An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘You must be plain with the fellows, captain,’ said I; ‘tell them that Sir Wilfrid’s craze grows upon him and that he must be narrowly watched, but with tact.’

‘I’ll see to it, sir,’ said he; ‘can’t do better than Cutbill and Furlong, I think. They’re both hearty chaps, chock-a-block with lively yarns, and they’ve both got good tempers. But dorn’t his honour get no better then, sir?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘Dorn’t he feel as if he was a-coming back to his old shape, sir?’

‘On the contrary,’ I answered, ‘yesterday he had only broadened, but this morning he feels so tall that he can’t stand upright.’

‘Well to be sure!’ cried the worthy fellow, with his long face working all over with concern and anxiety. ‘It’s all her ladyship’s doing. It’s all her caper-cutting that’s brought him to this. Such a gentle heart as he has, too, and a true gentleman through and through him when his mind sits square in his head? But lor’ bless me, sir, what did he want to go and get married for? ’Taint as if he wanted a home, or a gal with money enough to keep him. Not that it’s for me to say a word agin marriage, for my missus has always kept a straight helm steady in my wake ever since I took her in tow. But all the same, I’m of opinion that matrimony is an institootion that don’t fit this here earth. It’s a sort of lock-up; a man’s put into a cell along with a gal. If she’s a proper kind of gal, why well and good. The window dorn’t seem barred and ye don’t take much notice of your liberty being gone; but if she tarns out to be of her ladyship’s sort, why there’s nothen to do but to sing out through the keyhole for a rope to hang yourself with, or, if ye ain’t got sperret enough for that remedy, to hang her with.’

The delivery of this harangue seemed to ease his mind, and he went forward with a face tolerably composed to give instructions to the two men who were to serve as companions or, to put it bluntly, as keepers to Wilfrid.

The weather held phenomenally silent and breathless. Just before lunch I went right aft, where I commanded the length of the vessel, and steadfastly watched her, and though I had my eye upon the line of her jibboom I did not see that the end of the spar lifted or fell to the extent of the breadth of a finger-nail. The sole satisfaction that was to be got out of this unparalleled condition of stagnation was the feeling that it could not possibly last. The dim and dirty blue of the sea went rounding not above a mile distant into a like hue of atmosphere, with a confused half-blinded vagueness of sky overhead that did not seem to be higher up than twice the height of our masts, and the appearance made you think of sitting in a glass globe sunk a fathom or two under water with the light sifting through to you in a tarnished, misty, ugly azure. A strange part of it was that though the sky was cloudless the atmosphere was so thick you could watch the sun, which hovered shapeless as a jelly-fish almost overhead, for a whole minute at a time, without inconvenience; yet his heat bit fiercely for all that; there was a wake, too, under him, flakes of muddy yellow-like sheets of a ship’s sheathing scaling one under another, as though they were going to the bottom in a procession. If you put your hand upon the rail clear of the awning you brought it away with a stamp of pain. I touched the brass binnacle hood by accident and bawled aloud to the burn which raised me a blister on the side of my hand that lasted for three days. A sort of impalpable steam rose from the very decks, so that if a man stood still a moment you saw his figure trembling in it like the quivering of an object beheld in clear running water. And how am I to express that deeper quality of heat which seemed to come into the atmosphere with the smell of the blistering of paint along the yacht’s sides?

Yet there was no fall in the mercury, no hint above or below to indicate a change at hand. Close alongside the burnished water lay clear as crystal and gave back every image with almost startling brilliance. I remember looking over and seeing my face in the clear profound as distinctly as ever I had viewed it in a mirror. It lay like a daguerreotype there. It was of course as deep down as I was high above the surface, and I protest it was like looking at one’s self as though one floated a drowned man.