CHAPTER IV MARIE BEGINS HER VOYAGE
This was the first voyage I had ever made. I was born in England, and was left at school when my mother went round the Cape to India on the second visit my father paid to that country. I had never in my life crossed a wider breast of water than the English Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Everything here, then, you will suppose was wonderfully new to me; infinitely stranger indeed than had the ship been a steamer whose funnel and masts have commonly but little in them to bewilder the landgoing eye.
Hundreds of times had I watched ships passing over the blue or grey waters which our house overlooked; but they were as clouds to me, indeterminable though beautiful decorations of the deep: I knew nothing of their inner life, of one's sensations on board, what the sailors in them did. I looked up now and beheld three masts towering into a delicate fineness to the altitude of their own starry trucks, with yards across, rigging complex as the meshes of a web, white triangular sails between. A sailor stood at the wheel, floating off from it with the easy, careless posture of the sea, his knotted hands gripping the spokes of the gleaming circle. A stout-faced man in the tall hat of the London streets, his neck swathed in a red shawl, walked up and down the deck near the cabin skylight. Mrs. Burke told me he was the pilot. She pointed to a man who was standing on the forecastle as though keeping a look-out on the tug, and said that he was Mr. Green, the first mate of the ship: indeed the only mate. The boatswain, she informed me, who was not a certificated officer, would take charge of her husband's watch when the ship was at sea.
She talked thus to distract my mind. I asked her what she meant by her 'husband's watch,' thinking she meant the timekeeper in his pocket.
'Why,' she said, 'every ship's crew is divided into two companies or watches, called port and starboard; the starboard watch is the captain's and the other the mate's. Let us walk a little. Already you are looking better, positively.'
Here Mr. Owen joined us.
'I declare, doctor,' exclaimed Mrs. Burke, 'that Miss Otway has already got a little colour in her cheeks, more even since we left Gravesend than, I warrant, Sir Mortimer has seen in her the last twelvemonth gone. If she means to begin to look well so soon, how will it be with her, sir, when this ship's bowsprit is pointing the other way and we shall be all ready to go ashore?'
Mr. Owen, in a soft felt hat, an academic bush of hair under either side of it, like the cauliflower wig of olden days, and a warm, heavy black cloak, might have passed for a clergyman. He asked permission to stroll the deck with us, and pointed out objects ashore and upon the water with an intelligence that proved him the possessor of a talent for colour.