CHAPTER VI

WE LOSE A MAN

Spite of Mr. Cocker’s hints as to Captain Keeling’s timidity in the matter of canvas, the old skipper evidently knew what he was about in taking in his flying kites in good time, for whilst the seamen were still scrambling in the rigging and skylarking up there in search of the parrot, the breeze freshened in a long moaning gust over the rail, with a brighter flashing of the stars to windward, and a sudden stoop of the Indiaman that sent a line of water washing along her sides in milk; and at midnight she was bowing down with nothing showing above her main topgallant-sail to a strong wind off the beam, the stars gone, and a look of hard weather in the obscurity of the horizon.

For the next four days we had plenty of wind and high seas with frequent grey rain-squalls shrouding the ship, and leaving her with streaming decks and darkened canvas and dribbling gear. It was Channel weather again, in short, saving that there was the relish of the temperate parallels in the air, whilst the seas rolled large and wide and regular with all the difference betwixt the motion of the ship and her rollicking neck-breaking capers in the narrow waters that you’d find between the trot of a donkey and the majestical thunderous gallop of a charger.

But the wet made a miserable time of it. What was there to be seen on deck save the gleaming forms of men in oil-skins, the sweep of the dark-green surge out of the near veil of haze, the rain-shadowed curves of the canvas--the whole fitly put to music by the damp dull clattering of booms, noises of chafing up aloft, and the wild whistling of the wind upon the taut weather rigging? The males amongst us who smoked would come together after meals in a huddle under the break of the poop, cowering against the weather bulkhead out of the wet of the rain; and on these occasions arguments ran high. If Colonel Bannister was of our company, nothing could be said but that he whipped out with a flat contradiction to it. In fact, he was of that order of mind who reckons its mission to be that of teaching everybody to think correctly.

Once he endeavoured to prove to Mr. Emmett that he was wanting in an essential qualification of a painter, namely, an eye for atmosphere, by requesting him to say how far the horizon was off, and roaring in triumph because Mr. Emmett answered five miles. Mr. Johnson, after a careful look at the sea, submitted that Mr. Emmett was right. The colonel, pulling out his white whiskers, asked how it was possible that a journalist should know anything about such things. Angry words were averted by Mynheer Hemskirk, who, with a fat face and foolish smile, broke in with a mouldy old puzzle: ‘Answer me dis: here iss a bortrait. I shtands opposite, und I shay, “Brooders und shisters hov I none boot dot man’s farder iss my farder’s soon! Vot relation iss dot man to dot bicture?”’ The colonel had never heard this, and asked the Dutchman to repeat it. Mr. Hodder in a mild voice said: ‘It is himself.’ Little Mr. Saunders, after thinking hard, said it was his father. ‘_That’s_ it, of course!’ shouted the colonel. The Dutchman said no, and repeated the lines with great emphasis, striking one fist into the palm of the other at every syllable. Then sides were taken merely to enrage the colonel. Some agreed with him, and some with the Dutchman. Mr. Emmett, feigning not to catch the point, compelled the stupid good-natured Hemskirk to repeat the question a dozen times over. So loud was the argument, so angry the colonel, so excited the Dutchman, and so demonstrative most of the others of the listeners, that the chief officer came off the poop to look at us.

I give this as an instance of our method of killing that dreary time. The old ladies for the most part kept their cabins; but the girls came into the cuddy as usual, and made the interior comfortable to the eye as they sat here and there with knitting-needles in their hands or a book upon their knees.

On one of these foul-weather afternoons, hearing a strange noise of singing, I entered the cuddy, and found Peter Hemskirk standing with his face to the company and his back upon one of the Miss Joliffes, who was accompanying him at the piano. He was singing a fashionable sentimental song of that day, ‘I’d be a Butterfly, born in a Bower.’ The posture of the man was exquisitely absurd as he stood with his immensely fat figure swaying to the movements of the ship, a ridiculous smile upon his face, whilst he held his arms extended, singing first to one and then to another, so that every one might share in the song. The picture of this great corpulent man, with an overflow of chins between his shirt collars, and a vast surface of green waistcoat arching out like the round of a full topsail, and then curving in again to a pair of legs of the exact resemblance of a pegtop--standing as he was with his feet close together--I say, the sight of this immense man singing ‘I’d be a Booterfly’ in falsetto, proved too much for the company. They listened a little with sober faces; but at last Miss Hudson gave way, and bent her head behind her mother and lay shaking in an hysterical fit of laughter; then another girl laughed out; then followed a general chorus of merriment. But the undaunted Dutchman persevered. He would not let us off a single syllable, but worked his way without the least alteration of posture right through the song, making us a low bow when he had come to an end; whilst Miss Joliffe, darting from the piano stool, fled through the saloon and disappeared down the hatchway with a face as red as a powder-flag.

Miss Temple was the only one of us unmoved by this ridiculous exhibition. She kept her eyes bent on a book in her lap for the most part whilst Mynheer sang, now and then glancing round her with a face of cold wonder. Once our eyes met, when she instantly sent her gaze flashing to her book again. Indeed, it was already possible to see the sort of opinion in which she was held by her fellow-passengers by their manner of holding off from her as from a person who considered herself much too good to be of them, though the obligation of going to India forced her to be with them. Yet one easily guessed that the other girls hugely admired her. I’d notice them running their eyes over her dress, watching her face and bearing at table, following her motions about the deck; and again and again I would overhear them speaking in careful whispers about her when she was out of sight. In short, she might have been a woman of distinguished title amongst us; and if the passengers gave her a respectful berth, it was certainly not, I think, because they would not have felt themselves flattered by an unbending or friendly behaviour in her.

On the following Thursday the wind slackened, the weather cleared, and midway of the forenoon it was already a hot sparkling morning, with a high heaven of delicate clouds like a silver frosting of the blue vault, a wide sea of flowing sapphire, and the Indiaman swaying along under studdingsails to the royal yards. I had been spending an hour in my bunk reading. As I passed through the cuddy on my way to the poop I heard the report of firearms, and on going on deck found Mr. Colledge and Miss Temple shooting with pistols at a bottle that dangled from the lee main-yard-arm. Most of the passengers sat about watching them; but the couple were alone in the pastime. The pistols were very elegant weapons, mounted in silver, with long gleaming barrels. Colledge loaded and handed them to his companion, occasionally taking aim himself.

She could not have lighted upon any practice fitter to exhibit and accentuate the perfections of her figure and face. Her dark glance went sparkling along the line of the levelled barrel; her lips, of a delicate red, lay lightly apart to the sweep of the breeze, that was sweet and warm as new milk; her colourless face under the broad shadow of her hat resembled some faultless carving in marble magically informed by a sort of dumb haughty human vitality. I cannot tell you how she was attired, but her figure was there in its lovely proportions, a full yet maidenly delicate shape against the clear azure over the sea-line, as she stood poised on small firm feet upon the leaning and yielding deck, her head thrown back, her arm extended, and a fire in her deep liquid eyes that anticipated the flash of the pistol.

‘A very noble-looking woman, sir,’ said a voice low down at my side.

Mr. Richard Saunders stood gazing up at me with the eager wistful expression that is somewhat common in dwarfs. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask the poor little chap if he had ever been in love; but he was a man whose sensitiveness and tenderness of heart obliged one to think twice before speaking.

‘Ay, Mr. Saunders. A noble woman indeed, as you say,’ I answered as softly as he had spoken. ‘But how pale is her cheek! It makes you think of the white death that Helena speaks of in “All’s Well that Ends Well.”’

‘What Hemmeridge would term chlorosis,’ said he. ‘No, sir; she is perfectly healthy. It is a very uncommon complexion indeed, and very fit for a throne or some high place from which a woman needs to gaze imperiously and with a countenance that must not change colour.’

‘She looks to have been born to something higher than she is likely to attain,’ said I, watching her with eyes I found it impossible to withdraw. ‘A pity there did not go a little more womanhood to her composition. She might make a fine actress, and do very well in the unrealities of life; but I should say there is but small heart there, Mr. Saunders, with just the same amount of pride that sent Lucifer flaming headlong to----’

Some one coughed immediately behind me. I looked round and met Mrs. Radcliffe’s gaze full. She was seated on a hencoop; but whether she was there when I came to a stand to view Miss Temple, or had arrived unobserved by me, I could not tell. I felt the blood rise in scarlet to my brow, and walked right away forward on the forecastle, greatly, I doubt not, to the astonishment of little Saunders, who, I believe, was in the act of addressing me when I bolted.

I went into the head of the ship and leaned against the slope of the giant bowsprit as it came in the towering steeve of those days, to the topgallant-forecastle deck, through which it vanished like the lopped trunk of a titan oak whose roots go deep. The ping of a pistol report caught my ear. There was a sound of the splintering of glass at the yard-arm, along with some hand-clapping on the poop, as though the passengers regarded this shooting at a mark as an entertainment designed for their amusement. Far out ahead of me, jockeying the jib-boom, sat a sailor at work on the stay there; his figure stooped and soared with the lift of the long spar that pointed like the ship’s outstretched finger to the shining azure distance into which she was sailing, and he sang a song to himself in hoarse low notes, that to my mind put a better music to the flowing satin-like heavings of the darkly blue water under him than any mortal musician that I can think of could have married the picture to. There were a few seamen occupied on various jobs about the forecastle. The square of the hatch called the scuttle, lay dark in the deck, and rising up through it, I could hear the grumbling notes of a sailor apparently reading aloud to one of his mates.

Presently the bewhiskered face of the boatswain showed at the head of the forecastle ladder. On spying me, he approached with the rough sea-salute of a drag at a lock of hair under his round hat. He had served as able seaman aboard the ship that I had been midshipman in, though before my time; this had come out in a chat, and now he had always a friendly greeting when I met him on deck. He was a sailor of a school that is almost extinct; a round-backed man of the merchantman’s slowness in his movements, yet probably as fine a sample of a boatswain as was ever afloat; with an eye that seemed to compass the whole ship in a breath, of a singular capacity of seeing into a man and knowing what he was fit for, most exquisitely and intimately acquainted with the machinery of a vessel; a delightful performer upon his silver pipe, out of which he coaxed such clear and penetrating strains that you would have imagined when he blew upon it a flight of canary birds had settled in the rigging round about him. The voice of the tempest was in his gruff cry of ‘All hands!’ and his face might have stood as a symbol for hard ocean weather, as the bursting cheeks of Boreas express the north wind. He carried a little length of tough but pliant cane in his hand, with which he would flog whatever stood next him when excited and finding fault with some fellow for ‘sogering,’ as it is called; and I once saw him catch a man of his own size by the scruff of the neck, and with his cane dust the hinder part of him as prettily as ever a schoolmaster laid it on to a boy.

‘At the wrong end of the ship, ain’t you, sir?’ he called to me as he approached in his strong hearty voice.

‘It’s all one to me,’ said I, laughing, ‘now that there’s no music in the like of that pipe of yours to set me dancing.’

‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, fetching a deep breath. ‘I wonder if ever it’ll be my luck to knock off the sea and settle down ashore? I allow there’s more going to the life of a human being than the turning in of dead-eyes and the staying of masts _plumb_. By the way,’ added he, lowering his voice, ‘I’m afeerd there’s going to be a death aboard.’

‘I hope not,’ said I; ‘it will be the first, and a little early, too. Who’s the sick man, bo’sun?’

‘Why, a chap named Crabb,’ he answered. ‘I think you know him. I once took notice of a smile on your countenance as you stood watching him at the pumps.’

‘What! do you mean that bow-legged carroty creature with no top to his nose and one eye trying to look astern?’

‘Ay,’ said he; ‘that’s Crabb.’

‘Dying, d’ye say, Mr. Smallridge?’ I considered an instant, and exclaimed: ‘Surely he was at the wheel from ten to twelve during the first watch last night?’

‘So he was,’ answered the boatswain; ‘but he took ill in the middle watch, and the latest noose is that he’s a-dying rapidly.’

‘What’s the poor fellow’s malady?’ said I.

‘Well, the doctor don’t seem rightly to understand,’ he answered: ‘he’s been forrards twice since breakfast-time, and calls it a general break-up--an easy tarm for the ‘splaining of a difficulty. But what it means, blowed if I know,’ he added, with a glance aft, to observe if the mate had hove into sight.

‘A general break-up,’ said I, ‘signifies a decay of the vital organs. I don’t mean to say that Crabb isn’t decayed, but I certainly should have thought the worst of his distemper lay outside.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said he; ‘you wouldn’t suppose that he’d need a worse illness than his own face to kill him. But this ain’t seeing after the ship’s work, is it?’ and with another pleasant sea-flourish of his hand to his brow, he left me.

A little later, I was walking leisurely aft, meaning to regain the poop for a yarn with Colledge, who stood alone to leeward, looking over the rail with his arms folded in the attitude of a man profoundly bored, when the ship’s doctor, Mr. Hemmeridge, came out of the cuddy door to take a few pulls at his pipe under the shelter of the overhanging deck.

‘So, doctor,’ said I, planting myself carelessly in front of him with a light swing on my straddled legs to the soft heave of the ship, ‘we are to lose a man, I hear?’

‘Who told you that?’ he exclaimed, gazing at me out of a pair of moist weak eyes, which, I am afraid, told a story of something even stronger than his jalap and Glauber salts, stored secretly amongst the bottles which filled the shelves of his dark and dismal little berth right away aft over the lazarette.

‘Why, the air is full of the news,’ said I: ‘a ship’s a village, where whatever happens is known to all the neighbours.’

‘I don’t know about losing a man,’ said he, striking a spark into a tinder-box and lighting his pipe with a sulphur match; ‘he’s not dead yet, anyway. We must keep our voices hushed in these matters aboard ship, Mr. Dugdale. Wherever there are ladies, there’s a deal of nervousness.’

‘True; and I’ll be as hushed as you please. But this Crabb is so amazing a figure, that I can’t but feel interested in his illness. What ails him, now?’

‘If he dies, it must be of decay,’ he answered, with a toss of his hand. ‘I can find nothing wrong with him but the manner of his going. He lies motionless, and groans occasionally. It will be a matter in which the heart is involved, no doubt.’

I saw my curiosity did not please him, and so, after exchanging a few idle sentences, I mounted the poop and joined Mr. Colledge.

He was looking at the water that was passing, but not greatly heeding the sight of it. I daresay, though there was much, nevertheless, to engage the eye of a lover of sea-bits in the delicate interlacery of foam that came past in spaces like veils of lace spreading out on the heave of the sea along with cloudy seethings of milk-white softness under the surface, which made a wonder of the radiant opalescent blue of the clear profound there that was softened out of its sunny brilliance by the shadowing of the high side of the Indiaman.

‘This is going to be a long voyage, I am afraid,’ exclaimed Colledge, with a sort of sigh, bringing his back round upon the rail and leaning against it with folded arms.

‘Not bored already, I hope?’ said I.

‘Well, do you know, Dugdale,’ he exclaimed, whilst I caught his eye following the form of Miss Hudson, who was walking the weather-deck with Mr. Emmett, ‘I believe I made a mistake in engaging myself before I started. When a man asks a girl to be his wife, he ought to marry her with as little delay as possible. Now, here am I leaving the sweetheart I have affianced myself to for perhaps ten months of ocean voyaging, with some months on top of it in India for shooting, and the chance beyond of being eaten up by the game I pursue.’

‘Why did you engage yourself?’ said I.

‘I had been lunching at her father’s house--Sir John Crawley, member for Oxborough, a red-hot Tory, and one of the noblest hands at billiards you could dream of. Do you know him?’

‘Never heard of him,’ said I.

‘Well, he rarely speaks in the House, certainly. I had been lunching with him and Fanny; and as I was not likely to see the old chap again this side of my Indian trip, he plied me with champagne in a loving way; and when I walked with Fanny into the garden for a little ramble, I was rather more emotional than is customary with me; and the long and short of it is I proposed to her, and she accepted me. Here she is,’ said he; and he put his hand in his pocket and produced a very delicate little ivory miniature of a merry, pretty, rather Irish face, with soft brown curls about the forehead, and a roguish look in the slightly lifted regard of the eyes, as though she were shooting a glance at you through her upper lashes.

‘A very sweet creature,’ said I, giving him back the painting. ‘Is not she good enough for you? Bless my soul, what coxcombs men are! What is there to fret you in knowing that you have won the love of such a sweetheart as that?’

He hung his handsome face over the miniature, gazing at it with an intentness that brought his eyes to a squint, then slipped it into his pocket, exclaiming with an odd note of contrition in his voice: ‘Well, I’m a doocid ass, I suppose. But still I think I made a mistake in engaging myself. There was time enough to ask her to marry me when I returned. Who knows that I shall ever return?’

‘Now, _don’t_ be sentimental, my dear fellow.’

‘Oh yes, that’s all very fine,’ said he; ‘but I suppose you know that tiger-hunting isn’t altogether like chasing a hare, for instance.’

‘Don’t tiger-hunt, then,’ said I, growing sick of all this. ‘Hark! what fine voice is that singing in the cuddy?’

He pricked his ear. ‘Oh, it is Miss Temple,’ said he; and he stole away to the after skylight, through which a glimpse of the piano was to be had. He took a peep, then bestowed a train of nods upon me, and a moment after crept below. Alas! for Fanny Crawley, thought I.

Both of the wide skylights were open, and Miss Temple’s voice rose clear and full, a rich contralto, with now and then a tremor sounding through it in an added quality of sweetness. Those who were walking paused to listen, and those who were seated let fall their work or lifted their eyes from their books. Mr. Johnson and one or two others assembled at the skylight. But no one saving friend Colledge offered to go below. I could have bet a thousand pounds that the cuddy was empty, or the girl never would have sung. In fact, one took notice of a sort of timidity in the very hearkening of the people to her, as though she were a princess whose voice was something to be listened to afar and with respect, and who was not to be approached or disturbed on any account whatever. Soon after she had ended, a male voice piped up, and Mr. Johnson, after listening a little, came sauntering over to me.

‘Your friend Colledge don’t sing ill,’ he exclaimed with the complacent grin he usually put on before delivering himself. ‘Do you feel equal to a small bet?’

‘What’s the wager to be about?’

‘I bet you,’ said he, closing one eye, ‘twenty shillings to a crown that Mr. Colledge and Miss Temple will have plighted their troth before we strike the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope.’

‘Why not latitude?’ said I.

‘Why, my dear sir, don’t you see that the longitude gives me a broader margin?’ And the fellow was actually beginning to explain the difference between latitude and longitude, when I cut him short.

‘I’ll not bet,’ said I; ‘I have no wish to win your money on a certainty. They won’t be engaged, and so you’d better keep your sovereign.’

He whistled low, and with a melancholy attempt at a comical cast of countenance, exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see how it goes. It is the wish, my friend, that’s father to the thought. But Lor’ preserve us; my dear Mr. Dugdale, do you suppose that a young lady after her pattern would ever condescend to cast her eye upon anything even the sixtieth part of one single degree beneath the level of the son of a baron and heir to the title and property?’

‘Do you recollect,’ said I, ‘how your name-sake Dr. Samuel Johnson told his friends that being teased by a neighbour at table to give his opinion on Horace or Virgil, I forget which, he immediately fixed his attention on thoughts of Punch and Judy? Suffer me now to imitate that great man and to think of Punch and Judy.’

‘Here comes Punch, I do believe,’ said he with a good-natured laugh.

As he spoke, up rose the figure of Colonel Bannister from the quarter-deck. His face was red with temper, his eyes sparkled, and his white whiskers stood out like spikes of light from a flame. We happened to be the first persons he came across as he climbed the ladder.

‘Of all infernal instruments,’ he cried, ‘the piano is the worst. What on earth, I should like to know, do shipowners mean by adding that execrable piece of furniture to the cabin accommodation? The moment I sit down to write up my diary, twang-twang goes that scoundrel Jew’s harp; and as if that noise were not enough, a woman must needs fall a-squealing to it; and then, when I think that the row is over for a bit, and I pick up my pen afresh, some chap with a voice like a tormented hog lets fly.’

‘You should write to the _Times_, sir,’ said Mr. Johnson.

The colonel gave him a look full of marlinespikes and corkscrews, and walked aft on his short stiff legs to the captain, with whom I heard him expostulating in very strong language. Presently the tiffin-bell rang, and I went below.