He explained, and she loved him, and thought how good he was.
Yes, there are even worse conditions of life to a girl than being shipwrecked with a sailor who is a gentleman, and if the gentleman informs the spirit of a sailor, its impulse is never greater than when it responds to the appeal of a girl's helplessness.
He cut up a little tobacco and smoked a pipe. It seemed to bring him within hail of civilisation, and Julia enjoyed the smell of the tobacco-smoke immensely, and said it made her think of her father.
"How would he relish this picture?" said he, referring to their situation.
"He would not like to be here, that is all he would think. Will this brig keep together, do you fancy?"
"Oh, yes, and I'll tell you what—the gale doesn't harden, which is a good sign. There was plenty of weather in the moon last night, but in these parts it is not often long-lived."
"Is not a tremendous sea running?" she asked.
"Yes, from the Ramsgate or Margate Sands point of view. You must go to about fifty-eight south, right off the Horn, and get amongst the ice to know what a tremendous sea is like. They come like the cliffs of Dover at you, and the deck is up and down, whilst the keel sweeps up the acclivity. It is splendid and frightful. I was hove to for a fortnight down there; we couldn't drive clear of the ice, and we had about four hours of daylight to see by. All the devils in hell raved in our rigging as we sat upright a breathless instant on the amazing peak we had climbed. No, Julia, this is not a tremendous sea, and the brig will hang together and outweather twenty such."
The vessel, however, was acting as though she considered it a tremendous sea. Had she been dismasted or a steamer her behaviour could not have been worse. Her sails a little steadied her, but her rollings and motions and plungings and heavings were sickening and insufferable, because she was nearly full of water. She had no buoyancy and the seas made a rock of her, and often sprang in green sheets right over her—a wet and yelling game of leap-frog.
Late in the afternoon, when it was almost dark, one of these seas filled the caboose and swept it to leeward, where it lay stranded. The outcry of hurled ironmongery, of crashing china, of skipping knives and forks, pot, kettles, and pans, along with the noise of the splintering caboose, was enough to make Hardy think that the brig was scattering under their feet. The girl grasped his hand when that sea came and the galley went; she thought it was all over with them. Hardy kept his thoughts to himself: his real anxiety was in the boat, which might be washed overboard or dashed into staves, and in the deck-house, which was their only shelter.