So things went on till midnight, when the men at the wheel were relieved, as well as the look-out forward, and the port watch came on deck; while, the starbowlines going below, Mr Mackay took the place of the second mate as the officer on duty. Tom Jerrold, too, lugged out Sam Weeks and made him put in an appearance, much against his will; but nothing subsequently occurred to vary the monotony of the life on board or interfere with the vessel’s progress, for, although it was blowing pretty nearly “half a gale,” as sailors say, we “made a fair wind of it”—keeping steadily on our course, south-west by west, and getting more and more out into the Atlantic with each mile of the seething water the Silver Queen spurned with her forefoot and left eddying behind her.
The wind, somehow or other, seemed to get into my head, like a glass of champagne I had on Christmas-day when father and all of us went to Westham Hall and dined with the squire. I can’t express how jolly it made me feel—the wind I mean, not the champagne; for it was as much as I could do to refrain from shouting out aloud in my exultation, as it blew in my face and tossed my hair about, pressing against my body with such force that I had to hold on by both hands to the weather bulwarks to keep my feet, as I gazed out over the side at the magnificent scene around me—the storm-tossed sea, one mass of foam; the grand blue vault of heaven above, now partially lit by the late rising moon and twinkling stars, that were occasionally obscured by scraps of drifting clouds and flying scud; and, all the while, the noble ship tearing along, a thing of beauty and of life, mastering the elements and glorying in the fight, with the hum of the gale in the sails and its shrieking whistle through the rigging, and the ever-murmuring voices of the waters, all filling the air around as they sang the dirge of the deep!
“You seem to like it, youngster,” observed Mr Mackay, stopping his quarter-deck walk as he caught sight of my face in the moonlight and noticed it’s joyous glow, reflecting the emotions of my mind. “You look a regular stormy petrel, and seem as if you wanted to spread your wings and fly.”
“I only wish I could, sir,” I cried, laughing at his likening me to a “Mother Carey’s chicken,” as the petrel is familiarly termed, a number of them then hovering about the ship astern. “I feel half a bird already, the wind makes me so jolly.”
Mr Mackay quietly smiled and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Take care, my boy,” said he good-humouredly, “you’ll be jumping overboard in your enthusiasm. You seem to be a born sailor. Are you really so fond of the sea?”
“I love it! I love it!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “Now, I can imagine, sir, the meaning of what I read in Xenophon with father, about the soldiers of Cyrus crying with joy when they once more beheld the sea after their toilsome march for months and months, wandering inland over a strange and unknown country without a sight of its familiar face to tell them of their home by the wave-girt shores of Greece!”
“You’re quite a poet, Graham,” observed Mr Mackay, laughing now, though not unkindly. There was, indeed, a tone of regret and of sadness, it seemed to me, in his voice. “Ah, well, you’ll soon have all such romantic notions taken out of you, my boy, when you’ve seen some of the hardships of a sailor’s life, like others who at one time were, perhaps, as full of ardour for their profession at the start as yourself.”
“I hope not, sir,” I replied seriously. “I should never like to believe differently of it to what I do now. I think it is really something to be proud of, being a sailor. It is glorious, it—it—it’s—jolly, that’s what it is, sir!”
“A jolly sight jollier being in bed on a cold night like this,” muttered Weeks, who was shivering by the skylight, the tarpaulin cover of which he had dragged round his legs for warmth. “Don’t you think so, sir?”