainly give us a steady trend southward, helped as the hull was by the blast every time she soared into the icy howl of it, I fetched a bull's-eye, and observing by the binnacle that the hulk's head pointed about east by north, I went to the starboard rail and overlay it, staring with desperate searching eyes into the hard gloom till I was almost frozen. But I could see nothing that looked like ice, no faintness, no spectral sheen, all that glared was foam running from the arched back of the surge; so I went below, where I boiled some coffee, and, shortly after eight, Miss Otway withdrew to her berth.

I took the bull's-eye to find me more clothes in the captain's cabin, and when I was wrapped up to the bigness of a Greenland's-man, I returned to the stove, dimming the lamp to a light that was just enough to see by, and lay down upon a couch. Presently I was startled out of a reverie by seeing a great rat come close to the fire, as though for the warmth. Very quietly putting my hand in my pocket, I pulled out my clasp knife, which I opened; the blade was dagger-shaped. Then, quick as lightning, I lanced the weapon at the beast and half severed its head. This pleased me, for in the course of our talks Miss Otway had said that in her time of loneliness, a huge rat had come into the cabin and looked at her till she was motionless with disgust and fear. I could not know, however, that this was the rat that had so served her; though it made one less aboard, and I dropped it into a coal-bucket to chuck over the side next day.

The sight of the bleeding, lifeless beast set my thoughts running on the hours the girl, whilst alone, had spent in this hull, and I wondered when I looked at the rat and listened to the shrieking and grinding noises, that she had not days before gone off her head. I guessed that her mind had been cast in a heroic mould; never else could she have come through such a term of loneliness with her wits all right. Less had driven strong men overboard, gaping madmen.

Whilst I sat following the wild and flying motions of the hull, testing them by sensation to gather if the buoyancy diminished, I was addressed. I looked round with a sudden surprise that was nearly fright: it was Miss Otway, furred and clothed from head to foot as she had left me.

'Are you going to sit up all night?' she exclaimed.

'I'm going to sit here,' I answered. 'I shall snooze at intervals.'

'Let me watch whilst you sleep,' said she.

'There's nothing to watch,' I answered, 'nothing to keep a look-out for.'

'A ship might see our lantern and come down to us.'

'She could do nothing in this weather.'

'But to think of being asleep whilst a vessel is coming down to see what the light means! Think of her hailing, getting no answer and passing on. It might be our only chance.'

I told her that might happen even though we both kept watch all night in the cabin. How, down here, should we hear a hail from the water? We'd need to keep a look-out on deck, which would kill her quickly and me soon after.

'Pray go and rest,' said I, 'and trust me to see anything that may come along and to hear anything that may hail.'

She looked reluctant, very white, her eyes dim and large with tragic expectancy as though she never knew but that in the next minute something frightful would happen.

I picked the rat up by the tail. 'Is this your friend?' said I.

She shrieked, believing it alive; then, shuddering and shuddering, staggered somewhat blindly in the direction of the cabin.

I jumped up and supported her, encouraging her by every promise and hope my brain could frame.

'You have not slept for nights,' said I, pausing at her door. 'Best now that I am here, if only that you may have strength enough to leave the hull and health enough to carry you to your home.'

She had removed her gloves: I grasped her ice-cold hand and returned to my couch.

The night crept away. I dozed at intervals, visiting the deck perhaps half a dozen times. In the morning watch I slept soundly upon the couch by the stove, and when I awoke it was nine by the clock under the skylight, still black as thunder, and the hull rolling heavily. I was cold to the heart, and before quitting the cabin kindled a fire to boil some water for a hot drink, then went up the steps to take a look.

It was still blowing fresh, but the wind had shifted north-west, and the sky was a clear, sparkling heaven of stars from sea-line to sea-line, the sea running in steady hills of ink to where you saw the horizon throbbing close under the pale lights of the night low down, so clear was the gale. The mast-head lamp burned dimly; but it would be daybreak shortly. I stared around the sea, and saw nothing north and west and east, but my sight going south was arrested by a low, irregular, dim line: it rose with the heave of the hull, and it was as far off as the horizon. It looked like the sheen of a long face of coast covered with snow: it was a mere attenuated film of faintness stretched where sky and water met, and I looked and looked, believing it a bank of cloud that would dissolve whilst I watched; but it hung steady, and still it was so elusive that sometimes I saw it, and when the hull sprang from the trough again it was gone; and yet again, when she roared to the height of a surge, it was there.

Well, daylight was at hand to resolve it. For my part I had no doubt it was ice; indeed it had astonished me to find these seas so open at this time of the year; only, if that sheen out in the morning darkness under the stars was ice, the drift had been ours to carry us to a sight of it: which signified a slide of keel running into knots: for that steamlike hovering down there had not been in sight two or three hours earlier, when my eye, as now, followed the hard curls of sea working into distance, though the sky was not starry.

I went below, trimmed the lamp, and prepared the table for breakfast. Whilst I was thus occupied, Miss Otway appeared. She came straight to the stove and held her hands to the blaze, and asked me when it would be daylight. I answered, 'Within an hour.'

'This almost perpetual darkness,' she exclaimed, 'is one of the most awful parts of this dreadful time.'

'I hope you slept well?'

'Yes, I slept soundly, and awoke only about a quarter of an hour ago. What is the time?' I named the hour. 'You've seen no signs of a ship during the night, I fear?'

'Nothing. It has blown hard. It still blows a fresh breeze of wind. This is the most seawardly vessel that was ever launched. It is lucky for us her cargo is a light one. Think of her laden to her chain-plate bolts with some dead weight of iron goods. She would have been under water day and night, and by this time have ceased to be a hull.'

'When were you last on deck, Mr. Selby?'

'I'm just now from the deck.'

'Is there anything in sight?'

'I'm waiting for daybreak to make sure.'

My answer caused her to make a step from the stove, and to advance her white face whilst she stared at me.

'Is there ice near us?' she asked.

'I find an appearance in the southward that may prove ice,' said I. 'But what else are you to expect in these seas?' I added carelessly. 'Here we are somewhere down in sixty degrees, and, since I have been aboard, the horizon has been almost clear. What shall we have for breakfast? Will you boil some coffee whilst I search the pantry? Suppose daylight should reveal ice—it may also show us a whaler fishing in the thick of the bergs!'

And assuming a cheerful, bustling manner I lighted a bull's-eye, whistling some sea tune the while, and went into the pantry, where, after a brief overhaul of the closet and shelves, I laid hands upon a tin of herrings, sardines, and some kind of delicate sausage.

'I am making free,' said I, putting the stuff upon the table.

'These things were laid in for you. I'll take an inventory of what's left by-and-by; I allow that everything for cabin use will be stowed in the lazarette. When you're transhipped the delicacies must go along with you. The whaleman's our chance, and his cupboard has no reputation for dainties.'

I waited for her to sit, attended upon her, then fell to myself. But all the while we remained seated she was straining her eyes at the porthole facing her, then turning to the porthole behind her as though she thought through the gleaming ebony of the glass, white with the foam it rose from, to behold the ice I had spoken about.

Day broke before I had breakfasted; it lay white in the snow on the skylight ere I rose, and the grey of it in the cabin windows was growing blue when I went on deck accompanied by Miss Otway. And now I looked at what, for the hour past, I had dreaded to see. The day had dawned in cold splendour; the sun was flashing in rose, at this moment perhaps two degrees above the horizon; a number of small clouds were floating near his face and looked like bits of gilt scaling off the rayless target-like luminary; otherwise the heavens sloped clear in a sheer vault of deeply dark blue, under which ran the sea of the rich hue of the sky, but full of gleams and the snow of melting crests, and here and there spaces of an exquisite ice-like green snaking currentwise over the heaving waters.

It no longer blew hard, but it was still a fresh breeze, spray-clouded in the frequent guns of it that shrieked in gusts over the bulwarks to the loftier lifts of the hull. But what my sight went to and remained fastened upon whilst, I own, my breath came and went quickly with the surprise of the magnificent, but to us the terrible, sight, was the scene of the southern quarter of the sea. There, stretching for miles and miles, was ice in bergs which to the naked sight looked to lie so close, the picture was that of a compacted coast of alabaster, broken with pinnacles and acclivities of a thousand shapes, curving in places as though in bays, the whole on either hand dying out in films of white, whilst over the bows and over the stern, too, every time we rose to the height of a sea I saw ice, plentiful as the breasts of the canvas of a vast fleet; and through the southern sky low down ran a long glinting line or gleam as though a continent of ice was reflected in its face; it was like the pearly radiance that hovers just off the edges of sails when lightly swelling in the tropics against a soft blue sky.

I glanced at Miss Otway: she was staring at the sight with large nostrils and a gaze of terror under the little frown that the strain of her gaze had knitted her brows into.

'That is ice,' she cried.

'Ay, miles of it' said I. 'But is there nothing good for us amidst that prodigious huddle of sail-like stuff?'

I took the telescope out of the companion and knelt with it to steady the tubes, and slowly and carefully swept the whole of that wonderful range, from film to film blue in the air. The sun's rosy light was full upon it; only the brush of an artist could show you what I saw as the surge ran me into a clear view of the horizon. It looked like a hundred cities of marble and alabaster, all of them going to pieces. It was no compact coast. There were many wide gaps, titanic streets fit for the tread of such ocean giant-spirits as would inhabit those colossal structures of crystal. The nearest point seemed about ten miles distant. All was clear sea between, and northwards I saw no ice.

Miss Otway stood beside me holding by a belaying pin in the rail. Again and again she would say:

'Do you see any signs of a ship? Is not that the canvas of a ship—there, just where your telescope now points?'

I saw no ship, but I looked with impassioned intentness till my eyeball seemed to melt dim through the lens under the brass it was pressed against, conceiving that in so vast an arm of ice some vessel might lie embayed.

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