Geoffrey Hampstead: A Novel

by Stinson Jarvis

At dawn, when they went into Charlotte, it was blowing a gale. Not a Cape Horn gale, perhaps, but a good enough gale, and the water was lively around the pier-heads. Several vessels could be seen up the lake, running down to the harbor for shelter, and wallowing in the sea. So they ran the yacht far up into the harbor between the piers, and made fast as far away from the lake as they could get, to avoid being fouled by incoming vessels, and to escape the heavy swell that found its way in from outside. An hour after the sailing vessels had made the port the mail-line steamer Eleusinian came yawing in, with some of her windows in bad shape, and glad to get in out of the sea.

Next morning it was blowing harder than ever. Everything outside the cabins was disagreeable. The water they floated in seemed to be principally mud, and on land the mud seemed principally water. Some of the adventurous waded through the mire to see the works for smelting iron in the neighborhood. But the only thing resembling fun outside the boat was trying to walk on the piers. Two figures, to which yellow oilskin suits lent their usual grace, would support a third figure, clad in a long water-proof, resembling a sausage. These three would make a dash through the wind and seize a tall post or a spile for mooring vessels, and here they would pause, hold on, and recover their lost breath. Then, slanting into the wind, they would make a sort of tack, partly to windward, till they reached the next spile, and so on, while occasionally they would be deluged with the top of a wave. The fun of this consisted in the endeavor to avoid being blown into the water. Certainly the sausage could not have gone alone. After several hours in the cabin the element of change in this exercise made it quite a pastime. It cooled the blood and took away the fidgets, and, on returning, made the cabins seem a pleasant shelter instead of a prison.

So far there had been no chance to leave the harbor for the purpose of reaching Toronto. The wind was dead ahead from that quarter. Young Dusenall was watching the weather continually, very anxious to get away to be in time for the yacht race there on the 7th and 8th. He was over at the steamboat hobnobbing with the captain of the Eleusinian, who was also anxious to get on with his vessel. What with whisky and water, nautical magic, and one thing or another between the two of them they got the wind to go down suddenly about five o'clock that evening. Charley came back in high good-humor. The captain had offered to tow the Ideal behind the steamer to Toronto, and nothing but a long, rolling sea, with no wind to speak of, could be noticed outside.

Jack did not like going to sea hitched up, Mazeppa-like, to a steamer, and he had misgivings as to the weather. The leaden-colored clouds, banked up in the west, were moving slowly down the lake like herded elephants. They did not yet look pacific, and he feared that they would make another stampede before the night was over. He declared it was only looking for another place to blow from. Charley answered that the race came off on the day after to-morrow, and, as they had to get to Toronto somehow, why not behind the steamer? As Jack was unable to do any more than say what he thought, he suggested "that, if the boat must go out in this sort of way during bad weather, that the women had better take the train home." The trip in the yacht promised to be unpleasant, but when Mrs. Dusenall considered the long, dusty, and hot journey around the western end of the lake she decided to "stick to the ship."

At seven o'clock in the evening they were flying out of port behind the steamer at the end of a long hawser. A heavy dead swell was rolling outside, and the way the Ideal got jerked from one wave to another boded ill for the comfort of the passage. Charley hung on, however, thinking that this was the worst of it and that the sea would go down.

The night grew very dark, and two hours afterward the gale commenced again, and blew harder than before from the same quarter. Every time they plunged hard into a wave the decks would be swept from stem to stern, while a blinding spray covered everything. If they had cast off at this time they could have sailed back to Charlotte in safety, but Charley was bound to see Toronto, and held on.

Suddenly, in the wildness of the night, they heard a crack of breaking timber, and the next moment the tall mast whipped back toward the stern like a bending reed. A few anxious moments passed before those aft could find out what had happened. In the darkness, and the further obscurity caused by the flying water, the bowsprit had fouled the towline. The bowstays had at once parted and, perhaps assisted by the recoil of the mast, the bowsprit had snapped off, like a carrot, close to the stem.

This large piece of timber was now in the water, acting like a battering-ram against the starboard bow, with the stowed staysail, and all the head gear, attached to it. There was no use trying to clear away the wreck by endeavoring to chop through all the wire rigging, chains, forestays, bowsprit shrouds, bobstays, and running gear, all adrift in a mass that would have taken a long time to cut away or disentangle, even in daylight and calm water. Besides this, one could not see his hand held before his face, except by lantern-light, and such was the unnatural pitching of the yacht that it was almost impossible to stand without holding on to something. Charley, who was steering, asked of one of the English hands, who was carefully crawling aft to take the wheel, "How's everything forward?" To Charley's mind the reply seemed to epitomize things as the man touched his hat and answered respectfully, "Gone to 'ell, sir." He spat on the watery deck, as he said this, while a blast of wind and half a ton of water from the bows swept away so effectually both the remark and the tobacco juice that Mr. Lemons could not help absurdly thinking of the tears of Sterne's recording angel. The sailor was very much disgusted at the condition of things, and both he and his remark were so free from any appearance of timidity that the Hon. M. T. Head felt like giving him five dollars. While on shore, the honorable gentleman was accustomed to emphasize his language, but, in the present crisis, no wild horses could have dragged from him a questionable word.

Geoffrey's long arms and strength came in well that night. At the first crack of the timber he slid out of his oil-skins for work, and his was one of those cool heads that alone are of use at such a time. On a sailing vessel the first effect of a bad accident in the night-time is to paralyze thought. The danger and the damage are at first unknown. The blackness of the night, the sounds of things smashing, the insecurity of foothold, the screaming of the wind, and the tumbling of the waters, all tend to kill that energy and concentration of thought which, to be useful, must rise above these enervating influences.

Jack had had more experience than Geoffrey, and thus knew better what to do. But Geoffrey, for his part, was "all there." When he was hanging down over the side, and climbing about to get the floating, banging mass of wreckage attached to the throat-halyards, the tops of the waves that struck him were unable to wash him away, and when he had succeeded in his efforts, the wreckage was hoisted bodily inboard.