CHAPTER III

MY FELLOW PASSENGERS

It blew a hard breeze of wind that night. Soon after I had left the deck they furled the mainsail and topgallant-sail, reefed the maintopsail, and tied another reef in the mizzen-topsail. In fact, it looked as if we were to have a black gale of wind, dead on end too, with a sure prospect then of bearing up for the Downs afresh. How it may be in these steamboat times, I will not pretend to say; but my experience of the old sailing-ship is that the first night out, let the weather be what it will, is, on the whole, about as wretched a time as a man at any period of his life has to pass through.

Mr. Colledge was sound asleep in his bunk, his brandy flask within convenient reach of his hand. It was certain enough that he had heard nothing of the disturbance on deck. I undressed and rolled into my bed, and there lay wide awake for a long time. The ship creaked like a cradle. The full dismalness of a first night out was upon me, and it was made weightier yet--how much weightier indeed!--by the recollection of the wild and sudden tragedy of the evening. Oh, the insufferable weariness of the noises, the straining of the bulkheads, the yearning roar of the dark surge washing the porthole, with the boiling of it dying out into a dim simmering upon the wind, the instant stagger of the ship to the blow of some heavy sea full on her bow, the sensation of breathless descent as the vessel chopped down with a huge heave to windward into the trough, the pendulum swing of one’s wearing apparel hanging against the bulkhead, the half-stifled exclamations breaking from adjacent cabins, the whole improved into a true oceanic flavour by the occasional hoarse songs of the sailors above, faintly heard, as though you were in a vault, and that strange vibratory humming which the wind makes to one hearkening to it out of the cabin of a ship.

I fell asleep at last, and was awakened at half-past seven by the steward, who wished to know if I wanted hot water to shave with. The moment I had my consciousness, I was sensible that a heavy sea was running.

‘No shaving this morning, thank you,’ said I, ‘unless I have a mind to slice the nose off my face. How’s the weather, steward?’

‘Blowing a buster from the south’ard, sir,’ he answered, talking with his lips at the venetian of the closed door, ‘and the ship going along ’andsomely as a roll of smoke.’

Here somebody called him, and he trotted away.

Mr. Colledge awoke. ‘By George!’ he exclaimed, ‘I’ve had a doocid long sleep.’

‘How d’ye feel?’ said I.

‘In no humour to rise,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I can have what breakfast I’m likely to eat brought to me here?’

‘Bless you, yes,’ I answered.

‘Any news, Mr. Dugdale?’ he asked, his voice beginning to languish as a sensation of nausea grew upon him with the larger awakening of his faculties.

‘We ran down a French lugger last night,’ said I, ‘and drowned a lot of men. That’s all.’

He eyed me dully, thinking perhaps that I was joking, and then said: ‘Well, there it is, you see. Yesterday, you were talking of the fun of a voyage; and the very earliest of the humours is the drowning of a lot of men.’

‘And women,’ said I.

‘Poor devils!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you hand me a bottle of Hungary water that you’ll find in my portmanteau? Much obliged to you, Dugdale: and will you kindly tell the steward as you pass through the cabin to bring me a cup of tea?’

‘Get up by-and-by, if you feel equal to it,’ said I. ‘Nursing sea-sickness only makes the demon more pitiless. Show yourself on deck, and the wind’ll blow the nausea out of you. And I’ll tell you a better cure than Hungary water or brandy flasks--a cube of salt-horse, Colledge; a hearty lump of marine beef, something to work up the muscles of your jaws, and to sharpen your teeth for you.’

‘Oh gracious, my dear fellow--don’t,’ he exclaimed, turning his face to the wall of the ship; and I heard him exclaim, as though muttering to himself: ‘How the water gurgles about this window, and what a doocid sickly green it is!’

But a very few of us assembled at the breakfast table. Colonel Bannister was there, a very ramrod of a man, with a Bengal-tigerish expression of face as he glared round about him from betwixt his white wire-like whiskers. There were also present Mr. Emmett, an artist, who was making the voyage to the East for the purpose of painting Indian scenery, a man with long hair curling down his back, a ragged beard and moustaches, a velvet coat, and Byronic collars, out of which his long thin neck forked up like the head of a pole through a scarecrow’s suit of clothes; Mr. Peter Hemskirk, who looked uncommonly fat, pale, and unfinished in his attire this morning; two young Civil Service fellows--as we should now call their trade--named Greenhew and Fairthorne; and Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, a journalist, bound to Bombay or Calcutta (I cannot be sure of the city), to edit a newspaper--a bullet-headed man, with a sort of low-comedian face, very blue about the cheeks where he shaved, and small keen restless black eyes, full of intelligence, whose suggestion in that way was not to be impaired or weakened by an expression in repose of singular self-complacency. Captain Keeling, at the head of the table, sat skewered up in his uniform frock-coat in stiff satin stock and collars. Mr. Prance occupied the other end of the table. He, too, was attired in a uniform resembling the dress worn by the skipper. He had a pleasant brown sailorly face, with a floating pose of head upon his shoulders that made one think of a soap-bubble poised on top of a pipe-stem. There were no ladies. Once I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Colonel Bannister’s Roman nose, and grey hair ornamented with a large black lace cap, fitfully hovering for a moment or two in the wide hatch past the chief officer’s chair, down which the steps led that went to the sleeping berths. But the apparition vanished with almost startling suddenness, as though the old lady had fallen or been violently pulled below. When, later on, I inquired after her, I learnt that she had betaken herself again to her bunk.

It was a mighty uncomfortable breakfast. The ship was rolling violently and convulsively upon the short snappish Channel seas--the most insufferable of all waters when in commotion, making even the seasoned salt pine for the long regular rhythmic heave of the blue ocean billow. The fiddles hindered the plates from sliding on to our laps; but their contents were not to be so easily coaxed into keeping their place; an unusually heavy lurch shot a large helping of liver and bacon on to Mr. Hemskirk’s knees; and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hemmeridge, came perilously near to being badly scalded by Mr. Johnson, the literary man, who, in reaching for a cup of tea tilted the swinging tray. There was not much talk, and what little was said chiefly concerned the incident of the previous evening.

‘Captain,’ cried young Mr. Fairthorne in an effeminate voice--he was the gentleman, it seems, who last night had been calling upon anybody to smother the ayah--‘whath to become of thothe poor Frenchmen?’

‘Sir,’ answered Captain Keeling in a manner as stiff as a marline-spike with his dislike of the subject, ‘I do not know.’

‘Frenchmen,’ cried Colonel Bannister in a loud voice, as though he were directing the manœuvres of a company of Sepoys, ‘are the hereditary enemies of our country, and it never can matter to a Briton what becomes of them.’

‘Boot my tear sir,’ remarked Mr. Hemskirk, ‘you are a Briton, yes--and you are a Christian too, und der Franchman iss your broder.’

‘My what?’ roared the colonel. ‘Tell ye what it is, Mr. Hemskirk: it is a good job that you cannot pronounce our language, otherwise you might happen sometimes, sir, to grow offensive.’

Mynheer, who seemed to have had some previous acquaintance with this little bombshell of a man, dried the grease upon his lips with a napkin, and cast a wink upon Mr. Greenhew, whose face of resentment at this familiarity caused me to break into such an immoderate fit of laughter that there was nothing for it but to bolt from the table.

I found a real Channel picture stretching round me when I gained the deck; a grey sky, lightened in places with a kind of suffusion of radiance that made one think of the rusty bronze lingering in the wake of an expired sunset. Saving these flaws of dull light, there was no break anywhere visible in the wide cold bald stare of heaven over our mastheads. The strong wind was a dry one, yet the horizon was thick with a look of rain all the way round; and out of the smother in the south, the sea was rolling in heights of a dark green, rich with creaming foam, that somehow seemed to satisfy the eye, as though each frothing crest were a streak of sunshine. There was a smack half a mile to windward of us staggering along and sinking and rising under a fragment of red mainsail; but there was nothing else to be seen in that way.

The wind was blowing free for us--almost dead abeam, indeed; and the _Countess Ida_ was swarming through it in a manner to put a quicker beat into the heart at the first sight of the picture she made. The topgallant-sail was set over the single-reefed maintopsail; the whole foresail was on her, and, with the other topsails and a staysail or two, was tearing the great ship through the short savage heapings of water with a power that made one think of steam as trifling by comparison. The forecastle was wet with flying spray. The galley chimney was smoking cheerily, and from all about the long-boat came hearty farmyard sounds of the grunting of pigs and the bleating of sheep and the cackling of hens. There was a gang of seamen at the pumps, and as they plied the brakes with nervous sinewy arms, their song chimed in with the gushing of the water flowing freely to the scuppers, and washing back again to their feet with every roll to windward. Other seamen were at work upon the carronades, or cleaning paint-work with scrubbing-brushes, or coiling gear away upon pins, and so on, and so on. It was after eight, and all hands were on deck, and a fine set of livelies they looked, spite of most of them being snugged up in black or yellow oil-skins. Ships went with full companies in those days, and but for the slenderness of our ordnance, it might have been easy to imagine one’s self on board a man-of-war when one ran one’s eyes over the decks of the _Countess Ida_ and counted the crew, and marked the butcher and butcher’s mates, the cook and _his_ mates, the baker and _his_ mates, the carpenter and _his_ mates, coming and going, and making a very fair of the neighbourhood of the galley.

The second mate warmly clad paced the weather side of the poop, sending many a weatherly glance to seaward, with a frequent lifting of his eyes to the rounded iron-hard canvas; whilst against the brilliant white wake of the ship, roaring and boiling upwards as it seemed, to the stoop of the Indiaman’s huge square counter, the figures of the two sailors at the big wheel stood out clear-cut as cameos, with the broad brass band upon the circle dully reflecting a space of copperish light in the sky over the weather mizzen-topsail yard-arm, and the newly polished hood of the binnacle gleaming as though sun-touched. A couple of midshipmen in pea-coats and brass buttons, curly headed young rogues, with a spirit of mischief bright in every glance they sent, patrolled the lee side of the poop; and up in the mizzen top were two more of them, with yet another long-legged fellow jockeying a spur of the cross-trees, with his loose trousers rattling like a flag; but what job he was upon I could not tell. The planks of this deck were as white as the trunk of a tree newly stripped of its bark. Four handsome quarter-boats swung at the davits. Along the rail on either hand went a row of hencoops, through the bars of which the heads of cocks and hens came and went in a winking sort of way, like a swift showing and withdrawing of red rags. On the rail, for a considerable distance, were stowed bundles of compressed hay, the scent of which was a real puzzle to the nose, coming as it did through the hard sweep of the salt wind. The white skylights glistened through the intricacies of brass wire which shielded them. Abaft the wheel, on either side of it, their tompioned muzzles eyed blindly by the closed ports meant to receive them, were a couple of eighteen pounders; for in those days the Indiamen still went armed; not heavily, indeed, as in the war-times of an earlier period, but with artillery and small-arms enough to enable her to dispute with some promise of success with the picaroon who was still afloat, whose malignant flag the burnished waters of the Antilles yet reflected, and whose amiable company of assassins were as often to be met with under the African and South American heights as in the Channel of the Mozambique, or eastward yet on the broad surface of the Indian Ocean.

I crossed the deck to where Mr. Cocker was stumping, and asked him if he could tell me off what part of the English coast our ship now was.

‘Drawing on to the Wight, sir,’ he answered, with a sort of groping look in the little moist blue eyes he turned over the lee bow into the thickness beyond.

‘Well, we’re blowing through it, anyway,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t have allowed these heels for any conceivable structure born with such bows as the _Countess Ida_. What is it?’ I asked with a glance at the broad dazzle of yeast dancing and whipping and slinging off the Indiaman’s tall side against the hurl of the weather surge.

‘It’ll be all eight,’ answered the second officer: ‘it would be ten had she worked herself loose of the grip of the stevedores. She wants the mainsail and foreto’garn’sail. These old buckets are manufactured to creak, and whilst they creak, they hold, it is said.’

His face crumpled up into a grin that made him look twenty years older under the thatch of his sou’-wester curling to his eyebrows, with the broad flaps over his ears like a nightcap for his sea-helmet to sit upon.

‘Pray, Mr. Cocker,’ said I, ‘was any damage done to the ship by the collision last night?’

‘There wasn’t so much as a rope-yarn parted,’ he answered. ‘I looked to see the spritsail yard sprung, for it’ll have been that spar, I reckon, which dragged the lugger’s masts overboard by the shrouds of them. But it’s as sound as anything else aboard the ship.’

He shifted uneasily, as though to make off, and, turning my head, I spied the captain looking into the binnacle. So, having had already enough of the deck, I stepped below for a smoke in the cuddy recess, where I found Mr. Emmett in a long cloak, such as mysterious assassins and renegade noblemen used to wear at the Coburg Theatre, sucking at a large curled meerschaum pipe, and arguing on the subject of longitude with a little man almost a dwarf, an honest and highly intelligent pigmy, with the head of a giant supported on the legs of a boy of six, an amiable earnest little creature, with a trick of looking up wistfully into your face. His name was Richard Saunders: and I afterwards understood that he was proceeding to India on behalf of some Pharmaceutical Society, to collect information on and examples of Hindu and other medicines, drugs, charms, and so forth.

Well, all that day it continued to blow a very strong wind. The ship’s plunging increased as the Channel opened under her bow and admitted something of the weight of the Atlantic in the run of its seas. There was a constant sharp-shooting of spray forward over the forecastle, and the wet came sobbing along; the lee scuppers to where the cuddy front checked it under the poop ladder. Very few of us assembled at lunch or at dinner.

During the progress of this last meal, Colonel Bannister left the table and went below, and after an interval, uprose through the hatch, with his large distinguished-looking wife holding on to him. Mynheer Peter Hemskirk, on seeing her, cried out: ‘Ah, Meestrees Bannister, boot dot iss vot I call plooky!’ and Mr. Johnson came near to breaking his neck whilst starting to his legs to stand as she passed. She took a chair next her husband, and sat grimly staring around her, her lips pale with the compression of them. She shook her head to every suggestion made by the steward, and then, being unable to hold out any longer, seized hold of her little ramrod of a husband and went staggering and rolling below with him. When he returned, he tossed down a glass of wine with an angry gesture and a fierce countenance, and looking at Hemskirk, cried out: ‘I’ve a great respect for my wife, sir, and she’s a fine woman in every sense of the word.’--The Dutchman nodded.--‘But,’ continued the colonel, clenching his fist, ‘if ever I go to sea with a woman again, be she wife, aunt, or grandmother, may I be poisoned for a lunatic, and my remains committed to the deep. This is the fourth time I’ve sworn it--my mind is now resolved!’

Out of all this sort of thing one could get a laugh here and there; but on the whole it was desperately weary work, and continued so till we had blown clear of soundings. Altogether, it was as ugly a down Channel run as any man would pray to be preserved from; the atmosphere grey, the seas a muddy green, the howling blast chill as a November morn, often darkening to a squall, that would sweep between the masts in horizontal lines of rain sparkling like steel, and with spite enough in the lancing of them to compel the strongest to turn his back. Now and again a lady passenger would show in the cuddy; but though there were some twenty-eight of us in all, not reckoning a couple of ayahs, and a Chinaman in the garb of his country, who acted as nurse to one Mrs. Trevor’s baby, never once in those days did above seven of us, barring the skipper and his mates, sit down to a meal.

The thick weather lay heavily upon the captain’s mind, held him in fits of abstraction whilst at table, dismissed him after a brief sitting to the deck, and kept him heedful and taciturn whilst there. He had had one collision, and wanted no more; and you would notice how that tragedy had served him, by observing him when in the cuddy to prick up his ears to the least unusual noise on deck, to glance at the tell-tale compass over his head, as though it were the sun which he had been patiently waiting for a chance to ‘shoot,’ to swallow his food with impatient motions to the steward to bear a hand, and to bolt up the cabin steps without a smile or syllable of apology to us for quitting the table.