List, Ye Landsmen! A Romance of Incident

by William Clark Russell

“Come, you shall not teach me my business. If I am not a Spanish sailor, I’ll not take counsel of a woman either.”

She snapped her fingers at me, and showed her teeth in an angry smile; turned, and I thought was going to her berth. Instead, she stopped and looked at me over her shoulder, made a step, and her whole manner changed. Her demeanor was, all of a sudden, a sort of wild tenderness. Why do I call it that? Because it suggested—the memory of it still suggests—the moment’s sportiveness of a tigress with its young. Her eyes softened: her face grew sweet with a look of pleading; she put herself into a posture of entreaty, her hands out-stretched and figure a little stooped. Acting, or no acting, it was as good as good can be. You would have said she loved me had you watched her eyes. The contrast between the rascally snap of the finger and this pose of appeal was sharp and strong; but how mean that stage for so rich a performance—the lifting, uncarpeted deck of a little, plain, ship’s cabin, with its austere furniture of table and lockers, and a skylight bleared with the grayness of the day without?

“Señor Fielding, let me be first with you.”

Another reference to the dollars! It vexed me greatly, and saying, “It always has been so,” I gave her a cool bow and went on deck.

We had quarreled before, but lightly, for the most part, and were friends again in an hour. This quarrel, however, ran into two or three days. She would not leave me alone. Did I mean to scheme for our salvation? Was she to be first with me? Was I ashamed of myself to be devoured by avarice? What was the good of dollars to a dying man? and was I not a dying man if I did not rescue her and myself from the crew of the brig? I don’t say she used all the words I put into her mouth. No; she was not so fluent then as all that; but I understood her very easily—rather too easily—when she sneered at me for thinking more of my dollars than of her.

Finding, however, that I continued resolutely sulky, answering her shortly, passing through the cabin instead of sitting with her as before and talking, she grew alarmed, felt that she had said too much, and made her peace. She made her peace by coming to my cabin. I was looking at a chart of the Southern Ocean when somebody knocked. My lady entered.

“Ave Maria! What will you think of me for coming to you thus and here? But my heart is too full of remorse for patience. Blessed Virgin! How long is half an hour when one is impatient! And I have been waiting for half an hour outside in the cabin. I have angered you, and I am sorry. You have been good to me, and you are my friend. And how do I show my gratitude? Forgive me, señor;” and with that she put out her hand.

It was very true that Yan Bol had declared the men would speak no ship until the silver was out of the brig. And in my opinion they were right. As we made for the Island of New Amsterdam we increased the chance of falling in with war-ships and privateers. For Amsterdam Island is in the Indian Ocean, at the southern limit of those waters, it is true, and in those times many vagabond vessels were to be found in the Indian Ocean on the lookout for the big rich ships, the tea waggons and spice and silk carriers bound to and from China and the Indies.

But it so happened that after we had lost sight of the little schooner which had taken the two Spaniards aboard, we met with no other sail—none, I mean, within reach of the bunting or speaking trumpet. At long intervals a tip of white showed in some blue recess of that sea, infinitely remote, pale as a little light that lives and dies and lives again while you look. Never before had the measurelessness of the ocean affected me as now. The spirits of vastness and loneliness which came shaping themselves to the imagination out of those month-wide breasts and secret solitudes of brine grew overwhelming to the mind—to my mind I should say; and often of a night when the deck was quiet and the sea black and the stars were shining, I’d feel the oppression of a mighty presence—of something huge and near.

And then consider the doses of salt water I had swallowed and was yet swallowing! I was fresh from very many months of the sea when I was picked up off an oar in the Channel and swept outward again into the world where the salt spits like a wildcat, and where the sound of the wind is not as its noise ashore; and I was still at sea with months of water before me in any case if I was not put an end to.