CHAPTER XIV. HARD WEATHER
Hardy carefully put away the good things he had discovered, and then made a pork sandwich with biscuits, and poured out a little rum which he mingled with water, and they both made a meal.
Had she been alone she would have been dying of fear; her lover was with her, and the sea had no terrors. They talked as they ate.
"I foresaw heavy weather," said he, "but not the loss of three men. We shall lose the ship, I fear; there are no signs of the weather clearing. My God! how this beast wallows! Why, you'd think the sun had burst out!"
For just then the air was whitened by a great sheet of water.
"If the boat forward is carried away—" He checked himself, and then continued, "If we lose the York we shall be picked up by something else. These old north-countrymen are born to live."
"I am seeing life on the ocean," said Julia, smiling at him.
"Why, it has come as thick as cockroaches," he answered. "When you get home you shall write your story, and the critics who take shipping on a summer day from Putney to Henley will exclaim as one man, 'What a lie!'"
"Who rang the bell?" said Julia. "That question will worry me whilst I live."
A sea struck the deck-house and blinded the weather-windows. The sturdy structure quivered. Hardy waited until the water had roared away overboard, and then said:
"A bell will strike of itself in a rolling ship. I have heard it. Or it was hit by a rope. Do you believe in ghosts, Julia?"
"I don't want to."
"The stroke was a sudden come-to in the reel of the brig, or a rope did it," said Hardy, and she tried to look as though she believed him.
Thus they talked whilst they sat in the deck-house, for out of it they would have stood to be washed overboard. The seas poured in gray-green folds, and the foam rolled about the decks like the cream of the breaker on shelving sand. She was a stout bucket and strongly knit, and if all had been well with her she would have sported with this breeze. Her canvas was setting her to the eastwards broadside on, and Hardy was glad of it, because he guessed that the York would remain hove to, and that her drift would not be much greater than the sag of this half-drowned Geordie.
But though he looked abroad he never witnessed any signs of improvement, or even promise of improvement, in the weather. It was not blowing harder, however, which was a good thing, yet he guessed that even if the weight of the wind remained as it stood, then, should it blow all night, a fair daybreak would not reveal the York, in which case they were shipwrecked, and must either wait to be taken off, or trust to God's mercy to keep the boat in her place forward, that they might launch her, and seek the succour that would not come. The deck-house was often hit by the sea, but the blows were rarely hard, and there was more terror in the thunder of the stroke than in the possibility of the structure going.
"I see a scuttle-butt out there," said he once during the course of the morning.
"What's that?" she asked.
"A cask for holding fresh water for the men to drink when on deck."
He stepped out, got under the rail, and crept to the scuttle-butt with the foam about his feet. The dipper hung by a sling; he dropped it through the hole and brought it up full, and tasting it found it fairly sweet, sweet enough for human necessity. He added security to the cask by further lashings, and covered the hole to protect the water from the flying salt, then crept back through the foam to the side of his sweetheart, first sending the sight of a falcon piercing the rain-swept obscurity of the quarter in which he guessed the York was lying hove to. But all was the confusion of the headlong surge, raging in frequent collision, the stormy stare of motionless vapour, the wink of the sea-flash within the veil of haze, and the universal groaning of old ocean when that grim Boatswain, the Gale, whitens her back with the thongs of his cat.
About midday they made another meal off pork sandwiches, a godsend to the poor creatures. As the time went by and the weather held as before, the sense of shipwreck grew keener and keener in Hardy. Not so with the girl; compared to what might have been, this wallowing lump of brig, filled with timber, straining afloat, was paradise. But Hardy did not much relish the notion of having to take to that boat yonder. He could see that with the yard-arm tackle which he would find she was to be easily got on to her keel, and hoisted out of it by the little winch just before the mainmast.
It might prove a job, for his shipmate was a girl; yet much harder jobs, girl or no girl, were to be got through at sea. But until the weather calmed he could not think of the boat, and if the weather did calm and left the brig afloat, which was very probable, and he managed to launch the boat, then, bethinking him of Julia and himself in that small squab fabric, his heart grew cold; because next to the raft the open boat in mid-ocean is the greatest desperation of the sailor. Nearly every chapter of its romance is a tragedy. One dies and is buried, one goes mad and springs overboard to drink of the crystal fountain which is gushing in the sweet valley just there. Another is hollow-eyed with famine, and the gaunt cheeks work with the movement of the jaw upon the piece of lead or the die of boot-leather, which helps the saliva. Hardy knew it all, had tasted some of it, and he could not think of Julia and that little open boat and the flawless horizon, more pitiless to the wrecked mariner than the cordon of soldiers to the famished city, without feeling his heart turn cold.
And now happened something which I fear the reader will think more incredible than any other incident in this volume.
After talking a little while together, these two people rose from their chairs and knelt down in prayer. Hardy believed in God and in the mercy of God, and so did Julia, and he asked God in the simple language of the plain English seaman's heart to protect them and be with them, and he thanked him for the mercy he had already vouchsafed; and depend upon it no British sailor will consider this an unnatural act on the part of Hardy, because always the proudest heart of oak in the hour of triumph, the most depressed heart of oak in the hour of trial, has been accustomed to look up to God and thank or beseech him, for it is he who shares the loneliness of the seaman on the wide, wide sea.
But let me assure the reader, also, that lovers do not make love in shipwreck as they do under the awning of the passenger liner, or in the bower of roses ashore. Death is too near to allow passion to expend itself in the form made familiar by the novel. Their talk often went to Captain Layard and the amazing cunning he had exhibited in inventing the trap they had all fallen into.
"I believe," said Hardy, "only two are dead on board. He had a book to give them the doses, and his brain was clearly equal to understanding what it said. But would the rum absorb all the poison? Would not one man get more than his whack? A few grains more would have done for us all. The beggar took care not to drink himself, and none of us thought of asking him to."
"How did you feel when you awoke?" she asked.
"Much as you did, I expect," he answered.
But talking was not very easy in this interior. The water, sheeting against the deck-house, seethed through speech and confounded it. There was the thunder of the fallen sea forward, and the incommunicable maledictions of a sodden brig in the trough filled the gale with bewilderment as it flew. Every fabric afloat has a voice of her own, and like her sailors, she knows how to swear when injured.
In the course of the afternoon Hardy stepped into the after-berths, but found nothing to reward his search. The papers of an old timberman are uninteresting; the letters of an auld wife of Sunderland to her Geordie are sacred, and saving three or four clay pipes and some tobacco, for which Hardy was grateful, there was little to be seen worth mentioning. If this gale slackened into moderate weather the girl should sleep in one of these berths; if not, near the door in the interior on the best sort of bed he could contrive, because, as he meant to keep watch and watch himself throughout the night, she would be close by to rescue if some thunderous surge should discharge the deck-house from its obligation of sticking. He had searched for candles and had found none; a few boxes of matches were in a sort of desk fixed to the bulkhead near the bunk. So he came out of the captain's berth with an old mattress, and then he brought some wearing apparel, a heavy coat with big horn buttons, and a pair of north-country breeches, which, if seized to a stay for fresh air, might fill up and stand out like the half of a Dutchman in a jump.
"What's all that for?" said Julia.
He explained, and she loved him, and thought how good he was.
Yes, there are even worse conditions of life to a girl than being shipwrecked with a sailor who is a gentleman, and if the gentleman informs the spirit of a sailor, its impulse is never greater than when it responds to the appeal of a girl's helplessness.
He cut up a little tobacco and smoked a pipe. It seemed to bring him within hail of civilisation, and Julia enjoyed the smell of the tobacco-smoke immensely, and said it made her think of her father.
"How would he relish this picture?" said he, referring to their situation.
"He would not like to be here, that is all he would think. Will this brig keep together, do you fancy?"
"Oh, yes, and I'll tell you what—the gale doesn't harden, which is a good sign. There was plenty of weather in the moon last night, but in these parts it is not often long-lived."
"Is not a tremendous sea running?" she asked.
"Yes, from the Ramsgate or Margate Sands point of view. You must go to about fifty-eight south, right off the Horn, and get amongst the ice to know what a tremendous sea is like. They come like the cliffs of Dover at you, and the deck is up and down, whilst the keel sweeps up the acclivity. It is splendid and frightful. I was hove to for a fortnight down there; we couldn't drive clear of the ice, and we had about four hours of daylight to see by. All the devils in hell raved in our rigging as we sat upright a breathless instant on the amazing peak we had climbed. No, Julia, this is not a tremendous sea, and the brig will hang together and outweather twenty such."
The vessel, however, was acting as though she considered it a tremendous sea. Had she been dismasted or a steamer her behaviour could not have been worse. Her sails a little steadied her, but her rollings and motions and plungings and heavings were sickening and insufferable, because she was nearly full of water. She had no buoyancy and the seas made a rock of her, and often sprang in green sheets right over her—a wet and yelling game of leap-frog.
Late in the afternoon, when it was almost dark, one of these seas filled the caboose and swept it to leeward, where it lay stranded. The outcry of hurled ironmongery, of crashing china, of skipping knives and forks, pot, kettles, and pans, along with the noise of the splintering caboose, was enough to make Hardy think that the brig was scattering under their feet. The girl grasped his hand when that sea came and the galley went; she thought it was all over with them. Hardy kept his thoughts to himself: his real anxiety was in the boat, which might be washed overboard or dashed into staves, and in the deck-house, which was their only shelter.
Happily the old bucket had taken up her position on her own account, and it was chiefly the bows and amidships which got the drenches; it was seldom that the deck-house was struck by a sea whose weight was a menace.
"It is miserable to be without light at sea," said Hardy, "on a black night in heavy weather. But there is no lamp here and none in the berths, and if there was where should I find oil? We must face it through, Julia, and you must sleep."
"I have had more sleep than I want," replied Julia. "I shall not mind the darkness if the bell isn't struck."
"It may be struck by a rope, by nothing else. If a ghost, how could an essence grasp substance? How could something you could walk through lift a knife or try and pull down a lamp-post?"
"I sha'n't like it if I hear it," she replied. "Oh, how dreadful to think of him washing about under us! Wretched man! You should have seen the unearthly expression of his face whilst he sat staring forward, waiting for the little drummer to appear."
"The great poet is true," said Hardy, who had fingered a few volumes in his day, albeit he was a sailor in the Merchant Service of England.
"'For shapes which come not at an earthly call Will not depart when mortal voices bid; Lords of the visionary eye whose lid, Once raised, remains aghast and will not fall.'"
"Those words are true of that poor dead man," said Julia. "Aghast! you should have seen him when he turned up his eyes to God and prayed."
The afternoon closed into early evening, and it was as black as a wolf's throat at the hour of sundown. Through the windows you could see the light of the foam, sudden pallid glares, rushes of dim phosphoric gleams which merely made the darkness visible. The brig was a drunken vision, and the yells of her rigging might be likened to the screams of a tipsy slut who is being thrashed by her man in a thunder-storm.
The two sweethearts ate some biscuit, and Julia held a lighted match whilst Hardy mixed some rum and water for them both. They drank out of the same glass, and neither of them apologised. Then Hardy felt and wound up his watch, for he wanted time, though he couldn't see it then except by striking a match. They sat together and I dare say he put his arm round her waist, and possibly she supported her head upon his shoulder after removing her hat.
It was a ticklish sitting-ground and they sometimes slided, which was a very good reason why Hardy should hold her by the waist, and why Julia should cling lovingly with her head. And in this posture they entered the night and passed perhaps a couple of hours, so that when Hardy struck a match he found the time nine.
He made for the mattress, felt and found it, and the north-country apparel which was to form the bedclothes. He then lurched back to Julia, who did not want to lie down, but he was her lord in resolution and her love consented.
Always groping, for despite the sea-flash it was inside here of a midnight blackness, he pillowed her head with a garment of north-country measurement, and then carefully covering her to the neck with the skipper's coat, he pressed his lips to the brow of the girl who was to be his wife, and who was therefore sacred to him, and bade her sleep and leave him to watch and nod and watch.
And now all that followed was sickening, sloppy, howling, reeling, foaming hours of darkness, with nothing in them but the drunken vision of brig, and the noisy rage of her straining heart. But at half-past three o'clock by Hardy's watch the weather was undoubtedly moderating; by five it was blowing a little fresh; by six it was daylight and the wind northeast, a pleasant breeze, and the green sea rolled in foamless swells, cutting the wake of the sun, which shone brightly out of every blue lagoon 'twixt the clouds.
The girl was up and sitting at the table. She had slept a little, but that little was sound and good. Hardy brought the telescope out of the berth: it was a poor glass, but you could see more through it than with the naked eye. The brig was rolling ponderously on the swell, whose heave was sometimes too sudden for her, and she would stagger with a scream of white water from her side. Her canvas was blowing out, and the sodden old cask may have had some way on her.
Hardy stepped out and looked for the York. Had he looked for St. Paul's Cathedral he could not have seen less of it. The ship was not in sight and he fetched a deep breath, for either her crew had abandoned him and Julia to what sailors would know might prove a terrible death, or the ship's drift had been faster than he had allowed for.
"She's not in sight," he shouted to Julia, then sprang into the main-shrouds, put his telescope over the rim of the top, and got into the top.
She was not in sight from the top and he crawled as high as the cross-trees, and she was not in sight from that elevation. Nothing was in sight but the horizon, which wound eel-like to the flashing clasp of the sun upon it.
He regained the deck and put the telescope down and sat beside Julia.
"What shall we do?" she said, when he had given her the news.
"We will breakfast," he answered.
And forthwith he made biscuit sandwiches of the pork, of which there still remained a good lump, a godsend. There was nothing much to elate him in the sight of the boat still safely lashed to the deck; he feared the open boat in mid-ocean with few provisions, little water, and an everlasting menace of weather, for blow it will if it does not blow now, and what sort of a time would they have had afloat in that boat last night?
Julia dredged her lover's face with her eyes but could not make out what was passing in his mind, because he himself did not know what was passing there.
"We must husband our stores," said he, "and wait for something to sight us."
Saying which he rose and stepped up a little ladder on to the top of the deck-house, directed by sailorly instincts to what he wanted, and there it was securely lashed to the iron stanchions of the low rail—a flag-locker. He opened it and took out the Red Ensign and carried it right aft, and bent it union down to the peak signal-halliards and hoisted it half-mast high, a signal of deep distress and death. Its rippling noise was pleasant, but the look of it was ghastly with its dumb appeal to a pitiless sea.
Julia stood beside him and sank her clear gaze far into the recesses of the ocean, and saw the sea line working and nothing more.
"Let's go and see if the galley has betrayed any secrets of food," said he.
The sluggish roll of the brig was no hindrance to feet accustomed to the bounding deck. They found the galley murdered; it was split and shivered, but the coppers to the stroke of the sea that slung them had spewed out a big lump of beef and a bolster of duff—the sailors' pudding—composed of dark flour and slush with here and there a currant, but not always. Hardy pounced upon the food as the adjutant lights upon the floating Hindoo.
"They left their dinner behind them," he said. "Good God! what a noble haul. Here is enough for a week with care."
"Is it cooked?"
He answered this question by pulling out his knife and cutting off a piece of the meat. Another half-hour would have cooked it, but it was eatable to human necessity.
He stowed this provender away in the deck-house and filled the breaker from the scuttle-butt, then went with Julia to look at the bell.
"You did not hear it last night," he said.
"No," she answered.
"It shall not trouble you again," said he, and he unhooked it, and threw it down.
"But who struck it?" she asked.
"He'll not strike it again," he answered.
He peeped through the forescuttle and saw nothing but the gleam of black water washing below.
"The rats don't like this sort of thing," said he. "Can you pull upon a rope, Julia?"
"I am as strong as you," she answered.
He smiled with a glance at her beautiful figure, and said:
"Turn to, then, and lend me a hand to shorten sail."
Between them they manned the necessary buntlines and clewlines, and Julia dragged as handsomely as her sweetheart.
"Give us a song, George, for time," she said, and he started "Chillyman," which sea-air Julia had caught from hearing it on board the Glamis Castle, and her voice threaded his like the notes of a flute.
"Randy dandy, heigh-ho! Chillyman! Pull for a shilling, heigh-ho! Chillyman!"[1]
In fact, you may put any words you like to these sea-tunes, and the sailors will pull the better if you damn the eyes of the quarter-deck in rhyme.
Hardy next thoroughly overhauled the brig, so far as perception of her condition was possible. He could not see why she should not hold together through twenty such gales as roared over her last night. He stood with Julia looking at their only boat, beside which there lay, as though placed by some angel of mercy, a watch-tackle. The sight of that watch-tackle sank him into contemplation, and Julia gazed at him whilst he thought. How weary were the motions of the brig upon that sulky sweep of swell! Yet the fine figure of the girl swayed to it with the graceful ease of a figurehead curtseying at the bow. She was shipwrecked, she was in a dreadful situation of peril, this time to-morrow she might be floating in the sea a corpse, and yet never on board the Indiaman, on board the York, or at home had she felt happier. She was loving him passionately and he was always with her, and she could not but be happy.
Presently he said:
"I will tell you how it can be done when it needs to be done. She is a small boat and not heavy, and you and I will cant her on to her bilge with handspikes, then I'll hook that watch-tackle to a strop round the foremost thwart and take the hauling part to the winch, and rouse her along to abreast of the gangway. That gangway there unships, and we sit low upon the sea, and we'll tumble the boat through the gangway overboard, smack-fashion. If she proves too heavy we'll rig out a spar"—here he cast his eyes round—"with the watch-tackle made fast to her, and the winch will do the rest. Yes, that is my scheme if it should come to it. Meanwhile let us be patient and keep a lookout for ships."
But the imprisonment on board this abandoned hull of Mr. George Hardy and Miss Julia Armstrong was to continue until the dawn of three days, counting from Hardy's time of finding the girl. All this while it was very fine weather, and of a night they would sit on top of the deck-house whilst Hardy smoked and Julia prattled. They watched the sea lights which glittered upon the black breast of the ocean; they watched the flight of the meteor. They talked of the stars, which nowhere wheel in so much splendour as over the sea, and of the great Spirit who controls their flight. Morally they were the least shipwrecked of people. They were happy in each other's company; if either one had been alone it might have proved madness to him or to her, but the voice of love, the presence of love even in the gloom of calamity, made a light of their own which was as inspiriting as the hope that springs eternal. It was not strange that no ships ever showed a white rag of canvas, a coil of sooty smoke upon the horizon in any point of the compass, because the brig sat low and her "dip" would be small, and a ship may be within the compass of a boat-race and yet not be seen. Hardy often went aloft and searched the waters; he did not lose heart, because he felt sure that something must heave in sight sooner or later, and meanwhile with great care the food they had would last them a week or perhaps longer, and there was fresh water for a fortnight or perhaps longer; for I am telling you what I have heard, and like the tramp in Dickens's sketch, my squire "would not tell a lie for no man."
Hardy was also sure that the brig would hold together, and being of the careless nature of the sailor, though provident, willing, and sober, he would not allow his spirits to be depressed, and he had eyes enough in his head to see that Julia regarded their perilous condition as something in the way of an outing—to be enjoyed. She was a fine girl and we are never weary of admiring her. I have told you that she was not pretty, but her face, what with the cock of her head, the hand on the hip, the speaking appeal of her eyes, carried such a character of romance that it not only interested you at once, when she looked at you full and fastened her eyes upon yours with her slight smile, it made you even think her pretty, and certainly the truest beauty of a woman's face comes into it from her mind.
Then broke the dawn of the third day, and Hardy, who had been sleeping since three, awoke and stepped out of the deck-house, and with the brig's telescope in hand climbed the few steps and searched the sea. It was again a fine morning; the heavens were lofty with their freckling of stationary small cloud; the wind was a light breeze a little to the north of east; and the sea, which streamed in thin lifts, sparkled to the caress of a hand that could make it roar when it thought fit.
Suddenly into the lenses of the glass there entered a full-rigged ship, showing nothing but three single-reefed topsails and a foresail and the trembling line of her hull a little above the horizon. "A full-rigged ship under that sail in this weather!" thought Hardy. "By heaven, it must be the York, and if so she is abandoned!"