The Honour of the Flag

by William Clark Russell

The darkeys lay aft to the tackles, and Jackson climbed over the rail with a countenance sour and mutinous with disappointment. He had scarcely sprung on to the deck, when we heard a loud crash like the report of a small piece of ordnance, and, looking towards the hulks, I was just in time to see them sliding off the back of the whale, one on either side of the greasy, black surface. They vanished in a breath, and the dead carcass, relieved of their weight, seemed to spring, as though it were alive, some ten or twelve feet out of the seething and simmering surface which had been frothed up by the descent of the vessels; the next moment it turned over and gave us a view of its whole length—a sixty to seventy-foot whale, if the carcass was an inch, with here and there the black scythe-like dorsal fin of a shark sailing round it.

Jackson hooked a quid out of his mouth and sent it overboard. His face of mutiny left him, and was replaced by an expression of gratitude. Five minutes later the old Hindoo Merchant was thrusting through it with her nose heading for the river Hooghley, and the darkeys tying a single reef in the foretopsail.

The Strange Tragedy of the "White Star."

It is proper I should state at once that the names I give in this extraordinary experience are fictitious; the date of the tale is easily within the memory of the middle-aged.

The large, well-known Australian liner White Star lay off the wool-sheds in Sydney harbour slowly filling up with wool; I say slowly, for the oxen were languid up-country, and the stuff came in as Fox is said to have written his history—"drop by drop." We were, however, advertised to sail in a fortnight from the day I open this story on, and there was no doubt of our getting away by then.

I, who was chief officer of the vessel, was pacing the poop under the awning, when I saw a lady and gentleman approaching the vessel. They spoke to the mate of a French barque which lay just ahead of us, and I concluded that their business was with that ship, till I saw the Frenchman, with a flourish of his hat, motion towards the White Star, whereupon they advanced and stepped on board.

I went on to the quarter-deck to receive them. The gentleman had the air of a military man: short, erect as a royal mast, with plenty of whiskers and moustache, though he wore his chin cropped. His companion was a very fine young woman of about six and twenty years; above the average height, faultlessly shaped, so far as a rude seafaring eye is privileged to judge of such matters; her complexion was pale, inclined to sallow, but most delicate, of a transparency of flesh that showed the blood eloquent in her cheek, coming and going with every mood that possessed her. She wore a little fall of veil, but she raised it when her companion handed her over the side in order to look round and aloft at the fabric of spar and shroud towering on high, with its central bunting of house flag pulling in ripples of gold and blue from the royalmast head; and so I had a good sight of her face, and particularly of her eyes.

I never remember the like of such eyes in a woman. To describe them as neither large nor small, the pupils of the liquid dusk of the Indian's, the eyelashes long enough to cast a silken shadow of tenderness upon the whole expression of her face when the lids dropped—to say all this is to convey nothing; simply because their expression formed the wonder, strangeness, and beauty of them, and there is no virtue in ink, at all events in my ink, to communicate it. I do not exaggerate when I assure you that the surprise of the beauty of her eyes when they came to mine and rested upon me, steadfast in their stare as a picture, was a sort of shock in its way, comparable in a physical sense to one's unexpected handling of something slightly electric. For the rest, her hair was very black and abundant, and of that sort of deadness of hue which you find among the people of Asia. I cannot describe her dress. Enough if I say that she was in mourning, but with a large admixture of white, for those were the hot weeks in Sydney.

"Is the captain on board?" inquired the gentleman.

"He is not, sir."