An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

This was the substance of Finn’s opinion as he imparted it to me that night. His sincerity touched me; besides, I saw worry enough in the poor fellow to make me sorry for him. Indeed, I resolved from that hour to back him up, heartily agreeing with him that the adventure was quite too vague to justify anxiety in respect of any one detail of the programme.

The weather was quiet when I went to bed that night. I came below from my long yarn with Finn, leaving a windy smear of moon over our mastheads and a dark sky going down from it to the obscured sea-line, with here and there a pale and vapoury point of star hovering sparely over a wing of cloud that lay still in the dusk, as though what wind there was blew low upon the waters. The wide sea came to the yacht in a dusky throbbing, like folds of gloom rolling with a sort of palpitation in them to the eye; the foam glanced in places, but there was little weight in the wind, and the pallid spires of the yacht’s canvas floated nearly upright through the dark atmosphere, with a sound of the sob of water coming off her weather bow and the dead plash of the hidden billow falling without life from her quarter, in a way that made one think there were fellows emptying buckets over the side abreast of the wheel.

Wilfrid had been moody and reserved throughout the dinner, and retired early to bed. I sat an hour with Miss Laura, with the mild diversion of a draught-board between us; but we soon forgot to play in talking. We had been but a few days together, yet I had already made the discovery that I wonderfully enjoyed her company, and that I immensely relished a quality of arch naïveté in her conversation, which owed something of its effect to the contrast between a sort of coquettish sagacity in many things she said and the nun-like artlessness and virginal sweetness I seemed to find in the gentle girlish regard of her charming eyes. I also observed in myself that the more I saw of her the more her beauty gained upon me. I never remember meeting a woman’s face that I would sooner have taken as a frank expression of mind; there was a softness and delicacy of feature that one instinctively accepted as an illustration of habitual refinement and purity of thought. Her manner, save when aroused, was of engaging gentleness and tenderness, and her smile the most amiable of any I remember. Her position was of great delicacy, and could not have failed to painfully distress one of your self-conscious women. Our adventure, every reference to it, every mention of the ‘Shark,’ every expression in Wilfrid of grief, shame, temper, was as it were a rude withdrawal of the veil from before her sister’s frailty. There was no other lady on board to help her to bear, so to speak, the burthen of the inevitable topic, and yet she never made it appear as though there was pain and shame to her in the subject, outside her grief for Wilfrid, her eagerness that her sister should be recovered, her resentment against the man who had betrayed and dishonoured his friend.

I may fail to convey what I thought of her maidenly acceptance of her share in this strange adventure, but I am certain that nobody but a person of exquisite instincts could have acted, as she did, the delicate and exacting part allotted her by my cousin.

The weather was still very quiet when I bade her good-night. I went to my cabin, and do not suppose I was ten minutes in my bed before I fell asleep. I awoke to a sound of a great roaring all about, accompanied by the cries of men on deck, the sharp flinging down of coils of rope and the thunder of shaking canvas trembling in every fibre of the hull. My bunk was an athwart-ship one, and I had turned-in, to employ the proper sea parlance, with my head to windward; but now the yacht was lying over on t’other side, and I awoke to find my heels in the air and the weight of my body upon my neck; but the angle of the craft was so sharp that it was not without a prodigious amount of heaving and floundering I managed to get my legs over and to sit upright.

A squall! thought I, feeling for my pillow, which I placed in the port end of my bedstead and once again lay down. A flash of sun-bright lightning glanced through the port-hole as though a gun had been fired into my cabin, and the interior glanced out into a noon-tide effulgence for one breathless instant, in which, however, I managed to catch sight of the angle formed by a coat with a stanchion, upon which it hung by a peg. Upon my word, it was as though the yacht was upon her beam ends—such a heel as was not to be realised by one lying in a bunk or even sitting upright in it: then came the darkness like a sea of ink, rolling to the sight in which the reflection of the flash still writhed, followed by a mighty shock of thunder that died away in a hundred rattling peals, as though ’twas high mountainous land all around the horizon, honeycombed with caverns and every peak as resonant as a hollow dome.

A sharp squall! thought I, but there was too much noise for sleep. It was all hands on deck I was pretty sure by the numerous scampering over my head; the harsh voices of the sailors bawling at the ropes would be swept into faint cries by the rush of the wind, and now and again a heavy lumpish sound that put a quiver into every plank, followed by a snarling noise like the hissing of half a dozen locomotives blowing off steam, was warrant enough to ears not unused to such sounds that the ‘Bride’ was taking large doses of water in pretty freely over her rail.

I lay quiet, and was presently sensible that the yacht was off the wind; the righting of her was no small comfort; she was manifestly going through it like a comet; the sea was now well aft, and the suggestion of swiftness I found in the mere feel of the hull, somehow or other, black as my cabin was and the blacker as it remained for the flash of lightning, was accentuated by the thunderous rush of each surge outstripping us in the race and hurling its black length along the vessel’s side, and the fierce spitting and crackling of the smother of spume that was raised by the vessel’s headlong flight, and that went raging and racing astern on top of the swelling ebony fold that swept forwards from the opposite direction.

Humph! thought I, if this is a case of ‘up keeleg’ with friend Finn he’ll have to enter into something shrewder and surer than dead reckoning to find his way back again into the ‘Shark’s’ wake. I had a mind to see what was happening, and after a spell of troublesome groping and clawing, during which I had like to have broke my nose by striking it against the edge of a chest of drawers built into a corner, I succeeded in lighting my lamp, and was presently snug in a pea coat and a sou’-wester which I had been wise enough to include in the slender sea outfit I had purchased for this voyage. The cabin light was always kept burning throughout the night, dimmed by one of the stewards, after we had retired to our berths, but with plenty of flame left to see by, and on emerging the first object I caught sight of was the figure of a man on his knees on the cabin floor in a posture of prayer and apparently in an agony of fright. Nothing was to be heard of him until I had approached close, for the roaring of the wind and the washing and foaming of seas drowned all other noises; but on stooping to make sure of the fellow, whose hands were clasped over his eyes whilst he held his face upturned as he swayed upon his knees, I could hear him praying with all his might, with an energy indeed that might of itself have accounted for the drops of perspiration that glistened upon his brow, if it wasn’t that his attitude of terror explained the secret of that moisture. It was Muffin. There was something so shameful in the fellow’s cowardice that all in an instant I lost my temper and gave him a kick which flung him at his length, face down, upon the deck. He set up a horrible howl.

‘Oh Lord! oh mercy! we’re gone! we’re gone! Oh, if I was only on dry ground——’