An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘Pooh, pooh; hang turning in! I feel myself of forty-spirit power to-night, just in the humour, if I were a member, to go down to the House and terrify the old ladies in it who call themselves Sir Johns and Sir Thomases, and who wear swallow-tailed coats and broad-brimmed hats, with a passionate attack on the British Constitution.’

He called for brandy and seltzer. However, we had not been sitting twenty minutes when his mood changed; his dinner-party face darkened. He folded his arms and lay back in his chair, looking downwards with a gathering scowl upon his brow. I rose.

‘Good-night, Wilfrid,’ said I.

He viewed me with an absent expression, said ‘Good-night,’ and at once went, but in a mechanical way, governed by habit without giving his mind to the action, to his berth, at the door of which I saw him stand a moment whilst he gazed hard at the cabin abreast him; then rubbing his brow with the gesture of one who seeks to clear his brain, he disappeared.

Four bells were struck forward. I quietly stepped on deck, and whilst I stood looking into the binnacle Finn came up to me.

‘Shall we tarn to now, sir,’ said he, ‘and get this here melancholy job over?’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘the sooner the better. Sir Wilfrid has gone to his cabin. Tell your people to be quick and secret.’

He trudged forward, and presently returned with Cutbill and another seaman. The three of them went below, leaving Crimp to get the gangway rigged and lighted. A couple of globular lamps, such as might be used for riding lights, were suspended against the bulwarks, and between them a seaman rested a grating of the length of a stretcher. The moon was rising at this moment on our starboard beam, an arch of blood defining the indigo-black line of the horizon there that on either hand of her went melting out into a blending of starladen sky, with the dark and gleaming ocean brimming to the yacht, vast as the heavens themselves looked. Presently up through the hatch rose the figures of Captain Finn and the two men, swaying under the weight of the canvas-shrouded form they bore. The watch on deck came aft and gathered about the gangway, where they glimmered like visionary creatures to the dull, yellow shining of the lamps. Face after face seemed to come twisting and wriggling out of the dusk—visions of hairy salts, rendered lifelike and actual by the dull illumination that glanced upon their shadowy lineaments. The wind filled the rigging with melancholy noises, there was a yearning sob in the sound of the water as it washed aft, broken and hissing serpent-like from the bow. The canvas rose dark, but it was now gathering to its loftier cloths a faint, delicate, pinkish tinge from the red moonbeam, though in a few minutes, when the planet had lifted her ill-shapen face clear of the black line of brine, all would be of a snow-white softness above us, and a sparkling line of bulwark-rail and glittering constellations in the skylight glass and a wake of floating and heaving silver rolling fan-shaped to us.

A couple of seamen caught hold of the grating and raised it level with the bulwarks, one end supported by the rail. The body was placed upon it, and ghostly it looked in that spectral commingling of starlight and lamplight and moonlight not yet brightening out of its redness—ghastly in the nakedness of its canvas cover, though, to be sure, there was no need at that hour to conceal it under a flag. Finn pulled a thin volume from his pocket and opened it close against one of the lanterns, peering into it hard and coughing hoarsely as though loath to begin. At last he mustered up courage and made a start. He pronounced many of the words oddly, and there was a deep sea-note in his delivery. I watched his long face twitching and working to his recital as he brought his eyes in a squint to the page with the lantern-light touching his skin into a hue of sulphur that made one think of it as the likeness of a human countenance wrought in yellow silk upon black satin. But the mystery of death was with us; it seemed to breathe—hot as the night was—in an ice-cold air off the dark surface of the sea, and a man’s sense of humour must have been of the featherweight quality of an idiot’s to flutter in the presence of the pallid, motionless bundle upon the grating, whose chill, secret subduing inspirations were unspeakably heightened by the eyes of the sailors round about gleaming out of the weak glimmer of their countenances vaguely shaped by the rays of the oil-flames upon the obscurity, by the silver gaze of the countless equinoctial heaven surveying us over the yardarms and through the squares of the ratlines and amid the exquisite tracery of the gear, and by the steadfast watching of stars low down in the measureless dark distances of the west and north and south, as though they were the eyes of giant spirits standing on tiptoe behind the horizon to observe us, and by the slow soaring of the moon that was now icing her crimson visage with crystal, and diffusing a soft cloud of white light over the eastern sky with an edging already of brilliant glory under her upon a short length of the dark sea-line there that made the water in that direction look as though its boundary were beating in ivory foam against the wall of sky.