A Dream of the North Sea Part 9

So Lewis cheerily ended his task, and when his man was laid out, with a dry bundle of netting under his head, the doctor bent over him only to smile in his face quietly. He never looked at himself in a gla.s.s excepting to part his hair; but he had learned that something in his look tended to hearten his patients, so he gazed merrily at the cripple and said, "Now, when you're better, tell your friends Professor Ferrier said you were the pluckiest fellow he ever saw. I couldn't have borne what you did. You are a real good, game bit of stuff! and don't let any one tell me otherwise."

This unconscionable young doctor was picking up the proper tone for the North Sea; he had no airs, and, when his boat was reeling away to his own vessel again over the powdery crests of the sea, an Aldeburgh fisherman said, "Well, Joe, be sewer, he's a wunnerful fine gent, that is! He's the wunnerfullest, finest gent ever _I_ fared for to see. And that he is--solid."

"Yes, Jimmy," said the skipper. "It's my belief, in a way o' speakin', that if that theer mizen-boom catched you and knocked your head off, that theer wunnerful young gent 'ud come, and he'd have his laugh, and he'd up and he'd mend you, same as if you'd never come adrift, not one little bit. What a thing is larnin', to _be_ sewer. Yes, sir, he'd mend you. n.o.body knows what he can dew, and n.o.body knows what he can't dew.

If we puts to this night--and I don't know why not, for we're sailin'--if we gets a turbot I'll pay for it, and he'll have that theer fish if I swims for it."

"You've always got a good way o' puttin' things, skipper, and I says I holds 'long o' you."

The patient slumbered blissfully in the dreary cabin, which could only be likened to a bewitched laundry in which things were always being washed and never cleaned; the men awaited the Admiral's signal; the snow thickened into ponderous falling ma.s.ses;--and the professor jumped on deck, to be met with a loud boom of gratification by Tom, who had begun to dread the snow.

I like to think of that young gentleman faring over the treacherous lulls of sad water amid the sinister eddies of the snowstorm. I wonder if any other country could produce a gently-nurtured young scholar who would make a similar journey. It seems doubtful, and more than doubtful.

Tom had been reading to the paralyzed fisherman, and, although his ordinary tones had too much of the minute-gun about them to suit small apartments, he could lower his voice to a quiet deep ba.s.s which was anything but unpleasant, and he had completely charmed the poor helpless one by reading--or rather intoning--"Evangeline." Seafaring folk _will_ have sentiment in their literature and music; humour must be of the most obvious sort to suit them--in fact they usually care only for the horseplay of literature--but pathos of any sort they accept at once, and Tom had tears of pride in his eyes when he told Lewis how the man had understood the first part of the poem, and how he had talked for a good half-hour about the eviction of the Acadians, and its resemblance to the fate of various fishermen's wives who had got behind with their rents.

The evening closed in a troublous horror of great darkness, and the anxious night began. Ferrier always made up his mind to stay below at night, and he amused himself either by s.n.a.t.c.hing a chat with the skipper, or by reading one or two good novels which he had brought. But imagine the desolation, the sombre surroundings, the risks to be run every hour--every second--and you will understand that those two English gentlemen had something in them pa.s.sing self-interest, pa.s.sing all that the world has to offer. Ferrier never dreamed of becoming a nautical recluse; he was too full of the joy of life for that: but he had a purpose, and he went right at his mark like a bullet from a rifle. Once that evening he went on deck and tried to peer through the wall of trembling darkness that surrounded him; the view made him feel like the victim in Poe's awful Inquisition story--the walls seemed to be closing in. Faintly the starboard light shone, so that the snowflakes crossed its path like dropping emeralds that shone a little in glory and then fell dark; on the other side a fitful stream of rubies seemed to be pouring; the lurid gleam from the cabin shone up the hatchway;--and, for the rest, there was cold, darkness, the shadow of dread, and yet the lookout-men were singing a duet as if death were not. The freezing drift was enough to stop one's breath, but the lads were quite at ease, and, to the air of a wicked old shanty, they sang about weathering the storm and anchoring by and by. Ferrier was not a conscious poet;--alas! had he the fearful facility which this sinful writer once possessed, I shudder to think of the sufferings of his friends when he described the brooding weariness of this night in verse. He bottled up his verses and turned them all into central fire; but he had poetry in every fibre all the same.

Tom remarked, "This is very much like being iced for market. I wonder what we could possibly do, if anything came into us as that barque did?

Let's talk about home."

"Pleasant indoors now; I can see the fire on the edges of the furniture. The very thought of a hearthrug seems like a heathen luxury.

What will you do first when you get home, Tom?"

"Turkish bath."

"And then?"

"Oysters."

"Then?"

"Dinner."

"And after?"

"I'll spend the whole evening in pretending to myself I'm on the North Sea again, and waking up to find that I've got my armchair under me."

"Can you see anything, Jim, just a point or so abaft the beam."

This was an ugly interruption to the Barmecides, who had begun to set forth shadowy feasts. That is the way in thick weather; you are no sooner out of one sc.r.a.pe than you blunder into another.

"Yes, sir, she'll go clear," sang out the man.

"She won't, I'm afraid," said Lewis, under his breath. It was most puzzling; there was no guide; the snow made distances ridiculous, and the black shadow came nearer.

"Up, all of you, and set your fenders. Doctor, show him a flare."

It was a smack, and her lights had gone wrong somehow; she was moving but slowly, and she let the Mission vessel off with a hole in the mizen.

The scrimmage would have meant death had any breeze been blowing; but the men took it coolly after the one dread minute of anxiety was over.

If we were all able to imagine our own deaths as possible--to _really_ imagine it, I mean--then one snowy night on the banks would drive any man mad; no brain could stand it. We all know we shall die, but none of us seem to believe it, or else no one would ever go to sea a second time in winter. A steady opiate is at work in each man's being--blurring his vision of extinction, and thus our seamen go through a certain performance a dozen times over in a winter, and this performance is much like that of a blindfold man driving a Hansom cab from Cornhill to Marble Arch on a Sat.u.r.day evening during a November fog.

The man who shoved the cork fender over the side had received a graze which sent a big flap of skin over his eye and blinded him with blood.

He laughed when Lewis dressed him, and said, "That was near enough for most people, sir. I've seen two or three like that in a night."

"Well, I like to see you laugh, but I thought all was over when I saw he was going to give us the stem."

"So did I, sir; but fishermen has to git used to being drowned."

As Lennard and the doctor sat filling the crew's cabin with billows of smoke, the former said--"There's a kind of frolicsome humour about these men that truly pleases me. Frolicsome! isn't it?"

"Well, we've stood another dreary day out; but think of those poor beggars aft, lying in pain and loneliness. Tom, let's say our prayers; I don't know that there's much good in it, but when I think of twelve thousand men bearing such a life as we've had, I think there must--there must be some Power that won't let it last for ever. Mind, when we've done praying, no more sentiment; we'll smoke and laugh after we've put in a word for the fishermen--and ourselves."

"And somebody else."

"Who?"

"I'll write and ask Mr. Ca.s.sall. That's Miss Dearsley's uncle."

I have seen our Englishmen fool on in that aimless way during all sorts of peril and trouble. I want you to understand that the evangelist and the sceptic both were prepared to hear the scraunch of the collision on that deadly night; they had seen two entire ships' companies lost since they came out, yet they would not give in or look serious altogether.

They had come to found a hospital for the mangled hundreds of fishermen, and they were going through with their task in the steady, dogged, light-hearted British way. Foreigners and foreigneering Englishmen say it is blockheaded denseness. Is it?

CHAPTER II.

A CRUCIAL TEST.

"When you sailed away in the Yarmouth ships, I waved my hand as you pa.s.sed the pier; It was just an hour since you kissed my lips, And I'll never kiss you no more, my dear.

"For now they tell me you're dead and gone, And all the world is nothing to me; And there's the baby, our only one, The bonny bairn that you'll never see."

("The Mate's Wife," by J. Runciman.)

Suffering--monotonous, ceaseless suffering; gallant endurance; sordid filth; unnamed agonies; gnawing, petty pains; cold--and the chance of death. That was the round of life that Lewis Ferrier gazed upon until a day came that will be remembered, as Flodden Field was in Scotland, as Gettysburg is in America, as January 19th, 1881, is in Yarmouth. Ferrier had stuck to his terrible routine work, and, as Sir Everard Romfrey observes: "To stick to work _after_ the great effort's over--that's what shows the man." The man never flinched, though he had tasks that might have wearied brain and heart by their sheer nastiness; the healer must have no nerves.

A little break in the monotony came at last, and Mr. Ferrier and Mr. T.

Lennard had an experience which neither will forget on this side of the grave. Contrary to the fashion of mere novelists, who are not dreamers and who consequently cannot see the end of things, I tell you that both men were kept alive, but they had something to endure.

The day had been fairly pleasant considering the time of year, and our friends were kept busy in running from vessel to vessel, looking after men with slight ailments. There was no snow, but some heavy banks hung in the sky away to the eastward. When the sun sank, the west was almost clear, and Tom and Lewis were electrified by the most extraordinary sunset that either had ever seen. The variety of colour was not great; all the open s.p.a.ces of the sky were pallid green, and all the wisps of cloud were leprous blue: it was the intensity of the hues that made the sight so overpowering, for the s.p.a.ces of green shone with a clear glitter exactly like the quality of colours which you see on Crookes's tubes when a powerful electric current is pa.s.sed through.

"That's very artistic, and everything else of the sort; it's ah-h better than any painting I ever saw, but there's something about it that reminds me of snakes and things of that kind. Snakes! If you saw a forked tongue come out of that blue you wouldn't be surprised."

"You're getting to be quite an impressionist, Tom. The sky is horrible.

I see all our vessels are getting their boats in; we'd better follow suit. How's the gla.s.s, skipper?" "Never saw anything like it, sir. This night isn't over yet, and I reckon what's coming is coming from the nor'-east. We're going to reef down. I haven't seen anything like this since 1866, and I remember we had just such another evening."

As usual, the gulls were troubled in their minds, and wailed piercingly, for they seem to be mercurial in temperament, and no better weather prophets can be seen.