Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 2 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

I helped her to undress, and saw her into bed, and I sat and read aloud to her until she fell asleep. Her mother had sat in an armchair watching her, until some one began to play on the piano, whilst I was reading to Alice, on which Mrs. Lee softly went out to silence the music, as I might suppose, for it presently ceased, and before she returned Alice had fallen asleep; whereupon, creeping from the berth, I whispered to Mrs. Lee that her daughter slumbered, and went to my own cabin.

The bracket lamp was alight, but it burnt dimly, and I brightened it for the sake of the cheerfulness and the companionship of the flame. I was sad at heart, and my head ached, but I was not sleepy. Secretly I had been greatly agitated by what the gipsy had said. Of course I knew it was pure invention on the woman’s part; but even as mere suggestions her words had sunk deep. Could it be that I was a married woman? Could it be that I had children? The thought raised an agony of desire to know—to be sure; but it brought with it no other yearning. I knew not that there were dear ones at home mourning over me as dead, and therefore my heart could not crave for them. To my eclipsed and blackened mind my husband and my children were as the unborn infant is to the mother that may yet bear it. I was without memory and, no matter what might be the imaginations infixed in my mind by the suggestions and conjectures of others, I was without the power to realise.

But not the less was the struggle after recollection a dreadful anguish. Sometimes I sat and sometimes I paced the deck of the cabin, and all the while I was saying to myself, ‘Suppose that I am a wife! Suppose that I have left a husband and children behind me at my home, wherever it may be!’ And then I would come to a stand, and fold my arms tightly across my breast, and close my eyes and with knitted brow search in the blackness within me, till the fruitless quest grew into physical pain unendurable as though some cruel hand were upon my heart.

And there was something more than my own intolerable mental condition to depress me. I could not doubt that Alice Lee was dying. She might be spared for some weeks; she might even be spared to find a grave in Australia. But when I had looked at her after her fits of coughing that afternoon, and when I had taken a final glance at her as she lay sleeping, I could not doubt that her time was short, that whether or not she should live to reach Australia she would certainly never behold her native country again. Short as had been our association, I could not have loved her more had she been known to me and had she been dear to me all her life. I loved Mrs. Lee, but I loved Alice Lee more than I loved her mother. My grief was selfish, but then all grief is more or less so. When this girl dies, I thought to myself, what friends shall I have? Who will compassionate my loneliness as she does? Who will make me feel as she does, whilst my memory remains black, that I am not utterly solitary? I know that whilst she lives I shall have a friend, someone who will care for me, someone who will not lose sight of me when this voyage is ended and the homeless world is before me. But she will die before the voyage is ended, and what then will become of me? O God, take pity upon me! I cried out of the anguish of my soul; and, throwing myself upon my knees, I clasped my hands and prayed for mercy and for help to Him to whom Alice Lee had taught me to pray.

The night was very quiet. The steerage was silent; one man I had observed reading at a table under the lamp; but the fine night, as I might suppose, detained his fellow-passengers on deck. There was a bright moon; the silver sheen lay upon the glass of the cabin porthole and so obscured it with misty radiance that the stars and the dark line of the horizon were invisible. The wind was fair and fresh, and the noise of the water washing past penetrated the silence. The ship rocked stately and slow; indeed it was true tropic sailing, with a tropic temperature in the cabin and a tropic night without, to judge by the glory of the moonlight upon the cabin window.

The minutes crept on, but feeling sleepless I had no mind to undress myself. Indeed, I had a longing to go on deck, for the temperature of the berth was uncomfortably warm; I did not know how to open the porthole, nor, though I had been able to open it, should I have dared to do so lest a sudden roll of the ship might submerge the orifice and fill the berth with water. The temptation, therefore, to go on deck was keen, and it was rendered the keener by my hot brow and headache; in imagination I tasted the sweet night wind cool with dew, and beheld the wide-spread splendour cast by the moon upon the vast dark surface of the sea. But then it would shortly be ten o’clock, at which hour a man regularly tapped upon my door and bade me extinguish my lamp; and then, again, I remembered how Mr. Harris and Mrs. Richards had stated that it was against the rules of the ship for women to wander alone upon the decks after the hour for extinguishing the lights had been struck upon the ship’s bell.

Suddenly I heard a voice calling down the hatchway at the forward end of the steerage; someone gruffly replied, possibly the man who had been seated reading under the lamp. I paid no heed to these cries; they were frequent enough down in this part of the ship. But about five minutes after the cry had sounded my cabin door was lightly beaten and opened, and Mrs. Richards entered.

‘I am glad to find you dressed,’ she exclaimed. ‘I believed you would have been in bed in spite of your light burning. There is a fine sight to be seen on deck. What do you think it is? A ship on fire! You may make many voyages without seeing such a sight.’

‘A ship on fire!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I should greatly wish to see it! But it is nearly ten o’clock.’

‘And what of that?’ said she.