In the crowd he standeth
And hath but few friends there.”
Hávamál.
“Nothing gives one so lively an idea of eternal, irresistible progress—of steady, inexorable, unalterable fate, as the ceaseless grinding of these enormous engines.” Thus moralised Birger, as, two days after the events recorded in the last chapter, he stood with his brother officer, the Captain, on the grating that gave air into the engine-room. “In joy or in sorrow, in hope or in fear, on they go—grinding—grinding, never stopping, never varying, never hurrying themselves:—the same quiet, irresistible round over and over again: we go to bed—we leave them grinding; we get up—there they are, grinding still; we are full of hope, and joy, and expectancy, looking out for land and its pleasures—they go no faster; they would go no faster if we went to grief and misery. If you or I were to fall dead at this moment, the whole ship would be in an uproar, every man of them all showing his interest, or his curiosity, one way or other—but still would go on, through it all, that eternal, everlasting grinding.”
“Everlasting it is,” said the Captain, who was not at all poetical, and who was anxious to be at his journey’s end. “This steamer is the very slowest top I have ever had the misfortune to sail in. By every calculation we should have made the coast of Norway ages ago; I have been on the look out for it ever since daylight; but six, seven, eight, nine, and no coast yet. Breakfast over, and here are your everlasting wheels of fate grinding away, and not one bit nearer land, as far as I can see, than they were before. I’ll be hanged if the wind is not getting northerly too,” he said, looking up, as the fore and aft foresail over their head gave a flap, as if it would shake the canvas out of the bolt-ropes. “I thought so. Look at them brailing up the mainsail! wind and steam together, we never got seven knots out of this tub; I wonder what we shall get now—and the sea getting up too?”
Several consecutive pitches, which set the horses kicking, and prostrated one-half of the miserable, worn-out, dirty-looking deck passengers, seemed fully to warrant the Captain’s grumbling assertion, and they scrambled back to the poop; upon which most of the passengers were by this time congregated, for the sun was shining out brightly, and the wind, though there was plenty of it, was fresh and bracing.
They had evidently by this time opened the north of Scotland, for the slow, heaving swell of the Northern Ocean was rolling in upon them; and this, meeting the windwash knocked up by the last night’s south-easterly breeze, was making a terrible commotion in the ship, and everything and everybody belonging to it.
“Land! land!” shouted the Parson, who had climbed upon the weather bulwarks, and was holding on by the vang to steady his footing. “Land, I see it now; where could our eyes have been? There it is, like blue clouds rising out of the water.”
There was a general move and a general crowding towards the spot to which he was pointing, but just then the ship pitched bowsprit and bows under, jerking the Parson off his legs; upsetting every passenger who had nothing to hold on by, and submerging half-a-dozen men on the jib-boom, who were occupied in stowing the now useless jib. They rose from their involuntary bath puffing and blowing, and shaking the water from their jackets, but continuing their work as if nothing had happened.
There, however, was the land, beyond a doubt. No Cape Flyaway, but land—bold, decided, and substantial. Whether it was that people had not looked for it in the right direction, or had not known what to look for; or whether, as was most likely, a haze had hung over the morning sea, which the sun had now risen high enough to dispel; whatever was the cause, there stood the hitherto invisible land, speaking of hope and joy, and quiet dinners, and clean beds, and creating a soul under the ribs of sea-sickness.