CHAPTER XXI MR. MOORE SAILS
I think, I will not be sure, that the date on which I returned to London from this visit to Sir Mortimer was October 26. In the year 1860 sailing ships bound to the Australias and the East Indies frequently, many of them regularly, touched at the Cape; small vessels, such as brigs and barques, also traded to that colony. There was steam communication, however, then. I believe the first of the steamers of the Union Steamship Company was despatched three years earlier, namely, in 1857.
Be this as it may, since steam was to be got I was resolved to have nothing to do with what the sailor calls tacks and sheets. A sailing ship might keep me four months upon the ocean in her struggles with head winds and failing catspaws. On the other hand, the Cape, by steam, was to be reached certainly within forty days. But having made up my mind, I found there was no time to lose, that is, if I resolved on steam; for, on reaching London, I learnt that the next Union steamer was the 'Cambrian,' sailing from Southampton on November 6.
It was this obligation of despatch, perhaps, which hardened me in my resolution. I meant to sail by the 'Cambrian' and there was no leisure for hesitation, no time for second thought. Not, indeed, that I was not passionately resolved; I had been so from the hour of clearly understanding that I must proceed to the Cape and procure the exhumation of the body if my mind was to be set at rest one way or the other. I mean, if I had been obliged to wait a month, say, for a sailing ship, I might have found myself troubled, my resolution a little unsettled, by the counsels of friends.
My father, for example, fully sanctioned my going, but advised me to consider how it would be with my memory if, when the coffin was opened, I recognised the body as Marie's.
I answered I had thought over that, and knew it would prove a terrible ordeal. But it must be worse with me if I stayed at home, never stirring to find out if the body that lay in Cape Town cemetery was indeed that of the girl I loved.
'Suppose she is drowned,' I reasoned, 'I should not believe it for months, perhaps years. No man could persuade me she was dead. Time alone must convince me. But how long should I allow myself? Meanwhile I must live in expectation. My life would be a torment of suspense. But by going to the Cape I shall satisfy myself at once.'
'Yes,' said my father, 'but you will only be able to satisfy yourself that Marie does not lie buried in Cape Town if, when the grave is opened, the remains should prove another's.'
'It will satisfy me to know that, at all events,' I exclaimed.
'Will they let you exhume the body?'
This staggered me somewhat; but I replied I would take my chance of it. The corpse had been brought to Cape Town, and there buried with a view to identification. The case was extraordinary; and when the Colonial authorities heard my story they would not refuse to let me disinter the remains.
Several friends offered like objections. One suggested I should ask that the clothes should be sent home, and submitted to the inspection of those from whom Marie bought her outfit; the shopmen would know their own wares. If they asserted the clothes had been sold by them—had at any time passed through their hands—there would be something solid to go upon; I could then sail for the Cape and confirm by inspection what to most would pass as a foregone conclusion.
But my answer was, it was not very conceivable that those who held the clothes would part with them; it was no case of suspected murder, so as to admit of the introduction of the machinery of the law; moreover, if I waited, the remains would become unrecognisable. It was already a question how far the climate would admit of an identification of them. The body arrived at the Cape August 10; this was the close of October. December would have come before I landed; and December is the burning midsummer of South Africa.
But herein, as in all the rest, I was prepared to take my chance. I felt a secret reluctance in one direction only. It shocked me even in imagination to think, if the remains should prove Marie's, of the memory I must return home with and be haunted by to my death-bed.
On November 5 I travelled to Southampton, and on the following day embarked in the steamship 'Cambrian' for Cape Town. I had said good-bye to my friends in London and went on board alone. Never did passenger tread a ship's deck with heavier heart than I. The vessel was full of bustle and confusion; she was taking out a large number of passengers who, with their friends, filled her fore and aft, overflowing the saloon, and crowding the raised deck or poop.
It is at such a time as this, and amid such a crowd as littered the 'Cambrian's' decks, that you learn what real loneliness is. I looked around me and saw not one face I had ever met before. There was much surging and elbowing of figures in the gangway, a constant dragging here and there of baggage, shouts from the ship to the shore, from the shore to the ship, with stewards dodging and shoving in and out, officers of the steamer twinkling and flitting in the finery of the merchant service.
I contrasted all this noise—threaded by strange groaning rumblings down in the bowels of the metal keel, as though the giant, steam, lying imprisoned, was beginning to mutter in his impatience and shake his chains—with the peace on board the 'Lady Emma' when I mounted her side with Marie and her father and Mrs. Burke. All was quiet there, the masts pointed their crossed and knitted heights silent in the breeze as a tree that sleeps in the dead calm of a summer's night; about was spread a shining scene of river abounding in life and colour, in gliding and in stately motion; but the ear was not vexed.
However, it would not be long before the 'Cambrian' was under way, and, indeed, whilst I was seeing to my baggage in my berth, and taking a view of the bedroom I was to sleep in for thirty-five or forty days, I heard noises and felt a vibration which satisfied me we were about to start.
The vessel was something less than nine hundred tons; she was fitted with a saloon, on either hand of which went a range of sleeping berths, and the amidships was filled with a long table. She was rigged as a schooner, with a couple of yards on each mast, and sat with a promise of swiftness in her posture, her bow being yacht-like and sharp, dominant, that is, with a good spring, whilst the run of her vanished in a very pretty mould of stern.
She would be laughed at now; side by side with the Cape white giantess of to-day, thrashing from the top of the North Atlantic to the other bottom of the South Atlantic in a trifle more than a fortnight, how meanly would she show! even as a pinnace or steam launch in the shadow of the man-of-war that owns her. No splendour of internal fittings; nothing rememberable in the form of smoke-room or bath-room. And still my heart swells with the memory of that little iron steamer, which long since ceased, save as one of the countless spectres of the deep, the true and only phantom ships of the sea.
It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew, and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke of flying flakes.
It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless. Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.
Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze, and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern of her with an arrow-like line of light.
Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the beautiful picture.
We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age; but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw from the wind the help the propeller might refuse.
This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table; the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.
My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name, was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their speech was my diversion.
I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation. The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man. What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or lean against. At this a great many people laughed.
A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and, marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health, that all wondered he did not speak and smile.
'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found. Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue, him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.'
'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman sitting five or six down on the opposite side.
'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster.
'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?'
'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose child it was.'
'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis.
The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.
Then the captain, at the head of the table, exclaimed: 'I knew a man years ago who had penetrated far north in a whaler. They were frozen up for a spell, hard bound in white ice, with hills to the horizon, till the season came and they broke adrift, the piece they were on floated round a point and gave them the sight of a little barque stranded on a slope, her topmast was standing, sails furled, everything in its place—she looked as if she had gone ashore the day before. They boarded her and found by her log and papers she had been in that situation eight years. But that wasn't it,' said he with a glance down the double line of listening faces turned his way, one of the most eagerly attentive of which I observed was the old gentleman's. 'In the cabin they found five frozen men, they looked to have died without a groan one after the other, every man in the act of doing something, none guessing that the forefinger of the grinning king was on his heart. One sat with a pipe in his hand, another leaned on the table as though he was meditating, a third lay back in his chair, his eyes on the skylight as if he heard a noise on deck. That's what cold will do,' said he.
Something at this point diverted the conversation, and the subject was dropped.
When I left the table I went on deck; the west was still full of warm splendour, the sea ran heaving in deep blue folds to an horizon crystalline in the delicate sweep of it against the east, on whose violet slope—that looked to thrill with the depth of its own hue as the blue of the calm trembles under the eye—a large star was flashing.
I lighted a cigar, sunk in thought over the talk about the ice. If the body should not prove Marie's, then, supposing the hull had got locked, how long would she be able to support life in the bleak dark cabin? I had often asked that of myself and of others. I asked it again now, and whilst my mind ran upon the dinner talk Captain Robson, the old retired Newcastle shipmaster, stepped up to me.
They did not allow you to smoke on the poop; I stood in what would be called the gangway, and Captain Robson came along with a great meerschaum pipe in his hand, stuffing the bowl with a queer kind of granulated tobacco which he pulled out of a little sack.
'This is Zooloo mundungus,' said he with a hoarse, shouting laugh; 'I am learning to like it. They say it is arle a man can get on the coast yon,' and he hove up three stout chins in a measured nod in the direction of the sea over the bows.
'Are you going to take charge of a ship?' said I.
'I'm going to seek a job,' he answered.
'Were you long at sea, captain?'
'Ay, was I? Since I was twelve. D'ee ken,' said he, broadening his accent for my entertainment, 'that I'm the original laddie of this yarn: A boy was holding a candle in the North Sea for the skipper whilst he overhauled his chart. "Eh, sir," says the boy, "if they did but ken war we was at home!" "If we kenned oursells," says the skipper, "I'd ne'er heed a dam!"'
'You seem to know a good deal about the ice,' said I.
'I knew too much about most things,' he answered, puffing. 'If you was to turn to and pump out my mind, more'd come up than what the poets call sparkling brine.'
He looked to right and left to observe if he was overheard, and I guessed he was a wag who liked the laughter of many.
Just then four Italian emigrants began to sing together on the forecastle; their voices swelled in a pleasing concert; the rude harmonies of the engine-room, dim and deep, as interpretable as human voices, so articulate was the metallic clangour, mingled with the music the singers made without vexing the ear.
I listened, then looked at Captain Robson, whose round face was staring deafly seawards.
'Captain,' said I, 'figure a dismasted hull in sixty degrees of south latitude and nothing of land nearer than the South Shetlands. When she was abandoned there was plenty of tall ice on the horizon in points, on both bows and astern. What's to become of that wreck?'
'Are ye speaking of the "Lady Emma"?' said he.
I started and exclaimed, 'Oh, you've heard of her loss?'
'I've known Jim Hobbs, one of her owners, ever since he was a boy,' he answered. 'A little while afore I left London I met him at a luncheon party and we talked that loss o'er. Loss! Well, ye've not to call it that yet, neither. The skipper and two females remained aboard, Hobbs told me. The crew was quick in desarting. There was twelve foot of stump forrard, Hobbs said; they should have given the capt'n a chance. With less than twelve foot of stump when I was a boy, good prizes have been blowed under jury canvas into safety. But when steam came in,' said he, turning to send a gaze of contempt at the funnel, 'the sailor went out. Let the master of the "Lady Emma" have had a collier crew of my time aboard, and they'd ha' made no more of the loss of all three masts—twelve foot of stump and the bowsprit remaining, according to Hobbs—than a dog of his tail.'
'What chance do you give the hull?' said I.
He viewed me with an arch lift of his eyebrows, as though his smile at the instant were in them only.
'I'll answer you as I answered Hobbs that same question,' said he, after discharging a number of puffs; 'she'll be heard of again. I don't care about the ice. Dismast your ship and she'll wash round an object. I'm not speaking of a dead-be shore leagues long. Plant an iceberg close aboard a hulk and she'll wallow clear. It's the height of spar, the weight of rigging, plenty of surface of stowed sail for the wind to shoulder, that keeps a vessel helpless in her drift when she's not under command.'
'But if she strikes she's gone, masts or no masts.'
'She'll swim for her life. It's like striking out clear of your clothes.'
'You give that hull a chance then, captain?'
'I give her this chance: first, as to the ice; she's a naked swimmer, light as a cask, with the wind for a buffer 'twixt her and the ice, and a backwash of sea which she'll make the most of. And then this: if a whaler falls in with her and she's sound they'll tow her clear. She was worth thirty-two thousand pounds, ship and cargo, when she left the Thames. There's sights of grease, mon, in that money.'
He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and his wife who were singing a duet.