Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 2 (of 3)

It was cold, but the sweep of the dry night-wind was refreshing and inspiriting to me, who had been confined to my cabin all day. A bull’s eye lamp burnt under the overhanging ledge of the poop-deck. Beneath it was the clock, and the small hand was close upon one. The gleams of the lamp touched no living figure, and so lonely looked the ship that I could have easily supposed myself the only human being on board of her. The great fabric was leaning over under a vast cloud of canvas, and a sound of stealthy hissing, such as the stem of a vessel makes when she is swiftly tearing over a quiet surface of ocean, rose into the wind on either hand.

A ladder was close beside me, conducting on to the poop, or upper deck. I mounted it, and stood at the head of the steps looking around me. I saw but two figures. One of them was on the other side of the deck. He was motionless, with his arm round a rope, and his shape stood out against the sparkling stars as sharply as though he were a statue in ebony. The other figure was at the aftermost end, at the wheel. There was a deep shadow of rigging and of sail where I had come to a pause. The dusky hue of the cloak I wore blended with the obscurity, and I was not observed by the figure opposite.

I looked over the side and watched the water sweeping past white as milk, with a frequent glitter of beautiful green lights in it. I looked away into the far distance, where the confines of the black plain of the ocean were lost in the darkness of the night, and fixed my eyes upon the stars, which were shining sparely in those dim and distant reaches, and said to myself, Where is my home? Which of all these countless stars is shining down upon my home now? But have I a home? How can I tell, for I do not know who I am? Then I looked up at the swollen, pallid breasts of sails climbing one on top of another into faint, almost visionary spaces where the loftiest were; and whilst I looked I heard two silver chimes ring out of the darkness forward. What can those bells mean? I wondered. How marvellous was the hush upon this great, speeding shadow of a ship, this dim bulk of symmetrical clouds waving its star-reaching heights in solemn measure as though to the accompaniment of some deep spiritual ocean-music, heard by it, but soundless to my ears! Where was the multitude of people who swarmed upon the deck when I had come on board in the morning? I knew they were resting below, and the thought of that great crowd slumbering in the heart of the sweeping, cloud-like shadow at which I gazed awed me; but the emotion changed into one of fear and of loneliness suddenly, and to rally myself I turned and walked towards the after-end of the vessel.

The moon was in the west, and the light in the sky that way was the silvery azure which I had witnessed through my cabin porthole. I walked to the extreme end of the ship, where the helm was, and stood by the side of the wheel. When I was on board the French vessel I had always found something fascinating in the machinery of the helm. I used to gaze with childish wonder at the compass-card, steadily in its brass bowl pointing out the little vessel’s course, and I would watch with surprise the instant response of the small fabric to the movement of the wheel.

But now as I stood here beside this wheel I surveyed a stretch of deck that seemed measureless, as the white planks, glimmering like sand from my feet went stretching and fading into the obscurity far forward. Behind me, from under the high, dark stern of the ship, rushed the pale and yeasty wake, like a line of pale smoke blowing over the sea. The stars danced in the squares of the rigging; they tipped as with diamond-points the sides of the sails, and they blazed at the summits of the three dim spires of the ship’s masts; and the moon in the west, poised in an atmosphere of delicate greenish silver, trembled a waving fan-shaped stream of light upon the summer pouring of the ocean under her.

All at once the helmsman, on the other side of the wheel, of whose presence I had hardly been sensible, uttered a strange low sort of bellowing cry, and tied along the deck to where the figure of the other man was. Involuntarily I put my hand upon the wheel, as though instinctively feeling that it must be held steady, and that it must be held in any case, or the ship would be without governance. The two men came slowly along. The motions of each were full of wariness, and suggestive in the highest degree of alarm and astonishment.

‘Dummed if it ain’t a-steering the ship,’ said one of them in a hoarse voice.

‘You scoundrel, it’s a woman!’ cried the other. ‘How dare you quit your post. You’ll have the ship in the wind in a minute,’ and they both arrived together at the wheel running, one being pushed by the other.

The man who pushed the other was dressed in a monkey-jacket with brass buttons and a naval cap. He was clearly one of the ship’s officers, but it was not surprising that I should be meeting him now for the first time. He thrust his face into my hood, and then backed a step and exclaimed, ‘Who are you?’ then immediately added, ‘Oh! of course. You’re the person that was taken out of the French brig. Come away from the wheel, will you, ma’m? Here’s an Irishman that believes you a ghost.’

The other muttered in his throat. I walked some paces away, and the officer accompanied me.

‘How is it that you’re not in your bed?’ said he.

‘I have been sleeping all day,’ I answered, ‘and have come up to breathe the air.’

‘We do not allow females to wander about the ship of a night,’ said he. ‘However, you cannot be supposed to know the rules.’ I saw him by the moonlight eye me strenuously and earnestly. ‘That’s a big bandage you have on, ma’m. I hope you are not much hurt?’

‘I was found lying injured and unconscious in a boat by the Frenchmen.’

‘And they tell me you have no memory.’

‘I can remember nothing,’ I answered.

‘What is that?’ cried he, pointing.

‘It is the moon,’ said I.

‘What is that but memory?’ he exclaimed.

‘I remember nothing of my past,’ said I. ‘Down to the hour in which I awoke to consciousness on board the French brig everything is black. But to whom am I speaking?’

‘You are speaking to the chief mate of the Deal Castle, and his name is Andrew Harris.’

‘What is a chief mate?’ I asked.

‘He is the person that is next in command to the captain.’

‘Then you are of consequence?’ said I.

He smiled broadly. ‘There are people who will run when I sing out.’

‘Nobody appears to be awake on board this ship, saving us who are here,’ said I.

‘Have you come on deck to find that out?’ he exclaimed; then directing his face at the forecastle he uttered a cry, and out of the shadow forward there instantly came a response. He cried again, and a rumbling ‘Ay, ay, sir!’ came out of the shadow. ‘So you see,’ said he, ‘there are four, not three of us, awake; and if I were to sing out again, in about five seconds the decks would be full of sailors running about. And you’ve lost your memory? D’ye know what part of England you hail from?’

‘I cannot even tell that I am English.’

‘What do they want to make out? That you’re from Greenland? I am trying to catch your accent. I have an A 1 ear for accents. I hoped at first you might be Lancashire, where I hail from. Then I fancied I could hear Derbyshire in you. But I reckon it’ll end in Middlesex’ he added thoughtfully; ‘that’s to say if London’s in Middlesex, which no man who goes to sea can be sure of, for every time he returns he wants a new chart, such is the growth of the little village. Does my talk give you any ideas?’ I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t the word London give you any idea?’

I thought and thought, and said, ‘It is a familiar word, but it suggests nothing.’

‘Curse the sea!’ he exclaimed, with an irritable twist of his head, as he looked round the horizon; ‘how ill it treats those who trust themselves to it! It robs you of memory, and it keeps me a poor man. Curse it, I say! I should like to know the name of the chap that was the first to go afloat. I’d burn him in effigy. But it’s some comfort to guess where his soul is. It wasn’t Noah. Noah had to save his life, and I allow he hated the sea as much as I do. All animals--pooh! but not worse than emigrants. And so you’ve lost your memory. And now what’s to bring it back to you, I wonder?’ He broke off to exclaim sharply to the helmsman and repeated, ‘What’s to bring it back to you, I wonder?’

He took a turn as though the remedy were in his mind and merely demanded a little thought. I watched him with deep anxiety. How could I tell but that even from him, that even from this man whom I had never before seen, with whom I was now discoursing in the heart of the ocean night, amid the silence of a faintly moonlit deck, with the sound of wind-brushed waters rising round about us, and the pale shadows of the leaning canvas soaring high above us--how could I tell but that even from this stranger might come the spark, the little leaping flame of suggestion to light up enough of my mind to enable me presently to see all? So I watched him with deep anxiety, whilst he took two or three turns.

Presently he halted facing me. He was a short man, scarcely as tall as I, square-built, and very firmly set on his legs. His hair appeared to be the colour of ginger. His chin was shaved, and he wore a bush of beard upon his throat. As much of his face as the moonlight silvered disclosed a dry, arch, sailorly expression.

‘It requires thinking over,’ said he. ‘My motto in physic is, Like cures like. What sent your memory adrift? You’ll find it was a shock. If the doctor would put you through a course of shocks you’d come out right. I’m a poor man, but I’d wager every farthing I’ll receive for the voyage, that if you were to fall overboard from the height of the ship’s side, when you were fished up you’d have your memory. Some sort of shock did the mischief, and any sort of shock’s going to undo it. That’s my belief. When McEwan visits you again you tell him what I say. Why, now, listen to this: an uncle of mine was so crippled with rheumatism and gout that he had to be carried like a dead-drunk man on a litter to the railway station. He was to consult some professional nob in London. With much backing and filling he was got into the railway carriage, and there he lay like a log, capable of moving nothing but his eyes. Half an hour after the train had started it ran into about forty waggons full of cattle. The bust-up was as usual: engine off the lines, driver in halves, the remains of the fireman in a ditch, several carriages matchwood, a dozen dead people under them, two-and-twenty persons wounded, and the country round about full of bleeding, galloping cattle. And who do you think was the first man to get out and run? My uncle. The collision cured him. He was a well man from the instant the locomotive bust into the waggons, and he has never known an ache since. It’s a shock that’s going to do your business, ma’m, take my word for it.’

I understood him imperfectly. Many of his allusions I did not in the least comprehend, yet I listened greedily, and for some moments after he had ceased I continued to hearken, hoping and hoping for some word, some hint, some suggestion that would help me to even the briefest inward glimpse.