CHAPTER IX
THE CRY OF A CHILD
It was cold, but the sweep of the dry night-wind was refreshing and inspiriting to me, who had been confined to my cabin all day. A bull’s eye lamp burnt under the overhanging ledge of the poop-deck. Beneath it was the clock, and the small hand was close upon one. The gleams of the lamp touched no living figure, and so lonely looked the ship that I could have easily supposed myself the only human being on board of her. The great fabric was leaning over under a vast cloud of canvas, and a sound of stealthy hissing, such as the stem of a vessel makes when she is swiftly tearing over a quiet surface of ocean, rose into the wind on either hand.
A ladder was close beside me, conducting on to the poop, or upper deck. I mounted it, and stood at the head of the steps looking around me. I saw but two figures. One of them was on the other side of the deck. He was motionless, with his arm round a rope, and his shape stood out against the sparkling stars as sharply as though he were a statue in ebony. The other figure was at the aftermost end, at the wheel. There was a deep shadow of rigging and of sail where I had come to a pause. The dusky hue of the cloak I wore blended with the obscurity, and I was not observed by the figure opposite.
I looked over the side and watched the water sweeping past white as milk, with a frequent glitter of beautiful green lights in it. I looked away into the far distance, where the confines of the black plain of the ocean were lost in the darkness of the night, and fixed my eyes upon the stars, which were shining sparely in those dim and distant reaches, and said to myself, Where is my home? Which of all these countless stars is shining down upon my home now? But have I a home? How can I tell, for I do not know who I am? Then I looked up at the swollen, pallid breasts of sails climbing one on top of another into faint, almost visionary spaces where the loftiest were; and whilst I looked I heard two silver chimes ring out of the darkness forward. What can those bells mean? I wondered. How marvellous was the hush upon this great, speeding shadow of a ship, this dim bulk of symmetrical clouds waving its star-reaching heights in solemn measure as though to the accompaniment of some deep spiritual ocean-music, heard by it, but soundless to my ears! Where was the multitude of people who swarmed upon the deck when I had come on board in the morning? I knew they were resting below, and the thought of that great crowd slumbering in the heart of the sweeping, cloud-like shadow at which I gazed awed me; but the emotion changed into one of fear and of loneliness suddenly, and to rally myself I turned and walked towards the after-end of the vessel.
The moon was in the west, and the light in the sky that way was the silvery azure which I had witnessed through my cabin porthole. I walked to the extreme end of the ship, where the helm was, and stood by the side of the wheel. When I was on board the French vessel I had always found something fascinating in the machinery of the helm. I used to gaze with childish wonder at the compass-card, steadily in its brass bowl pointing out the little vessel’s course, and I would watch with surprise the instant response of the small fabric to the movement of the wheel.
But now as I stood here beside this wheel I surveyed a stretch of deck that seemed measureless, as the white planks, glimmering like sand from my feet went stretching and fading into the obscurity far forward. Behind me, from under the high, dark stern of the ship, rushed the pale and yeasty wake, like a line of pale smoke blowing over the sea. The stars danced in the squares of the rigging; they tipped as with diamond-points the sides of the sails, and they blazed at the summits of the three dim spires of the ship’s masts; and the moon in the west, poised in an atmosphere of delicate greenish silver, trembled a waving fan-shaped stream of light upon the summer pouring of the ocean under her.
All at once the helmsman, on the other side of the wheel, of whose presence I had hardly been sensible, uttered a strange low sort of bellowing cry, and tied along the deck to where the figure of the other man was. Involuntarily I put my hand upon the wheel, as though instinctively feeling that it must be held steady, and that it must be held in any case, or the ship would be without governance. The two men came slowly along. The motions of each were full of wariness, and suggestive in the highest degree of alarm and astonishment.
‘Dummed if it ain’t a-steering the ship,’ said one of them in a hoarse voice.
‘You scoundrel, it’s a woman!’ cried the other. ‘How dare you quit your post. You’ll have the ship in the wind in a minute,’ and they both arrived together at the wheel running, one being pushed by the other.