The Sea and the Jungle Part 2

bows were pointing skyward on a long up-slope of water, the broken summit of which was too quick for the "Capella"-the bows disappeared in a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as shot, raked the bridge, the foredeck filled with raging water, and the wave swept along our run, dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; with but a faint hissing of foam, as in a deliberate silence. The "Capella" then began to run down a valley.

The engines were reduced to half speed; it would have been dangerous to drive her at such seas. Our wet and slippery decks were bleak, windswept, and deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces, constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild lights in the sky as she rolled and pitched, and somehow those reflections from her polish made the steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a man showed anywhere on the vessel's length, except merely to hurry from one vantage to another-darting out of the ship's interior, and scurrying to another hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit.

The gale was dumb till it met and was torn in our harsh opposition, shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed our iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine the flawless flood of air pouring silently express till it met our pillars and pinnacles, and then flying past rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and mouths were so many, loud, and poignant, that you wondered you could not see them. Our structure was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove against our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them strongly vibrating, was curiously invisible. The hard jets of air spurted hissing through the winches. The sound in the shrouds and stays began like that of something tearing, and rose to a high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, in the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; but there the ship itself contributed a note, a metallic murmur so profound that it was felt as a tremor rather than heard. It was almost below human hearing.

It was the hollow ship resonant, the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads quivering under the drumming of the seas, and the regular throws of the crank-shaft far below.

It was on this day the "Capella" ceased to be a marine engine to me. She was not the "Capella" of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon squatting low in the water, with bows like a box, and a width of beam which made her seem a wharf fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose to meet the approaching bulk of each wave with such steady honesty, getting up heavily to meet its quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success that we found ourselves perched at a height above the gloom of the hollow seas, getting more light and seeing more world; though sometimes the hill-top was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke the inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so like a brave patient thing that now her portrait, which I treasure, is to me that of one who has befriended me, a staunch and homely body who never tired in faithful well-doing. She became our little sanctuary, especially near dayfall, with those sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight before its time.

Your glance caught a wave pa.s.sing amidships as a heaped ma.s.s of polished obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal fractures in its gla.s.s. It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its translucent deeps. It pa.s.sed; and the light released from the sky streamed over the "Capella" again as your side of her lifted in the roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as the bilge. The steamer spouted violently from her choked valve, as it cleared the sea, like a swimmer who battles, and then gets his mouth free from a smother.

Her task against those head seas and the squalls was so hard and continuous that the murmur of her heart, which I fancied grew louder almost to a moaning when her body sank to the rails, the panic of her cries when the screw raced, when she lost her hold, her n.o.ble and rhythmic labourings, the sense of her concentrated and unremitting power given by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying funnel, the cordage quivering in tense curves, the seas that burst in her face as clouds, falling roaring inboard then to founder half her length, she presently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre of foam, the cascades streaming from her in veils,-all this was like great music. I learned why a ship has a name. It is for the same reason that you and I have names. She has happenings according to her own weird. She shows perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by the general chemics of iron and steel and the principles of the steam engine; but something counts in her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy men and the sullen men whose bright or dark energies poured into her rivets and plates as they hammered, and now suffuse her body. Something of the "Capella" was revealed to me, "our" ship. She was one for pride and trust. She was slow, but that slowness was of her dignity and size; she had valour in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong and hard, taking heavy punishment, and then lifting her broad face over the seas to look for the next enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. The eye judged by those a.s.sailing hills, so vast and whelmingly quick. The hills were so dark, swift, and great, moving barely inferior to the clouds which travelled with them, the collapsing roof which fell over the seas, flying with the same impulse as the waters. There was the uplifted ocean, and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by the gale-the gale forced them apart-the foundered heavens, a low ceiling which would have been night itself but that it was thinned in patches by some solvent day. And our "Capella," heavy as was her body, and great and swift as were the hills, never failed to carry us up the long slopes, and over the white summits which moved down on us like the marked approach of catastrophe. If one of the greater hills but hit us, I thought--

One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, who was on watch, saw such a wave bearing down on us. It was so dominantly above us that instinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his whistle. It was his first voyage in an ocean steamer; he was not long out of his apprenticeship in "sails," and so he did not telegraph to stop the engines. The Skipper looked up through the chart-room window, saw the high gloom of this wave over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to get at the telegraph himself. He was too late.

We went under. The wave stopped us with the shock of a grounding, came solid over our fore-length, and broke on our structure amidships. The concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. When the "Capella"

showed herself again the ventilators had gone, the windla.s.s was damaged, and the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on which a steel hawser was wound, had been doubled on themselves, like tinfoil.

By day these movements of water on a grand scale, the harsh and deep noises of gale and breaking seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no more than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. But courage went with the light. At dusk, the eye, which had the liberty during the hours of light to range up the inclines of the sea to distant summits, and note that these dangers always pa.s.sed, was imprisoned by a dreadful apparition. When there was more night than day in the dusk you saw no waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical shadows, and they swayed noiselessly without progressing on the fading sky high over you.

I could but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was see-sawing much superior to us all round. The "Capella" remained then in a precarious nadir of the waters. Looking aft from the Chief's cabin I could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, because that projected out of the shadow of the hollow into the last of the day overhead; and often the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. The sense of onward movement ceased because nothing could be seen pa.s.sing us. At dusk the steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a narrow sunken place which never had an outlet for us; the shadows of the seas erect over us did not move away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles.

You know the Suss.e.x chalk hills at evening, just at that time when, from the foot of them, they lose all detail but what is on the skyline, become an abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That was the view from the "Capella," except that the skyline moved. And when we pa.s.sed a barque that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on the summit of the downs. The barque did not pa.s.s us; we saw it fade, and the height it surmounted fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But where we saw it last a green star was adrift and was ranging up and down in the night.

This was the dark time when, struggling from amidships to the p.o.o.p, you knew there was something organised and coherent under you, still a standing place in chaos, only because you could feel it there. And this was the time to seek your fellows in the saloon, where there was light, warmth, sane and familiar things, and dinner. The "Capella's" saloon was fairly large, and the Skipper's pride. It was panelled in maple and oak, with a long settee at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the velvet protected by a calico cover. A bra.s.s oil lamp with an opaline shade hung over the table from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a closed American stove, with a rigorously polished bra.s.s flue running up through the deck. On two oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some artificial plants blossomed; from single stems each plant blossomed into flowers of aniline dyes and of different species. One of these plants, an imitation palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, was carefully watered throughout the voyage by the steward till it wilted into corruption and an offence, and became a count against the steward which the skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral ornaments lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady visitor at Itacoatiara admired the magenta rays of one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest minutes with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind the green bark) more as a sacrifice and a hard duty than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards, shaking his head regretfully.

Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, and repellent, with a handful of fire to its wide capacity for draughts, in the northern seas.

It had curious marine odours then, with which I was not friendly till long after, odours that lamps, burnished bra.s.s, newly polished wood, food, and the steward's storeroom behind it, never fully accounted for; and I remember it as I found it in the still heat of the Amazon, when it had the air of an oven; when, writing in it, the sweat ran off the fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling everywhere on its green baize table cover, and banging against its lamp. I remember it a.s.siduously now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now scattered over all the world, thrown together in it then for a spell to make the most of each other. It has the indelible impress of a room of that house where first the interest in existence awakened in us.

The Skipper, with stove behind him, took his seat before the soup tureen at the head of the table. You would as soon think of altering the chart-room clock, even were it wrong, as of touching the soup tureen without the Skipper's orders. It is his duty and his right to serve the soup, and to call the steward to inform him the density of the vegetables in it is too heavy. We have no market garden on board, you know.

The Doctor was on the Skipper's right hand, and the Purser next to the Doctor, and on the opposite side, the chief mate. There was the plump and bald-headed German steward, in white ap.r.o.n, the lid of one eye heavier than the other, serving us in his shirt sleeves, sometimes sucking his teeth with a noticeable click when he knew a dish deserved our approval. You kept the soup in the plate by holding it off the table and watching its tides. When her stern sailed up, and the screw raced, the gla.s.s shade of the lamp, being a misfit, took our eyes to watch the coming smash; the soup then poured over you, and trying to push your chair back from the mess, you found the chair was a fixture on the floor. This last fact was never remembered. I should try to push my "Capella" chair back now, if I were sitting in it.

The Doctor, who had been long enough tinkering careless bodies to have grown a little worn and grizzled, was often removed from us by a faint but impervious hauteur, though maybe he was only a little better and differently dressed. He was a patient listener, but his eyes could be droll. The Doctor's chuckle, escaping from his thoughts while he was unguarded, would sometimes make the captain look up from a narrative with question and a trace of resentment in his glance. The captain was a great traveller, but he was puzzled to find the memory of our surgeon following him to the most remote and unfamiliar strands. "Now how did that fellow come to be at a place like that?" the captain would whisper to me afterwards. "Can't make him out. Who is he?" The surgeon had a bottomless fund of short stories, to which he would sometimes go about the time when we were pushing away the banana skins and nutsh.e.l.ls. He had an elusive and stimulating method with them. He knew his work. At the end of one the captain would explain the fun to the seriously interested mate (who had leaned forward to learn), placing spoons and crumbs to demonstrate the main points. Then the mate, too, would join us with his happy laugh. The late and giddy laughter of the mate, when he also arrived, became a welcome feature of a yarn by the surgeon. We expected it. The mate's own stories were usually bawdy; he always prefaced them with some unmanageable hilarity, which impeded his start.

Mate (_pushing over his plate for soup_). That big wave washed out the men's berths, sir.

Captain. Then it did some good. The dirty brutes.

Mate. Heard the men grumbling to-night. Said we'll never get the hawsers to run out with them bugs in the hawse pipes. Say the bugs don't belong to them, sir-ship's property.

Doctor. Any this end of the ship, captain? Good Lord!

Captain. Not a bug. And if there's any for'ard the men brought 'em. No bugs in my ship. Never saw one in my cabin.

Mate (_making a confused effort to master his emotion, not to spill his soup, and to be respectful_). Te-he! you will, sir, Te-he! (_Realises he may not laugh, but suffers internally._)

Captain (_indicates an interrogation with frightful eyes and guttural noises_).

Mate (_controls himself by concentrating on a fork_). Well, sir-I'm just telling you-I heard it said the men annoyed with bugs-some of 'em said seein's believin'-said they had enough for everybody. (_His voice breaks into a stifled falsetto_) So they emptied a match-match-they emptied a match box full down your ventilator this morning.

The captain would frequently keep his seat in the saloon after dinner till he had finished his cigar, and in the vein, would put a leg over the arm of his chair, which he had pushed back (his chair was cushioned, and was not a fixture), and frowning at his cigar, as if for defects, would voyage again his early seas. I suppose a sailor would call our skipper a hard case. He was an elderly man, tall, spare, and meagrely bearded. His eyes were set close into a knife-like nose, and they were opaque and bright, like two blue stones under a forehead which narrowed and tightened into a small shiny cranium. There were tufts of grey wool above his temples. No light came through his eyes to make them limpid, except when he was fondling Tinker, the dog. They shone from the surface, giving him a look of peering and intent suspicion. The skin of his face, neck and hands, now worked a little loose, was so steeped in the tincture of sunshine that it had preserved an unctious child-like quality. His dress and habits betrayed an appreciation of his own person. He kept his own medicines.

I guessed he would have a ruthless process in an emergency; he would identify the success and safety of the ship with his own. He laughed from his mouth only, throwing his head back, showing surprisingly perfect teeth, and laughter did not change the crystalline glitter of his eyes. There was something alien and startling in his merriment. As though his own mind were too cold for him at times he would seek out me, or the chief, to find warmth in an argument. He would irritate us into a disputation; and though he was a choleric man, quick at opposition, yet his vocabulary then was flinty and spa.r.s.e. It stuck, and was delivered with pain. You could think of him labouring at his views of men and affairs with a creaking slate pencil. He set one's teeth. But he was a sailor, cautious and bold, with a knowledge of ships and the sea that was a mine to me. Let me say that, during the voyage, I found him busy making a canvas cot. He sat on the p.o.o.p and worked there, bent and patient as a seamstress, for days. With a judgment made too readily I believed he was, naturally, making it for his own comfort, against the heat of the river. When it was finished he was rolling up his ball of yarn, surveying his job, and he said, mumbling and shy, that the cot was for me.

The Skipper, on this day that our decks were swept, swore about the men and the bugs during dinner, muttered with foreboding about the gla.s.s, which was still falling, and the coals, which were being burnt to no purpose. We were hardly doing more than holding our place on our course.

The saloon was delirious, and when she flung up her heels, the varied noises rose with the racing propeller to a crescendo of furious castenets. The mate let us. The Skipper sat glooming, eyeing his cigar resentfully, his leg over the arm of his chair. The Doctor was swaying with the ship, weary and forlorn. Tinker had an appeal in his eyes, and made timorous noises. The Purser wondered why he was there at all, and blamed his silly dreams. The night boomed without. What a night!

Skipper. If this southerly wind goes round to the west and north, look out. I saw porpoises to-day too.

Doctor. When are we due at Para?

Skipper. Huh! What's this talk of Para? You wait. All this talk about when we shall get there's no good.... Now in those Newfoundland schooners where I served my time-I wouldn't have no talk in them about getting anywhere. Seems as if somebody heard. You always run into it.

There was the "Lizzie Polwith." She was about 80 tons. Those west country schooners in the fish trade are never more than 100 tons, else they'd have to carry more than a master and one mate. I was her master, and a kid of eighteen. We left Falmouth for Cadiz. Now look what happened. My mate was old Tregenna. He was a regular misery. I never knew such a dead homer, not so much as he was, always wanting to talk about his wife. I say, when you've cast off, it's best not to have a home. The ship wants all you can give her. Tregenna, he looked back a lot. You know what I mean. Couldn't keep his mind on his job, but wished he was through with it. There he'd be cutting bread at dinner, and it 'ud remind him, and he'd be wishing he was cutting it at home. When things began to go stiff, he'd say, "who wouldn't sell his little farm to go to sea?" Used to figure out on paper how long we'd be before we'd be back. Why, you never know when you'll get back.

See what happened. We left Cadiz that year on the first of January, and got things just right. The winds chased us over. There were big following seas, but you know those schooners ride like ducks. Up and over they go. Never a drop did we ship. Though they're lively enough to bruise and sicken all but good sailors. And old Tregenna was rubbing his hands and making out his figures better and better.

We arrived off St. Johns in a bit more than three weeks. I reckon I'd done it all right, being such a young chap too. Well, I was turning in that night, and just as I got into the companion a man said, "There goes a lump of ice." I jumped out again. Why, there was ice all round us. The sea was full of it as far as I could see into the night. "This is all along of your figuring," I sang out to Tregenna. "But you'll have a lot of time to reckon it up afresh," I said.

So he had. Do you know when we got in? We got in on April 15. We were two months and a half getting in. And we came over in three weeks.

There's something in that Jonah story. Always some fool who can't keep his mouth shut and his mind on his job.

We did have a time. Two and a half months, and our provisions ran out.

We were living on a little meal and dried peas. The ice chafed the "Lizzie" till the rudder was worn down to the stock. It roughed up her wooden sides till they looked as if they were covered with long coa.r.s.e hair. We were a sight when we got in. You wouldn't have known us, hardly. We looked as if we'd come up from the bottom.... Don't ask me when we shall get to Para. Wait till we're out of this. Listen to that dog. Shut up, you Tinker. Making that noise, sir! Go and lie down.

The Skipper clapped on his cap aggressively and went out. The Doctor had a long and eloquent silence. Then he turned to me. "This beats all," he said. "Come and have a drop of gin, old dear." He led the way to his berth, which smelt of varnish and of lamp, and we swayed in chorus as the ship rolled, and had a heartening mourn together. But for its accidental compensations travel would not be worth the trouble. In proof of that there is the entry in my diary some days after:

"December 22. Awoke at four a.m. with the ship rolling as brutally as ever. A great noise of waters and things banging. The seas huge at sunrise, when the light came over their tops. Depressing sight. The sky was blue at first, but was soon overcast with squalls. The horizon ahead gets slate coloured, and low clouds underneath, like ragged bales of dirty wool, come towards us heavy and fast. Then the squall and waves rush down on us express, and the ship buries herself. Constantly hearing engine-room bell sounded from bridge to slacken speed as a big sea appears. The captain popped in his head as I was deciding whether to get up or stay where I was. He gazed sternly at me and said he was looking for Jonah. I half believe he means it too. Everybody is weary of this.

The men have been in oilskins since the start.

"Noon to-day, Lat. 42.6 N. Long. 11.10 W. Miles by engines since noon yesterday 222. Knots by revolutions 9.2. But the slip is 49.2 per cent.

So actual distance 112 miles only, and knots 4.6. Bad going. Wind southly. Engines racing and engineer still at throttle.

"Night, and a full moon tearing past cloud openings. The ship occasionally shows like a pale ghost, the black shadows of the funnel guys and stanchions oscillating on the white paint-work as she rolls. I went into Chief's cabin, and from its open door-for it was sensibly milder-looked out astern over the way we had come. Up and down, this side and that, went the steamer, and the Great Bear, in a wind clear patch of sky, was dancing on our wake. Polaris was making eccentric orbits round the main masthead light. Then the Skipper came in. He sat gazing astern. The look of his face was enough. It was quite plain he would like to be offended to-night, and attack anybody about anything.

Presently he started intently as he looked astern, and jumped from his seat crying the ultimate anathema on the chap at the wheel; and ran out.

The Chief glanced astern and laughed. 'The old man comes in here because it's uncommon handy for watching the wake. Look at it. Somebody on the bridge writing letters on the ocean. Thinking of his sweetheart, and her name is Sue.' We gave the Skipper's voice time to reach the wheelhouse, and then saw the wake visibly tauten out.

"I went aft, balancing like a man learning the tight rope, along the trestle bridge. The moon was still falling precipitously through the broken sky, and areas of the great seas, where the sweeping searchlight of the moon showed monsters shaping and slowly vanishing, were frightful. There were sudden expansions of vivid green lightnings in the north and east. I found the Doctor in the chief mate's cabin. I sang some songs in a riving minor, accompanied by the mate on an accordion, for the doctor's amus.e.m.e.nt, and discovered why sailors always use the accordion, previously a mystery to me. It has a sad and reflective note, suited to men with memories when alone on the ocean. It ought to fit Celtic bards better than the harp. It has a fine expiring moan. The mate gave an imitation of a dying man with it.

"To bed at 11. Tried to read Henry James. My c.o.c.kroach came out to wave his derisive hands at me. No wonder. The light was very bad, and I was pitched from side to side of the bunk. Nearly thrown out once. I might just as well have attempted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original.

So I read the last letters from home instead and then fell asleep as a little child."

There was something of leisure in her movements next morning. I felt sure the gla.s.s must be rising at last. The air felt lighter and more expansive. A peep through the port showed me the ceiling had gone up considerably in the night. There was little wind, for the waves, though as great as ever, had lost their white ridges. Their summits were rounded and smooth. We were running south out of it, though the residue of the dreary northern seas was still washing about the decks. It was December yesterday, but April to-day. The engineers' messroom boy, with bare fat arms, went by the cabin, singing.

At breakfast we heard that Chips, who had retired to his bunk for some days past to mend a leg damaged when the hatches were in danger, had met with a still more serious misfortune. We fell into a mood of silent and respectful compa.s.sion. There was nothing to be said. Chips had lost his Victoria Cross. He was an old hero in trouble. The few of us who were British there-true, most of us were Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, and Portuguese-felt we represented The Country. Chips limped about the forecastle with reproach in his face, and we felt we were petty in noticing his face was also dirty, though it certainly was difficult to avoid seeing that too, perhaps because, and this can be said for us, the dirt was of longer standing than the reproach. Then again it is common knowledge that Chips sleeps in straw, having no mattress.

Chips' story we knew. It had been whispered about the ship. He was at the Siege of Alexandria, and a sh.e.l.l fell near a group of men on his ship. Chips picked it up and dropped it overboard before the fuse was finished. The Doctor and I felt especially responsible, for a reason I cannot easily explain, it is so vague, and we told Chips we would help him in his search for his lost treasure. This took us to Chips'