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

by William Clark Russell

Of something done, I know not where;

Such as no language may declare.’

But time deepened the silence and the darkness. The old yearning grew sick, it languished; curiosity itself, the vulgar, commonplace quality of curiosity, fell mute and closed its eyes and seemed to sleep. The utter inability to penetrate, resulted in a sort of stagnation of soul. My mind lapsed into a condition of absolute passivity. I knew that I had a past; but of it, of all that entered into it, and created it, I was as ignorant as though it had never been. I believed it to be extinguished for ever, and I became resigned to the loss as we become resigned to the loss of those who have died; though a loss it was not to my unremembering brain in the sense that death is a loss to the mourner who has dried her tears; for she can remember; but I, though conscious of a loss, and of a loss that for all I knew might have rendered me a widow and motherless for life, though with a husband and children living and craving for me, could not weep over it, for I knew not what I had lost.

My condition excited much interest in Sydney; that is to say, amongst a circle of acquaintances whom we had got to know through some of the passengers who had come out in the ship with us. A doctor, whose reputation stood high in Sydney, was introduced to me, questioned me closely, subjected me to all the tests he could devise, carried Mrs. Lee and me here and there with some worthy, kind notion in his head of my memory taking fire from the sight of shops and streets, and gardens of beautiful flowers and the like; but all to no purpose. From nothing he could do, from nothing that I could see, did I get the least hint. I perfectly comprehended everything that I beheld, and everything that I heard; but no images of the past were presented to my mind.

I went by the name of Miss C——, and was thus spoken of by everybody excepting Mrs. Lee, who always referred to me and addressed me by the name of Agnes. Before I left Sydney, however, my appearance had greatly improved. It might have been the change from the sea to the shore; it might have been that condition of passivity which I have mentioned, which had silenced in me to a very large extent the dreadful, wearing, benumbing, blind conflicts of my spirit with my memory; but be the reason what it might, I was looking so much better when Mrs. Lee and I rejoined the ship, when she was about to sail for England, that Mrs. Richards scarcely recognised me. My hair was growing very thick and abundant again; it remained as white as snow, but being very plentiful, it looked as though it were powdered; it contrasted finely with my dark eyes and gave them, as Mrs. Lee would tell me, a very rich and glowing expression. Hair had sprouted, as Mr. McEwan predicted it would, on the brow which had been injured and where the scar was; but, strangely enough, this hair was black, whereas the other eyebrow was as snow-white as the hair of my head. There was but one way to remedy this extreme of hue. I could not make the growing hair white; and therefore, to rescue my face from the odd cast which the differently coloured eyebrows imparted, I purchased some dye at Sydney, and so brought my left eyebrow to look like my right one. That the shape of my nose had been altered by its having been broken or indented above the bridge I very well knew, but I could not know to what extent its shape differed from its form before the accident befell me. It was now, as of course it has ever remained, what might be termed a Roman nose, though scarcely high-bridged enough for that shape; but I easily conceived that the structural change of it, coupled with my snow-white hair, and the scar over my right eye, that gave a somewhat overhanging look to the brow there—these were changes, I say, to make me easily conceive that, however my face may have shown in the past, it could hardly be more changed had I worn a mask. My complexion, however, had wonderfully cleared. Those strange fine lines, the effect, as Mr. McEwan declared, of a terrible shock to the nervous system, were fading out of my cheeks, though they lingered somewhat obstinately about my forehead. I was pale, but no longer sallow; my skin, indeed, had grown very clear; and I was not always pale either, for, being very nervous, and constantly possessed by a painful sense of embarrassment through my not having any memory, and through my being conscious that my intellect was weakened by the want of memory, a very little matter would bring the blood to my cheeks, and often I would turn scarlet when suddenly addressed.

As you will suppose, I presented what may reasonably be called a very striking appearance, what with my white hair and dark eyebrows, and dark shining eyes and clear skin, and youthful well-proportioned figure. Mrs. Richards would tell me that amongst the passengers (during the homeward run) I passed for any age, from five-and-twenty to forty.

But to proceed with my story. It was some time about ten months from the date of my being rescued from the French brig—whose people, more especially the kind young Alphonse, were often in my mind—that the Deal Castle arrived in the River Thames. I stood on the deck with Mrs. Lee, all the canvas was furled, and the ship was being dragged up the river by a small steamboat. We had met with thick blowing weather in the Channel, and I had seen nothing of the English coast; but now we were in the River Thames; the land, with houses and gardens and fields, and blue hills in the far distance, was on either hand. It was a fine summer day; the river was crowded with ships of many kinds; one seemed to feel the beat of the mighty heart of the great metropolis that lay hidden beyond the bends and reaches, in this great artery of its river; and I gazed about me with an impassioned yearning.

There was no detail of the busy, shining scene at which I did not thirstily stare—from the half-embowered church-spire ashore—from the windmill languidly revolving—from the white cloud of a locomotive speeding through a cutting—from the tall factory chimney soiling the pure azure with its dingy feathering of smoke; from these and from scores of such things as these, to the barge with chocolate-coloured sails lazily stemming the stream, to the stately ship towing past, to the great steamer whose destination might be the land whence we were newly returned, to the little wherry doggedly impelled by its lonely occupant in a tall hat.

I gazed with a passion of anxiety and expectation, kindled afresh in me by the sight of the land—by the sight of what I had again and again been told was the land of my birth, the unremembered land in which my home was; but to no purpose. Nothing came back to me.

‘We shall pass through London,’ said Mrs. Lee, ‘and your memory may return at the sight of the streets; for rest assured, even supposing your home is not in London, that you have visited the great city, perhaps very often. And if London gives you nothing, and there is still the journey to Newcastle, then there will be Newcastle itself. And if all remains blank, there is my home for you to share; and though I should rejoice, even as my angel daughter would, over the recovery of your memory, you have become so necessary to me, dear Agnes, as a companion, that parting with you would be almost like losing another child.’